born to a family of nature enthusiasts and adventurers, Marcie Mara-Ann spent the majority of her young life exploring the Rocky Mountains on horseback with her family—an experience which fostered in her a strong affinity for nature and matters of the environment. while other girls were learning to use their curling irons and talk on the phone, she was learning how to build a fire in the rain, fly fish for dinner in an alpine lake, and survive in the stunning, rugged beauty of the Colorado wilderness. during the school year in the city, Mara urban youth was defined by playing flute in the school band, devising elaborate science faire projects involving mice and various genres of music, and running cross-country with her journalism teacher. once at college, she turned vegetarian, started listening to public radio, stopped wearing a bra, and began protesting injustice.
via undergraduate studies in Boulder and Sweden, Mara moved to San Francisco in the fall of 1991 to join the avant-garde writing community and coincidentally dropped in for a new era in electronic music and the emergence of the world wide web. spanning a decade, she has been inspired and infused by San
Francisco Bay Area experimental writing, music, and performance ; trans-world explorations through Asia, Europe, and the Americas; mindful practices in yoga and meditation; and a continuously evolving love affair with the wild beauty of California's flora, fauna, and her endlessly innovative West coast culture. these rich alchemical forces have tempered Mara into a multi-media collaborator working with musicians, dancers,
and visual artists. she has worked/studied with artists such as Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Carla Harryman, Fred Frith, Maggie Nicols, Katherine Mezur, Juliana Spahr, Stephen Ratcliffe, Walter K. Lew, Maggi Payne, Molly Holm, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Edwin Torres, Kathlen Fraser, Gino Robair, Olivia Block, Terry Riley, and Pauline Oliveros. Mara holds an MFA from Mills College in creative writing with cross disciplinary emphasis in music, media, and performance.
as an artist working with language, M. Mara-Ann expresses her creativity through writing, singing, and intermedia performance. inspired by the musicality of language, the architecture of text, her love of philosophy, the exacting nature of abstraction, and the interplay between nature and technology, Mara's approach to language combines a passion for *hybridity* and *experimental forms*. often, Mara's artistic process involves the creation of a core manuscript such as lighthouse, or more recently Containment Scenario, from which a family of related multi-media works emerge both as excerpt and exponent. this constellating dialogue can be seen with the CD Luminous, the audio-visual installation the mirrorrim, and the multi-media performance Containment Scenario as they relate to the book Containment Scenario: DisLoInterMedTextIdentCation: Horse Medicine just out from OBooks. as a poet that sings, a writer who performs, and a storyteller creating immersive multi-media shows, Mara's latest performance work, Containment Scenario, focuses on the current environmental situation through the lens of improvisational music-dance-theater and explores the language used to discuss climate change as we attempt to name and un-name the ineffable.
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