Rachel Gita Karp

I make performances about U.S. politics and policy. My performance-making begins when I learn something about the U.S. that boggles my mind: a statistic about contemporary life that's problematic, an aspect of our country's past that's different from how we do things in the present. I do far-reaching research to make sense of what I've learned: recovering history, exploring culture, engaging experts. I then transform that research into invitations for others to interrogate the politics and policies with me. Through participation, curiosity, and generosity, we work together to understand these specific and systemic conditions on physical and intellectual, communal and personal levels--and to see how each person can act to change the politics and policies if they wish: to make them, and our country, what they want and need them to be.

A production photo from PACKING AND CRACKING, a party bus performance about gerrymandering. Co-created and directed by Rachel Gita Karp, presented in 2021 through the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics. Photo Credit: Kitoko Chargois.

Rachel Gita Karp writes and directs performances about U.S. politics and public policy. Her current focuses are reproductive freedom, gender representation in politics, voting, and privacy. Rachel has developed and directed new performances about these topics and more through The Drama League, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, Ars Nova, Mabou Mines, Irondale, Brooklyn Arts Council, the Center for Artistic Activism, the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics, Actors Theatre of Louisville, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, The Wild Project, The Brick, The Flea, IRT, Dixon Place, Philly Fringe, Incubator Arts Project, Women Center Stage, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Monson Arts, Barn Arts, Anonymous Ensemble, Orchard Project, the Powerhouse and Samuel French Festivals, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chatham University, Columbia University's graduate and undergraduate schools, and Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama. Associate and assistant directing credits include productions on Broadway, Off-, and regional, including productions through Signature Theatre, The Mad Ones, Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, 13P, Big Art Group, Woodshed Collective, and PearlDamour. BA, Columbia; MFA, Carnegie Mellon. At Carnegie Mellon, Rachel was a John Wells Directing Fellow, which supported her academics, and a Milton and Cynthia Friedman Fellow, which supported her work in women's policy research in Washington, D.C.

Asia Stewart

I use performance to question the limits of the category of “woman” and assess how constructions of gender intersect and interact with race, class, and sexuality. I particularly focus on the liminal position of Black women, who are readily identified as being spectacular figures: either sub-human, machine, or monstrous. Featuring looped behaviors, my performances flirt with excess and absurdity to rival the sheer incomprehensibility of the systems and structures that have been manufactured to oppress Others. Each performance centers body memories and is inspired by my attempts to reckon with my estranged relationship to my gendered and racialized queer self.

In Gorgades, I covered my entire body in dark, artificial hair. While clothed in my dress of hair, I performed normal tasks like braiding, tying, and combing my hair, and completed actions, like sweeping the floor.

Asia Stewart is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. After receiving degrees in the social sciences from Cambridge and Harvard University, she has sought ways to embody abstract sociological theories and transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body. As a National YoungArts Winner in Musical Theatre and a former National Arts Policy Roundtable Fellow with Americans for the Arts, Stewart uses her past experiences on stage to inject her work with a heightened sense of theatricality. In 2020, Stewart concluded her first independent performance series, Graft, which attempts to capture the violence that constructions of whiteness and femininity wrought on Black bodies. Works from that series are currently being showcased in Sentient.Art.Film’s 2021 Omnibus project and appeared in Whitney White’s installation experience and musical DEFINITION at the Mercury Store in Brooklyn in Summer 2021. Stewart has begun a new performance series on intergenerational trauma and sexual violence as an artist-in-residence at the NARS Foundation. That work will premiere in Brooklyn in June 2022.