Peggy Piacenza

Being an artist is how I process being alive, how I find connection, and how I find community.

I believe in the power of the lived experience. I have spent decades dancing and observing my body change with the passing of time. Mortality hovers over me in a new way, asking me to pay attention differently—as a human and as an artist. I believe the body is a site for transformation, that it is inherently political; that my continued connection to art-making is a form of somatic activism.

A central component in my work is the connection to others. Live performance has the power to allow for a transference of ideas, a sacred space of the profane to be accessed through intentional listening and intimacy. The creative process is a space to play out the interior/exterior life with all of its vulnerability and discomfort. I crave connection through my art-making: How are we touched artistically, spiritually, physically, intellectually, emotionally? What is important about any moment, experience, feeling?

My work’s inherent meaning is never a linear storyline where I control the narrative; instead, the work is in a state of flux and presents itself in its own timing. I am dedicated to countering the tempo and consumerist drive to produce steadily; my projects develop over long time periods and involve deep relationships and research.

Peggy Piacenza has been choreographing, performing, and building community in Seattle since the 1990s. Her work embodies a wide spectrum of experience, drawing from research and formal schooling in religion and gender studies, a commitment to silent meditation retreats and somatic movement practices, explorations in improvisational methods, video art, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Piacenza investigates an endless range of human experiences—labor, identity, aging, the female body, connection, vulnerability, sensuality, humor, stillness, grief, failure, spectacle, shame, busyness, nature, silence, discomfort, freedom, repetition, and touch.

The Forever Project, which premiered at On the Boards in Seattle, WA, in 2024, utilizes video installation, archival materials, and live performance to explore the non-linear, fragmented construction of identity and the relationship of the self to others. Piacenza’s 30-year-long performance career and history as a sex worker culminate in an embodied tapestry of artistic material, a thematic entanglement of sex-labor, the pursuit of freedom, and ageism. Her personal and artistic movement archives are deconstructed and exaggerated with dark humor through a satirical ecofeminism lens, in a never-ending project of self-growth and the search for purpose. Within The Forever Project, the body emerges as a container for the sacred and profane, a site for memoir and fiction to coalesce as the blurred lines between the real and artificial are explored.

Other works by Piacenza include sweet, rotten, sweet, BONFIRE Gallery, Seattle, WA (2019); The Event, Base, Seattle, WA (2017); and Touch Me Here, Velocity Dance Center, Seattle, WA (2015), and Washington Performance Hall, Seattle, WA (2014). In 2011, she served as project director for LEAP: Dreaming the Sacred through Traditional and Contemporary Forms of Dance, a convening of Cambodian and American artists in Cambodia dedicated to fostering cross-cultural dialogue on classical and contemporary forms of dance, culminating in an informal performance. She received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant to support the project.

Piacenza has collaborated and performed with Seattle-based dance-theater companies 33 Fainting Spells and Pat Graney Company, as well as choreographers Dayna Hanson, Deborah Hay, Stephanie Skura, Lionel Popkin, Wade Madsen, Beth Graczyk, and bi-national performance collective Same As Sister (S.A.S.).

She has received a Helen Gurley Brown Magic Grant (2011) from Smith College and an Artist Trust Fellowship Award (2024). Piacenza is co-founder of Base, a nonprofit dedicated to elevating risk and invention in dance, performance, and multidisciplinary art.