about robert karimi

(short version)

Iranian interdisciplinary artist/guatemalan educator, playwwright, travieso, robert karimi’s performance work has been featured from Australia to Alaska. National poetry slam champion, Def Poetry Jam performer, NPN residency recipient, NPN creation fund awardee, karimi received the Illinois Arts Council fellowship for excellence in New Performance Forms in 2006. At Pangea World Theater and Asian Arts Initiative, he will premiere Cooking con Karimi and the Quest for the Secret Ingredient. karimi directs film/theater and teaches workshops about comedy, mixed race issues, performance, and cross-cultural spirituality. He has collaborated with Laurie Carlos, Guillermo Gomez Peña, and Freestreet Theater in Chicago. A UCLA graduate, he has trained with Plasticene, 500 Clown, and Second City. Informed by the methods of Spolin and Boal, karimi believes in the power of humor to engage audiences to find the joy within their personal chaos.

 

Long Version

robert karimi, an interdisciplinary artist/activist whose Iranian/Guatemalan hybrid heritage serves as a point of departure for his artistic/spiritual/political reflections, mixes poetry, music, storytelling,visual art, and performance art to explore sampled consciousness, an idea borrowed from hiphop, where identity is negotiated, that we sample, blend, fade in and fade out the various subcultures and experiences we come into contact to create self.

Featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, karimi has performed his work all over the nation in bars, nightclubs and universities, and has shared the stage with the likes of poets past and present: the Last Poets, I Was Born With Two Tongues, Lorna Dee Cervantes and Saul Wiliams to name a few. He worked with MacArthur Fellow Guillermo Gomez Peña in the Brown Sheep Project.

Karimi’s site specific performance work has been featured at the Artspace, Galeria de la Raza, Yerba Buena Arts Center, La Peña Cultural Center, and as part of a lecture series at the Smithsonian Institute. His site-specific performances have included Cooking con Karimi, a gallery-based cooking show, Opening Day at McMuertos, a Regeneration project challenge to the commercialization of Dia de los Muertos, and Reverend of the Discochurch, a performance art piece exploring the spiritual qualities of dance culture.

karimi was a member of the 1999 National Poetry Slam Championship Team, and his poetry has been published in Callaloo, Asian American Collective- Chicago’s kitchen poems, and the upcoming Longman Press’ Latino Literature Today anthology. His performances have been recorded in the U.S., Germany and on the web, most recently as a Book of Voices selection on e-poets.com. And, he directed/produced/wrote a short film based on one of his poems.

Named 2006 Fellow for New Genres in Performance by the Illinois Arts Council, karimi also recently received a National Performance Network Creation Fund grant to work on a theatrical cooking show: Cooking Con Karimi.

A recipient of numerous National Performance Network residencies, his projects have received funding from the Zellerbach Family Fund, Illinois Arts Council, Illinois Humanities Council, and the Film Arts Foundation. blindfolded, a youth performative exploration of the connection between the Iranian Hostage Crisis and 9/11, which he facilitated/directed with Freestreet Theater in Chicago, received the Towner Award for most innovative approach to the humanities in Illinois for 2005

karimi has created curriculum for poetry and performance in middle and high schools, and has created a poetry curriculum that increases reading and writing skills as well as improves creative fundamentals that will soon be published in a book.

He now performs throughout the world, directs short films, lectures about issues of mixed culture and teaches poetry and performance workshops.