Ashley Tata

Ashley Tata makes multi-media works of theater, contemporary opera, performance, cyberformance, live music and immersive experiences. These have been presented in venues and festivals throughout the US and internationally including Theatre for a New Audience, LA Opera, Austin Opera, The Miller Theater, National Sawdust, EMPAC, BPAC, The Crossing the Line Festival, the Holland Festival, The Prelude Festival, The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, and the Fisher Center at Bard. Her work has been called “fervently inventive,” by Ben Brantley in the New York Times, “extraordinarily powerful” by the LA Times and a notable production of the decade by Alex Ross of the New Yorker.

Since the pandemic-induced theatrical shut down, she has continued to make, directing a live cyberformance of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest which transferred from Bard College’s Fisher Center, Off-Broadway to TFANA; a multimedia live-streaming communal event with National Sawdust to mark the release of the quarantine-created album Con Alma with Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera and broadcast to Canal 22 in Mexico, WNET All-Arts in the tri-state area and online; a Zoom-accessed Virtual Nightclub and dance party called The Boot with Beth Morrison Projects; a music video for rock band Sylvan Esso which aired on Colbert’s YouTube Covid channel; a physically-distanced adherent, landscape-integrating adaptation of John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds with ensemble Alarm Will Sound at PS21 in Chatham, NY; and directed the simulcast productions of the Bard Music Festival's Out of the Silence series featuring The Orchestra Now.

She also works in the realm of immersive entertainment, escape rooms and advertising and was the Creative Director of Immersive Escape Productions where she devised environmental, multi-platform, immersive escape rooms, created an experience for musician St. Vincent tailored for the drop of her album, Masseduction and led the team that was awarded a gold medal in Medical, Marketing & Media awards in 2018 for an immersive escape experience tailored for the release of a cholesterol-reducing drug for Amgen.

She earned her MFA in directing at Columbia University and has taught, guest taught or been a guest artist at Mannes School of Music, Harvard University, MIT, Marymount Manhattan College, Colgate College, Bard College and LIU Post. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors’ Lab, the recipient of the Lotos Foundation's Emerging Artist Award in Arts and Sciences and a winner of the 2017 Robert L. B. Tobin Director/Designer grant. She is currently in residence at 153 Coffey a multi-disciplinary warehouse space in Red Hook, Brooklyn and one of the inaugural members of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s residency cohort.

Her Associate work has been with directors Robert Woodruff, Jay Scheib, Daniel Fish, Richard Jones among others in such venues as St. Ann’s Warehouse (on the critically acclaimed production of Oklahoma!), Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Lincoln Center Theater Festival, The Park Avenue Armory, Spoleto Festival, USA, Fort Worth Opera and LAOpera at REDCAT.