Sister Sylvester

Sister Sylvester is a multimedia artist and amateur microbiologist. Her installation work, “Constantinopoliad” (2024), premiered at CPH:DOX, where it won the INTER:ACTIVE prize, and toured to the Venice International Film Festival as part of the Best of Festivals selection. Her work, “Drinking Brecht: An Automated Laboratory Performance” (2024), premiered at IDFA and continues to tour internationally, including to Open City and Thessaloniki Film Festivals. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum, she created the VR documentary “Shadowtime” (2023), which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and toured to IDFA, GIFF, Thessaloniki Film Festival, and SXSW, 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, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Recent works include: “Constantinopoliad,” with a live score by Nadah El Shazly, commissioned by the Onassis Foundation and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (2023), as a site-specific work in the Onassis Library, Athens, and at the Internationaal Theater of Amsterdam; “The Eagle and The Tortoise,” which showed as a work-in-progress at National Sawdust NYC and premiered at Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, as a part of IDFA On Stage (2022), and in NYC as part of Under the Radar Festival 2024.

She is a 2025 Creative Capital fellow, a current resident at ONX Studio, a 2019 MacDowell Fellow, and an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program, and CPH:DOX lab. She co-teaches a bio-art class at Colorado College and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.

Her work has been called “genuinely subversive” by ‘Time Out’ NY; “imaginative and original” by ‘The New York Times’; “perplexing” by ‘Theaterscene’; “apocalyptic” by ‘Artforum’; and an “otherworldly, intimate, off-kilter, queer artistic orgasm” by ‘LiFO’ Athens weekly.

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