Kenneth Collins is a transdisciplinary artist, working at the intersection of digital media, performance, cinema, and installation. He got his start as an artist in New York City working for Richard Foreman at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater in the East Village. He has since been a resident artist at Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, SUNY Buffalo’s Creative Arts Initiative, and was a member of Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab. Collins is best known for his work with Temporary Distortion, a non-profit arts organization he formed in New York City in 2000 with the mission to create experimental work that is accessible to all.
Temporary Distortion (named one of the “Best New York Theater companies” by TimeOut NY Magazine) has maintained its roots in downtown NYC as an invested stakeholder in the local community for over 20 years, while also performing at notable venues around the world. The group explores the tensions and overlaps existing between the practices of theatre, cinema, music, and media art. Together with Collins, they continually work across disciplines to create performances, installations, films, albums, and works for the stage that have been shown in over 25 cities in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States.
Collins’s work with Temporary Distortion occupies the gray space between the “black box” of the theatre and the “white cube” of the art gallery. While Temporary Distortion most often performs at international theatre festivals, they have also been featured in exhibitions at the Benaki Museum in Greece, the Aram Art Museum in South Korea, the Bakhrushin Museum in Moscow, the Yates Gallery at the Chicago Cultural Center, and at Ideal Glass Gallery in New York City.
Since 2012, Collins has been dedicated to studying meditation and compassion-based practices with a variety of teachers as part of his focus on integrating the contemplative arts into contemporary performance. During this time, he served as a volunteer at Tibet House US and The Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science in NYC. In addition, he was certified to teach mindfulness meditation by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, after completing a two-year training program in awareness and compassion-based practices. Recently, he has begun to incorporate artificial intelligence into his work in contemplative performance, as a means by which to reflect on the complexity of human thought and consciousness through an unconventional lens.
Academic essays discussing his work with Temporary Distortion have been published in Yale’s Theater, NYU’s The Drama Review, UCSD’s TheatreForum, Queen Mary’s Contemporary Theatre Review, American Theater Magazine, Chance Magazine, and other industry leading periodicals.
His work is also discussed in the books: Performance & Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field, Corps en Scène: L’acteur et les Technologies (Bodies on stage: Acting Confronted by Technologies), Utopii performative: Artisti Radicali ai Scenei Americane in Secolul 21 (Performative Utopias: Radical Artists on the American 21st Century Stage), Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance: Deep Time of the Theatre, Every Leader is an Artist, Theatre Today, and the popular introduction to theatre textbook, Theatre, Brief (13th Edition). His plays and writing on the arts have been published in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Yale’s Theater, UCSD’s TheatreForum, and Chance Magazine.
Kenneth Collins is Assistant Professor of Media Arts Production in the Department of Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He has an MFA in Directing and Digital Media Design from the University of Iowa and an MA in Theatre from Florida State University.