Kendra Ware is a performance-based multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals an interest in history, personal narrative, and experimental approaches to art-making. Using live performance, video, and installation, she creates hybrid staged environments that explore the intersections of race, gender, class, cultural politics, and identity while challenging social norms and notions of otherness.
Currently, she is working in collaboration with Grammy-Award winning artist Martha Gonzalez on a concept album and theatrical concert, Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind, a project of the National Performance Network Creation Fund. She is the creator/writer/performer in The American Dream Nightmare: How to Wake Yourself Up, a multimedia performance experience depicting anti-Blackness, that deep dives into the ancestral. Most recently, she staged the experimental video Soñar es Luchar at the Latino Cultural Center for Cara Mía Theater and directed the premiere of Virginia Grise’s theatrical adaptation of Their Dogs Came with Them site-specifically in Perryville Women’s Prison and under the I-19 Freeway in Tucson, Arizona with Borderlands Theater.
Her work has also been developed and/or produced by Automata LA, REDCAT, Son of Semele, Upright Citizens Brigade, The Santa Barbara Contemporary Museum of Art, East West Players, The Last Bookstore, La Mama Theater, Pregones Theatre, The Flea Theater, Pan Asian Rep, Borderlands Theater, and a todo dar productions. Ware has been a guest artist with La Mama Theater in Umbria, Italy, Long Beach Dance Foundation, Indy Convergence Indianapolis, York University, Northwestern University, Sarah Lawrence College, CalArts, Arizona State University, and University of Arizona. Her work has been awarded a NEFA Creation and Touring Grant, NPN Documentation and Creation Fund Grant and was recently recognized as a semi-finalist for the Barbara Whitman Award. 2022 Dramaleague Directing Fellow alum, 2023 Lloyd Richards SDCF New Futures Residency MFA: California Institute of the Arts.