Yanira Castro Court/Garden Performance work 2015 Federal Hall, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's River To River Festival photo by Maria Baranova photo
Yanira Castro's interdisciplinary work takes the form of live performances and installations that incorporate text, movement and video. The work focuses on the significance of gathering and watching--the historical, political and social resonances of the act of being present together in performance. In her work, Castro negotiates complexities of sources, authorship and practice with a team of collaborators (including the audience) to build the work as a communal act. Castro is a Puerto-Rican artist based in Brooklyn. In 2009, she formed the interdisciplinary collaborative group, a canary torsi, an anagram of her name. Her work has been presented and commissioned extensively in New York by organizations including The Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Arts Center, Invisible Dog Art Center, ISSUE Project Room, Danspace Project, and Dance Theater Workshop. She is a 2016 NY Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellow, 2017 Gibney Dance Center DiP Artist, and a participant of LMCC’s Extended Life program (2017-2015). She has been a Returning Choreographic Fellow at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Vermont Performance Lab Artist, BRIClab Artist, Dance New Amsterdam Artist-in-Residence, Artist Ne(s)t AIR (Romania), Sugar Salon Fellow, and Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow. Her work has been recognized with awards including NEFA’s National Dance Project, The Jerome Foundation, MAP Fund, New Music USA, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and USArtists International. In 2009, she won a Bessie Award for “Dark Horse/Black Forest” at The Gershwin Hotel presented by PS122. The archive for her participatory performance project, "The People to Come" (thepeopletocome.org), was featured in The New Museum’s exhibit “Performance Archiving Performance” in 2013. In 2017, her trilogy of works CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR were presented simultaneously over three weeks in NYC by three commissioning organizations, The Chocolate Factory, Abrons Arts Center and The Invisible Dog Art Center. Castro received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature from Amherst College and in 2017 received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater.
