Contact: sistersylvester **at** protonmail.com
Sister Sylvester is a multimedia artist based in New York and Istanbul. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum she created the VR documentary Shadowtime, (’23) which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and continues to tour to festivals including IDFA, GIFF, Thessaloniki Film Festival and SXSW; and the film Our Ark which premiered at IDFA (’21) and has screened at festivals internationally. In her live work she creates visual essays and books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Most recently Constantinopoliad, with a live-score by Nadah El Shazly, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (‘23) as a site specific work in the Onassis Library, Athens, and at the Internationaal Theater of Amsterdam; and The Eagle and The Tortoise, which showed as a work-in-progress at National Sawdust NYC, and premiered at Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, as a part of IDFA On Stage (‘22), and in NYC as part of Under The Radar 2024. She is a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and CPH:DOX lab. She co-teaches a bio-art class at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.
Her work has been called ‘genuinely subversive’ by Time Out NY; ‘imaginative and original’ by New York Times; ‘pulse-raising’ by Exeunt Magazine, ‘perplexing’ by Theaterscene, ‘apocalyptic’ by artforum, and ‘otherworldly, intimate, off-kilter, queer artistic orgasm’ by Life Magazine, Greece.