We are delighted that internationally known, award-winning performance artist, writer, and playwright Denise Uyehara will be the inaugural AAIR for spring 2013. For over two decades, Denise has investigated what marks us in our migration across borders of identity through interdisciplinary performance. She is a recent recipient of the MAP Fund, the National Performance Network Creation Fund and a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council. Her work has been presented across the United States. and in London, Vancouver, Helsinki and Tokyo. A founding member of the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, she conducts workshops for artists and a wide range of communities (LGBTQ, women, people of color) and is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities. For more information about Denise plus a sampling of her work, you can visit Denise online at http://deniseuyehara.com/.

Titled ‘Memory and the Occupied Body,’ this three-week residency by Denise Uyehara includes a public artist talk and discussion with students and the community, followed by a series of intensive workshops in interdisciplinary performance with an IDAAS class and through a community workshop series open to the broader Claremont Colleges and off-campus communities. The residency will culminate in a final “showing” by the students and community members in public daytime “showing.”

Throughout the residency, Uyehara encourages students to conduct a close “reading” of their own lives, seek out new ways to interrogate and represent their past, shed light on who they are now, and make a connection between their personal experience and larger the larger community and world. The residency takes into consideration where the students are “at”– no performance experience is necessary. Students can engage in a variety of expressions to create their projects: visual art, writing, found artifact, spoken word, theater, movement/ritual, poetry, music, etc.