Kenneth Collins works at the intersection of digital media, performance, cinema, installation, and artificial intelligence. He is best known for his work with Temporary Distortion, a non-profit arts organization he formed in New York City in 2000 with the mission to create experimental work that is accessible to all.
Temporary Distortion (named one of the “Best New York Theater companies” by TimeOut NY Magazine) has maintained its roots in downtown NYC as an invested stakeholder in the local community for over 20 years, while also performing at notable venues around the world. The group explores the tensions and overlaps existing between the practices of theatre, cinema, music, and media art. Together with Collins, they continually work across disciplines to create performances, installations, films, albums, and works for the stage that have been shown in nearly 30 cities in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
Collins’s work occupies the gray space between the “black box” of the theatre and the “white cube” of the art gallery. While Temporary Distortion most often performs at international theatre festivals, they have also been featured in exhibitions at the Benaki Museum in Greece, the Aram Art Museum in South Korea, the Bakhrushin Museum in Moscow, the Yates Gallery at the Chicago Cultural Center, and at Ideal Glass Gallery in New York City. Collins has also worked as a resident artist at Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, SUNY Buffalo’s Creative Arts Initiative, and was a member of Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab.
His work has been written about in the books: La vidéo en scène: L'acteur et ses technologies, Performance & Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field, Utopii performative: Artisti Radicali ai Scenei Americane in Secolul 21, Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance: Deep Time of the Theatre, and the popular US introduction to theatre textbook, Theatre, Brief, among others. Academic essays discussing his work have been published in Yale’s Theater, NYU’s The Drama Review, UCSD’s TheatreForum, Queen Mary’s Contemporary Theatre Review, American Theater, Chance Magazine, and other industry leading periodicals. His plays and writing on the arts have been published in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Yale’s Theater, UCSD’s TheatreForum, and Chance Magazine.
Kenneth Collins is Assistant Professor of Media Arts Production in the Department of Film & Media Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He has an MFA in Directing and Digital Media Design from the University of Iowa and an MA in Theatre from Florida State University.