Artist Statement

I follow a tangled path. Inherently ambivalent, leaning to this side and that and operating through analogy, intuition, and association, always seeking the larger pattern in the small isolated event. I consciously tune in to coincidence, stray conversations, marginal information sources, and deeper patterns emerge. By integrating the imaginal pathways of the premodern mind with its symbolic and visionary mode of processing information, I recognize and manifest the divine and destructive liminal figures lurking inside and out. I consider myself a sacred ironist and skeptic, dancing between logic and archaic perception, myth and modernity, reason and hallucinatory excess. I actively practice witnessing and probing experiences, enjoying the moment-to-moment flow of chaos until something unexpected blossoms.

Biography

Writer, Performance Maker, Installation Artist, Experimenter, and Ethnographer.

Thomas Riccio is from Cleveland, Ohio, where he grew up in a working-class Italian American neighborhood, worked as a US Merchant Seaman, and was a member of the Teamsters and Steel Workers unions. He received his BA in English Literature from Cleveland State University and his MFA from Boston University. He studied in the Ph.D. program in Performance Studies at New York University with Richard Schechner.

He is a Visual and Performing Arts professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and previously a Professor of Theatre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He lived in Alaska for fifteen years and directed an Alaska Native performance group, Tuma Theatre.

He was Assistant Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre and Robert Brustein’s research assistant at Harvard University. He later became Dramaturg and Resident Director at the Cleveland Play House and Artistic Director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, where he developed and produced several experimental theatre and performance works. He has directed over one hundred plays and performance works at theatres, including LaMama ETC, The New York Theatre Workshop, the Teatro di Roma of Italy, and the National Theatre of Sakha (Siberia).

“Riccio searches for different ways and means to transplant a peoples traditional performance culture into a modern expression to address existing social, political, and human concerns. He tries to find his way to the roots of a culture’s myths in search of the power and origins of a culture’s expression.”

— The Helsinki Messenger, Finland

Visiting Professorships: the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania); the University of Pondicherry (India); the University of Nairobi; the Korean National University for the Arts; Tribhuvan University (Nepal); Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Ethnography, Jishou University, Hunan, China (2016-2020);  and Visiting Professor of Drama Therapy, California Institute of Integral Studies. 

“His projects connect the cults and rites of natives with modern theatrical expression. For Thomas Riccio all of his travels and theatre work in the remote parts of the world have something in common. What he calls “Hubs of Memory”. There is something that links his work with the Eskimos and between the Elvis cult in Cleveland and the tribal performance of Zambia. It is not a reduction but rather a split identity that has developed between the old and new expressions, but they are all still, at their core, rites and idolatry trying to influence and make sense of our everyday life experience.”

— Märkische Oder-Zeitung, Frankfurt

As Founder and Artistic Director ) of Dead White Zombies, an award-winning, Dallas-based, post-disciplinary performance group, he wrote, designed,  and directed performance immersions.

Riccio works extensively in Indigenous performance, ethnography, ritual, and shamanism and has conducted fieldwork in South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Russia, Alaska, Korea, India, Nepal, China, and the Republic of Sakha (Siberia), which declared him a Cultural Hero of the Sakha.

He devised and directed Shadows from the Planet Fire for the Metamorphosis Theatre of St. Petersburg, Russia, a performance applying pre-Christian Slavic ritual. With the !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert developed a camp-wide healing ritual with eight traditional healers to deal with the trauma of losing their traditional folkways. For the Korean National University for the Arts, he devised and directed Twelve Moons, a performance that re-imagined and evolved traditional performance vernaculars. Working with traditional practitioners, he facilitated the creation of contemporary masked characters to revitalize the Kumkum mask tradition. In Ethiopia (2009), he devised and directed Andegna for Lul Theater, which blends traditional and modern idioms.  

“He asks them to search in themselves, their experiences and memories and asks them to tell him about them. The appropriate revelations are then used where necessary being worked into the structure of the play ... Judging by what we were shown. It is not very difficult to make him an equal with a master.”

— The Echo, Republic of Sakha (Siberia)

He has been published by the leading journal in the theatre and performance field and is the recipient of several international grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards. Most notably, the International Distinction Prize in Playwriting from the Alexander Onassis Foundation; his play Rubber City ran in repertory at Kleist Theatre in Frankfurt; a fellow at UCLA's APEX: Asian Pacific Performance Exchange (1999), an artist-in-residence at Toolik Field Station (Institute of Arctic Circle Biology, 2003), Halka in Istanbul (2014), and the Watermill Art Center (2016), he collaborated with Sibyl Kempson and was dramaturg for 12 Shouts for the Ten Forgotten Heavens,  a series of twelve one-day performance rituals at the Whitney Museum, NYC (2016-18); he performed in a sacred cave as part of his residency at Ionian Art and Culture Center (Greece 2021), was a participant the 2022 NEH Summer Seminar in Tibetan Buddhism at UC Berkley, and will be a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, 2024.

“Humans, the most enabled and greatest beneficiary of earth’s magnificent offering, are responsible for its maintenance and balance. Theater has the ability to shape thoughts and feelings, to prod and provoke a new consciousness, explore and reveal a re-conceptualizing our relationship, role, and obligations to create a world of inclusion, gratitude, and healing. Theatre, its content, form, function, and expressions, can be a vital part of a co-evolutionary process, enabling an emergent narrative of place where the voices of humans, animals, flora, spirits, all the elements of the environment, and ancestors “speak” each in their in their own way. Our survival as a species depends on it.”

from Narrative of Place

He has worked extensively as a Narrative Engineer for Hanson Robotics, creating robot "personalities" for the world's leading conversational social robots. Robots include Bina, Zeno, Joey Chaos, Swami, Einstein, Jules, and Sophia. He was the company's April Creative Director (2018-2019).

His photographs, videos, and installations have been exhibited at various international festivals and on television. His visual media work has been presented as installations, publications, and gallery exhibits.

He is currently completing an ethnographic study with the Miao, an ethnic minority in southwestern China. His first documentary film on the Miao, Huan Nuo Yuan,  was shown internationally. A film documenting the Zhui Nui Water Buffalo Ritual is in post-production. He was a featured actor in Wedding Dresses (2016), a Chinese and Miao-language feature film. Dragon Eye, a 10-channel video installation, was presented at the SP/N Gallery (2024). His book, Sophia Robot: Post Human Being, will be published by Routledge in June 2004.

“I am deeply intrigued by your work, and admiring of so much of it. You are a unique character with your far-reaching theatre work and travels. But you are also a harbinger. And a person who incarnates the intercultural problem/opportunity.”

—Richard Schechner TDR, The Drama Review

Human-to-human interaction, isn’t that what life and happiness are all about? Reward and success are understood in terms of emotional, physical, and mental effort. And that’s exhausting, fulfilling, and rewarding. That is what is lacking, what humanity is losing, and what is being taken from us by technology, consumerism, materialism, and urbanization. People sharing with other people. It is very simple, and in that lies beauty and hope. Conversing, sharing, caring, and working together to create something that leaves the world better than we found it. The more you give, the more you receive. Sharing and giving to others, to your part of the earth, to elders, ancestors, animals, and to the needs of the present. A thought, a word, a feeling, or an action is an interaction with the world, which is simple and constant rewards and happiness. My belief in the world’s goodness keeps me going and makes me a lucky guy.

 I’m a child of the 1950s and became a big fan of classic horror and sci-fi when American Dream propaganda was at its apex. I was manufactured during the Ur-moment of the Amerikkkan Zombie. Every Saturday, I was at the Madison Theatre where, for twenty-five cents, you could scream and cringe, go home, and have nightmares. They ran Three Stooges shorts in between features—horror, comedy, and absurdity fused in my consciousness. I was born and raised in a working-class ethnic neighborhood of Cleveland amidst chemical and stamping plants, foundries, and factories. Life was an immersive walk through horror, sci-fi, and ethnic comedy. That’s why I like working with the post-industrial aesthetic of West Dallas. There is a terrible, poetic beauty offered up by our chosen environments.

Cleveland, the mistake on the lake, the city where the Cuyahoga River caught on fire (twice), the Rust Belt, a corrupt devolution wasteland. We lived up the street from a beach. Lake Erie, a lake declared dead, putrid with industrial effluents mixed with organic death, bloated dead carp gasping, speckled with pustules, slick and colorful with toxin-provoked hues. We would sit on top of a large pipe for fun, waiting for the rumbling, majestic spew of raw sewage to overflow. These feelings and images are like maggots wormed into my genetics. They lay underneath, a dark passenger, the inspiration for the Dead White Zombies.