About
James Harrison Monaco is an experimental theater-maker, writer, music composer, and storyteller. He explores innovative performance forms while working in the tradition of live epic poetry—his work at core seeks always to blend hyper-literary narrative and live music, a practice and combination he considers quite ancient.
His pieces often tackle themes of travel, translation, immigration, borders, memory, quiet violence, quiet grace, global loneliness, and time; he is a trained percussionist, and his music is at once densely rhythmic and ambient.
His process often involves extensive research in a handful of languages; the resulting writings are unabashedly complex and literary, yet with a great love for plot and melodrama. He’s a translator of Spanish and Italian, he’s a music composer, and he writes prose fiction & non-fiction.
His theater projects have often been directed by Rachel Chavkin, Andrew Scoville, and Annie Tippe. Some of his works include his experimental techno-musical Travels (Ars Nova 2024), a bespoke audio-tour about the histories of lace and labor co-created with Janani Balasubramanian (Tracing Lace, Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 2023), his ambient-music-based visual art lecture on colonialism and landscape painting Paulownia (The Momentary Museum, 2022), The Conversationalists (with JJJJJerome Ellis at The Bushwick Starr, 2020), Ink (with JJJJJerome Ellis, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Under The Radar Festival, WCMA, etc.), and Piano Tales (with JJJJJerome Ellis, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Joe’s Pub, La MaMa, etc.).
He has been named a New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center Theater, and he’s received residencies with The Public Theater, The Sundance Institute, BAM, The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, New York Theatre Workshop, BRIC, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, among others.
As a freelance music composer he has worked with such artists as Claudia Rankine, Shamel Pitts, nicHi douglas, Rachel Chavkin, Jillian Walker, Eric Berryman, Jerron Herman, and theater company The TEAM.
