About

Lance Gharavi

Lance is an experimental artist, scholar, Professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre, and Associate Director of the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University.

An early pioneer in the field of digital performance, Gharavi’s work focuses on points of intersection between performance, technology, science, and religion—not always all at once. He specializes in leading transdisciplinary teams of artists, scientists, designers, and engineers to advance research and create compelling experiences. Recent projects have involved robots, architectural projection, social media, 3D projections, seismic data, and planetarium systems.

Gharavi's scholarship on religion, technology, and performance has been published around the world and in several languages. His work appears in journals including Theatre Topics, Modern Drama, Text and Performance Quarterly, Ecumenica, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, PAJ, Esoterica, and Performance Matters. He is the author of Western Esotericism in Russian Silver Age Drama (New Grail 2008), editor of the anthology Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith(Routledge 2012), and the translator for the special 100-year anniversary edition of Aleksandr Blok's symbolist masterpiece, Roza I Krest (Tsentr Knigi Rudomino 2013), published in Moscow.

Gharavi collaborated with EarthScope—the largest solid Earth science project ever funded by the National Science Foundation—to write a children's book about earthquakes. Recent or ongoing projects include Port of Mars, an NSF-funded game-based platform for social science experiments to help future human space communities thrive;  GHOST Lab, a DoD-funded laboratory/art installation for research into robotics and AI; and a series of project on artificial intelligence and higher education. He is the director of St. Bird, an art/science collective, the director of Ars Robotica, an initiative to advance research in robotics and AI through the arts, and the Executive Director of the Centre for Applied Eschatology, a conceptual art project about existential and catastrophic risk. He is the recipient of the Bridge Initiative: Women in Theatre 2018 Ally of the Year for his efforts in promoting diversity in the arts.