Jess Dobkin 2019 Visiting Artist in Residence

Jess Dobkin has been a working artist, curator, community activist, and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo theatre performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. Her practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. She’s operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. Some of her projects include The Artists’ Soup Kitchen, The Artist-Run Newsstand and The Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar. Her recent performance, The Magic Hour, was developed and produced in a multi-year residency at The Theatre Centre with support of the Canada Council. She received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship to fund her international archival research in 2018-2019. She’s taught as a Sessional Lecturer at OCAD University and the University of Toronto, and was a Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her film and video works are distributed by Vtape and her performance work is held in performance art archives internationally.

www.jessdobkin.com

Research Questions / Lines of Inquiry during Hemi Residency:

What is the potential lifespan and spirit life of a performance, and how might its documentation “perform?”
How might artists use physical, digital, and energetic archival materials in the creation of new artworks?
How might an audience create an archive? How might an archive be activated as a site for performance?

Land Acknowledgement

The Hemispheric Institute at New York University acknowledges with respect the Lenape nation, whose traditional homelands NYU now occupies. We recognize the longstanding significance of these territories for Lenape nations past and present. We acknowledge that we work in a city with the largest urban Native population in the United States. Even as we work to increase the historical awareness of Indigenous exclusion and erasure, we acknowledge the effect of that legacy in educational institutions, at NYU, and across the hemisphere. We are committed to work revealing Indigenous history and life-worlds and to the inclusion of Indigenous voices and participation, in allyship with Indigenous makers and communities across the Americas.

About Us

The Hemispheric Institute gathers artists, scholars, writers, learners, and activists from across the Americas. We focus on social justice and research politically engaged culture and performance. We share this work in digital archives and amplify it through dialogues and public scholarship, residencies, publications, and gatherings. Our dynamic, multilingual network traverses disciplines and borders and is grounded in the fundamental belief that artistic practice and critical reflection can spark lasting cultural change.