BIOGRAPHY
Yara Travieso is a Brooklyn based Cuban-Venezuelan-American anti-disciplinary artist working across performance, film, and ritual. Travieso’s theatrical practice has been an embodied vehicle for survival within violent systems, and has evolved into a call towards our inextricable bond with each other and nature. Her work centers the body as a microcosm of all living systems and thus, any attempt to regulate the body or the land is untenable. Guided by her deeply feeling body, her work draws from the mad, the absurd, and the matrilineal and cultivates a practice of “story-listening” rooted in vulnerability, humor, & liberation. Growing up barefoot, dancing salsa and Joropo in her Miami backyard, Travieso’s art now encompasses hybrid performance films, protests, and rituals of surrender and interconnection.
Travieso is a United States Artists Fellow, Creative Capital awardee, and grantee of the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures and the New York State Council on the Arts. She is the inaugural Jacki Apple Award recipient via Franklin Furnace, a Gibney Open Interval Fellow through the Simons Foundation, and a YoungArts alumna. Since 2019, she has served on the Dance faculty at her alma mater, The Juilliard School, where she received the 2023 John Erskine Faculty Prize. She has held residencies at The Chelsea Factory (2023–24) and the University of Maryland (2025–26), PS122 RAMP, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, BRICLab, STREB, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and The Bessie Schonberg Artist in Residence Program.
Her productions have been presented at Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, Performance Space NY, The Knockdown Center, the High Line, Joe’s Pub, BRIC Arts Media House, Opéra National de Lorraine, New World Symphony Center, and EMPAC, among others. Her films and visual work have appeared at El Museo del Barrio, Film at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, PBS, SXSW, the NY Latino Film Festival, the Museum of the Moving Image, and Vizcaya Museum.
She co-founded Miami’s Borscht Film Festival, dubbed “the weirdest film festival on the planet” by IndieWire and has led community happenings like ¡EPA! For Asylum Seekers, and collaborations with LASTESIS, mobilizing a performance of 25K women and trans communities at the Women’s March.