A Passion for Risk Taking

Allison M Keating is an interdisciplinary artist and generator of provocative live performances and immersive installations, a director of experimental theater, an artist curator, a producer, and a production designer.

Keating creates artistic projects that are relevant to NOW, charging people to examine and question our current contemporary moment, to provoke community engaged discussion in a hopeful effort towards perception change, empathy, and a more tolerant society. Keating's art works herald unfettered self expression and are daring, ambitious, visually striking, exciting and never without a sense of danger. She works to ensure the experimental arts (works of art in which the outcomes are unknown) thrives in Los Angeles by fueling a culture of collaboration, resource sharing, support and sustainability, both economic and environmental.

Most recently, Keating embarked on a year long performance art project titled Performing an Actor which was canceled due to Covid. Her performance company Wild Art Group created projects in LA from 2015 - 2021. Wild Art Group projects include Finally, a Play about Joy performed at EL Segundo Museum of Art in 2019 and at the Blue Roof Studios Arts Festival. This sophisticated toy theater musical was made to emotionally counteract her previous project, On Death, a one night only by design performance inspired by Trump’s renunciation of the Paris Climate Agreement and a friend’s suicide. The On Death performance was filmed and the final art object for the project is a paper documentation archive to outlast us all called the On Death Paper Tape, exhibited at Angels Gate Art Center. In 2016, Wild Art Group premiered H&G, a public outcry, a fun hysteric performance about our imminent demise and America’s new fear of extreme weather, performed at Paloma Street Studios. Keating installed a solo exhibition and accompanying art book titled The Identity Project at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. For the exhibition she embodied different characters relating to her identity to question the authenticity of performance and gender. Machine Project invited Wild Art Group to create Hiking Podcast inspired by the National Park System’s centennial celebration.

Previously, Keating created a new play through a cross-continent collaboration with the London based playwright Simon Parker called Yellow Fever, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in 2014. Also at the Fringe in 2013 she premiered MASK by John Michael Johnson. In 2012, through a project called LikeUs Keating collaborated with Nina Caussa Rius to create performances online using social media and content found from the internet including plays such as Our Town, Medeamaterial, and a new Charles L. Mee play titled Retweeting Coney Island.

From 2004 through 2010, Keating was a generative artist and resident production designer for 3-Legged Dog Media & Theater Group in New York City. The company produced her original play, Rods and Cables, short film Winston’s Letter, and several video installations.

As a curator, Keating produces the Wild Art Party series, nights of extreme creative freedom for artists to perform and experiment in a low pressure environment with a supportive audience. She currently serves as the Deputy Director, Finance & Operations at REDCAT. Previously, she was the Executive Director of Levitt Pavilion Los Angeles, the Co-Director & Curator of Performance at LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), a non-profit dedicated to commissioning site/situation specific contemporary public artworks, and the Artistic Assistant at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills where she programed free outdoor concert series and a large two day festival of local artists. Additionally, Keating was Artistic Associate at 3LD Art & Technology Center in New York City. She was a curator of resident artists and founder of the 3LD Media Arts Program, curating digital, media and trans-media artists. Keating helped produce and curate several large scale community social events at 3LD which featured a night of free art exhibitions, performances, and technology demonstrations to the public.

Allison M Keating received her BFA in Drama at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and a Directing MFA from the School of Theater at the California Institute of the Arts with an auxiliary concentration in the Integrated Media Program.