2024 LAB ARTIST

Working across performance, film, and community facilitation, Nora Sharp (they/them) hosts audiences in worlds where language and embodiment merge in surprising, funny, and illuminating ways. Their work often addresses the perpetual unraveling of queer+trans identity formation, and the reverberance of key moments in familial, romantic, and casual relationships. A 2023 Queer|Art Mentorship Fellow in Performance, Nora has had work presented by On the Boards, Movement Research at the Judson Church, New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix 37, Open TV, Steppenwolf Theatre’s LookOut Series, Midwest RAD Fest, the Fly Honey Show, the Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, and at DIY artist-led performance nights across Chicago; and supported by residencies at the The Croft, Hambidge, Links Hall, and High Concept Labs. Outside making their own work, they have facilitated regular work-in-progress performance spaces, performed or dramaturged for many independent artists, shared Amtrak coupons for creative research, and co-organized artist collective response efforts, in addition to working a day job in social change organizing.

Current Practice/Project: Nora is currently working on Origin Story, a one-them-show born from the outer space of trans dis-certainty that takes audiences down a choreographic and comedic rabbit hole of intertwined sci-fi futurism and personal history. Additional ongoing and upcoming projects and practices include The Real Dance, a micro reality TV show about dancemaking; Swine Ball, a dance-theater work about familial lineages of complicity and resistance; Sharp Tank, a semi-regular community work-in-progress series; and Nor Art, a newsletter about side pockets of queer culture and the trying-to-be-an-artist industrial complex.