Serena Caffrey
Serena Caffrey (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist working across live performance, installation, analogue film, print, and the written word. Their performance scores dictate quotidian, task-based gestures that repeat or endure for long periods of time, frequently in accordance with significant lunar and solar events, and investigate time, longing, and land-body relationality. In standing, sitting, drawing, or walking for whole days, Caffrey embodies and thereby critiques the seemingly never-ending cycles of labor that capitalist calendars of production dictate. Teetering on the fulcrum of ritual, dance, and endurance training, their performances ultimately propose a practice of radical witnessing via failure—slowing to stillness in order to learn the time scales of beyond-human kin.
In their work as a somatic consent educator, Serena supports artists to overcome destructive patterns of overworking, self-sabotage, and sensory overload to build a creative practice rooted in sacred self-limits that honor intuitive wisdom and support whole-person wellness. They also serve as a grant writer and organizational consultant to arts organizations, helping them better articulate and advocate for their creative purpose and operating needs, as well as reaccess creative flow by building a consent-based work culture that uplifts the dignity and agency of all actors.
Caffrey received their BA in Studio Arts from Bard College where their thesis performance, The Anxiety of Being Wrong, gained numerous honors including the John Bard Prize in the arts. She has been an artist-in-residence at ArtFarm Nebraska and Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, NY. Her drawing and print work has been exhibited internationally in Milan and Kyoto, and their performances have premiered at the Gowanus Ballroom in Brooklyn, The Mortuary Los Angeles, and The Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles. Caffrey is currently pursuing their MFA in Printmaking at the University of Arkansas - Fayetteville, located in their hometown.