Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video/performance art. Her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were essential to the formulation of the genre. Her influence was crucial to the development of contemporary art in many genres&--;from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. During the past decade, Jonas has collaborated with composers such as Alvin Lucier to develop collaborative video-performance works, and has performed and toured with The Wooster Group. Her most recent work continues to explore the relationship of new digital media to performance. Jonas is currently developing a
performance for the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin where three of her installations will also be included. Jonas has been awarded fellowships and grants for choreography, video, and visual arts from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the CAT Fund, the Artist TV Lab at WNET/13 (New York City), the Television Workshop at WXX1 (Rochester), and the Deutsche Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in Germany. Jonas has received the Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Modern Art Prize at the Tokyo International Video Art Festival, the Polaroid Award for Video, and the American Film Institute Maya Deren Award for Video. In 1994, Jonas was honored with a major retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in which she transformed six performance works into installations for the museum. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Rosamund Felsen in Los Angeles and the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York City.