Faye Driscoll

Faye Driscoll is a choreographer, director, performance maker, and installation artist who has expanded contemporary dance into participatory, multisensory environments where bodies, spectators, objects, voice, and live sound function as one unstable choreographic system. Based in Los Angeles and New York, Driscoll earned a B.F.A. from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and performed with Doug Varone & Dancers for several years, appearing at Jacob's Pillow in 2001 after earlier participation in the Pillow's Modern Traditions Workshop. Her work emerged publicly in the mid-2000s with pieces like *Wow Mom, Wow* (2007), which combined postmodern dance, pop-musical structures, and extreme theatricality. *837 Venice Boulevard* (2008), an autobiographical work framed as a theater within a home, earned a 2009 New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Outstanding Production. Works including *There is so much mad in me* (2010) and the duet *You're Me* (2012) developed a vocabulary in which speech, unstable identities, visual excess, humor, and physical risk were inseparable from choreography.

Driscoll's practice shifted decisively with the *Thank You for Coming* trilogy, designed to alter the relationship between audience and performers. *Attendance* (2014), *Play* (2016), and *Space* (2019) progressively shifted participation, authorship, and attention: the first two built communal ensemble situations, while the final installment centered Driscoll's solo presence. This series became a defining example of her interest in spectators as part of the work's social machinery rather than passive viewers. Recognition accelerated alongside: in 2013 she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Creative Capital award. The Doris Duke Artist Award and United States Artists Fellowship followed in 2016, then the Jacob's Pillow Dance Award in 2018.

That year Driscoll also brought her physical-theater sensibility into other media, choreographing for Young Jean Lee's Broadway production *Straight White Men* and Josephine Decker's film *Madeline's Madeline*. Her 2020 Walker Art Center exhibition *Come On In* translated choreographic scores into six audio-guided experiences for museum visitors. She then made *Calving* (2022) at Theater Bremen and *Weathering* (2023) at New York Live Arts. *Weathering* places ten performers and accumulating materials on a rotating platform, making interdependence, exhaustion, touch, sound, scent, and environmental instability physically perceptible. The work involved scenic designers Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan, sound and music director Sophia Brous, and dramaturg and scent designer Dages Juvelier Keates alongside the performers. Driscoll received an Obie Award for directing *Weathering* in 2023 and the Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal for the work in 2024. She also premiered the site-specific *Oceanic Feeling* at Rockaway Beach in 2024. In April 2026, the American Academy in Rome announced her as a 2026–27 Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize fellow in Environmental Arts and Humanities.