Haruko Crow Nishimura

Haruko Crow Nishimura is co-director, actor, dancer and vocalist for Seattle's Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE). The company creates performance work inspired by punk, comics, cinema, nightmares, and fairy tales driven by the power of live music and their own style of visceral movement theater and dance. Her work with the ensemble has been featured in 10 countries presenting large scale experimental dance and theater projects, concerts, site-transforming spectacles and ongoing public experimentation.

She was commissioned along with DAE by director Robert Wilson to interpret his work Einstein on the Beach at the Baryshnikov Center in 2013. She directed a large scale site specific mutli-disciplinary project for the 50th anniversary of the Seattle Worlds Fair at Seattle Center in collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects in 2012. She danced as a soloist with the Kronos Quartet in 2015 as part of the 95 rituals - Anna Halprin’s 95th birthday anniversary project at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2015. She was the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.

In addition to her work with DAE, Nishimura is constantly collaborating with both local and international artists to push the boundaries of her medium such as dancing in the street, creating rituals for strangers in public spaces and hosting artist salons cultivating community spaces for artists to share their work.

Her most recent work Skeleton Flower tells the story of her own struggle with identity depression, childhood trauma and finding her voice. The work pas performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City, the Spotlight USA festival in Plovdiv Bulgaria, ODC Theatre in San Francisco and at Seattle’s On The Boards.