About the Artists

Hope Sandrow

Elke Luyten, originally from Hasselt, Belgium, lives and works in New York City. Currently Luyten is performing in the acclaimed new work by Robert Wilson called “The Life and Death of Marina Abramović”. In 2010 she performed four pieces by Marina Abramović at the exhibition “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present” at the MoMA in New York. In 2009, Luyten starred in “GIRLMACHINE” which was chosen as one of the best performance of the PERFORMA09 Festival. She also maintains a diverse repertoire of solo work, created in collaboration with director Kira Alker, which has been showcased at venues in Mexico, Belgium, France and Japan. She has been an artist-in-residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, UCLA’s Hothouse Program and the Nottle Theatre Company in South Korea. Luyten is the first to receive the position of Artist Advisor at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. She is working on a new solo piece called "Studies of Inertia" which is supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and will be produced by Dance New Amsterdam in New York in December 2012.

Kira Alker, a native of San Francisco, holds a BA in Theatre from Pomona College and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. She has been creating movement performances in collaboration with Elke Luyten since 2003. Her work has been showcased internationally at such venues as the REDCAT in Los Angeles, the International Conference on Performance Art Theory in Mexico, the Dream Shot Festival in Belgium and the Kyoto University of Art and Design and Honen-in Temple in Japan. In the spring, she will be a featured choreographer in The Kitchen’s Dance and Process series. Kira currently works as Sarah Michelson’s rehearsal assistant and most recently performed in Michelson’s Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer at the Whitney Biennial in 2012.