Kevin Cunningham

2020 FIC Fellow

Kevin Cunningham

Kevin Cunningham is an award-winning New York based producer, director, writer, designer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and Executive Artistic Director of 3-Legged Dog.

He has produced over 150 ambitious interdisciplinary artworks since 2006. These works often defy genre classification. They include films, immersive performance, multi-media and interactive dance, opera and theater works, large-scale interactive installations, video mapping projects, interactive art, AR, VR, MR and code art. He has produced, directed and designed works on three continents.

In 1994, he began producing his own multimedia performance works as a writer, director and production designer at La Mama, PS 122, The Signature Theater, The Kitchen, 3LD and the Ontological Theater. Works include Automatic EarthThe Realism of Simple MachinesDegeneracy, Losing Something, Spy Garbo and with his frequent collaborator Chuck Mee, the immersive theater work Fire Island.

Over the last five years he has worked on the very large-scale immersive work called Not-Knowing with Mee. Not Knowing incorporates large scale holographic and immersive projection with tracked video mapping techniques to create a “mixed reality bridge” between cinematic and lived reality. He is also collaborating with Academy Award winner Carol Dysinger on the creation of an immersive performance and expanded cinema work called One Woman War based on Dysinger’s 16 years as a documentarian of life in war zones in Afghanistan.

Awards: Venice Biennale (2) , Sundance Film Festival (4) Prague Quadrennial (2), American Film Institute, New York and Hamptons Film Festivals, CPH:DOX. American Theater Wing Hewes Design Award, Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund Awards (2) Drama Desk Nominations (4).

In 2017, Angels Bone, the opera he produced with the Prototype Festival, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Fellowships: Nokia/Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology Program and the Future Imagination Collaboratory Fellowship at NYU Tisch.

 

Projects

3LD Immersive Interactive Platform

The 3LD Immersive Platform is an integrated digital platform that includes a video mapped space with multiple powerful creative tools and interactive systems 42 artists have created work on the platform since 2017. The platform continues to accrue tools and capabilities as each artist works on it.

3LD Mixed Reality Bridge

The 3LD Mixed Reality Bridge is a creative technology system that incorporates, video mapping, mo cap, tracked video mapping, holographic projection and full spectrum chroma 3D to create an apparently seamless bridge between cinematic reality, stage reality and everyday reality.

Return to Reality (working title)

Return to Reality (working title) is a creative, curatorial and technological set of strategies to keep audiences engaged with artists and arts organizations as they create a sequence of works or shows that slowly bring audiences through virtual interactive works to fully live gatherings around original art works and events.

Kevin Cunningham project image

Spy Garbo Designed and Directed by Kevin Cunningham––surround video registration grid with holographic projection system. (Photo: Aaron Harrow)