About

Admiral Grey is an artist creating live performance and video art populated with the colorful art objects and costumes she handmakes from repurposed materials and other post-modern detritus. Her maximalist designs and intricate creations adorn intimate pageantry, weaving with us through the tragicomedy of existence.

A committed multidisciplinary artist and writer from a young age, she performed as a trumpet player, singer and actor with regional orchestras, theaters and competitions before studying acting with Circle Repertory Theater as part of the NYSSSA program before college. After attending the acting conservatory at Boston University’s School Of Fine Arts for a year (with a course on Nietzsche thrown in), she transferred to Goddard College for a broader and more radical education where she furthered her studies in philosophy, writing, sculpture, film, and video in addition to music and theater. While at Goddard she wrote and performed in several theatrical pieces, performed original music, gave poetry readings, and created intimate yet complex art installations. One installation was a complete recreation of her own bedroom in the large atrium of the school library, where each object in the room had tiny, brief beseechments written somewhere on them, so that the objects themselves became a play/performance piece the more someone spent time in the installation.

She left Goddard for financial reasons and moved to New York - where she found she also was not able to afford the internships with experimental theater troupes she had been connected to. So instead, she wrote and printed zines, was a founding member of the art-punk band Drayton Sawyer Gang, threw shows and festivals, and continued making dioramas and costume as she honed her unique aesthetic in the Brooklyn experimental and avant garde scene. Soon after she found her way back into performing and creating modern theater, acting and devising with independent companies like Sister Sylvester and putting up works of her own. In 2012 a friend invited her to help develop a new show out of St. Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab, though she hadn’t worked in puppetry before. The show she helped to develop became Robin Frohardt’s runaway success The Pigeoning, and after that she puppeteered with the show around the world for many years, until beginning development with the same crew on The Plastic Bag Store. Part of the devising and building team, she puppeteered in the live show and film and continues to work with the show today.

Admiral has created and performed original theatrical works not only with Frohardt but with The Nerve Tank, The Drunkard’s Wife, Sister Sylvester, Psychic Readings, and several other companies and collaborators in various roles including: composition/sound design, writer, director, actor, dancer, costume/props design, and video design, in New York and internationally. She has released several albums and toured with various music projects including Cellular Chaos (Skin Graft Records), The Simple Pleasure, and Ecstatics, and toured alongside Lydia Lunch performing spoken word in 2016 and 2017. Her video and performance art has been featured in a variety of exhibitions including a residency with Vidium at Mana Contemporary’s 777 Mall for Miami Art Week in 2019. Her current multimedia project The Human Dream Project archives and illustrates intimate recordings of people describing their dreams with puppetry, video art and live sound design. The Human Dream Project Dream Hotline is now open, where people from around the world can call in 24 hours a day and have their dreams anonymously recorded (1-845-215-7073).

Admiral has been a residency participant at NACL, Mana Contemporary, BUOY, Chinatown Soup, Kinosaito, Bethany Arts Community, and Springville Center for The Arts, among others. “The Maiden”, her first collaboration with The Nerve Tank (in which she composed the music, sound-designed an interactive set that could be ‘played’ like instruments by the performers via electronic Arduino triggers, and performed) was nominated for Outstanding Performance Art Production at the New York Innovative Theater Awards. The Human Dream Project has received funding from the New York Foundation For The Arts, the Henson Foundation, Artists’ Relief, Indie Theater Fund and has had workshop performances at outdoor sculpture park Opus 40 in September 2021 and at St. Ann’s Warehouse Puppet Lab in 2022. The Tank is producing The Human Dream Project’s NYC premiere which will run throughout April 2024.

For bookings and other inquiries please contact snakeintheboot@gmail.com