Welcome: Ryan Tacata, Assistant Professor
We're excited to welcome Ryan Tacata as a new Assistant Professor in our Theatre Performance area, beginning in the Fall term. We can't wait to see what new energy he brings to the area and the SCA overall. Welcome, Ryan!
Ryan Tacata is a performance maker and scholar. His creative practice is deeply collaborative and engages in place making, ordinary acts, and gift-giving. His recent work includes a minor repair. (2019), an archive-based response commissioned by the City of Chicago for the exhibition goat island archive—we have discovered the performance by making it; Lolas (2017), a performance installation in honor of Filipino grandmothers (Asian Art Museum, SF); For You, (2016–), a series of dedicated performances for specific audiences; and dancing in Doggie Hamlet (2015–) by Ann Carlson, a site-specific dance with four human performers, sheep herding dogs, and 30+ sheep. His academic research plays critical intimacy in the key of everyday life, and focuses on alternative methods of archival research and performance art historiography. He is currently writing on the occasion of art with an emphasis on social ceremony, art history, and occasional literature. His work has appeared in Performa, TDR, Performance Research and SFMoMA's OpenSpace. Prior to joining the School for the Contemporary Arts, he taught courses in performance at the San Francisco Art Institute, and in the MFA Theater and Performance Making Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (SF) and University of Chichester (UK). In 2018, he was Visiting Lecturer for the Abandoned Practices Institute with Erin Manning, and was Lecturer in the Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture (ITALIC) program at Stanford University from 2018-2020.
BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007.
PhD, Performance Studies, Stanford University, 2015.