cv (very Abridged)
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bio
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Training and Experience:
Co-founder, Boston Public Works Theater Company & Founding Artistic Director, Alley Cat Theater, Boston, Massachusetts Solo Shows: 2024
Group Shows: 2026
Publications: 2019 Online: 2026
Residencies 2017, 2018
Support
Collections Private collections in Boston, Brooklyn, New York, San Diego, Florida, Ohio, Utah, West Virginia, and Massachusetts Permanent Collection: Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts Press |
John Greiner-Ferris is multidisciplinary artist.
Artistic Statement here >> For years, to pay the bills, I worked as a corporate and freelance photographer/writer, using my artistic skills in the commercial world to make money, while making art at night and on the weekends. It wasn't the best situation. In essence I was exchanging my life and hawking my talent for money. Welcome to the life of an artist in America. In 2007 I inexplicably put down the camera—these things sometimes happen in the arts, these unexplained long-term departures. It's happened before. Right after graduating art school I also stopped making images for awhile. I think art school burned me out on photography, and it wasn't until the initial joy returned that I began working again. During this recent hiatus I made the choice to dedicate myself fully to the theater, an art form I felt would take advantage of all of my artistic and political interests and talents. I earned an MFA in playwriting, formed two theater companies, doing everything from fundraising to sweeping the stage. To this day I love doing all aspects of art making. My visual work influences my writing, and the theater influences my visual work. (I co-founded Boston Public Works Theater Company and founded Alley Cat Theater. Plays produced in Boston, New York, Provincetown, Chicago, Raleigh, and Los Angeles along with other, smaller cities; developed at Boston Playwrights Theater, The Inkwell, and Great Plains Theater Conference. Twice a semi-finalist at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Conference--2012 and 2020. Nominated in 2018 for Best New Play, Best Set Design, and Best Lighting Design by the Independent Reviewers of New England.) My work has been financially supported by The Boston Foundation ($15,000 LAB Grant for daring, new theater); Eastern Bank Trust Grant twice, The Bob Jolley Charitable Trust in support of new work, the Massachusetts Cultural Council/Quincy Art Council, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Twice I've received Artist Merit Grants from Vermont Studio Center. At a residency at VSC in January 2017 while working on a play, just as inexplicably, I again took up the camera and picked up where I left off. Almost everything I make now, an image, a piece of artwork, or a story, I consider a political act. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the ensuing quarantine gave me the time to do something I had been yearning to do for a very long time: which was get back into the studio and pursue making mixed media artwork and assemblages. My current work merges my abstract visual world with my writer world, allowing me to use words and visual content in a different context than when they are used on a printed page or when they are spoken. In 2023 I joined Atlantic Works Gallery, an artist-run gallery in Boston. |
