Co-curating Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food
Last year I had the pleasure of working with brilliant international artists through Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food, which I co-curated with Gideon Lester. The 2022–23 edition of Fisher Center’s LAB Biennial, Common Ground, was a year-long international program focusing on the politics of land and food which took place across four continents. The festival included two four-day festivals at and around the Fisher Center—one at harvest time (October 13–16, 2022), and one in the growing season (May 4–7, 2023). The Biennial showcased a robust line-up of new commissioned works by Kenyon Adams, Tara Rodríguez Besosa, Kite, Cooking Sections, Vivien Sansour, as well as myself, alongside a rich program of talks, panels, and installations that ran in tandem throughout the academic year. For more info about Common Ground, visit Fisher Center’s website here.
Receiving the Mellon Grant for Bard College
I am pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Bard College $2,000,000 in support of my research, artistic production, and curatorial practice. The funding will allow the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA), the Fisher Center at Bard, and and myself to implement a new model in which the college provides infrastructure to support my own creative and scholarly output. As the Founding Director of CHRA, Distinguished Artist in Residence at Bard’s Theater & Performance Program, and guest co-curator at the Fisher Center at Bard, the grant will support my practice’s production and touring, scholarly and artistic research at Bard College at large, and curatorial work at CHRA and the Fisher Center in particular. The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant makes it possible for CHRA and the Fisher Center to offer tangible resources to develop and disseminate ambitious, forward-thinking work, of my own […]
Receiving the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts
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, […]
First Reader of my work is out – Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production
I’m very honored and humbled to share that the first reader of my work was published last month. Edited by Laurel V. McLaughlin and Carrie Robbins and published with Amherst College Press, “Tania El Khoury’s Live Art is the first book to examine the work of Tania El Khoury, a ‘live’ artist deeply engaged in the politics and histories of the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region.” The book description is as follows: Tania El Khoury’s Live Art is the first book to examine the work of Tania El Khoury, a “live” artist deeply engaged in the politics and histories of the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. Since the 2011 Syrian uprisings, El Khoury has conceived and created works about lived experiences at and across international borders in collaboration with migrants, refugees, displaced persons, and other artists, performers, and revolutionaries. All of El Khoury’s works […]
Co-curating Tashweesh Festival 2022
I had the privilege to be invited along with the brilliant Tunisian curator and activist Bochra Triki to co-curate Tashweesh, a festival on feminist practices happening in Tunis, Brussels, and Vienna hosted by L’Art Rue, beursschouwburg, and Tanzquartier Wien. Our work started with planning a closed online retreat during the pandemic that created an intimate, open, and conversational space for feminist artists and activists from SWANA and Europe. It then moved to the opening in Berlin of a commission by artist Rima Najdi who created a live art piece on the experiences of birthing and revolting. Tashweesh culminated in three programs involving scholars, artists, writers, activists, DJs, singers, cooks, librarians, and many more. For more info, visit: https://tashweeshfestival.com/ and read our curatorial text below: For the last two years, despite a pandemic that drastically shifted how we collaborate across borders, we had the incredible opportunity to curate feminist artists and […]
Directing the Center for Human Rights & the Arts
I joined the faculty of Bard College in New York to direct the new OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts. The center supports work by artists, activists, and researchers from around the globe creating networks of collaborations and solidarity. It has a flagship Masters Program with scholarships available for local and international artists and activists. For more info, visit chra.bard.edu
Receiving the 2019 Bessie Award
The Bessies: The New York Dance & Performance Awards Outstanding Production 2019 I am honoured to have been awarded a bessie award for outstanding production 2019 for As Far As My Fingertips Take Me presentation at Under The Radar festival in New York City. Check out the list of all the brilliant award winners that includes the below description of my work. Tania El Khoury As Far As My Fingertips Take Me at Under the Radar/The Public Theater For bringing the experience of migration and border control to our most intimate place—the body. For filling the audience’s ears with a story of displacement, while drawing the journey on their arm. reaching unseen and unprotected through a wall: a global crisis is brought home in indelible ways.
“Where No Wall Remains” and Other News
Where No Wall Remains An international festival about borders co-curated by Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester [Photo by Samar Hazboun] I am excited to share the details of my curatorial debut in collaboration with Gideon Lester of the Bard Fisher Center. We dreamt of a festival that took place across three continents and commissioned inspiring artists who challenge borders in their work and their everyday. Between 21 and 24 November, New York’s Bard College will host Where No Wall Remains, a festival on borders of all kinds—political, physical, and bodily. It features nine original performances and installations by artists from the Middle East and the Americas: Ali Chahrour, Palestine Hosting Society, Jason de León, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Tashweesh, Emilio Rojas, Rudi Goblen, Emily Jacir, and me. Book your tickets soon! Click here to view the full program. Cultural Exchange Rate A new work by Tania El Khoury Cultural Exchange Rate is an interactive piece in which I share […]
I’m a 2019 Soros Art Fellow
Soros Art Fellowship I am honoured to be one of the cohort of 11 people from around the world who are the 2019 Soros Art Fellows. The Open Society Foundations fellowship supports innovative mid-career artists whose work advances social change around the world. It provides artists with the resources to develop a large-scale project on their own terms in their own local contexts. This year’s fellowship focuses on artists and cultural producers working on art, migration, and public space. The generous funding allows us to take time to re-imagine our practice, and be inspired by each other. Our first meeting took place in New Orleans, a city I always wanted to visit. The meeting was filled with soulful food, emotional conversations, critical engagement, and a sense of fond camaraderie. I urge you to look up the work of every single person of the cohort and discover their important work. As […]
2019 projects and touring
Life takes you to weird places including New York I was never a big fan of New York or Amreeka as a concept-empire. But being there for four months, I admit that the city grew on me—especially that I got to work with and meet various groups of innovative, radical, and brilliant artists and curators. The journey started in January with the beloved Under The Radar Festival. But the reason I was based in New York until May was related to my relationship with Bard College in upstate New York and its Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. While there I taught a practice and seminar course on the politics of interactive performance with an incredible group of students. I was also working the Fisher Center’s artistic director Gideon Lester and senior producer Caleb Hammons (along with the whole team) as guest curator for their biennial festival’s edition on borders […]