Celebrate the Artist | Doletzki, Izaguirre, Merlo | February 20, 2024

Celebrate the Artist

February 20, 2024

6 – 9pm

Celebrate the Artist is one of Theaterlab’s oldest and most valued programs, in which we celebrate international artists and introduce them to New York audiences by presenting workshops, performances, and, most importantly, a Theaterlab-style wine and snacks reception. The program aims to connect visiting international artists in transit with the New York artistic community to promote cultural exchange.

Through Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs Global, we are able to welcome Simona Doletzki from Berlin as curator in residence, whose show will open in March in our Gallery Space. We are excited to welcome her as part of this cultural exchange! We’re are also thrilled to announce that Mafe Izaguirre, a Venezuelan-American cybernetics artist, and Joey Merlo, an Italian-American playwright, were awarded NYSCA’s Targeted Ops Artist-in-Residence and will each be embarking on creating a new project throughout 2024 at Theaterlab.

These three artists, along with many new and familiar faces, will be making work unique to our dazzling white-boxes this year. We want to invite you to come meet and celebrate them as we kick off 2024 on a high note!

Please kindly RSVP by clicking the link. We hope to see you there!

RSVP HERE

Meet the Artists!

Simona Doletzki, looking into the camera.

Simona Doletzki has studied art history and archaeology at Humboldt University Berlin and Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy. She completed a master’s program in art history at Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen and University of Connecticut. She gained work experience in the arts and the cultural sector in Germany and abroad. Among other things, she worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Institute for Foreign Relations Berlin and the Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur in Berlin. Her main areas of work are contemporary art, history of photography, art and spatial strategies, theory of perception, art and politics.

Mafe Iraguirre posing in their workshop, in front of the camera. The workshop contains cybernetic components, and mechanical equipment.

Maria F. (Mafe) Izaguirre (Caracas, 1978) is a New York-based Venezuelan artist specialized in cybernetics. Her work inquiries the ways in which humans and technology can cooperate, and how this cooperation as Hybrid Spiritual Systems™ amplifies consciousness. Izaguirre’s thought-provoking propositions offer new perspectives on the human condition, as she challenges the traditional view of the human as separate and superior from other species and machines. She believes that the humans of our time are hybrid entities, interconnected with multiple beings, agents, and systems, whose identities are shaped by their interactions and exchanges. Izaguirre’s work is a reminder that we are a universal, entangled, and vibratory ever evolving organism.
To read more visit: mafeizaguirre.com

Joey Merlo looking into the camera. A lamp hangs above their head, illuminating the space.

Joey Merlo is a New York Foundation for The Arts playwriting fellow and the artist-in-residence at The William Steeple Davis House in Orient Point, NY. He is a theatre maker and educator who has worked all over the world including Greece, Peru and Ghana. Projects include his off-Broadway premier, On Set with Theda Bara, at The Brick in February 2024 and Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond The Closet at The Tank in June 2024. Joey’s work has been made possible with support from Eureka!, Theaterlab, Rough Draft, Abingdon Theater Company, where he was a playwright-in-residence, and through grants from The Puffin Foundation, The Merchant & Ivory Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. They hold a BFA from NYU, Tisch’s Experimental Theater Wing and an MFA from Brooklyn College.
www.joeymerlo.com | @joejoemerlo