Shadows, Puppets, Film/Video, Media Arts, Installation/Sculpture, Animation, Opera, Performance
About
Please Contact Facing West Shadows Artistic Director Lydia Greerdirectly: lydiakgreer@gmail.com
Facing West Shadows is a Lumia arts collective that uses shadow casting and hybridized art forms to create magical acts of rebellion as experimental art in the gold rush climate of the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Expanding into film/animation, theater/opera, puppetry, and sculptural installation, Facing West Shadows creates surprising experiences for the audience by seamlessly combining old and new technologies and art forms.
Facing West Shadows Artistic Director Lydia Greer and artist and shadow theatre practitioner YaWen Chien are artists in residence currently at Memeraki Artist Residency in Limassol, Cyprus (summer 2024), where they will present new work inspired by an ancient Aristophanes play, Lysistrata. Artistic Director Lydia Greer will present work in Prague and Czechia for the NaFilm Museum (National Film Museum (summer 2024) and at Union Docs in Queens, New York (summer 2024). Facing West Shadows has recently been an artist in residence at The Exploratorium Museum of Art, Science and Human Perception and the DEAR residency for time-based contemporary art and exhibited large-scale media installation at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art.
In 2015, Facing West Shadows Theatrical Director Caryl Kientz, and Artistic Director Lydia Greer formed an experimental shadow theatre collective called Facing West Shadow Opera with their consistent collaborators: countertenor and conductor William Sauerland and soprano Shauna Fallihee. Facing West Shadow Opera was originally founded by collaborating artists Jessica Eastburn and Lydia Greer in 2014. Since then Caryl & Lydia have expanded to theatre, film/video, installation and performance working under Facing West Shadows. Contact both Lydia & Caryl at: lydiakgreer@gmail.com and carylk@gmail.com
Facing West Shadows (principal members: Lydia Greer (artistic director) and Caryl Kientz (theatrical director) is a collective of artists, puppeteers, filmmakers and musicians hybridizing art forms to create magical acts of rebellion as experimental art that is sustainable in the current gold rush climate of the Bay Area. FWS combines analog shadow theatre with original animation, video projection of found footage and sometimes Opera performed live. Expanding into film, theatre and installation, Facing West Shadows depicts stories re-imagined with unique visual storytelling to create surprising experiences for the audience by seamlessly combining old and new technologies and art forms.
Facing West Shadows has been commissioned by The Exploratorium, The Institute for Advanced Uncertainty, Shapeshifter’s Cinema, Berkeley Public Library, Radar Productions, Other Cinema, Kala Art Institute, and The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, among others.
Lydia Greer is a widely exhibiting multimedia artist, visual designer, filmmaker and animator who works in hand-made stop-motion, multiple and single- channel video, and sculptural installation. She has been an artist and consultant for the last decade with ShadowLight Productions, an internationally recognized shadow theater company based in San Francisco notably working on multiple large-scale, bilingual, interdisciplinary shadow theatre plays incorporating video, dance, sound, hand-built lights, puppets, live actors and masks. She has enjoyed commissions at The Exploratorium Museum (SF), Shapeshifter’s Cinema (Oakland), Other Cinema at ATA (San Francisco), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), Berkeley Center for New Media (Berkeley), Radar Productions (San Francisco), and inclusion in The Channel of Democracy: Womanhood, Power & Freedom in Video Art, an all-women video art exhibition at the International SF PhotoFairs 2018 at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture (San Francisco). In 2018, she was awarded a Media Arts Fellowship and Exhibition at Kala Art Institute (Berkeley) and has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. www.lydiagreer.com
Caryl Kientz is a director, performer, puppeteer and installation artist based in Oakland CA. She has worked with ShadowLight Productions for 10 years on numerous productions as a shadow theater performer, designer, assistant director, consultant and for the last year as the managing director. She has performed shadow theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Museum in NY, the Cowell and Southside Theaters at Fort Mason, Brava Theater, Joe Goode Annex in SF. She has performed internationally in France, Canada, Turkey, Greece, Poland, and Taiwan.
Ya Wen Chien is a visual artist, illustrator, and performer. She was born in Taiwan and currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received an MA in Digital Media in Bristol, England. Her paintings have been shown in Taiwan, South Korea and North America. Her shadow puppetry performance credits with ShadowLight are THE REBIRTH OF APSARA (dir Larry Reed, 2013), The Science Fiction Projects (dir. Ellen Sebastian Chang, Larry Reed, 2014,2016), FEATHERS OF FIRE (dir. Hamid Rahmanian, 2016-2018), SHADOWS FOR CARLOS VILLA (Reed, 2020), filmed shadow puppetry performance for documentary PIECE OF MIND (dir. Sheila Ganz, 2021). Ya Wen has worked with Facing West Shadows collective on many notable installations, films and performances as a shadow designer and puppeteer.
