Carmen C. Wong
Carmen C. Wong (b. 1980) is a conceptual food artist and artistic director who orchestrates hybrid plays, audio-walks, gastro-art performances or performative installations. She is the founding Artistic Director and agent provocateur of banished? productions, where she produces the work she directs. A 2012 Mayor’s Arts Awards nominee for Outstanding Emerging Artist, and recipient of the 2010 DCCAH Young Artist Award, Carmen first got her start in interdisciplinary performance in Berlin, working on Constanza Macras/Dorky Park’s “Back to the Present” (2003). Her continuing work in Scandinavia and Europe was fueled by a HIAP artist residency in Helsinki in 2010, where she researched local food and art cultures, networks, and trends in order to incorporate these elements into her gastro-art practice.
She continues to study other forms of live art in Europe to create culturally-relevant versions of her evolving hybrid gastro-performance project series, “Tactile Dinner”. With a Theatre Communications Group Global Connections travel grant in 2011, she was able to return to Berlin and Helsinki where she staged “Socially Tactile Dinner” and “Tactile Taste of Helsinki” and “Dinner for the Forgotten” (2012). In 2012, she was invited to co-develop this series into a “Tactile Eating” workshop in Haparanda, Sweden.