The Culture Desk

culture. Creativity. connection.

ProJECTS

Past Projects (portfolio coming soon)

2021-Present

Pulsations LA (2024)

Conceived, created and executive produced a Cultural Treasures of South LA concert in front of the Vision Theater in Leimert Park for Make Music Day (Fete de la Musique), livestreamed globally as part of the 2024 Paris Cultural Olympiad. Featured artists included Dwight Tribble, Fernando Pullum Community Arts Center Jazz Ensemble, Kinnaro Taiko and S. Pearl Sharp.

Promise Zone Arts South Los Angeles (aka Cultural Treasures of South LA) (2021-2023)

Promise Zone Arts South Los Angeles, aka Cultural Treasures of South LA, was a community-based cultural asset mapping initiative in the South LA Promise Zone led by of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with LA Commons, Community Coalition, the South Los Angeles Transit Empowerment Zone (SLATE-Z) and USC’s Neighborhood Data for Social Change initiative.

On behalf of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of Los Angeles, I revived, redesigned, redeveloped and oversaw implementation of this complex multi-partner project. We worked deeply with the community to identify cultural treasures – widely-defined – and created a website with publicly accessible database, interactive maps and video story bank a resource for advocacy and driving narrative change for South LA. The process was supported by a still-ongoing series of public programs produced by LA Commons in collaboration with the City of Los Angeles DCA.

2016-2017

Performance Lab at the Skirball Cultural Center

Programmed and produced a five-week performance lab at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Transformed the Skirball’s largest gallery into a reconfigurable performance space with modular seating, lighting, sound and staging. Out of the five works, four were offered developmental residencies that culminated in fully produced public performances (within the technical limitations of the pop-up performance space). We worked closely with the artists on dramaturgical, presentational and logistical development for the following projects: Keith A. Wallace’s The Bitter Game, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s The Bumps, Split Britches’ Unexploded Ordnances and Lionel Popkin’s Inflatable Trio. A fifth work, Manual Cinema’s Lula del Rey, was presented for its L.A. premiere. Every performance was sold out and the Performance Lab received considerable coverage in the L.A. Times, KCRW, L.A. Weekly and other major local outlets.

Sunset Concerts at the Skirball Cultural Center

Programmed and produced two seasons of the Skirball Cultural Center’s signature summer concert series. Overhauled production in year two, streamlining tech needs assessment and equipment sourcing, reducing costs and improving the quality of the sound, lighting and staging. Significantly redesigned audience experience from pre-concert onsite arrival on site to end of concert exit. By streamlining venue entrance process, re-locating concessions area, reconfiguring seating and activating an expanded campus footprint, we increased food and beverage sales and garnered significant positive user feedback while growing audience.

Program 2017: American Tune Tribute to Paul Simon featuring Sean Watkins & Friends, Ibibio Sound Machine, Delgres, Dayme Arocena, David Buchbinder’s Odessa/Havana, Betsayda Machado y la parrando el clavo

Program 2016: Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, Sinkane, Thalma de Freitas, M.A.K.U. Soundsystem, Music Maker Blues Revue, Shai Tsabari and the Middle East Groove All Stars

Literary and Ideas Programs at the Skirball Cultural Center

Programmed and produced ongoing series of mission-aligned literary and “ideas” conversation programs including Ariel Levy and Maggie Nelson; An Evening with the National Book Awards featuring Viet Thanh Nguyen, Karan Mahajan and Robin Coste Lewis in conversation with David Ulin; Eric Liu; Mohsin Hamid with Hector Tobar; Boris Fishman; Sheryl Sandberg; Moby; Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik with Aminatou Sow; Shirin Ebadi with Reza Aslan; Diane Guerrero with Angelica Salas; and Michael Twitty

2015

“Ephemeral Objects” at San Diego Arts Institute

Curated and produced (installed) complex exhibition exploring the intersection of art and technology premised on research and writing from my blog “Ephemeral Objects: Art Criticism for the Post-Material World” (EphemeralObjects.org) funded by a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. Including a variety of works ranging from code-based algorithmic art to interactive video, sound art and immersive installations, the logistics of production encompassed a wide array of challenges. The known challenges of exhibition design in a gallery were complicated by issues of finding, configuring and maintaining compatible hardware/software, installing sculptures with embedded experimental technology, identifying and defining sonic space to minimize aural overlap and more.

Participating artists included: Trevor Amery, Banrei, Cooper Baker, Renae Barnard, Sheldon Brown, Lana Z. Caplan, Larry Caveney, Andrea Chung, Francisco Eme, Richard Gleaves, Yelena Gluzman in collaboration with Jen Hofer and Eric Leonardis,Vijay Hingorani, Rich Jones, Tara Knight, Bonnie Lander in collaboration with Brendan Nguyen and Adam Tinkle, Nick Lesley, Xareni Lizarraga, Whitney Lynn, Max Nanis, Margaret Noble, Sean Noyce, Celeste Oram, Micah Silver, Marinta and André Skupin, sosolimited, Suzanne Thorpe, Chris Warren, Shannon Willis, Shahrokh Yadegari and Kathryn Zazenski.

Make Music Day San Diego in Balboa Park

Organized, programmed and produced first-ever Make Music Day in San Diego as part of the Balboa Park Centennial Celebration, attracting more than 8,000 visitors and activating 20+ sites with 50+ performances. Led extensive community engagement efforts, identified audio sponsor to provide multiple sound systems, brokered unprecedented cooperation and collaboration between multiple cultural institutions in Balboa Park, received significant media coverage in every major print, TV and radio outlet.

2010 – 2014

River to River Festival at LMCC

STREB, “Human Fountain”

A co-commission, with Brookfield Properties, of a major dance spectacle by STREB EXTREME ACTION, show in part at River to River in 2011 and world premiering as part of the London Olympics in 2012.

Laurie Anderson at The River to River Festival

Collaborated closely with Laurie Anderson to co-curate and produce a series of events for the 2013 River to River Festival. Programs included live-score documentary with filmmaker Sam Green and musicians The Quavers and yMusic; the live score film “Indiamore” by Chassol’; an interactive app-based soundwalk by Liubo Borissov and Konrad Kaczmarek, Andrew Schneider’s “Tidal” and an evening of stories and songs with Laurie Anderson in Rockefeller Park.

Alarm Will Sound, “John Cage’s Song Books”

Programmed and produced Alarm Will Sound’s multimedia re-imagining of John Cage’s epic work “Song Books” for the River to River Festival. A co-commission with the Holland Festival and the Cork Opera House.

Susie Ibarra, “Digital Sanctuaries”

Co-conceived, programmed and produced app-based soundwalk with original compositions for The River To River Festival. The rich history of Lower Manhattan was transformed into electroacoustic soundscapes honoring the communities that have inhabited each city space including African burial grounds, Native American Indian Museum, Irish communities, Jewish communities, Chinatown, Castle Clinton the first port of entry for immigrants in New York City. Ibarra composed musical scores that included featured soloists on the recordings, and field recordings interwoven as an homage to local and global communities from each topography. The soundwalk was set amidst twelve sites in Lower Manhattan, geolocated and accessed through the mobile web app. Created in collaboration with visual artist Makoto Fujimura, with interaction design by Shankari Murali.

600 Highwaymen, “This Great Country”

Programmed and produced renowned performance company 600 Highwaymen’s re-imaging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in an abandoned storefront in the South Street Seaport. Critically acclaimed for its radical casting and staging, this presentation put 600 Highwaymen on the map for the first time and they haven’t stopped since.

So Percussion & the Joshua Light Show, “Amid the Noise”, “Imaginary City” & “Where (We) Live”

Programmed and produced a collaboration between So Percussions and the Joshua Light Show. So Percussion were offered a developmental residency to continue evolving their concert-length work “Where (We) Are’ including “open studio” hours when the public could watch the band at work. The Joshua Light Show team joined So Percussion for part of the residency to engage with the music which informed the final performance of their light show accompanying the concert.

Suzanne Thorpe, PHLOQ

Phloq is a 3D sound installation conjuring the sensation of birds taking flight to inspire an exploration of innate, linked movement among bird life, comparable choreographed maneuvers of man, the networks that facilitate both, and interruptions and confusions that may arise. To invoke this narrative, composition, technology, environment and listener are enjoined to create a distributed musical interaction that afforded a dynamic perceptual experience. Created in collaboration with Paul Geluso, designer of the 3D Sound Object from which the work was diffused. Phloq was installed June 15 – July 14, 2013 at St. Cornelius Chapel on Governors Island, New York and presented in collaboration with Harvestworks.

Site-Specific Dance and Performance Works

Over the course of three seasons at River to River I worked with numerous choreographers to identify sites, develop projects and produce their work in public spaces and unexpected venues throughout Lower Manhattan. Select artists and projects include:

  • Luciana Achugar, “Feeling is Believing”
  • Beth Gill, “Electric Midwife”
  • Maria Hassabi, “SHOW”
  • Stephen Petronio Company, “Like Lazarus Did”
  • Tere O’Connor Dance, “Untitled New Work”
  • Wally Cardona, “The Set-Up: Junko Fisher”
  • Yoshiko Chuma & The School of Hard Knocks, “A-C-E ONE”
  • Deganit Shemy, “2 kilos of sea”
  • Sylvain Emard, “Le Grand Continental”
  • STREB, “Human Fountain”
  • Tara O’Con, “Underneath Where We Are”
  • Richard Maxwell/NYC Players, “Showcase”
  • Molly Rice, “The Saints Tour”
  • Maureen Towey, “Three Sisters” (community engaged staged reading working with senior citizens at Good Companions Senior Center on the Lower East Side)
  • Company SJ (Ireland), “Acts without Words II”
  • Improv Everywhere, “The MP3 Experiment”
  • Come Out & Play, “Come Out & Play: After Dark”, “Come Out & Play for the Whole Family”, “The Commons”
  • CHERYL, “On The Waterfront”

Site-Specific Music Works

Over the course of three seasons at River to River I worked with numerous musicians, composers and collaborators to identify sites, develop projects and produce their work in public spaces and unexpected venues throughout Lower Manhattan. Select artists and projects include:

  • “Kun: 64 Toy Pianos” performed by 64 musicians playing toy pianos throughout the South Street Seaport and on Piers 15 and 17l
  • Louis Andriessen’s “Hoketus” performed by Yarn/Wire ensemble on the balcony and across the street from the NY Stock Exchange.
  • Aaron Siegel, “Group” (a participatory iPhone symphony)

Site-Specific Installations

Over the course of three seasons at River to River I worked with numerous visual and media artists to identify sites, develop projects and produce their work in public spaces and unexpected venues throughout Lower Manhattan. Select artists and projects include:

  • LOVID, “U R QR”
  • Caraballo-Farman, “The Signs of Paradise”
  • Mary Mattingly, “Flock House”

Open Studios/Developmental Residencies

  • New York City Players, “Isolde”
  • Trisha Brown Dance Company, “Astral Converted”

Access Restricted at LMCC (2012)

Series of site-specific panel discussions

  • “From Radio Row to the Freedom Tower: Arts and the Evolution of Lower Manhattan”
  • “At the Intersection: Art, Money and Politics”
  • “On the Waterfront: Re-Imagining the East River Waterfront Esplanade”
  • “Sacred and the Secular: Arts and Community at Trinity Wall Street”

InSite: Art + Commemoration at LMCC (2011)

Xu Bing, “Where Does the Dust Itself Collect” at the Spinning Wheel Building. Installation commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Other Projects

“The Future at The End of The World” at the Farley Post Office (NYC)

Arts collective Immediate Medium engaged me to curate nine makers of dance, theater, performance, music and media to create an immersive, interdisciplinary group performance called The Future at the End of the World in the largely abandoned offices of the James A. Farley Post Office in Midtown Manhattan. The Post Office, which stands at its own moment of transformation as it becomes a new transportation hub, served as the site and inspiration for ten simultaneous, site-specific micro-performances around the themes of time, space, fortunetelling, futurology, reincarnation, the last week of the world as we know it and the beginnings of new worlds to come. The show was a celebration of the conjunction of performance collective Immediate Medium’s 10th anniversary and the “end” of the Mayan calendar.

Featured artists included: Vanessa Anspaugh, The Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (Tei Blow + Sean McElroy), The Bureau for the Future of Choreography, Blake Carrington, David Commander, David Conison + Co., Immediate Medium, Ouroboros (Lisa Clair + Sergei Tcherepnin), Rob Ramirez and Jillian Sweeney + Jeffrey Cranor.

“Ephemeral Evidence” at Exit Art Gallery

I curated and produced the durational performance installation called Ephemeral Evidence, a project selected as part of Exit Art’s Collective / Performative final group exhibit in Spring 2012. It consisted of a series of collaborative explorations between writers and performing artists to investigate the relationship between practice and skill in performance-making, object-making and context. The writer/artist pairs were Aretha Aoki with Maura Donohue, Rebecca Davis with Aaron Mattocks, Arturo Vidich with Jeremy M. Barker and Sarah Rosner & the AO Movement Collective with Alyssa Alpine. The installations were durational from 9AM-5PM culminating performances each day. The closing day of the exhibit featured an all-day display of the created objects, a special performance by Dan Safer and Mike Mikos of Witness Relocation and concluded with a “process dinner” performance installation titled “Come Over To Our Place” hosted by Andy Horwitz and Chloë Bass.

“Everyone’s A Critic” at On the Boards (Seattle, WA)

I co-conceived, created and produced this community-engaged, participatory performance projet commissioned by Seattle’s On the Boards. Between September 2012 and March 2013, we identified seven members of the local arts community – each representing a different segment of the ecology – and invited them to respond to a work in the On The Boards TV catalogue. We spent a week in residence working with respondents to develop their presentations, culminating in an evening of lecture/performances followed by community discourse.

2007 – 2009

Prelude Festival

Co-curated, developed programs and produced three seasons of The Prelude Festival of Contemporary Theater and Performance, The Martin     E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center at CUNY. Artists presented and/or commissioned include: Marina Abramovic, John Jesurun, David Levine, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Jay Scheib, Richard Maxwell/NYC Players, The Living Theater, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Radiohole, Kristen Kosmas, Richard Foreman, The Builders Association, Sheila Callaghan, Banana Bag & Bodice, National Theater of the United States of America, Jenny Schwartz, Big Dance Theater, Toshiki Okada, The Debate Society, John Moran. Complete detailed list in-progress.

“Eli Valley vs the Sway Machinery in the Temple of Self Hatred”

Conceived, programmed and produced an evening of music, media and literature at Joe’s Pub entitled. “Eli Valley vs the Sway Machinery in the Temple of Self Hatred” for The Foundation for Jewish Culture in collaboration with The Forward. Featured multimedia collaboration between musician Jeremiah Lockwood (The Sway Machinery) and political cartoonist Eli Valley with special guests Alicia Jo Rabins’ Girls in Trouble and author Irina Reyn.

Beyond Gaga

Programmed and produced an evening of contemporary Israeli (and Israeli-influenced) choreography for The Foundation for Jewish Culture and Tablet Magazine at the JCC in Manhattan. Choreographers Deganit Shemy, Saar Harari and Andrea Miller (of Deganit Shemy & Company, LeeSaar The Company, and Gallim Dance, respectively) presented excerpts of their work, discussed their methods, and explored the meaning of contemporary movement in relation to historical conceptions of the Jewish Body. Followed by a conversation moderated by Elizabeth Zimmer.

2002 – 2007

Performance Space 122

Artists presented and/or commissioned include: Spalding Gray, Elevator Repair Service, Peggy Shaw, They Might Be Giants, David Neumann, Eric Bogosian, Mac Wellman, Roger Guenveur Smith, Forced Entertainment, The Civilians, Mike Daisey, Young Jean Lee, Claire Danes, Sarah Michelson, Taylor Mac, Thomas Bradshaw, International Contemporary Ensemble, Radiohole, Eileen Myles, Mabou Mines, Palissimo, Ant Hampton/rotozaza, Japanther, Robbinschilds, Maria Hassabi, Temporary Distortion, Okwui Okpokwasili. Festivals produced include: Act French, N05: Norway in New York, Buenos Aires in Translation, PS122 Summer Season at The Spiegeltent, PS122 Summer in Union Square, The Imagine Festival. Complete detailed list in-progress.

Of the many projects I worked on at P.S. 122 there are a few that stand out as particularly challenging because of scale and/or ambition:

Sarah Michelson, Shadowmann Parts I & II

I worked closely with Sarah’s producer Barbara Bryan to produce and present Sarah Michelson’s groundbreaking work Shadowmann. Conceived as a two-part, site-specific work co-presented with The Kitchen, Sarah Michelson’s Shadowmann remapped the boundaries between artist and performer, indoors and outdoors, and buildings and bodies, inspired by the Bauhaus tradition of “grand sites.” The work was made in collaboration with Parker Lutz, Mike Iveson, Tanya Uhlman, and Greg Zuccolo. I later worked closely with Barbara Bryan co-producing Sarah’s next project with P.S.122, Daylight.

NØ5 – Norway in New York

I produced this festival of new experimental performance from Norway produced in collaboration with The Network for Performing Arts in Norway, BIT Teatergarasjen, Black Box Teater and Teaterhuset Avantgarden and the Norwegian Consulate. Artists included zero visibility corp, Hooman Sharifi, Baktruppen, Verdensteateret and Ole Mads Vevle.  The festival was enormously successful, selling out many performances with most of the shows getting reviewed positively in the New York Times.

Taylor Mac, Red Tide Blooming

Having co-created The Ethyl Eichelberger Award with P.S. 122’s executive leadership, I lobbied strongly for Taylor Mac to be the inaugural recipient. For his Award-funded project he conceived of a massive spectacle, Red Tide Blooming, that was his first big ensemble musical. A departure from his visceral solo post-apocalyptic drag performances, I worked closely with Taylor during the development and production process.

The WYSIWYG Talent Show

In February 2004 I co-created and produced the first-ever (in the world) all-blogger series of readings and performances. It was a ground-breaking series, one of the first cultural events to bring the online experience into real life, just prior to the dawn of social media. It was about bringing an online community together in real time and space, an unprecedented notion at the time. The series presented music, comedy, readings, performance art, a videoblog film festival, a political blogger panel during the RNC in 2004 and more, continuing until 2007.