Die No Die (The High Line)

Matty Davis (b. 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) lives and works in New York, New York. Davis’ work has been featured at institutions including Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2023); The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas (2023); Center for Performance Research, New York, New York (2022); Kanal Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium (2021); The Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2019); and The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2018). He has participated in prominent international artist residencies, including at The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas (2022); Ucross Foundation, Clearwater, Wyoming (2022); Art Omi, Ghent, New York (2020); and The Watermill Center, Watermill, New York (2016).

Performer Bios

Chloé Cooper Jones
Chloé Cooper Jones is a professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a best book of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Time magazine, and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing in 2020. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and an Associate Professor of Writing at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Nile Harris
Nile Harris is a performer and director of live works of art. He has done a few things and hopes to do a few more, God willing.

Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson
Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson are co-founding artistic directors of slowdanger, a multidisciplinary performance entity utilizing movement, found material, integrative technology, electronic instrumentation, and vocalization to produce performance work since 2013. Based out of Pittsburgh, PA, slowdanger synergizes mediums, utilizing process-based practice to delve into circular life patterning including effort, transformation, and death. They have been featured in or by Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” MoMA, The Kennedy Center, The Andy Warhol Museum, Usine C (France), and more. They were 2022 awardees of the NPN Creation Fund and NEFA/National Dance Project to create their work SUPERCELL, which premiered in 2023 at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland and the Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh.

Tony Orrico
Tony Orrico is known for his ingenuity within the intersections of performance and drawing. His works investigate mental and physical endurance, somatic drawing, choreography, bio-geometrics and improvisational practices. Orrico has performed/exhibited his work across the US and internationally in Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. His visual work is in the permanent collections of The National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, Mexico City) as well as prominent private collections such as Grazyna Kulczyk, Kablanc/Fundación Otazu and Bergmeier/Kunstsaele among others. He has presented at the CCCB, Centre Pompidou-Metz, The New Museum, and Poptech 2011: The World Rebalancing. Orrico was one of a select group of artists to re-perform the work of Marina Abramovic during her retrospective at MoMA (2010). As a former member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, Orrico has graced such stages as the Sydney Opera House, Teatro La Fenice, New York State Theater, and Theatre du Palais-Royal. Orrico is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture & Intermedia, and Dance at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City. In 2020, Orrico was included in the book PERFORMANCE DRAWING: New Practices since 1945, a collection of interviews and essays exploring the relationship between drawing and performance, published by Bloomsbury.

Bryan Saner
I have made my living doing a combination of creative socially active practices: industrial arts, restoration, repair, making, teaching, and performing. Each discipline participates in the other’s goals without separation. I try to make long-term commitments to collaborate closely with artists and activists. We are developing alternative creative, educational, and economic communities inside and outside of existing established systems. We congregate in private and public architectural spaces, theoretical institutions, and human bodies. These practices endeavor to advance culture by building, destroying, and rebuilding human spaces and relationships.