HONORA FOÀ

Honora Foà is a multimedia artist.

She is currently developing a cycle of 7 Frequency Operas entitled  RECOMBINANTDNA, which explore different frequency spectra through two lenses – science and myth.

A pioneer of multidisciplinary art, Foà’s New York based dance theatre company incorporated movement/dance, voice, music, food, art installation and media projection. The company was a grant recipient from the National Endowment for the Arts.

She created and collaborated on two notable performance cycles, WATER MURDERS, with playwright Bradford Riley, and her own  RECOMBINANTDNA, which is the core of her ongoing focus. A collaboration with artist Amy Landesberg produced a full gallery show at the Sandler-Hudson Gallery in Atlanta.

After ten years with the New York company, Ms Foà’s son was born, inspiring an interest in education and the developmental perception of children. An MFA from the University of North Carolina in Dance and PhD studies in Education followed.

Foà became Creative Director of Visioneering International in 1989. In this capacity, she served as chief designer and producer of two World’s Fair pavilions for the United Nations (Genoa, Italy; Taijon, Korea), work for the Hayden Planetarium, installations for Fernbank Science Museum, and video art installations throughout Augusta Children’s Hospital and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s Emory Hospital.

In 2003, Foà began work on Mythic Journeys, a performance festival and conference held in 2004 and 2006. Bringing together more than 150 presenters, speakers, artists, and performers, Mythic Journeys used the great archetypal stories, sacred traditions and folk tales as a ground from which new art in consonance with interdisciplinary conversation can create a context for contemporary events. Psychologists, scientists, poets, scholars, politicians, business people, artists and musicians brought their expertise and creativity to bear on the experiences and issues of our time.

In 2005, Mythic Journeys was the subject of a two-hour documentary on National Public Radio. Mythic Imagination has also produced two Human Forum conferences for The Alliance for a New Humanity. A feature-length film about Mythic Journeys was released in the spring of 2010.

In 2013, the film Banaz, A Love Story, for which Ms Foà was a writer and story developer, won a Peabody and an Emmy for Best International Documentary. She continues to consult on various films.

The Creativity in Captivity project, a collaboration with Francesco Lotoro and Dahlan Foah, is an ongoing series of performances that Foà writes and directs, narrates true stories, in which musicians play music written in the concentration, internment and prisoner of war camps of World War II.

RecombinantDNA, which began cooking in 1999 but made way for some of the other projects listed, developing slowly and deeply, emerged in 2014, Her multimedia Frequency Opera, The Birth of Color: A Marriage of Darkness and Light with Lucio Ivaldi and David Brendan Hopes, was recorded in Budapest. In 2016, it was performed as an official selection of the Budapest International Arts Festival.  Field of Desire, the 2nd opera with animator Dennis Hlynsky and Jonathan Warren, with voice and music by Lisa Sokolov, completed in 2021, is now an immersive film experience. Blood&Breath, Magdalen in Altamira, is to be performed in Rome, Italy in October, 2024. The next Frequency Opera, Viktor&Elizabeth is in development as a film for 2025-26. The final three Frequency Operas of the RecombinantDNA cycle, are all in development as immersive experiences.