I’m very honored to share that I was recently announced as one of ten recipients of the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. The annual award recognizes risk-taking mid-career artists in each of the fields of dance, music, film/video, theater, and visual arts. The award includes an unrestricted prize of $75,000 and the invitation to design and take part in a week-long residency at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), in Valencia, California, in early 2024. The prize was initiated and funded by the Herb Alpert Foundation and has been administered by CalArts since 1994. Recipients of the award are selected through a multi-stage process. Each year, the CalArts faculty invite fifty artists and art professionals to nominate two artists each. The one hundred nominated artists are then invited to apply to the award, which is judged by a panel of three experts for each field: dance, music, film/video, theater, and visual arts.
Describing my artistic practice, The Herb Alpert Foundation said the following: “Via the breadth of her multifaceted imagination and the powerful sense of ethical responsibility imbedded in her work, artist Tania El Khoury creates sensorially rich interactive installations, performances (site-specific, interactive, one-on-one, “lectures…”) and physical and aural encounters all in the service of engagement. Serious in intent – mining and questioning issues of national and transnational constructions of identity, human rights violations, forced migration, gender violence and trauma, the effects of decades of wars and occupations, the relation of archives and history – her work is also playful, theatrical, elegant, and complex.”