Victoria Eleanor Bradford, American artist and choreographer, born in Louisiana, lives in Chicago, and develops work under her company A House Unbuilt. She is invested in image-making, public performance, and text-based systems for movement. Her vocabulary starts in the joints and creates a cross section of rapid action and sculptural movement. Through time-intensive projects, her work investigates personal narrative and the psychological gestures embedded in the body. She creates improvisation projects that subtly intersect with social practice, and she collaborates with artists of all disciplines while bringing work to public sites, private homes, galleries, stages, and the internet.
Approximately a year and a half ago, Bradford took her work to the front lawns of the neighborhood in which she grew up. Without permission, trespassing as she captured her dance on video, she began a daily ritual that has continued to today and into Chicago. She has recently expanded her Neighborhood Dances project through a microresidency at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, a Sponsored Artist Residency with High Concept Labs, and a Featured Artist selection for Chicago Artists Month in Fall 2015. She also spoke on Neighborhood Dances for a panel discussion at the Chicago Architecture Biennial in November 2015.
Other key projects include Dinner Dance (dinnerdance.co), produced as part of her HATCH Residency at Chicago Artists Coalition, and Skirts (skirtsfordancing.com), an ongoing collaborative project which Bradford received a DCASE Individual Artist Award to develop. Skirts is currently in a new phase of work and will premier a dance film at Chicago Artists Month this Fall.
Bradford’s work has been produced in conjunction with the MCA Chicago, Chicago Artists Month, Open House Chicago, Chicago Artists Coalition, Design Cloud Gallery, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, and Sullivan Galleries, Lumen Video and Performance Art Festival, among others. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art/Sculpture from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio/Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
For more information, visit victoriaeleanorbradford.com