2025 Cohen New Works Festival Projects

Installation

This is your chance to sample small art pieces created by your very own colleagues and peers! With just a quarter or two, you can visit our machine and receive a random and anonymous 2D artwork of your very own. Each piece is handcrafted by a member of the College of Fine Arts community, and the proceeds will be used to fund various Fine Arts projects. Looking forward to you stopping by! Share your experience and what piece you ended up with by including #UTArtVend on social media.

Project Leads: Marisa Lawrence and Jason Buchanan

Found Footage Filmmaking Workshop

Description to come!

Project Lead: Arash Baqipur

Play

A surreal exploration of Restorative Justice, gun violence, afterlife and the misogynist corners of the internet, Death and the Girl takes place in a dream and in purgatory.

DRU, a lonely teenager with sleep paralysis and the dream of going to college, is used to seeing things in her sleep. So when she sees MAN in the middle of the night, she is not scared. MAN tells her about his execution. Was he electrocuted, beheaded, hung, shot? He can't remember. But he knows what they all feel like. As they get to know each other, MAN embodies different people in DRU's life until she can finally accept the fact that she, too, is dead.

Project Lead: Giulianna Lucia Marchese and Nadia Milad Issa

Play/Cabaret

Emiliana is a queer woman who leads a double life. By day, she is Silvia Ibarra, the daughter of a prominent, Spanish-descendant doctor. By night, she transforms into Emiliana, a cabaretera (dancer/sex worker) who impersonates Emiliano Zapata and rallies her audience to fulfill the revolutionary hero's mission. Inspired by the prostitute melodramas of the Mexican Golden Age of film and the politics of post-revolutionary Mexico, Emiliana: A Revolution Cabaret recreates the atmosphere of the cabarets in 1940's Mexico City to address issues of social justice for Indigenous, femme and queer folks.

Project Leads: Jessica Peña Torres and Laura Camacho

Installation

An interactive video installation, Escucha Coreográfica considers the distance between movement expression, sound and language and between familiar and unfamiliar aesthetics. Participants engage one-on-one with the aural record and verbal description of a dance piece they are most likely unfamiliar with. How do we appreciate dance without bodies? How do we decipher rhythm without a beat? Escucha Coreográfica invites each audience member to listen with their entire body to a dance.

Project Lead: Alejandra Martorell

Interactive Experience 

What does a peach and a donkey have in common? They both are ways to refer to the buttocks, that piece of anatomy that has folks flocking to the gym, buying special leggings and becoming the focal point of countless bathroom selfies. WHY? Join us in this activation that is part structured performance and part interactive improvisation that blends dance, storytelling, humor and history as we unpack (pun intended) the current obsession with the gluteus, shed light on historical/problematic fetishization of the black behind, normalize that every body has a booty and (hopefully) understand the need to twerk and the proper technique. With a live DJ, projection and a cast acting as performers and facilitators, we will create a unique experience to share the many stories our fannies pack.

Project Lead: Aysha Upchurch

Play/Interactive Experience

A performance of a tarot reading for an entire audience, where each tarot card is a short play. This is an attempt at divining our collective past present and futures, and every show is experienced differently at the random or fated pull of a card.

Project Lead: Nick Hart

Performance

An artist's self-portrayal as a female Iranian refugee, conveyed through a collection of sounds, movements, texts and visuals. The work draws inspiration from "The Conference of the Birds," a 12th-century Sufi poem by Iranian poet Farīdud-Dīn Attar. The poem narrates the journey of 30 birds as they traverse seven metaphorical valleys: Quest, Love, Understanding, Independence, Unity, Astonishment and Nothingness in their search for the “Truth.” In the end, the birds realize that the divine truth they seek resides within themselves. This revelation exemplifies the Persian concept of "Simorgh," meaning "thirty birds,” a powerful symbol of unity and self-discovery.

Project Lead: Mojgan Misaghi

Performance

With inventive storytelling and poignant humor, Laughter in the Deep offers a thought-provoking exploration of human-animal connections and coping mechanisms for life’s challenges through four different pieces: Laughter in the Deep, Snow, my Dearest Friend, Word of Mouth, and Albert Run. 

Project Lead: Lydia Wayne Chang

Installation

This installation aims to capture that moment the sounds of the night and the fireflies blending into stars. When I was seven years old I fell in love with the universe. I looked out from a double-wide on the side of a mountain. In the waving oak trees, a galaxy of fireflies mirrored the stars overhead and everything felt so small and infinite and beautiful. To me, it felt like the vinyl lattice of the porch was the only barrier keeping me from tipping forward into space. The distant interstate seemed to rumble in harmony with the cicadas and the wind in the oak leaves. Everything felt so alive and so beautiful. This moment of beauty in the vastness of everything has defined how I see the world and people in it.

Project Lead: Gavin Strawnato

Concert

Paracussion is an innovative commissioning project and concert that aims to address inequities and create a more inclusive space within the world of percussion. These compositions are designed to include specific impairments and categorized using a classification system inspired by the Paralympics. These classifications highlight accessibility, not limitations, ensuring that musicians with varying abilities can find music tailored to their needs. The classifications addressed in this project are Impaired Muscle Power, Limb Deficiency, Leg Length Difference, Short Stature and Vision Impairment. At the heart of Paracussion is commissioning five new works, one for each classification, composed and performed by students from The University of Texas in one concert. These compositions will showcase a variety of percussion instruments, including drum set, hand drums, keyboard instruments struck with mallets (e.g., marimba, vibraphone, xylophone), non-pitched instruments struck with sticks (e.g., snare drum, bass drum, tom-toms) and timpani.

Project Lead: Jenna Boone

Dance/Visual Art

Roses are the flower of all flowers, existing no longer as themselves but within the symbolism and expectations we have placed upon them. Their delicate, beautiful and soft petals are what we expect to cradle in our hand, until we grasp their stems and bleed mercilessly. The rose has always reminded my sister and I of ourselves - bearing the expectations placed upon our own feminine flesh to conceal the inner suffering unique to our own. A suffering we all conceal beneath the layer of thorns that uphold the soft petals expected from us. If we really took a second to see the rose for what it is, not what we expect it to be, we might finally notice the Quiet Tears of Roses. A multimedia dance and visual arts work, Quiet Tears of Roses compliments contemporary ballet choreography with anaglyph painting techniques to tell the stories of women bearing debilitating reproductive health issues.

Project Leads: London Lack and Paris Lack

Interactive Experience 

An immersive experience that welcomes its audience into the wacky world of reality television, where they will have actual influence on the events of the evening. Now, imagine: you are a production assistant showing up for the first day of your new job working behind-the-scenes of your favorite reality-competition show. Then, enter the contestants— six hopefuls ready to give it their all for the chance to win a grand prize of one million dollars. The competition is only getting started and it is anybody’s game… except the winner has already been decided. Choose-your-own-adventure as you watch the competition unfold, participate in puzzling challenges, untangle the mystery of who production is secretly championing and, perhaps, alter the final outcome.

Project Leads: Anthony Anello and Julia Kreutzer

Concert/Performance

SIMP is an ambitious, multidisciplinary live performance of an original experimental hip-hop/pop album. At its core, SIMP tells the story of "the Simp," a character whose journey through love, loss and longing reveals why he has earned his infamous title. Through bold storytelling, avant-garde music and carefully designed theatrical elements, the performance invites audiences to step into the chaotic and raw emotions of its protagonist. Prepare to follow the Simp on a visceral journey of self-discovery, where love is ultimately a curse and a catalyst for change. 

Project Lead: CULTLEADERDON

Play

Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are reunited at a small, dank studio in Los Angeles to record a YouTube interview for an unspecified Condé Nast property. Much to the chagrin of Daria, the director, Sunny, the DP, and Lucky, the 1st AD, The rest of the criminally underpaid crew has walked out, seemingly in protest of 'recent actions' made by some in the trio. The interview begins as planned, but the balance of power between the CEOs and the underpaid crew twists when the billionaires begin to realize that they all are mysteriously unable to leave the sound stage. Here is a farce of little consequence. A take on the new genre of "eat the rich" style commentaries, but with just a little more praxis.

Project Lead: Gabi Giron-Vives

Outdoor Puppetry Performance

A giant lantern puppet outdoor parade with original music that re-visits areas of the campus and city that have been impacted by environmental injustice. The performance blends the difficulty of seeing environmental injustice as an outsider, the high visibility of an element like puppets and the use of music as a tool to know/understand through sound.

Project Leads: Khristián Méndez Aguirre, Laura Camacho and Michael DeWhatley

Film

Have you ever wished you could go crazy and rid the world of all the obstacles you face when walking to the bus stop? In this totally unrealistic and made-up scenario, Things That Happen to a Girl Walking to a Bus Stop follows Girl, a person who is just trying to get to her destination but can't due to the annoying hurdles that block her path, aka disrespectful men. Inspired by the many times Women have been stopped and bothered while walking the streets in Austin, Texas. Girl goes through real-life situations; the outcome, however, are daydreams a Girl imagines because she just can't be left alone. Who doesn't want to go super saiyan and blast away all the annoying men that bother you?

Project Lead: Madi Palomo

Play

“We are the only poets… and everyone else is prose.” Emily Dickinson, 1851

We Are The Only Poets is a play that uses the poetry that Emily Dickinson exchanged with Sue Dickinson, her sister in-law and rumored companion, to offer an interpretation of the writer that is not restricted by historical stereotypes or patriarchal narratives. If poetry is the most honest and vulnerable form of language, then Emily should be remembered by the words she wrote– free from the distortions of time and tradition.

Project Lead: Lola Rose McNallie

Performance

A powerful and poignant dance piece that explores the complexities of love and codependency. This tragic love story unfolds through movement, revealing the painful truth that sometimes, love may not be enough to keep two people together. In three acts through dance, we aim to capture the universal experience of codependency and the struggles of an average relationship. Dance offers a profound way to express the intricate layers of human emotion, which is why it’s the perfect medium for this story. Through this performance, we invite you to empathize with our characters and, in doing so, hope to inspire a deeper understanding and compassion toward yourself and your own relationships.

Project Leads: Jose Salcido, Katelyn Doyle and Gabi Hernandez