Annie Dorsen

For the past decade, director and writer Annie Dorsen has engaged with what she calls “algorithmic theater”—exploring how reality is disassembled and reordered not just by machines and computers, but by the complex logic that drives such technology. While the progression between the two songs in Yesterday Tomorrow is driven by software, the resulting work is resolutely human. As Dorsen noted in BOMB Magazine, “the whole thing is, of course, about the present moment of performance…[where] all of our storytelling, and all of our imagination, and our daydreams and fears and anxieties and regrets are being experienced.”

Dorsen’s project The Slow Room (2018) premiered at Performance Space New York and was co-commissioned by the Wex as part of the Spalding Gray Award. In addition to being named a 2019 fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, Dorsen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2017), the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in theatre (2014), and an Obie Award (2008). She is a visiting assistant professor of practice in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.