JEFF MCMAHON’s live work blending text with movement and media has been presented throughout the world. He has performed at Performance Space 122, Dance Theater Workshop (now New York Live Arts), The Kitchen, PS 1, LACE, Cleveland Performance Art Festival, Jacob's Pillow, Highways, Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, Dance Works (Toronto), and numerous other venues in the U.S. Canada, and Europe.
For the P.S. 122 Benefit in June 2011, he performed a short monologue. He continued working on Tributaries, a series of these short monologues, during a monthlong writing residency at Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain, in Fall 2011, and will be developing these as live/media presentations in 2012.
In July 201, he directed the premiere of his Straight Talk, a play for six actors satririzing modern communication, at Dixon Placein New York. Also that year, his collaborative site specific piece, Changing Courses: the real dinner theatre, premiered as a work-in-progress at the Engrained Cafe, Arizona State University/Tempe, supported by a grant from the Institute for Humanities Research.
In 2009, he had a 5-week writing residency at the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY. Assisted by a research grant from Herberger College of the Arts/ASU and a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, he and media designer Jacob Pinholster created the performance installation Counter Indications, presented in Phoenix in 2008. Special Operations, a play for three actors was presented as a staged reading at Son of Semele Ensemble (Los Angeles) in December 2008. His solo, Failure To Thrive (we small hours), directed by Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, was seen in excerpt at the 2007 Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics Encuentro in Buenos Aires (excerpt of that performance: Hemi Cabaret) The completed version premiered at Dixon Place in NYC in July 2007, presented at Teatro Caliente! in Phoenix, and in early 2008 at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.
In 2002 he premiered his multi-media work, HEEL, created in response to September 11. A Certain Release, a "digital play" featuring live and virtual actors, for which he received a New York State Council on the Arts Playwrighting Commission, was presented as a work in progress at the ASU Institute for Studies in the Arts in 2003. Honorable Discharge, written in 2004 for performer Lance Gharavi, examines the war in Iraq in relationship to local police actions.
Training includes theater/dance at Reed College and Empire State College/SUNY, and with Joan Skinner, Mangrove Collective, James Tyler, Ruth Zaporah, Jeanette Lovetri, and David Schein. In 1998, he completed an MFA in nonfiction writing from the School of the Arts, Columbia University. He received eight Fellowships and two Project Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fellowship from the NY Foundation for the Arts, and funding from the NY State Council on the Arts and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His work has been reviewed by many publications and is archived at the New York Public Library of Performing Arts Dance Collection, and at the Live Art Study Room in London.
Work chronicled as part of the Alliance for the Arts Estate Project Web site, a survey on the impact of AIDS on the dance communities of New York and Los Angeles compiled by David Gere
http://www.artistswithaids.org/artforms/dance/catalogue_index.html
Interview of McMahon by the Irish performance artist/scholar Aine Phillips
