Join PPP's Fridays@2 speaker series for a conversation with Vanessa Anspaugh on art-making, the awakened body and her two decades of work.
The Performance as Public Practice Fridays@2 speaker series facilitates discussions about the creation and study of performance. PPP welcomes artists from within and beyond the Winship Drama Building, including current students, distinguished alumni and arts leaders from across the country, to share their research and methodology. Up next is a conversation with Vanessa Anspaugh, a choreographer and performance-based artist developing new work in the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin this season.
Talk: Movement, Reflection, Conversation
Through shared contemplation of work that spans two decades, Anspaugh hopes to explore how art-making becomes a way of showing up—to ourselves, to each other and to the places we find ourselves, expected or not. This is an invitation into the prismatic, the multiple, the awakened body as a site of creative intelligence and profound, necessary feeling.
We will meet in WIN 2.112 and then move outdoors for a short, experimental movement activity (no dance experience required). Following this, we will gather inside (WIN 2.112) where we will trace through two decades of Anspaugh's work to engage in a conversation that maps efforts to stay awake to the vicissitudes of the present moment.
About Vanessa Anspaugh
Vanessa Anspaugh is a choreographer/performance based artist. She was born and raised in the unceded land of the Tongva & Chumash (also known as Los Angeles, CA) amongst an eclectic family of artists, affected by the vast urban landscape and Pacific Ocean. The numerous paradigms of paradox existing in Los Angeles in the 80’s and 90’s made vibrant and stark impressions on her as a meandering child of this particular time and place. In 2001, she relocated to New York where she based herself for the better part of the last two decades. As a performer,
Anspaugh has worked for Taylor Mac, Sara Shelton Mann, Aretha Aoki, Faye Driscoll, Juliette Mapp, Robbinschilds, and devynn emory. She was deeply influenced by her one year with MGM GRAND (Modern Garage Movement) collaborating with Jmy Leary and Biba Bell with whom she toured the western coast and her collaborations with visual artists such as, SWOON, Every Ocean Hughes and Amber Bemak. She is a two-time Bessie Award Nominee for both Most Outstanding Choreographer (morning after mournings) of 2023 and Most Outstanding Production (The End of Men).
Her work has been commissioned and presented by The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, The Rubin Museum, The Bates Dance Festival, The River to River Festival, The Sculpture Center, The Hessel Museum, Opera House Arts, Space Gallery, along with other national & international venues. Her work has been written about in multiple periodicals such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, The Brooklyn Rail, Forbes Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Movement Research Journal, and academic journals, such as Theatre Survey. In 2013, beloved dance champion Sam Miller (RIP) invited her to join the first cohort of the LMCC Extended Life Artist Grantee & Residency program where she worked closely with mentor Jennifer Monson.
Anspaugh has moved about as a visiting teaching artist with time at Bard, Smith, Bowdoin, Colby and Bates Colleges and looks forward to her time working at UT Austin developing a new work with students in 2025.
DATE
October 17, 2025 at 2:00 p.m.
WIN 2.112
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