USA Projects

OBIE-award winning performance-making team PearlDamour has a 13-year history of creating work for theaters and alternative sites. Their intimate, interactive work playfully examines the interconnectivity of place, narrative and persona. PearlDamour is a three time recipient of the Rockefeller foundation MAP Fund. Their upcoming HOW TO BUILD A FOREST is a Creative Capital project, commissioned by and premiering at The Kitchen in NYC. Other NYC work has been commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art, arts>WFC, and PS122. Regional project support includes the Jerome and Puffin Foundations, NYSCA, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Irving Linn Charitable Trust, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Moore Family Fund for the Arts of Minneapolis Foundation, among others. Lisa and Katie's work has been published in Theater Magazine and Play: Journal of Plays (Always/Never Her Trilogy). Critical acclaim includes their 2003 OBIE for NITA & ZITA, shared with Kathy Randels of Artspot Productions in New Orleans.

As a creative team, PearlDamour makes pieces that honor our intense, shared love for vivid, conceptual performance work. Our work is intensely interdisciplinary – crafted by extensive collaborations with artists of other fields, including visual artists Krista Kelley Walsh, Charles Goldman, Kurt Mueller and Shawn Hall, choreographer Emily Johnson, and composers Sxip Shirey, Joel Pickard and Tom McDermott. We move fluidly between the roles of writer, director, performer, asking: how can each project generate its own questions, logic and energy? In answering this question, we want our audiences to feel like they are inside of an experience, rather than watching something happen "over there." When we make a show we create room for the audience to feel like they have slipped into the private headspace of a performer they are watching: an intimate, associative, surprising place. After our first collaboration (The Grove, in 1996), we've almost never lived in the same city at the same time, and instead travel to each other's hometowns where we dive in for short, intensive creative sessions that ultimately lead to performance. As a result, we have multiple performance homes that we adore-primarily Austin, New York City, Minneapolis, and New Orleans.