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, 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 Fall 2009, he has been awarded a 5-week writing residency at the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY. With collaborators at ASU, he has begun work on a peformance project examining food and sustainability which will premiere in 2010. 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. Other recent projects are Straight Talk, a multi-character play satirizing modern communication through the speech of young adults, and his solo, Failure To Thrive (we small hours), directed by Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, 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