Artist in Residence 2019-2020
Street Angel
Michelle Sui
This week, Automata welcomes Los Angeles artist Michelle Sui for the first on-site session of her 2019-2020 Residency. While in Residence this year, Sui will be developing her film project Street Angel, an ongoing work exploring the fraught onscreen and off screen history of Los Angeles' Chinatown. Street Angel will be presented in progress at Automata in Spring 2019. Additionally, while in residence, Sui will be conducting research and inviting conversation in the neighborhood, and will curate / present two screenings of early Chinese films accompanied by live original music and translation (Spring 2020). All public residency events will be free and open to the public.
Michelle Sui’s residency is made possible through the support of the Artists in Communities Program of the California Arts Council.
Michelle Sui is a Chinese-born, Los Angeles-raised performer, composer, choreographer, writer and director. Her solo performances, site-specific theatrical experiences, films, and immersive multimedia compositions have been presented in Germany, Italy, the Republic of Georgia, and across the U.S.
Much of her work exists at the intersection of forms and draws upon body as geography, language in translation, and the performance of femininity. Songs of Body, her six-part synesthetic song cycle, merges embodied vocal music, scent design, and wearable arduino sensor technology and was a 2016 finalist of the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers.
Michelle's ongoing research in the human voice and women's folk music traditions has taken her to Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and various autonomous regions of China. She frequently leads embodied voice workshops in the U.S. and internationally. Her production company Nü House creates work that facilitates conversations across borders and connects diverse artists and communities around the world.