ELISE KERMANI

Elise Kermani is the Artistic Director of MiShinnah Productions, a flagship company focusing on genre bending performance. She teaches media art at SUNY/Empire State College and has a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School.  Kermani's award winning film JOCASTA, a modern retelling of the Oedipus myth screened in Athens, GREECE in May 2012. Her POE[...and the museum of lost arts], developed during a 2 month residency at 3LD Art and Technology Center, screened at the Anthology Film Archives in December, 2015. Kermani has composed several sound scores for choreographer Vicky Shick and as Shick’s composer and sound designer has toured to Budapest and Dublin. Her latest performance film Iphigenia: Book of Change was released on blu-Ray in 2019 and is currently touring colleges and galleries in the US.

Elise got her career started when she moved to Los Angeles after receiving her master’s degree from Columbia College Chicago in the late 1980s. As a vocalist and performance artist, she performed her ‘sound poetry’ in the Los Angeles area with musicians in the Independent Composer’s Association and with alternative bands until she moved to Houston in 1988 and became involved with DiverseWorks Artspace producing the SonicWorks-Extending the Instrument music festival. She moved to Brooklyn in 1992, formed TROUSERS an all-female avant garde band (1993-1996), produced the DICE DVD compilation of women composers (1992-1996) and remained in upstate New York and Manhattan until 2017 when she moved back to Los Angeles. She now splits her time between Long Beach, Indiana, a beachside town on Lake Michigan, and the Los Feliz neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Brian Siebert, from the New York Times says: It’s not just Ms. Shick who is perfect. Pathétique is her seventh collaboration with the costume designer Barbara Kilpatrick and the sound designer Elise Kermani. This is one of the most reliably beguiling teams in dance.” Allan Kozinn from the New York Times describes Kermani’s music as "…a vivid sonic atmosphere…"

The following is a sampling of performance/films that Kermani wrote, directed and produced:

Iphigenia: Book of Change (49 min, 2016)Performed at the Electric Lodge in Venice, California. https://vimeo.com/184578753/fa77969edc

POE [...and the museum of lost arts] (56min, 2012) Performed at 3LD Art and Technology Center, NYC. https://vimeo.com/145530760/b52571ea0c

JOCASTA: esti gar enai (52min, 2008) Performed and filmed upstate New York, in an abandoned Shaker Barn. https://vimeo.com/78869983/9708c3d999

JUSTICE (12min, 2017) Performed and filmed at Riverside Park on the Solstice, NYC. https://vimeo.com/297737871/a1cf6d5743

Agamemnon's Daughter (4min, 2014) Performed and filmed in Southern California, Ocean and Desert. https://vimeo.com/146053463/c8da411f03

Private Eye/Public Hand (a 39 minute performance filmed by Franklin Furnace Archives, 1995) https://franklinfurnace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p17325coll1/id/100/rec/1

Some images from Elise performing in Private Eye/Public Hand (1993-1995) and Blur Ear (2001-2003):