Lars Jan / Early Morning Opera

Lars Jan is a director, writer, visual artist, and founder of Early Morning Opera. Jan’s original works — including Holoscenes, The Institute of Memory (TIMe), and Abacus — have been presented by the Whitney Museum, Sundance Film Festival, BAM Next Wave Festival, Under the Radar Festival, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, New York Live Arts, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art TBA Festival, Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival, Artichoke (London), and NYU Abu Dhabi among others.His visual works have most recently been exhibited at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and Istanbul Modern, and are represented by Charlie James Gallery. Jan is a past MacDowell and Princeton Atelier Fellow, artist-in-residence at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, and recipient of the Sherwood and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts100 Awards. He is the son of émigrés from Afghanistan and Poland and a TED Senior Fellow.Early Morning Opera (EMO) is a genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience, while reflecting Lars Jan’s background in progressive activism. Their works chart complex constellations of ideas through language and other media, and assert the vital function of live events in our increasingly mediated world.Since presenting their first work in 2004, EMO has evolved into a permeable network of principal artists and an ever-expanding group of new collaborators, with expertise in fields as diverse as data visualization, architecture, climate paleontology, cognitive neuroscience, and experimental plumbing.Developed through multi-year processes, EMO projects don’t look much like one another. This diversity of output is partially due to the permeable, ever-expanding nature of the company’s collaborative structure, which is often inclusive of non-artists, and also attributable to the investigative, experimental nature of their process, reflected in the maxim: Art is Research, Performance is a Lab.A hallmark of their work is an integrated, expressive use of emerging technologies in live performance. Due to the aesthetic and formal diversity of their projects, they have been commissioned and presented by media centers, museums, galleries, theaters and film festivals across the U.S., including the Whitney Museum, The Sundance Film Festival, Under the Radar Festival, EMPAC, REDCAT, PICA TBA Festival, and the BAM Next Wave Festival.