Marianne Weems is the artistic director of the New York-based

Obie Award The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards originally given by ''The Village Voice'' newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City. In September 2014, the awards were jointly presented and administered with the A ...

-winning performance and media company, The Builders Association, https://thebuildersassociation.org/ founded in 1994. She is a director of theater and opera and a professor at

UC Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of ...

Early life and early career

Weems was born in

Washington state Washington (), officially the State of Washington, is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. Named for George Washington—the first U.S. president—the state was formed from the western part of the Washington ...

and grew up in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

. She attended Reed College before graduating from

Barnard College Barnard College of Columbia University is a private women's liberal arts college in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1889 by a group of women led by young student activist Annie Nathan Meyer, who petitioned Columbia ...

. In 1986–87 she attended Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program where she founded the performance and study group The V-Girls along with Martha Baer, Erin Cramer, Jessica Chalmers and

Andrea Fraser Andrea Rose Fraser (born 1965) is a performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of Institutional Critique. Fraser is based in New York and Los Angeles and is currently Department Head and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio of the ...

. From 1988 to 1993 she was dramaturg and assistant director with

The Wooster Group The Wooster Group is a New York City-based experimental theater company known for creating numerous original dramatic works. It gradually emerged from Richard Schechner's The Performance Group (1967–1980) during the period from 1975 to 1980, an ...

and during that time also worked with

Susan Sontag Susan Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, philosopher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her ...

Ron Vawter Ron Vawter (December 9, 1948 – April 16, 1994) was an American actor and a founding member of the experimental theater company The Wooster Group. Vawter performed in most of the group's works until his death from a heart attack in 1994 at the a ...

Richard Foreman Richard Foreman (born June 10, 1937 in New York City) is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Achievements and awards Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays, b ...

and many others. From 1986 to 1989 she was program director for the independent arts foundation Art Matters, where she remains a member of the Board.

Career

In 1994 Weems founded the performance and media ensemble The Builders Association with Dan Dobson, David Pence, John Cleater, Jennifer Tipton, and Jeff Webster; Moe Angelos and James Gibbs joined the company in 1998 and 1999 respectively. The Builders Association's first production was an adaptation of Ibsen's The Master Builder, set in a full-scale three story house constructed inside a New York City warehouse. Since then company has been recognized internationally as a leader in theatrical innovation for their interdisciplinary stage performances and use of digital technology. Collaborating with architects, sound, and video artists, software designers, and performers, Weems and The Builders Association combine video, text, sound, and architecture to explore the interface between media and live performance in a culture that is, as Weems puts it, "irrevocably mediatised." The company's last four productions have received their New York premieres at the

Brooklyn Academy of Music The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is a performing arts venue in Brooklyn, New York City, known as a center for progressive and avant-garde performance. It presented its first performance in 1861 and began operations in its present location in ...

; their work has been presented at

New York Theatre Workshop __NOTOC__ New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) is an Off-Broadway theatre noted for its productions of new works. Located at 79 4th Street (Manhattan), East 4th Street between Second Avenue (Manhattan), Second Avenue and Bowery in the East Village, ...

, the

Lincoln Center Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (also simply known as Lincoln Center) is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has thirty indoor and outdoor facilities and is host to 5 millio ...

Festival, the Public Theater, the

Singapore Arts Festival Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) is an annual arts festival held in Singapore. It is organised bArts House Limitedfor the National Arts Council. The festival is usually held in mid-year for a stretch of one month and incorporates th ...

, London's

Barbican Centre The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London and the largest of its kind in Europe. The centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and art exhi ...

, Romaeuropa Festival, the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogota, the

Wexner Center The Wexner Center for the Arts is the Ohio State University's "multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art". The Wexner Center opened in November 1989, named in honor of the father of Limite ...

, the Walker Center for the Arts, and the

Melbourne International Arts Festival Melbourne International Arts Festival, formerly Spoleto Festival Melbourne – Festival of the Three Worlds, then Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, becoming commonly known as Melbourne Festival, was a major international arts festi ...

—the company has toured to over 80 international venues. Weems has been an adjunct, lecturer, and visiting artist at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

’s Lewis Center for the Arts,

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

in Columbus, the

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universi ...

, and many other institutions. From 2008 to 2014 she was the head of graduate directing at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

’s School of Drama and is now professor in the Theater Arts program at

. She is the co-author of ''Art Matters: How The Culture Wars Changed America'' (NYU Press, 2001) and recently co-wrote a book with Professor Shannon Jackson ''The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater'',(MIT Press 2015.)Marianne Weems
at th
Lewis Center for the Arts
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Personal life

She divides her time between San Francisco, CA and New York City with her daughter Sunita.

Productions with the Builders Association

* ''Master Builder'' (1994) * ''The White Album'' (1995) * ''Imperial Motel (Faust)'' (1996) * ''Jump-Cut (Faust)'' (1997–98) * ''Jet Lag'' (1998–2001) * ''Xtravaganza'' (2000–02) * ''Alladeen'' (2002–05) * ''Avanti'' (2003–05) * ''Supervision'' (2005–06) * ''Invisible Cities'' (2005–07) * ''Continuous City'' (2007–10) * ''Jet Lag 2010'' (2010) * ''House/Divided'' (2012) * ''Sontag:Reborn'' (2013) * ''Émilie'' (2014) * ‘’Elements of Oz" (2016) * ‘’Strange Window: Turn of the Screw" (2018)

References

External links

The Builders Association website

Marianne Weems ''Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre''. By Greg Giesekam. Palgrave Macmillan Press. 2007.

Builders Association records, 1983-2014
held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division,

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, is located in Manhattan, New York City, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on the Upper West Side, between the Metro ...