RYAT YEZBICK

My work stems from my experience as a gay, transgender-masculine, Arab-American person raised in a Charismatic (Pentecostal) Catholic church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a child, I often felt confused about my simultaneous desire to belong and the distinct feeling that I was not of the community. I learned to perform a position in order to fit in with the group for fear I was being watched by a wrathful god. God was my first encounter with surveillance technologies. My experiences led me to examine the ways in which people on the margins aesthetically take on and perform the moral majority within their communities as a kind of “threat management” strategy. I explore the costs and benefits of these strategies in my practice through live performance, new media, experimental documentary, drawing and installation.

My practice is highly interdisciplinary and research based. As a former cultural anthropologist, I use qualitative research methods to investigate technology’s impact on group identity and collective memory through public archives and collaborations in the era of digital surveillance and decentralized global conflict. However, unlike cultural anthropologists, I figure my experience centrally in my work, rooting these themes in a complex set of questions around security, home, gender, family, love, violence, power, and responsibility. My work seeks to uncover the ways in which power structures, buttressed by cultural beliefs, impact how at home we feel in our own bodies.

I am an award-winning artist, published author, and multi-time grant recipient. I have held fellowships at MIT with the Open Documentary Lab and am a current fellow of Onassis ONX Studio and Faculty member at Arizona State University’s Narrative and Emerging Media MA Program in Los Angeles. My project, The Innocence of Unknowing, has won awards from the Colombia Digital Storytelling Lab (Breakthrough in Storytelling Award), Ars Electronica (New Animation Art Award), and is a finalist for the Lumen Prize Legacy Award. I obtained my MFA from CalArts and am affiliated with the Guild of Future Architects. My work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Melbourne, Glasgow, and Athens, and in notable group exhibitions and performances at the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Los Angeles), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Materials & Applications (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), The Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Glasgow International 2018 (Glasgow), The Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity (Banff), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), Space One (Seoul), the Bangkok Biennial MAHA Pavilion (Bangkok), LAXART (Los Angeles), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles), the Queer Biennial (Los Angeles), Tribeca Film Festival 2025 (New York), New Images (Paris), and Ars Electronica (Linz).

RYAT ˈrī-ət

RYAT YEZBICK