I am an interdisciplinary artist, writer, director, and performer.
I was born & raised in Puerto Rico, then I lived in New York, and now I live in Los Angeles.
I practice art and magic, I cannot separate one from the other.
Performance is ritual and ritual is performance.
Arrangements of words and objects are spells.
Meaning making and disrupting are spells.
I believe in art and magic as tools for healing, preservation, revolution, connection, and liberation.
I trained as an actor, singer, and physical performer (BFA Tisch/NYU; Moscow Art Theatre; MFA CalArts).
I invite amateur and do-it-yourself aesthetics to disturb established modes of theatrical performance, and activate embodied research as ritual acts of decolonization/unsettling.
My practice engages a multi-referential and horizontal research sharing process, drawing on historical documentation, literature, user-generated online platforms, macro/micro cultural phenomena, and personal experience, in order to create events that consider American mythologies, exorcize cultural content, and subvert authoritative ways of accounting for truth.
I’ve created dinners, lectures, walking tours, videos, stage shows, and game nights. My full-length solo works unravel timelines embedded with precise historical reenactment into musical extravaganzas: Brandenburg Gate: The American Hits (PAM), and “¡Con la boca es un mamey!” (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions).
My collaborative practice with Sallie Merkel, Emotional Labor Co., weaves popular culture and academic inquiry into non-linear, transgressive studies of girlhood, as in Our-So-Called Sleepover, or, Freud and Jung Crash 1995 Through a Ouija Board (LAX Festival), and creates transformative ritual via playful entertainment, as in The Commons (digital series) and the iterative Witches’ Cabaret (We Put a Spell on You! at Machine Project's Mystery Theater; Witch House at CalArts; Love Spells at Mast on Fig; and Casting into the Unknown, and The Graveyard Shift and Other Stories, both presented via livestream).
As a performer, I have collaborated with artists Janicza Bravo, Carolina Caycedo, Danielle Dean, Harry Dodge, Lizzie Fitch & Ryan Trecartin, Sean Grattan, Amy Howden-Chapman, Zoe Aja Moore, Tyler Matthew Oyer, Monica Rodriguez, and Greg Wohead.
Thank you for visiting.
With love,
Mireya
