Yara Travieso

Yara Travieso is a Brooklyn-based Cuban-Venezuelan-American anti-disciplinary artist working across performance, film and ritual. Travieso’s theatrical practice has been an embodied vehicle for survival within violent systems and has evolved into a call towards our inextricable bond with each other and nature. Her work perceives the body as a microcosm of all living systems and thus, any attempt to regulate the body or the land is untenable. Guided by her deeply feeling body, her work draws from the mad, the absurd and the matrilineal, cultivating a practice of “story-listening” rooted in vulnerability, humor and liberation. Travieso’s art encompasses hybrid performance films, protests, and rituals of surrender and interconnection.

Travieso is a United States Artists Fellow, Creative Capital awardee, and grantee of the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures and the New York State Council on the Arts. She is the inaugural Jacki Apple Award recipient via Franklin Furnace, a Gibney Open Interval Fellow through the Simons Foundation and a YoungArts alumna. Since 2019, she has served on the dance faculty at her alma mater, The Juilliard School, where she received the 2023 John Erskine Faculty Prize. She has held residencies at The Chelsea Factory (2023–24), the University of Maryland (2025–26), PS122 RAMP, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, BRICLab, STREB, Tribeca Performing Arts Center and The Bessie Schonberg Artist in Residence Program.

Her productions have been presented at Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, Opéra National de Lorraine, New World Symphony Center and others. Her films and visual work have appeared at El Museo del Barrio, Film at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, PBS, SXSW, the NY Latino Film Festival, the Museum of the Moving Image and Vizcaya Museum. She co-founded Miami’s Borscht Film Festival and has led community happenings like ¡EPA! For Asylum Seekers, and collaborations with LASTESIS.