Asha Tamirisa (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator whose practice spans experimental sound performance, moving image, multimedia installation, and critical media research. Working across experimental and expanded media forms, her work engages entanglements of technology, materiality, metaphor, and memory.
Tamirisa’s improvisational, site and material-driven performances have been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Museum of Science, Bitforms Gallery, La Lumière Collective, Nonevent’s Waterworks Festival of Experimental Music, Indexical’s Digital Alchemy series, and at several artist-run and community venues. Her recorded works have been released by Tripticks Tapes, Presses Précaires, Pan y Rosas Discos, and Private Chronology.
Her expanded media, experimental cinema, and installation works have received support from the LEF Foundation, The Kitchen, the Media Archaeology Lab Artist-in-Residence Program, Perte De Signal’s Research-Creation Residency, the I-Park Foundation Moving Image Residency, the Maine Arts Commission Media Arts Fellowship, and Le Laboratoire’s ArtScience Converged Commission. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally at institutions including the Portland Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, UnionDocs, Punto y Raya, WomanMade Gallery, and the New Zealand International Film Festival.
Her scholarly work contributes to feminist sound studies, media archaeology, and critical technology studies, with publications appearing in Feminist Review, the Journal for Popular Music Studies, and edited collections including Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People (Routledge).
From 2013–2017, Tamirisa was a member of OPENSIGNAL, a collective concerned with gender and race in electronic media practice. She is currently part of PICNIC COLLECTIVE, an interdisciplinary and collaborative initiative supported by the Ellis Beauregard Foundation and SPACE Gallery’s Kindling Fund.
She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia and an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. She has taught at Street Level Youth Media, Brown University, RISD, and Bates College, where she is currently Associate Professor.
︎︎︎ ashatamirisa at gmail dot com