Professor of Art & Design, Theater and Drama, and Women's and Gender Studies
About
Holly Hughes is a 2010-11 Guggenheim Fellow and internationally acclaimed performance artist. She began her work at New York City's WOW Cafe in the Lower East Side, a cooperative art space that gleefully described itself as "a home for wayward girls," or "a refuge for feminists who had been run out of other feminist organizations." At WOW she worked with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, the Five Lesbian Brothers. She has performed at a variety of venues including the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, Yale Rep, New Victory Theatre, numerous colleges, universities and community based performance spaces. In 1990, she was propelled into the center of the Culture Wars after the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded funding granted to Hughes and 3 other artists under pressure from conservative politicians. She is the recipient of 7 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as funding from the Jerome Foundation, the MAP Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts. Her work is widely anthologized. Current projects include a national tour of her most recent solo performance "The Dog and Pony Show: Bring Your Own Pony," curating a series of animal themed performances at Links Hall in Chicago (May 2012), development of a new solo piece in collaboration with Dan Hurlin.
Hughes is co-lead faculty with Malcolm Tulip in the new BFA program in Interarts Performance.
Affiliation(s)
Field(s) of Study
- Art and experimental theatre
- Feminist humor
- Animal studies
- LGBT studies
- Performance and social change
