Melia Efstratis Chendo

Melia Efstratis Chendo is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Their work with photo, video, and performance engages with the politics of (dis)identification, spectatorship, and desire. Critical theories of gender, sexuality, race, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology have shaped their exploration of the body as the site of intersubjectivity — where experience is felt, created, and shared.

A year prior to the Performance Studies MA Symposium, Chendo graduated with a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU Gallatin.

Project Title: Psychoanalysis and Silence: Scoring Invisibles, Living Gaps 

Project Description: This project examines the practice of psychoanalysis as an aesthetic experience and object of study. Drawing on Chendo’s performance series Get on the Couch (2026) in collaboration with Denisse Griselda Reyes (M.A. ‘26) and their theoretical focus on trauma studies, visual culture, and phenomenology, this project engages psychoanalysis as a perverse sexual practice that is all bound up with looking, desiring, withholding, and turning toward one’s own opacity. Chendo’s performative method experiments with (counter)transferential relations between the performer and audience, spectacle and spectator– relations that are unspoken yet always already in the room with the analyst and analysand. With consideration to silence as an analytic method, the project asks: how can we theorize lived “aesthetic experiences” that exceed the bounds of representation? How can psychoanalysis do the work of “loosening” a subject if language is also a form of binding? What is the shape of silence in an analytic room, in a performance, on a dance floor? The project’s mixed-media form, involving aesthetic attention to gaps in speech, imagines psychoanalysis and performance art as encounters with the invisible and the otherness in oneself.