Aviya Hernstadt, 2022
Aviya is a New York-Jewish multidisciplinary performance artist working primarily in movement, autobiography, comedy, and sculptural installation. She deconstructs Jewish rituals, traditions, and stories in hopes to dig out their contemporary, diasporic, queer, apocalypse-surviving, and anti-racist contexts. She has performed in collaboration with Carmen Caceres DanceAction, Yehuda Hyman’s Mystical Feet Company, and The New Shul. Her recent works include “Are my tears disturbing you?”, a dance theater piece choreographed for the New Shul’s High Holidays services, and “Gelilah,” a multidisciplinary performance piece exploring religious pageantry made in collaboration with sculptor Madeline Coven. In 2021, she spent 6 weeks as an artist-in-residence at The Sable Project in Vermont.