Deke Weaver

Biography

Deke Weaver is a writer-performer and media artist. His performances and videos have been presented throughout the U.S. and abroad in experimental theater, film/video, dance, solo performance, and broadcast venues such as PBS, Channel 4/U.K., the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center, the Sundance Film Festival, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Berlin Video Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art/LA, the Moth, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,  and many others including livestock pavilions, national parks, night clubs, backyard sheds, and living rooms. Recent work on his life-long project, The Unreliable Bestiary—a performance for each letter of the alphabet, each letter represented by an endangered species—includes creating and touring a live-cinema solo version of the original sprawling site-specific WOLF performance, editing the multi-camera video documentaries for WOLF and ELEPHANT, designing the artist books for MONKEY and ELEPHANT, research for BEAR and TIGER, an early workshop for TIGER (part of Perform Midwest: Incubating Collaborative Research, a project funded by the Humanities Without Walls consortium), conference presentations, and the performance-lecture Choose Your Grizzly (MacDowell Downtown in Peterborough, NH, and Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, Chicago). The texts for MONKEY and ELEPHANT are included in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (edited by Holly Hughes and Una Chaudhuri, 2014, University of Michigan Press). A Guggenheim Fellow and Creative Capital grantee, a resident artist at Yaddo, Isle Royale National Park, a three-time resident at Ucross, and a five-time fellow at the MacDowell Colony, he has been awarded commissions and grants from the city of San Francisco, the states of New York and Illinois, and other public and private foundations. He is currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with appointments in the Department of Theatre and the School of Art & Design’s New Media Program.