Lars Jan

Biography

The son of émigrés from Afghanistan and Poland, Lars Jan is a director, playwright, designer, visual artist, activist, and educator, working at the intersection of theater, technology, and public engagement. He leads interdisciplinary creative teams to develop hybrid works spanning artistic mediums, with performance most often the hub, fueled by extensive research and collaboration in fields beyond the arts, such as science, anthropology, and engineering. These works explore issues such as surveillance, national borders, housing scarcity, screen-based persuasion, and climate change.

Through his performance + art lab Early Morning Opera, Jan has presented original works — including Holoscenes, Joan Didion’s The White Album, The Institute of Memory (TIMe), and Abacus — at BAM Next Wave Festival, Whitney Museum, Sundance Film Festival, Art Basel Miami Beach, ICA Boston, YBCA, Wexner Center, Times Square Arts, Toronto Nuit Blanche, London’s Burning Festival, NYU Abu Dhabi, Istanbul Modern, Sydney Festival, Athen’s Niarchos Cultural Center, and Montreal’s Festival TransAmériques, among many others.

He is a Guggenheim Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, TED Senior Fellow, Sundance Art of Practice Fellow, Creative Capital Awardee, and winner the 3rd Audemar Piguet Art Commission. He is currently developing a mixed-reality performance tracing the Afghan side of his family 40,000 years into the past; a photo series of vehicles in which people live in LA; and a performance about Odysseus and dementia. He is Head of Directing in the School of Theater at CalArts.