Staff
Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes, performance, cinema, and installation. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its investigation of memory, power and loss.
Geiser creates innovative, hypnotic live performances that integrate performing objects and projection. Her performances have been presented at The Public Theater, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Redcat, The Walker Art Center, CalArts Center for New Performance, HERE, and other venues.
Geiser’s films have been presented at the National Gallery of Art, MOMA, LACMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Wexner Center, Centre Pompidou, and the Strasbourg Museum, among others.
A Guggenheim Fellow, Geiser’s work has been recognized with a Doris Duke Artist Award, an OBIE Award, and with grants and fellowships from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation, NEA, Center for Cultural Innovation, MapFund, the Jim Henson Foundation. Geiser is on the faculty of the School of Theater at CalArts.
Susan Simpson is a Los Angeles based, multidisciplinary artist and designer and Co-Artistic Director of Automata. Her practice includes puppet theater, dioramas and animation. She makes performances and interactive public art works that engage viewers in intimate viewing. Her works often investigate the history, mythology and social dynamics of the sites where they are located. Much of her performance work has been focused on the history of liberational thought and action in the queer communities.
Tim Tsang is the Special Projects/Creative Consultant for Automata, and an artist engaged in infinite play as an accumulative performance strategy. Tsang scripts friendly spaces—theoretical, physical—that invite perplexity and warmth, serving as repositories for critical thinking, contemplation and escapism in the contexts of exhibitions, academic conferences, events, games and concerts. Often through over-identification and over-exposure toward the social, these spaces activate poetic explorations, re-framings, reflections and expansions of interactive creative processes.
His work has been presented at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Kaaitheater (Brussels), Human Resources (Los Angeles), School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Galerija Reflektor (Užice, Serbia), Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland), Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon (MOCAM), and Automata Theater (Los Angeles).
Tim holds a B.M. in Music from Berklee College of Music, and an MFA in Music and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts.
Dan Rae Wilson is a lifelong Angeleno and multimedia artist whose work lies at the intersection of the uncanny body and the ephemera of the subconscious. An MFA graduate of CalArts, DanRae work centers around fiber arts, film, and puppetry. In addition to continuing their own practice, they have dedicated their career to actively working with Los Angeles nonprofits, such as The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Automata, and The Center for Advanced Body Literacy. By focusing on financial efficiency and mission clarity, allowing arts organizations to thrive and better serve their communities.
Cassia Streb is a sound artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She writes music for specific situations and for special places. Her work is often composed for friends and colleagues in order to highlight aspects of their musicality that she admires. Cassia plays viola, small percussion instruments and found objects in her work with improvisation and interpretation of notated scores. Some of her recent projects include Sound House, a modular, interactive sound and puppet piece and co-founding Music for Your Inbox, a digital concert platform that presents the work of experimental visual and sound artists. Cassia is a founding member of the Southland Ensemble, a contemporary chamber ensemble dedicated to the interpretation and performance of experimental music, as well as the Koan Quartet, a string quartet performing works by living composers.
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work is grounded in literature, painting and the conceptual avant-garde. Her working methods involve handcrafted material, mixed media, and interchange between new and old technologies.
Cherlyn’s media-based works have been shown internationally at venues and festivals including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, and Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. She received the Jury’s Prize at Women Make Waves Int'l Film Festival, Taiwan (2014), the Jury Award at Ann Arbor Film Festival (2018), and the Best Experimental Film Award at South Taiwan Film Festival (2019).
She is a lecturer at CalArts, where she has taught: “Aesthetic Inquiries - Contemporary Asia," "Gender and Sexuality in Asian Cinema" and "History of Experimental Film." She is the curator of the film series Threshold to Threshold at Automata, Los Angeles, the founder of Experimentalist Media Collective, and the editor of B-Journal.
Dylan Marx does website/social media for Automata. He is also a composer and musician. His work ranges from experiments in recording, archival sampling, and mime. He received his BA in Music Composition and Electronic Music Productionfrom UC Santa Cruz and his MFA in Experimental Sound Practices and Integrated Media from CalArts.