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.