Selected Portfolio

Ryan Conarro is a theatre maker, interdisciplinary artist, creative producer, and a facilitator of community engagement and social change through performance, documentary work, and creative placemaking.

Artist Talk & Interview:

Voyage Denver and the Queer Performance Work Saints of Failure

In conjunction with Saints of Failure, Ryan’s original, site-specific performance work at Denver’s Historic Grant Avenue Church, Voyage Denver featured Ryan in a May 2021 artist talk & interview.

Saints of Failure in Denver included post-show community dialogues with faculty from the University of Denver Department of Religious Studies, the Center on Colfax, and PFLAG Denver, moderated by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Saints of Failure originally premiered at Brooklyn’s Lafayette Avenue Church in 2019, where it was recognized with an NBC OUT Queer Performer Spotlight and a Brooklyn Arts Council Artist Fund Award.

Check out the Voyage Denver interview by clicking here or on the image. Check out more about Saints of Failure by clicking here.

Curating & Moderating International Arts-Based Community Dialogues for Change:

When the Salmon Spoke

Ryan served as creative director, producer, and co-creator of When the Salmon Spoke, an interview-based production featuring cinematic imagery, indigenous music and visual art, and captivating life stories from residents of coastal Tlingit and Haida communities and inland Tahltan communities of Alaska and British Columbia, all linked by the Stikine River.

The production shifted from a live event to a digital media production during the Covid pandemic. Ryan served as co-editor of video and audio.

In 2020-21, Ryan moderated a series of dialogues to use When the Salmon Spoke to advocate for changes to federal water and fisheries management policy by Canada and the U.S. These dialogues included a Colloquium at the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology, and the Salmon Nation Festival of What Works (pictured). Ryan and his collaborators were recognized with the 2021 U.S. Water Prize for Outstanding Artists by the US Water Alliance.

For more about the production, dialogues, and story initiatives of When the Salmon Spoke, please click here or on the image.

Directing & Performing Off-Broadway & National Tour:

ALAXSXA | ALASKA

Ryan was producer, co-director, and a performer in the Ping Chong + Company production ALAXSXA | ALASKA, which he created with Ping Chong, Gary Upay’aq Beaver (Yup’ik), and puppet designer Justin Perkins. ALAXSXA | ALASKA is an interdisciplinary performance exploring cross-cultural encounter in the Last Frontier, including recorded voices and stories of community members from across the state. The piece premiered at University of Alaska Anchorage in August 2017 and toured Alaska communities in 2017 and 2018. Its Off-Broadway premiere took place at La MaMa in 2017.

Ryan led the creation and editing of an accompanying story website, Encounters Alaska, and he produced a community dialogue series in each presenting community across Alaska, as well as a virtual storytelling event between the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage and La MaMa in New York. Ryan oversaw and supported Ping Chong + Company communications staff as they facilitated an ongoing social media story-sharing series during production tours. Finally, Ryan led a team of Native and non-Native educators in creating an Alaska Studies arts-based curriculum, based on ALAXSXA | ALASKA and rooted in excerpts from the show, which was formally adopted as a 9th grade course by the Lower Kuskokwim School District in western Alaska in 2022.

Time Out New York called ALAXSXA | ALASKA a ”sumptuous anthropological collage,” and The Village Voice called it “spellbinding.”

For a 12-minute documentary about ALAXSXA | ALASKA, including performance excerpts, highlights from 2 statewide Alaska tours, and a look at the community engagement work of the production, please click on the image above.

For Ping Chong + Company’s production page and performance history, please click here.

To check out the accompanying community stories project Encounters Alaska, please click here.

Devising Queer Performance:

BAD HUSBAND //\\ BAD HOMO

BAD HUSBAND//\\BAD HOMO was created by Ryan and an interdisciplinary ensemble, presented by and developed at New York’s landmark downtown performance venue Dixon Place in July 2019 and January 2020. This dancey, draggy, no-holds-barred theatre work asks an urgent cultural question for our cultural times in this culture: Can a poster boy for gay marriage become a pioneer of gay divorce?

In BAD HUSBAND//\\BAD HOMO, Ryan Conarro tells his story of achieving the gay American dream of the 21st century: he gets married, only to see that fantasy turn into a nightmare when his marriage falls apart. But Ryan was never a good gay in the first place. Scared of the scene and the men he wanted to want, he’s always steered clear of hooking up, partying, or wearing angel wings in parades.

Now, in this poignant, unfiltered comedy of errors, Ryan’s picking up the pieces: he’s hitting (and missing) the scene and searching for his inner gay diva, with the help of Kirya Traber (a recently-married gay) and dancing queens Jimmy Crowell and Will Atkins.

For more about BAD HUSBAND//\\BAD HOMO, visit the Dixon Place production page here.

Staging Scripted Works Using Studio Experiments Process:

Annie Baker’s The Flick at University of North Georgia

Proceeding from his diverse range of arts experience; his Interdisciplinary Arts MFA from Goddard College; and his lineage from mentors and makers in the performance field, Ryan has articulated a collaborative theatrical process. A recent example of an outcome of this process in Ryan’s production of Annie Baker’s The Flick, as guest artist at the University of North Georgia. Through Ryan’s process, the student designers and performers manifested a playing area onstage to represent the interior life of Avery, the main character of the play.

Ryan’s process is inspired by processes used by visual artists and dancers - artists who are often more practiced than conventional theater makers at trying things out, painting over, layering, going back and trying again. Ryan guides his collaborators - both performers and designers - to move away from the language of “rehearsal,” of “getting things right,” and instead to create Studio Experiments. This interdisciplinary process manifests an effusion of design treatments, performance vignettes, texts, and character interpretations. From here, Ryan and his collaborators become sculptors, carving away the less specific or less potent material to find the heart of the project. Then, finally, they rehearse and perform.

For more images from The Flick and other works directed by Ryan, please click here or on the image above.

Facilitation & Education:

DevisingHUB at Ping Chong + Company

Ryan’s experience as a facilitator and a curator of artist collaborations includes conceiving and leading Ping Chong + Company’s DevisingHUB, a 5-week incubator for generative interdisciplinary artists in New York interested in creating original performance works. Ryan led 3 cohorts / sessions of DevisingHUB, from 2015 through 2019.

For a 3:40 video summary of DevisingHUB at Ping Chong + Company, please click on the image above.

Audio Storytelling & Arts for Restorative Justice:

Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio

Ryan created and served as General Manager for Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio, a program of the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative. Ryan co-led the station with 15 incarcerated producers at 4 state prison facilities: Limon, Sterling, Denver Women’s, and Buena Vista Correctional Facilities. Inside Wire was the first and only statewide prison radio station in U.S. history.

Among several milestones, Inside Wire producers were awarded a 2022 Silver Anthem Award for Human & Civil Rights and a 2023 Gold Signal Awards for Documentary and for Public Service & Activism. Ryan also organized a team of formerly incarcerated storytellers with lived experience in the Colorado justice system, and they were granted a 2022 LEDE Fellowship from the Solutions Journalism Network.

Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio has been featured on CBS Mornings, NPR’s All Things Considered, Rocky Mountain PBS, and more.

For more about Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio, please click here.