Lance Gharavi

Lance Gharavi is an experimental artist and scholar, associate professor in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre and an Affiliated Faculty in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and the Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming.  

An early pioneer in the field of digital performance, Gharavi specializes in collaborating with transdisciplinary teams of artists, scientists, designers, and engineers to create original and innovative works of media-rich live performance. Recent projects have involved research robots, architectural projection, social media, 3D projections, and planetarium systems. Much of Gharavi's artistic work focuses on intersections of art and science. His efforts make scientific research and history accessible to the general public, query the implications of scientific theories and technological innovations, and explore ways in which artists, scientists, designers, and engineers can collaborate to advance research and produce compelling experiences.

Gharavi's scholarship on religion, technology, and performance has been published around the world and in several languages. His work appears in journals including Theatre Topics, Modern Drama, Text and Performance Quarterly, Ecumenica, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, PAJ, Esoterica, and Performance Matters. He is the author of "Western Esotericism in Russian Silver Age Drama" (New Grail 2008), editor of the anthology "Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith (Routledge 2012), and the translator for the special 100-year anniversary edition of Aleksandr Blok's symbolist masterpiece, "Roza I Krest" (Tsentr Knigi Rudomino 2013), published in Moscow. He collaborated with EarthScope—the largest solid Earth science project ever funded by the National Science Foundation—to write a children's book about earthquakes. His ongoing research project into robotics and performance, Ars Robotica, was selected as a Transdisciplinary Exemplar by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru). He recently completed working with a team of artists and physicists on a project about the Earth's deep interior called Beneath, and is currently working on projects about robots and the future of humans in space.