Sophia Cleary

Email:

socleary@ucsd.edu

Website:

https://www.sophiacleary.com/

Pronouns:

she/her/hers

Biography:

Sophia Cleary is an interdisciplinary artist focused on performance and liveness. Making her work through the lens of the fool, or trickster, Sophia uses play as a method and critical position to engage her audience in a system where power dynamics necessarily shift. Drawing upon her life experience as a birth doula, waiter, standup comedian, and analyst for a private investigator, Sophia explores the nature of relationships, vulnerability and authenticity. In her live performance work, she focuses on the space between performer and audience as an aperture that restricts or expands and uses humor as a lubricant to mirror, respond to, or disrupt the status quo. In her current work, Sophia teases out the theatricality embedded in disciplinary systems that control and condition the body. From readymades to monologues, she addresses the stakes of live performance and lays bare its attending contracts and procedures.



Sophia has presented her work in Scotland at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in New York City at the Center for Performance Research, Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory, Dixon Place, The Kitchen, and e-flux, and in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum, MoCA, and Human Resources Gallery. She is the founder and coordinator of works-in-progress performance series REHEARSAL, where she has advised over 75 performing artists in the development of their work. She holds a BA in Dance and Art History from Marlboro College, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and is currently working toward her MFA in Visual Arts at University of California San Diego.