HERE ARTIST
RESIDENCY PROGRAM
One of the most robust residency programs in the country and serving as a national model, HARP provides a commission, developmental support, career planning, and an opportunity for a full production to cross-genre artists within a collaborative environment of peers working across disparate art forms – including theatre, dance, music, puppetry, visual art, and new media. Each HARP artist receives significant long-term support of $125,000, which includes $50,000 in cash and more than $75,000 in equipment, space, and services over 2-3 years to tailor each residency to each artist’s individual needs.
With the launch of URHERE (our new digital and outdoor platform), HERE has expanded our HARP cohort to include digital and outdoor artists. Selected artists will partake in a 1-2 year residency to create digital native and/or outdoor works that will premiere on URHERE. URHERE HARP residents will receive $50,000 ($25,000 in cash and $25,000 in equipment, space, and services) over 1-2 years. Through significant investment of time and resources, dynamic work within a strong community is created.
Throughout the year, we offer a window into the creative process of the artists in our nationally recognized HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP). Watch for RAW / Resident Artist Works to catch these fresh in-process works!
You can review the HARP application guidelines here.
See below for details on our current HARP artists.
The HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) is made possible with public funds from: National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. Additional support provided by Alliance of Resident Theatres/ART NY; Café Royal Cultural Foundation; Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Inc.; Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; Doris Duke Foundation; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Fund for the City of New York; Howard Gilman Foundation; The Mertz Gilmore Foundation; The Jim Henson Foundation; Jerome Foundation; JKW Foundation; The Leon Levy Foundation; Lucille Lortel Foundation; Mellon Foundation; The Mental Insight Foundation; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation; National Performance Network; New England Foundation for the Arts; New York Community Trust; New York Foundation for the Arts; OPERA America; Puffin Foundation; Royal Little Family Foundation; The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; The Scherman Foundation; Select Equity Group; The Shubert Foundation; The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation; Tow Foundation, and HERE’s generous community of individual donors.
Psychic Self Defense is an object focused theater piece where we, audience and performers, train to defend ourselves against the force of the corporations that seek to leech our psychic energy. Psychic Self Defense will create an empty space where visions can happen by way of that most basic of theater machineries– curtains opening (endlessly).
Psychic Self Defense takes Dion Fortune’s 1930 occult self-help text of the same name as point of departure. Fortune’s book is about how we protect ourselves from paranormal psychic attacks from beings such as vampires and ghosts. This evening-length performance attempts to create new psychic self defense strategies for an era where capitalism incentivizes and normalizes the hijacking of our attention– via smartphones, apps, screens in all public spaces. How do we regain a sense of mental spaciousness? Psychic Self Defense aims to create this experience of empty space by way of the hypnotic effect of at least 45 minutes of curtains opening. The piece will explore visual and sonic abstraction, and will rely on theatrical machinery, puppetry techniques, lights, shadows, a sound score that features samples and generative electronics, movement based performance, talking, negative space and positive energy.
Nia Witherspoon’s new work, Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure + Wisdom School – inspired equally by the “bad bitches” of hip-hop, the reproductive justice movement, and the sacred sex workers that graced Egyptian temples – presents women and trans folks of color with opportunities to re-encounter their sexualities through the lens of the sacred, in the hopes of increasing bodily autonomy and dispelling toxic masculinity.
A new interdisciplinary dance performance: part-ritual, part-celebration, part-laboratory, and part-dinner. Commissioned and produced by HERE with an expected premiere in fall 2024, this multi-sensorial live performance centers on food justice and environmental ethics. The show is structured as a series of vignettes that audiences will wander through to participate in the act of eating together, witnessing embodied performance by mythological creatures, and experiencing sound/video movement installations. The team includes: Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya as directors/choreographers/
RHEOLOGY is the autobiography of an avalanche. A physics symposium. A concert. My mother studies the rheology of granular materials: how the natural landscape flows in fits and bursts. She also sings the songs of Bengali poet-composer Tagore. Most singers approach his songs delicately. But my mother’s voice is strident. Confrontational. She says, “gawla khule ga”: sing with your throat open. When she’s teaching me a song, I ask her to translate lyric by lyric. Scattered throughout the house are yellow pads scrawled with equations. Sigmas and deltas. I’ve always been mystified by these other, intricate languages my mother speaks. RHEOLOGY is a performance memoir. A translation across boundaries of language, gender, discipline, and generation. An artist son studies his physicist mother. She studies the strange behavior of sand. Together, they try to understand the science—the story—of how things flow.
The HawtPlates are a family singing group that was formed in a one-bedroom apartment in The Bronx. They create live vocal works by breaking down vernacular musical forms and reconstituting them into other modes of performance, producing sound tonics and “one pots’, harkening to the spirit of the family heirloom recipe. Their work honors their lineage and personal histories while outwardly reporting an ultimately human experience.
The HawtPlates have worked with numerous organizations and artists across disciplines including Meshell Ndegeocello, Abigail DeVille, Kaneza Schaal, Hilton Als, Helga Davis, Steffani Jemison, Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and The D.R.E.A.M. Ring, National Black Theater, The Public Theater, Performance Space New York, and The Park Avenue Armory among many others. The HawtPlates is comprised of drama desk-nominated composer/performer Justin Hicks, his sister, singer/songwriter Jade Hicks, and his wife Tony-nominated actor/singer Kenita Miller-Hicks.
Same As Sister (S.A.S.) is a NYC and Toronto-based performance collective led by twin choreographers Briana Brown-Tipley + Hilary Brown-Istrefi. Initiated in 2013 to make experimental narrative performance accessible to a diverse audience through collaborative and interdisciplinary practices, their commissions have been presented at The Citadel (Toronto); Base (Seattle); Archaeological Museum of Messenia (Greece); Danspace Project (NYC); CAMAC (France); BRIC Arts Media (NYC); and NYLA (NYC), among other venues. S.A.S.’s recent commission, This is NOT a Remount, was nominated for a 2022 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Production (Dance). They were an Alternate and Finalist for the Jerome Foundation’s 2021-22 and 2019-20 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (Dance), and are the recipients of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ 2022 and 2017 Emergency Grant (Dance); Queens Council on the Arts’ 2020 Queens Arts Fund New Work Grant (Multi-Discipline); and a New York Foundation for the Arts’ 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship (Choreography). sameassister.com
Janani Balasubramanian is an artist and researcher creating accessible, inviting, and beautiful portals to natural and computational worlds. They work in emerging media, installation, immersive performance, poetry, prose, conceptual art, and public art.
Janani has received residency and commissioning support for their work from the Tow Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Sundance Institute, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, NYFA, New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, CAST at MIT, MAP Fund, Public Theater, Pioneer Works, Mount Tremper Arts, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts, UCross Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. Their work has been presented at dozens of venues internationally, including the New York High Line, SF Exploratorium, Red Bull Arts, Academy of Natural Sciences, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Janani is a member of the Guild of Future Architects, and has been the artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History since 2017.
In 2023, they will be in residence at Colorado College, University of Colorado, Camargo Foundation, and Djerassi Arts Center. In 2023-2024, they will be the Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University, jointly hosted by the Physics and Electrical Engineering Departments.
Joshua William Gelb is the director, performer, and creative technologist behind Theater in Quarantine, the Obie and Drama League Award-winning digital performance laboratory operating out of an East Village closet measuring only 8 sq feet. Working with over one hundred collaborators and livestreaming dozens of productions to its YouTube Channel, TiQ has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Japan’s NHK Television, and has been profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Gelb holds a masters in directing from Marianne Weems’ Future Stages Program at Carnegie Mellon, has participated in the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and prior to the pandemic created both Jazz Singer and The Black Crook in residence at Abrons Arts Center while his Drama Desk nominated adaptation of A Hunger Artist, created in collaboration with Sinking Ship Productions, continues to tour. TiQ’s full archive can be found and streamed anytime at youtube.com/theaterinquarantine.