Allison M Keating
After receiving her BFA from New York University, Tisch School for the Arts, Allison was a company member of 3-Legged Dog Media and Theater Group in New York City for five years. 3-Legged Dog (3LD) produces new, original works in theater, performance, media and hybrid forms. As a company member, Allison worked as a generative artist and resident production designer, and performed in two award winning productions with the company. The company produced Allison’s original play Rods and Cables and her short film Winston’s Letter, among other projects. Her video installations have been shown at 3LD Art & Technology Center’s video art exhibition and in their storefront windows. With Artistic Director Kevin Cunningham, she designed Losing Something (Winner of the American Theater Wing Hewes Design Award for Innovative Production Design), and Fire Island, the designs for which were exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.
Most recently, Allison developed and directed the new play Yellow Fever through a cross continental collaboration with London based Playwright Simon Parker. The play premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Allison has also collaborated internationally with 3-Legged Dog and Antarticá, the Mexican experimental arts group, with whom she produced a performance installation for the México Now Festival.
As an artist who interrogates media and online spaces, Allison has found an interesting niche within creative online marketing practices. At 3LD, she was the Artistic and Development Associate and functioned as the head of 3LD’s marketing department, and collaborated on several community wide marketing campaigns. Allison helped to produce and curate several large scale community social events at 3LD, including a night of free art exhibitions, performances, and technology demonstrations to the public. She was a curator for 3LD’s robust resident artist program and founded the 3LD Media Arts Program, which showcases the work of emerging media artists in the building’s street level commercial display and public gathering spaces. She has also worked as a freelance marketing consultant for Ideal Glass Gallery in Soho with LA-born artist Willard Morgan.
Allison’s interest in curation and fine art eventually led her to the California Institute of the Arts, where she received her MFA in Directing and Integrated Media and was mentored by Travis Preston, Dean of the School of Theater and Kristy Edmunds, Artistic Director of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. At CalArts, Allison presented “Birth/Control,” an exhibition on choice which included seven female multimedia artists from across the Institute and was a curator for the CalArts Digital Arts Expo and TedX CalArts. Through the CalArts School of Theater, Allison directed the LA premiere of Woman from the Past by German writer Roland Schimmelpfennig, and premiered MASK by Calarts Alumni John Michael Johnson at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
It was within the Integrated Media department at CalArts where Allison first met Eric Carter and formed the group LikeUs with collaborator Nina Caussa. LikeUs explores social media platforms as new spaces for performance and uses found internet-based content. The group has “performed” Our Town, Medeamaterial, and Retweeting Coney Island, a new Charles Mee play, using these strategies. They have also created installations investigating online spying using Chatroulette in coffee shops.
Allison has always created art in team environments, and has occasionally worked with teams of 50 or more artists. She is always looking for new ways to create innovative experiences for audiences, and she often experiments with form, structure, audience participation, interaction between digital and physical space, and ethical boundaries.
Allison is currently investigating the fear of extreme weather through interactive role playing performance simulations. She is also working on Our Population, a documentary project about the size of our population and its relation to family planning decisions.