Moving Artist Residency at Mendocino Art Center 2026

The Moving Artist Residency at the Mendocino Arts Center (MAC) is an emergent residency built for artists responding to the times through performance, dance, ritual, and body-based art practice. We offer this space to those interested in embodying and working with timescapes, legacies, ruptures, and knowledge of the present moment. For one week of the month-long residency, artists will have the opportunity to participate in a week-long aerial workshop with the Mendocino Dance Project. During this time, artists will take their work off the ground and into the towering redwood trees, exploring vertical dance as a meeting point between body, gravity, and landscape. Through research, improvisation, and collaboration, artists will investigate movement suspended in space, re-imagining dance beyond the horizontal plane and engaging the redwoods as both partner and stage. These rare and unique trees are the tallest trees in the world, echoing history, teaching resiliency, and giving us the opportunity to listen to our own bodies and to the land. Following this experience, residents are invited to use their remaining weeks to spontaneously/organically shape their experience. We invite artists to experiment with individual and collaborative processes, find ways of sharing space and work and cultivate independence and interdependence. In times like these, we believe in the power of the artist's attunement to spaces of uncertainty and abundance. We believe in their guidance and what they have to communicate, channel, and transfer to the audience – whether that be us, the land, or the bridge / boundary between the two. We believe that movement is a medium of blessing, emergent relationship, and new direction; a place to experiment and to navigate the unknown we are all walking through. In this vein, we invite artists in this period to experiment alone or in community with the unique landscapes and waters-capes of Mendocino, whose timelessness and boundlessness are our original movers. This focus on place-based emergent performance will allow artists to collaborate and converse with the surrounding area of the Mendocino Arts Center, which poses its own complex juxtapositions: a rural town settled on Coastal Pomo Land, nestled between the redwoods and the sea.