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, later becoming 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.

Dragon Eye is a multi-channel installation by the artist–scholar Thomas Riccio, whose work spans video, installation, ethnography, social practice, and performance experimentation. It is based on his twenty-year relationship with the Miao people of Hunan, China. The Miao, who live in remote mountainous regions, are the indigenous people of China who are internally colonized.

The installation includes vivid examples of Miao ritual, shamanic, and spirit medium practices. To best convey the sensorial vibrancy of Miao, the installation uses ten projectors running simultaneously to create a dynamic montage in dialog with other projectors and with the observer to evoke the sensuality, animism, and spirituality of Miao's life. The Dragon Eye presents an atmosphere, feel, insight, and essence, with sounds and images speaking ancient and modern culture as it transitions and vanishes into history.

As with much of DWZ's work, the immersive aspect forces audiences to examine their own value systems. 'In this country, we have mythical American values we're not even aware of, Riccio ventures. 'DWZ shows put you in the thick of it.'

—American Theatre Magazine

My experimental performance practice blends with my work with indigenous people and performance, which references my scholarly and ethnographic work in ritual and shamanism and is then influenced by my work with humanoid social robots. Somehow it all works. It is like a non-stop party in my head. Add in our crazy world. You have fun, unexpected, mind-altering surprises with explosions of revelation. At times difficult to articulate and monetize, but I don't care. It gives me the freedom to say and do whatever, whenever, however. I don't worry about tastes, popularity, or approval. I do what I do.

—from an interview, Dallas Observer