Sister Sylvester

Sister Sylvester is a multimedia artist based in New York and Istanbul. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum, she created the VR documentary “Shadowtime” (2023), which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and continues to tour to festivals, and the film “Our Ark,” which premiered at IDFA (2021) and has screened at festivals internationally. In her live work, she creates visual essays and books that become performances and spatial narratives, playing with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Most recently, “Constantinopoliad,” with a live score by Nadah El Shazly, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (2023), while “The Eagle and The Tortoise” was shown as a work-in-progress at Ferus Festival and premiered at Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, as a part of IDFA On Stage (2022). She is a current resident at Onassis ONX, a 2019 MacDowell Fellow, and an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and the CPH:DOX lab. She teaches a bio-art class, “The School of Genetically Modified Theater,” at Colorado College and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.

Sister Sylvester is an Onassis AiR Fellow for 2022-23.