Stephanie Acosta

Stephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist, director, experimental archivist and organizer who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of their practice. Blending performance with practice-based and studio research and engaging ensembles in facilitated processes, they create fleeting performance works that examine perception in shared experiences. Acosta has presented her works with and for Museum of Art and Design, MCA Chicago, Chocolate Factory Theatre, Knockdown Center, the Current Sessions, Miami Performance International Festival, IN>Time Symposium, Abrons Arts Center, and the Performance Philosophy conference.

As dramaturg Acosta has collaborated with artist Miguel Gutierrez, on multiple projects including Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us) Ballet de Lorraine, France, This Bridge Called My Ass in 2019 for American Realness, and Super Nothing premiering at NYLA Jan 2025. Recent choreographer collaborations include Jessie Young, Kayla Hamilton, Leslie Cuyjet and Amber Sloane.

The curatorial performance experiment Sunday Service ran for 6 seasons co-created by Alexis Wilkinson at Knockdown Center. Later reuniting with Wilkinson as curator for Good Day God Damn at the Chocolate Factory Theatre, a solo exhibition, with accompanying talk show Apocalypse Talks, speaking on themes of multi-crisis making and radical hope found in art practices. Delving further into lost histories Acosta joined as lead archivist for the AUNTS Archive and the Jo Andres Archive for which they have curated exhibitions of the artists catalogue alongside Laurie Berg.

Currently, Acosta is developing multiple performance works including a techno-opera with artist Alexa Grae, Tone Pillar, which combines mystical nightlife, surrealist staging and multi media production with live operatic scores alongside an series of studio works, videos and plays, Lichen Baby…It’s Me Moss, entangles dual research threads looking at lichen’s symbiosis and moss’s natural structure to find poetics of being.