David Michalek (*1967) lives and works in New York City. Michalek’s practice is inherently multifaceted and continues to expand into ever more media, encompassing opera, live performance, filmmaking, photography, drawing, installation, sculpture and public projects. His work, whether composed as performance, as two-dimensional images, or in the form of sculpted and found objects, is distinguished by a certain humanism. Michalek is a maker of images, which, moving or stilled, often point to the history of painting. His films and performances, correspondingly, have been described as tableaux vivants. They often follow notated scores (for both music and movement), even as their actions are ruled by the contingencies of collaboration.

His work concentrates on carefully-staged marginal moments that develop density with minimal action through interplays of image, sound, and decelerated time. Exploring notions of durational and rhythmic time, his works engage and generate intimate yet open-ended narratives. His recent work considers various forms of slowness alongside contemporary modes of public attention. His practice plays with creating forms of “Social Sculpture” – works with an aesthetic that can provoke situations that are uniquely social and collectively unique.

Michalek’s work frequently involves collaborations with actors, dance artists and musicians, and he is particularly drawn to projects that bring artists and ideas into effective pairings, in settings ranging from museum galleries, theaters and public spaces, to houses of worship, community organizations and centers of learning. Notable project collaborators have included the International Contemporary Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, violinist Gil Shaham, flutist Claire Chase; composers Andy Akiho, Du Yun, and Nathan Davis;and choreographers Yvonne Rainer, David Neumann, Wendy Perron, Liz Gerring, Madeline Hollander, Francesca Harper and Reggie Gray. He has received commissions from major dance companies, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and New York City Ballet, to create new media performance projects.

His visual art and performance projects have been shown nationally and internationally, including at Lincoln Center, New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey, the International Center of Photography, the Shanghai Symphony, the LA Music Center, Jacob’s Pillow, Sadler’s Wells, PS21, Danspace Project, Le Laboratoire and the Edinburgh Festival, and he has presented and exhibited work at numerous international performing arts centers, museums and festivals including the Spoleto Festival, the Paris Opera Bastille, Tanz im August (Berlin), Festspielhaus St. Pölten, the Louvre, The Kitchen, La MaMa, GONG/Ostrava (Czech Republic), the Venice Biennale, the Brooklyn Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, among others. In 2008, Michalek was awarded a Bessie Award (Installation and New Media) for his work Slow Dancing.

He has, on occasion, acted as a visual artist and designer for other directors, including for Lucinda Childs (for her 2020 production of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten at the Opéra de Nice Côte d’Azur), and for Peter Sellars (for his production of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise at the Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera, and for his production of György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments with soprano Dawn Upshaw and violinist Geoff Nuttall).

Michalek is on the visiting faculty of Yale Divinity School and Harvard University’s Theater, Dance and Media Program, where he lectures on Art and Social Action.