Lani Asuncion

Artist-in-Residence | Summer 2022

Community Art Project: “Performance: History/Ritual/Identity”

Lani Asunción (they/she) is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist creating socially engaged art in both private and public spaces. Weaving a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance connected to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx-American. Asunción integrates new media technologies and transmedia storytelling through ritualized performance to encourage conversations that magnify connections to facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives.

Asunción has exhibited their video performance work in CONTACT ZONE (2018) at the Honolulu Museum of Art School presented by Pu’uhonua Society, and had solo shows at the New Bedford Museum of Art (2016) and Radial Gallery (2020) with the Department of Art and Design at Dayton University. They have performed live at Studios at MASS MoCA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, and Aurora Picture Show in Houston, TX. Running community and public art projects at Brookline Arts Center, Boston Cyberarts, Urbano Project, and Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia. They have been awarded artist residencies at the Studios at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Vermont Studio Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, I-Park, Elsewhere, The Wedding Cake House, Queer.Archive.Work, Caldera Arts Center, and BigCi in Australia. Asunción is an awardee of the Live Arts Boston (2020) grant from the Boston Foundation, City of Boston's Transformative Public Art grant (2020), Dame Joan Sutherland Fund from the Australian American Association (2017), and the Kala Fellowship (2023) from the Kala Arts Institute in Berkeley, CA. Their project Revolutionary AYAT was awarded the 2022 New England Foundation for the Arts Public Art for Spatial Justice grant. They are founding member and Director of Digital Soup who are core members of the Cultural Equity Incubator (CEI) partnering with Arts Connect International (ACI). They received their Master’s Degree in Fine Arts in Performance and Video at the University of Connecticut.

As a Summer 2022 Artist-in-Residence at Urbano, Lani is leading “Performance: History/Ritual/Identity” a Community Art Project exploring performance art, place-based histories, ritual, storytelling, identity, and community.

WORK SAMPLES