About the artist
Hélène Lesterlin creates performances and time-based
art works. Founded in 2012, Studio Reynard is home base
for her work as artist, director, performer, curator and
instigator of collaborative projects. studio-reynard.com
Current projects include a series of works steeped in
French medieval sources – tapestries, folk tales,
troubadour ballads, and encyclopedic lists of real and
fantastic creatures; Fox vs. Kingdom, a satiric
puppet show based on the story cycle of Reynard the Fox,
was last seen in NYC as part of the St. Ann’s Warehouse
Puppet Lab’s 2014 Labapalooza festival; Darkling,
a somber, transmogrifying solo dance performance with
live interactive video was presented in the Cinedans
festival (Amsterdam, The Netherlands); and Echo,
a walking sound work that visits ghosts using micro
radio transmitters is in progress. She is also creating Geographica,
an improvised dance duet with a radio-based score for
Wave Farm’s Groundswell 2014 event at Olana, mining the
Olana archive for source material and responding to the
historic site.
From 2005 – 2011, Lesterlin served as founding
Curator for Dance and Theater at EMPAC – the
Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – an institution
dedicated to the production and presentation of
adventurous contemporary work spanning performance,
media, installation and art. She is the recipient of
awards and residencies, including the 2014 Individual
Artist Grant, a Decentralization Program regrant from
NYSCA, administered by Arts Mid Hudson; the Summer
Stages Choreography Fellowship (Concord, MA); an Artward
Bound residency administered by the Field (Sperryville,
VA); and a training residency sponsored by the Fondation
Royaumont in France. She was selected to participate in
TCG’s Artistic Leadership training in 2004. In
1999-2000, a Luce Fellowship allowed her to pursue her
work for a year in Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a BA in
Visual Art (sculpture/performance) from Yale College and
a MFA in Dance from Bennington College. She grew up in
Paris, London and New York City, and currently lives in
upstate NY.
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