Say Hey

ryanconarro [at] gmail [dot] com

Artist Statement

I’m a creative producer, an interdisciplinary artist, a storyteller, and a facilitator. I devise performances, installations, and shared experiences informed by documentary materials, and I facilitate processes that engage diverse communities. My work as a maker and educator—ranging from large-scale public performances, to solo installations, to assets-oriented projects with communities and schools—explores fundamental questions of identity, place, and belonging: Who am I? Who are you? How do we share space with each other and learn to live and work together?

I grew up as a military brat; my father was an Army doctor. In each new state and city, I learned to seek and build community and to cultivate my deep curiosity about places and histories. We were a Catholic family, and my four siblings and I gained an appreciation for ritual and spectacle and song and hope. Over time, my experience coming out and eventually stepping away from the church showed me the necessity - the power and the pain - of bringing a critical, questioning lens to institutions and individuals around us who hold authority and control. I learned that the act of speaking and amplifying a story, a lived experience, can be a potent, radical way to raise those critical questions. It’s a practice that can sharpen and celebrate what’s healthy and whole; and, it’s an essential tool for envisioning and manifesting change that’s long overdue to rectify injustice. Storytelling can be a savior.

This understanding of the power of story has been reinforced for me, time and again, during my journey as an artist-citizen working in community settings, from rural villages in Alaska, to street festivals and church halls in Brooklyn, to prisons in Colorado. In all of these contexts I’ve employed a range of facilitation approaches and aesthetic forms—including puppetry, video design, and digital media—in a variety of established, experimental, and community spaces.

As a community worker, I’ve led projects in places that I’ve also called home, with neighbors and friends as participants. From these experiences, I can speak first-hand to the accountability that comes along with belonging: the power of mutual trust; the complex position of insider-outsider; and the benefits of conducting interviews, research, and performance in which one is encountered as a peer and a fellow citizen—not “just” as an artist or facilitator.

I’ve also led projects in contexts where I’m a short-term guest, from Stonington, Maine, to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to Abu Dhabi, UAE. These varied collaborations have given me an awareness of the nuances of working as a visitor in a place: the ethics of entering and exiting a community; the limits and pitfalls of the anthropological lens; and the complex dynamics of race, power and privilege, from my place as a guest facilitator in diverse settings.

Whether I’m sharing space with neighbors on my block, or in a fine arts venue in a city across the globe, or any place and space between… I commit to an ethical practice of being and making, rooted in deep listening.

Biography

Ryan Conarro is a creative producer, interdisciplinary artist, and an educator-facilitator. He’s the Media Arts Partner Artist with Youth on Record, a music and media education organization in Denver. With the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative, he served as General Manager and Program Director of Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio - the first statewide prison radio in the U.S. In 2020-21, Ryan was Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Denver. There, he taught Devising Documentary Performance, Theatre for Creative Placemaking, and Contemporary Queer Performance. And from 2014-2020, Ryan worked at Ping Chong + Company in New York as Artistic Collaborator in Residence and Education & Community Projects Associate. He’s a past company member of Juneau’s Perseverance Theatre and of the New York-based international company Theater Mitu. He was Artistic Director and a founding member of Generator Theater Company, and he performed on national tour and Off-Broadway at the New Victory with the Aquila Theatre. Ryan has also directed two operas with Juneau’s Opera to Go.

Ryan has served as adjunct faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Open Arts department. At NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, Ryan has taught Applied Theatre. At the New School, he designed and co-led Collaborative Theater Practices for Ping Chong + Company. At University of Alaska’s bachelor’s and master’s of education programs, he’s taught Arts Integration and Student Engagement. He’s led similar course work as a teacher leader with the Alaska Arts Education Consortium, and in a variety of education conferences and workshops. He’s presented work at NYU’s Applied Theatre Forum, and he’s facilitated workshops for Arena Stage’s arts education team.

Ryan’s New York K-12 arts education experience includes serving as a Ping Chong + Company teaching artist trainer and a lead teaching artist at New York City and New Jersey schools, including Flushing International High and the U.N. International School. He’s served as a Kennedy Center Partners in Education teaching artist and teacher trainer in Stonington, Maine; Juneau, Alaska; and Kodiak, Alaska. He’s a long-time artist on the Alaska State Council on the Arts Artists In Schools program roster, and he sat on the council’s Arts Education Advisory Committee. He was Drama Content Coach for the Alaska Department of Education’s State System of Support for three years, visiting intervention-status schools in rural Alaska to provide arts integration strategies to teachers. He spent seven years as a teaching artist with the Lower Kuskokwim School District arts integration program, where he served 13 village school sites by providing drama-based instruction to staff and students. And he was resident drama teaching artist for 4 years at Glacier Valley Elementary in Juneau. Ryan has facilitated arts workshops in communities and schools around the U.S. and internationally.

Ryan’s theater training began at the Gainesville Theatre Alliance in northeast Georgia. He earned a BFA in theatre and English at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, where his creative work focused on documentary performance practice and arts education. His other training and education includes courses in NYU’s Educational Theatre master’s program; the O’Neill Puppetry Conference and the Juniper Tree School for Puppetry Arts; the SITI Company’s summer intensive at Skidmore College; Theater Mitu’s South India Artist Intensive; and the semester Shakespeare Intensive at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He’s a student of Gurukkal Sivakumar in the Indian traditional martial art form kalaripayattu.

After his undergraduate training at NYU, Ryan moved from New York to Alaska in 2001 as an AmeriCorps volunteer for KNOM Radio in Nome, where he worked as morning show host and traveled in the Bering Strait region as Public Affairs Director. In Juneau, he designed and implemented the KTOO-JDHS Broadcast Journalism Program, a project teaching radio news production skills to Juneau high school students, and mentoring them as they created stories for air on KTOO’s Morning Edition.

Ryan grew up with four siblings as an Army brat living in various parts of the U.S. When he’s not in a theater, workshop space, or school, he likes to spend time in wild spaces, to stroll the neighborhood, and to drink a second (or third) cup of coffee.