Discipline: Interdisciplinary Art – multimedia installation, Visual Art – sculpture

Narcissister

Discipline: Interdisciplinary Art – multimedia installation, Visual Art – sculpture
Region: Brooklyn, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2015, 2023

Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Masked and merkin-ed, she works at the intersection of dance, art, and activism in a range of media including live performance, film, video, collage, and sculpture, all while integrating prior experience as a professional dancer and commercial artist. She has won Creative Capital and United States Artists Awards for her work.

She presents her award-winning works worldwide at festivals, nightclubs, alternative spaces, museums, and galleries including The New Museum, PS 1, The Kitchen, and the Abrons Art Center. Interested in troubling the popular entertainment and experimental art divide, she appeared on America’s Got Talent.

Festivals include the Music Biennale Zagreb, Chicks on Speed’s Girl Monster Festival, Festival of Women Ljubljana, Copenhagen’s first live art festival, and the Camp/Anti-Camp festival in Berlin, among others. Her video The Self-Gratifier won “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at the 2008 Good Vibrations Film Festival; Vaseline won the main prize in 2013. Her first feature film, Narcissister Organ Player, premiered at Sundance 2018 and won Best Documentary at Hacker Porn Film Festival Rome, Italy and is still touring worldwide. Her activist short film "Narcissister Breast Work" premiered at Sundance 2020 and won a Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short at Outfest 2021.

Narcissister was a re-performer of Luminosity in The Artist is Present at MoMA. In 2013, she was in “Fore” at The Studio Museum and had her first solo gallery exhibition "Narcissister is You" at envoy enterprises. She was nominated for a Bessie Award for her evening-length piece Organ Player, which debuted at Abrons Art Center in 2013.

While at MacDowell in 2015, she worked on the edit of Narcissister Organ Player. She also worked on photographic images to be exhibited in conjunction with the premiere of the film. The film was made with the support of a Creative Capital Award Grant and a Theo Westenberger Award Grant, which the artist was awarded in July 2015.

Studios

Adams

Narcissister worked in the Adams studio.

Given to the MacDowell Association by Margaret Adams of Chicago, the half-timbered, stuccoed Adams Studio was designed by MacDowell Fellow and architect F. Tolles Chamberlin ca. 1914. Chamberlin was primarily a painter, but also provided designs for the Lodge and an early renovation of the main hall. The studio’s structural integrity was restored during a thorough renovation in…

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