Claudia La Rocco gave a Visiting Writer Lecture at the Arts Research Center on November 21, 2013.
Claudia La Rocco is the author of Drive By (Smooth Friend, 2022); Certain Things (Afternoon Editions, 2022); Quartet (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020); petit cadeau (The Chocolate Factory, 2015); and The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited, 2014).
Her prose poem I am trying to do the assignment was published by [2nd floor projects] as a limited-edition chapbook. She edited I Don’t Poem: An Anthology of Painters (Off the Park Press) and Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, the catalogue for Danspace Projectʼs PLATFORM 2015, for which she was guest artist curator. Her collaborators include the visual artist Anne Walsh and the dance artists Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener; animals & giraffes, her improvisation ensemble with musician/composer Phillip Greenlief and an ongoing roster of collaborators, has released the albums July (with various musicians; Edgetone Records), Landlocked Beach (with Jon Leidecker; Creative Sources), and animals & giraffes live @ medicine for nightmares (with Kyle Bruckmann, Alexandra Buschman-Román, and Adriana Camacho Torres; Evander Music).
La Rocco’s poetry and prose have been published in such anthologies as 6X6 #34: I Like Softness (Ugly Duckling Presse),Imagined Theatres: Writing for a theoretical stage (Daniel Sack, ed; Routledge), and On Value (Ralph Lemon, ed; Triple Canopy). Her work has been presented by The Walker Art Center, The Kitchen, The Whitney Museum of American Art, et al. She has received grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Rainin Foundation, and Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, and had residencies at such places as Contemporary Art Stavanger, Headlands Center for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Lukkeskåra/Rådlausjuvet (Norway).
She has bylines in numerous publications, including Artforum, BOMB, East of Borneo, and The New York Times, where she was a dance and theater critic and reporter from 2005 to 2015; and has taught and lectured widely, including at Stanford University, Princeton University, the School of Visual Arts, San Francisco Ballet, and Tokyo’s Dance New Air festival. La Rocco founded the social and online criticism collective The Performance Club, and from 2016 to 2021 was editorial director of the arts and culture platform Open Space. She currently edits The Back Room, a Small Press Traffic publishing program.