2021 Princess Grace Honoraria
Nominated by: Centrum
Alice Gosti is a transnational immigrant choreographer, curator and hybrid performance artist who creates site-responsive performance rituals and live art installations that examine how history and politics enter the body and condition how we move and relate. Gosti is also the founder and artistic director of MALACARNE, an all-womxn/nonbinary ensemble committed to co-authoring transformative performance rituals that fight reductive ideas regarding class, sexuality, gender, ability and ethnicity. Born and raised by installation architects in Perugia, Italy, she’s worked between Italy and occupied Duwamish and Coast Salish land (Seattle) since 2008.
Drawing on current and historical social realities, her projects center people made invisible by white-normative power structures, including: immigrants, womxn, trans-activists, Indigenous populations and those experiencing homelessness. Through “How to Become a Partisan,” “Material Deviance in Contemporary American Culture,” “Invisible Womxn” and “Bodies of Water,” she’s investigated fascism, unfettered capitalism, the othering of womxn and Seattle’s complex relationship to water.
Gosti’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, commissions and residencies including: a Vilcek Creative Promise in Dance award (2012), ImPulsTanz danceWEB scholarship (2012), Seattle Office of Arts and Culture awards (2014 and 2017), Artist Trust GAP grant (2014), Velocity Dance Center residency award (2015), Cornish Artists Incubator award (2015 and 2016), Bossak/Heilbron Award (2015 and 2019), Seattle University residency award at the University of Washington (2016), Artist Trust fellowship (2017), the inaugural Italian Council Grant from the Italian Government (2017 – 2018), residency award at the McColl Center for Arts + Innovation (2018), 4Culture grant awards (2018 and 2020 – 2021), a NEFA National Dance Project Grant Production (2016 – 2018), a NEFA Touring grant (2019), a Jacob’s Pillow, Pillow Lab Residency award (2019), a Centrum NW Heritage Residency award (2020 – present) and an National Performance Network Documentation and Storytelling Fund award (2020).
