ABOUT ────────
Carissa Lee Pinckney is an artist, producer and curator based in Chicago, Illinois
Armed with a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I began acting professionally in 2010. I have appeared in several short films, and been featured on Key and Peele (Comedy Central) and The Crazy Ones (Fox). I created and produced the web series Living With Strangers (LWS) through my production company, Apartment 12 Productions, together with my co-creator and friend, Tracy Ofosuhene. LWS has screened around the regional and international film festival circuit. During this time while working as an actor, I was lucky enough to join the team that workshopped Aleshea Harris' "What to Send Up When It Goes Down" performing the work at Boston Court Performing Arts Center and at A.C.T. in San Francisco. After those performances I began to understand that I needed to break free of the conventions of theater and film. My passion for storytelling drove me to create through acting, directing, writing and producing. Now my desire for change and connection drives me to push past the rules of any one genre and make art that blurs the lines between theater, film, intervention, craft and event. Now during my pursuit of a MFA in performance from the School of the Art institute Chicago I am exploring themes of generational trauma and healing, community building and empathy.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT ────────
My work consists of traditional theater, public intervention, filmed performance, sound performance, and workshops. I use my body, Black Archives, vulnerability and conversation to foster empathy and build connections between people, aiming to change the audience experience from that of a passive viewer to an active participant.
I see performance has the ability to transform audiences' perceptions about individuals and society. I am constantly striving to harness the power of performance. Seeing it as an art form that goes beyond mainstream entertainment or education. Utilizing it as a device that provides visual experiences and helps me to marry two parts of myself: the artist and the citizen. Permitting me to look at my own experiences and explore the legality and illegality of black vernaculars in a larger cultural context. Black archives and personal family history are used alongside cultural narratives surrounding Black women to explore the tensions and misunderstandings that shape the current emotional landscape of anti-blackness.
My work at its best deepens understanding between people, connecting them and giving them permission to engage their curiosity about one another. The work calls audiences to action. I make performances in order to give participants the opportunity for discord. Expanding theatrical experiences outside the walls of theaters and galleries into the streets and into minds. In hopes that, with time and care, we can discover what happens to the air in a room, when love is professed, or a secret is told, or a racial slur is uttered, or How the tears of a stranger on television feel like our own?