BIOGRAPHY
Yara Travieso is a Cuban-Venezuelan-American anti-disciplinary artist, educator, & community collaborator working in performance, film, ritual & protest. There is a legacy of Latin American art and spirituality by women and queer people rooted in the resistance of control over bodies and lands as sites of ownership & production. Travieso’s practice lives in this lineage, however, rather than resisting systems of control, she surrenders to the collective body, including nature, as a means of sensing a moment of individual & collective liberation. When we perceive the body as a microcosm of all living things and vice versa, "regulating or possessing” the body or land becomes untenable.
Travieso is a 2023-24 Chelsea Factory Artist, a 2021 New York State Council For The Arts Individual Artist in Film & Media grant recipient, a 2019 United States 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. She is currently on faculty at The Juilliard School, where she received the John Erskine Faculty Prize as well as a Dance BFA in 2009. Her productions have been featured in NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, Performance Space NY, The Public Theater, The Knockdown Center, The High Line park, Opéra National de Lorraine France, New World Symphony Center, & The Experimental Media Performing Arts Center among others. Her films have been presented with El Museo, Film at Lincoln Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, PBS, SXSW, NY Latino Film Festival, Museum of The Moving Image among others. VICE describes La Medea, Travieso’s touring made-for-camera live musical 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. In 2019 she collaborated with The Women's March and Chilean Feminists LASTESIS to bring a performance protest to 25k women. She has led talks and lectures with: The Ford Foundation, The Park Avenue Armory, MoMa, BAM, NYU, National YoungArts Foundation (‘05 alum), Fordham, The New School, UnionDocs, and Ghetto Film School, among others. She is the recipient of residencies such as: PS122 RAMP 2016, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, BRICLab, STREB, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and The Bessie Schonberg Residency at The Yard.