Yanira Castro is a Puerto Rican born interdisciplinary artist living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Since 2009, she has made participatory performances and interactive installations with a team of collaborators under the moniker, a canary torsi. Her work is rooted in communal construction as a practice of radical democracy and invites the public into co-creation. Castro is the recipient of the 2022 Herb Alpert Award for Dance and has received two Bessie Awards for Outstanding Production and a NYFA Choreography Fellowship as well as various commissions, residencies and national project grant awards. Her latest projects include: “Last Audience: a performance manual” created and published with Museum Contemporary Art Chicago and a performance podcast, “Last Audience,” a 3-part space opera grounded in Boriken. She is a co-author of “Creating New Futures’ Phase 1: Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance,” and “Phase 2: Notes on Equitable Funding from Arts Workers.” Both are collectively-written documents drafted as calls-to-action to address deep-rooted inequities in the performance field.
