Yara Travieso is a Cuban-Venezualan-American, Brooklyn based film/stage writer, director, filmmaker and choreographer drawing from a kaleidescopic Latin American womanist lense. Playing with scale, myth, various time mediums, and spiritual-magical-telenovela-realism, Travieso aims to manifest the unseen truths that live beneath the surface of her mother’s, her mother’s mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s skin.
Travieso is a 2019 United States Arison Artist Fellow, a 2016 Creative Capital recipient, and a 2014 winner of The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant via The Ford Foundation and The Surdna Foundation. Her original live productions have been featured in NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, Performance Space NY, The Knockdown Center, Madison Square Garden, BRIC Arts Media House, Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, APAP, Opéra National de Lorraine France, Miami’s New World Symphony Center, and Miami Dade Live Arts among others. Her site specific works have taken over Vizcaya Museum’s surrounding swamplands, five blocks of NYC’s High Line park, YoungArts’ entire city block campus, and 360° of Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center’s concert hall. Her feature length film work has been presented with Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Miami Film Festival, Dance on Camera Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival, SXSW Panel Picker, and Museum of The Moving Image. Her short form films have been commissioned by Google, Hermes of Paris, GQ, Glamour, I Am An Immigrant, Conde Nast among others. VICE describes La Medea, Travieso’s touring made-for-camera live musical experience as “A modern-day Medea is mythology’s 'Nasty Woman’.”
Travieso co-founded the Borscht Film Festival in 2005 and co-ran it until 2010 when it was named “the weirdest film festival on the planet” by IndieWire and received the prestigious Knights Arts Grant and the Miami New Times Mastermind Award. Travieso received a Dance BFA from The Juilliard School in 2009. After which, she danced professionally for the MET Opera from 2010-2014. In 2015 she associate directed and toured the opera Orphée aux Enfers in France alongside director Theadore Huffman.
Travieso is currently on faculty at The Juilliard School for an original Film/New Media course. She is a speaker leading and taking part in conversations, lectures, masterclasses, or workshops, in spaces like: The Ford Foundation, The Park Avenue Armory, MoMa, BAM, National YoungArts Foundation (‘05 alum), NYU, Fordham, The New School, UnionDocs and Ghetto Film School, among others. Travieso has helped organize actions advocating for Latin American womxn’s rights and most recently worked with The Women's March alongside fellow activists like Paola Mendoza and the Chilean feminist collective, LASTESIS to lead the Chilean performance protest “Un Violador En Tu Camino” for 25K participants in front of the White House. She is the recipient of residencies such as: PS122 RAMP 2016, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council 2015, BRICLab 2014, STREB 2014, Tribeca Performing Arts Center 2013, and The Bessie Schonberg Residency at The Yard 2011.