Asher Hartman

I'm a writer, director, and maker of live performance with my company of artists and performers, Gawdafful National Theater. I combine strategies of theater and performance art to make works that grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. My writing is dense, mangled, poetic, infused with clown and cringe humor and evidence of trance and psychic journeying. I write specifically for the highly skilled actors and artists who perform my work, and take that work through a long rehearsal process in order to mine and make sense of these layered, complex texts that address American violence and predation. Whenever I can, I set these performances in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit strong feeling.

Asher Hartman is a visual artist, writer, and director whose live works address American psychological and physical violence through dense, layered texts meant to arouse the audience's unconscious desires. His rigorous rehearsal processes and collaborations produce abstract performance theater works meant to disrupt audience's expectations of political narratives. Hartman is committed to working with performers over a long period, allowing his plays to evolve through many iterations. 

He wrote and directed Blessed with Switch (2024) in collaboration with composer and performance artist Jasmine Orpilla, with whom he has worked for more than a decade. The piece is an unsettling, abstract embodied text of speech that hacks at the immaterial feminine body. It premiered at The Art of Performance @ UCI, University of California, Irvine and subsequently had a French language premiere at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.

Hartman premiered It’s Better to Start Out Ugly, a play about three economically marginalized gay men who cannibalize the foreign and the foreigner, at The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2023). The piece was also performed at JOAN, Los Angeles, CA (2023) and will have a production at New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles, CA in 2025. His other works have been shown at Yale Union, Portland, OR; Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA; Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, CA; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA, among many other venues. Hartman is writing an autobiographical-fantastical book entitled Kay Whale: Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses and Gaunt Motherfuckers, which explores the effects of misogyny, racist privilege, multiplicity, violence, and loss, and considers how unexamined traumas can turn into weapons against the world. 

He is the recipient of a California Community Foundation Fellowship for the Visual Arts (2022), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2019), a Center for Cultural Innovation Artist Resources for Completion Grant (2011), and a Durfee Artists’ Resource Completion Grant (2010). 

Hartman is on faculty at Otis College of Art and Design and California Institute of the Arts. He is also a practicing psychic and has been reading for individuals since 2001.