Moira MacDonald
Artist-in-Residence
March 6 – 20, 2023

Moira Lael MacDonald is a multidisciplinary theater artist and filmmaker. She was awarded an Artists’ Residency in June of 2020 at Automata Arts in Los Angeles, during which she continued development on her current project, Blue Waves.  Her most recent work, Selkie, was performed at Automata Arts as well as the Skirball Cultural Center in LA.  Other work includes Edwin, Margery and Me, Anatomy Lesson, Amaranth, The Life of the Bee, and Letter from the Bees. Her short hand-processed film, The Visible Woman, has been screened at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, and at Concord Space as part of the Heavenly Directives series. Moira holds an MFA in Puppetry and Integrated Media from CalArts, and a BFA in Acting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  She teaches at Pasadena City College, Moorpark College, and the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility. Moira was born and raised in Sitka, Alaska.

While in residence, Moira continued the development of Blue Waves, an original  puppetry work that follows the lives of Lily Golden, a Soviet scholar of African-American and Jewish descent, and Svetlana Alliluyeva, a writer/translator and the daughter of Joseph Stalin.  Their paths intersected in mid-60s Moscow, and they became close friends, up until Alliluyeva’s defection to the United States in 1967. Collaborators included Gina Marie Napolitan, Jesse Kingsley, and Natalie Ferguson.