Alex Tatarksy (PS MA '19)
Performance Studies alum Alex Tatarsky (MA '19) has received the second annual Triple Canopy Fellowship. Tatarsky is a performer, writer, and researcher based between Philadelphia and New York City. Working in the tradition of street and circus performers — and trained as a clown — Tatarsky draws on improvisation, prop-based comedy, and dramaturgy. Tatarsky’s unsettling, hilarious performances make use of unstable (even deranged) narrators to probe personal and collective fantasies, turning nonsense into a source of insight. The New York Times hailed Tatarsky’s 2023 play Sad Boys in Harpy Land as “a thrilling and frenetic mental breakdown of a show” that “has the delirious effect of twisting you into communion with a live-wire artist.”
The 2025 Fellowship follows years of collaboration between Triple Canopy and Tatarsky. Tatarsky has contributed to two issues of the magazine and performed at the organization’s inaugural Symposium in 2023. Triple Canopy has also collaborated with Tatarsky and Ming Lin’s art-and-research collective Shanzhai Lyric and its subsidiary group Canal Street Research Association.
For Tatarsky, magic acts as both a practical technique of trickery and a metaphor for the inner workings of power. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, Tatarsky will consider how states sustain themselves through strategic misdirection. Over the course of their fellowship, Tatarsky will develop a series of performances that take the form of quests, including a journey to the country’s capital of magic, Las Vegas, to learn from the professionals. The performances will serve as the basis for a novel to be edited by Triple Canopy.
ABOUT THE TRIPLE CANOPY FELLOWSHIP
The Triple Canopy Fellowship supports unorthodox, genre-defying artists in the development of a project that advances the magazine’s commitment to the role of artists as public thinkers. Each year, one fellow is awarded a $10,000 honorarium, plus a $5,000 production budget, along with extensive support from Triple Canopy’s editors and staff over a multiyear period. The Triple Canopy Fellowship was established in 2024. Support for the Fellowship has been generously provided, in part, by the Lambent Foundation.
