Dance Past Faculty

Suzanne Bocanegra

Suzanne Bocanegra headshot

About

Suzanne Bocanegra is an artist living and working in New York City. A recipient of the Rome Prize, she has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her recent work involves large-scale performance and installation, frequently translating two dimensional information, images and ideas from the past into three dimensional scenarios for staging, movement, ballet, and music.

Bocanegra's piece "Rerememberer," uses the weaving instructions for a scrap of antique Danish peasant fabric as a template for an evening-length theatrical performance, with an amplified loom, an accordion virtuoso, a DJ, and an orchestra of fifty volunteers playing violin who have been taught to play only one hour before the performance. "Rerememberer" was premiered at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City and traveled to Copenhagen in 2010.

Her piece "When a Priest Marries a Witch, an Artist Talk by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Paul Lazar" premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC in 2010 and traveled to the Wexner Center in Ohio, the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, James Cohan Gallery in NYC, the Performing Garage in NYC, Princeton University, the Prelude Theater Festival in NYC, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas and Mt. Tremper Arts in Mt. Tremper, New York. It also had a week-long run at the Chocolate Factory, an experimental theater in NYC.

Bocanegra's work has been seen in exhibitions in the United States and abroad, in such venues as the Serpentine Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Hayward Gallery in London, the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. Her theatrical, video and film work has been presented at the Bang on Can Festival, the New Haven Festival of Art and Ideas, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and as part of the Wordless Music series in New York.

A major show of Bocanegra's work titled "I Write the Songs" opened at the Tang Museum in July 2010. This show traveled to Site Santa Fe in the summer of 2011.

In 2013 "Bodycast, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Frances McDormand" a one hour lecture performance, premiered at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. It has since travelled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Henry Museum in Seattle and Commonweal in Bolinas, California. The New York premiere will be December 4 - 7, 2013 on the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

A catalogue of Bocanegra's work called "I Write the Songs" is available on Amazon.

"Rerememberer (all the threads)"

Campus Address

Lewis Center for the Arts
185 Nassau Street

Email Address

sb11@princeton.edu