Erin O’Brien

I use performance, video and installation to explore notions of “home” and “homeland”.  As a mixed race child of Vietnamese immigrant mother and an Irish-American father, who was a career diplomat, my sense of home has always been fluid and ever changing.  I was conceived in Vietnam and born in the U.S.  In a sense, I was exiled before I was born and lived most of my life as an ex-patriot.  My art practice is about exploring these disjointed identities that co-exist in my body and this ever-present search for home.  More than the emotional and physical sense of home, I am interested in the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and spirituality shape this construct.  Through my work, I investigate issues such as war and memory, transnational identity and belonging, and multiple identities and its attendant baggage.

I am interested in how the social and political define the performativity of interaction and cultural memory throughout history.  I am investigating the way war exists in the imagination of the American public and concerned with developing a vision for peace.  Using humor, narrative and conceptual structures, I develop work that is invested in collective healing from trauma, whether personal or inherited to further social justice and cultural understanding.  My conceptual performances and installations also critically engage with popular culture, such as reality television, and well-known memorials, monuments and institutions that reflect the complexity of our social and political reality.

Bio:

Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Queer Vietnamese-Irish American interdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and popular educator.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago recently presented O’Brien’s conceptual performance, Peace Salon.  As an interdisciplinary artist, her solo performance art has engaged audiences up and down the West Coast from Los Angeles to Vancouver B.C.  Called a “modern day Virgil” by the LA Weekly, O’Brien’s work addresses hate crimes, homophobia, and violence against women, with sensitivity and humor.   She has toured her one-woman show “The Monk Who Licked Me” at colleges and communities from Oregon to Santa Fe to Maine.

As a community activist and popular educator, O’Brien has developed programs for Sisterfire, Southern Californians for Youth, the UCLA Labor Center’s Summer Internship Program, and APALA (Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance).  O’Brien has conducted diversity and cultural community building workshops for over a decade.  O’Brien has also trained with Augusto Boal and conducts Theater of the Oppressed workshops.  She was a founding member of Arts In Action, a political and cultural arts collective space in the heart of LA’s pico-union neighborhood.

O’Brien holds an MFA in Studio Art/Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Erin will be conducting research for a new body of work in Vietnam as a Fulbright Fellow in 2009.

Here is a list of workshops that I conduct regularly.  I generally work with programmers to assess and identify the most ideal fit for the campus or organization.

Grassroots Organizing

• Recruitment and outreach
• Choosing an Issue
• Power and Power Mapping
• Strategy Development
• Coalition Building
• Initiative Process
• Legislative Process
• Economic Justice
• Environmental Justice
• Youth Workers’ Rights
• Educational Access
• Affirmative Action
• Media
• Leadership development
• Organizational Planning
• Train the Trainer
• Capitalism 101
• Popular Education
• Labor History

Theater/Performance

• Performance Art
• Improvisation
• Creating your own story
• Creating Street Theater
• Forum Theater/Theater of the Oppressed
• Boal Technique
• Popular Education Theater
• Theater Games and exercises
• Love & War Workshop series

Diversity

• Anti-Oppression 101
• Homophobia/heterosexism
• Queers of Color and intersectionalities
• Sexual Assault Against Women
• Sexual Harassment
• Cultural Competency
• Identity strands
• Communication Styles
• Spectrum
• Breaking down the isms