Joan Jonas Performance Workshop and Artist Talk in conversation with artist Judith Barry

MFA Arts Program, Clark University at Mass Moca, North Adams, Massachusetts

January 6 -7, 2026

On January 6–7, 2026, Joan Jonas will lead a performance workshop and participate in an artist talk in conversation with Judith Barry as part of the MFA Arts Program at Clark University, held at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. The event brings together two artists whose practices engage performance, video, and interdisciplinary research. Organized within the MFA residency framework, the workshop and talk are intended for program participants and focus on artistic process, critical discussion, and contemporary approaches to performance-based work.

Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art, and an acclaimed multimedia artist whose work typically encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.

She has had major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, Germany; and the Queens Museum of Art, New York. Jonas developed a multimedia installation featured in the United States’ pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.