A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
A headshot of SAIC faculty member Maire Witt O'Neill

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Maire Witt O'Neill

Assistant Professor, Adjunct

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Professional Site

Bio

BFA, 2009, Maryland Institute College of Art; MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Máire Witt O’Neill is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL crisscrossing disciplines such as performance, video, theater, sculpture, installation, writing, directing, education. O’Neill is also one half of the collaborative duo Mia+Máire, whose largest project to date is the performance of a corporation, SoftPantsStudios, which creates SGCtv (Sad GIrls Club TV) and Mad Girls aka MAGGOTS Club TV. O’Neill received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Assistant Professor, Adjunct at SAIC and the Director of the Theater program at Music House Chicago. O’Neill’s work revels within a collision course of entertainment, voice, philosophy, television, and goofy games of conceptual twister. Exhibitions: O’Neill has exhibited and performed in venues such as Anthology Film Archives, NY; American Medium Gallery, NY; Mana Contemporary, NJ; Lithium Gallery, IL; High Tide, PA; Vox Populii, PA; Defibrillator, IL; The Nightingale Theater, IL; Goldfinch Gallery, IL; Extase Gallery, IL, Oklahoma, IL; Beverly Theater Guild; and Beverly Arts Center.

Personal Statement

I make performance, reality television, lecture, and installation to undermine constructs of a broadly defined "authority"—seeking stability in groundlessness. My work is often not what it seems and exactly what it seems simultaneously—its purported genre or context (performance, lecture, reality tv, etc.) becomes the trampoline that ideas are bounced off of, but in the process, gravity flips and the trampoline begins bouncing off of the ideas.

I am also one half of the collaborative duo, Mia+Máire. Our largest project to date is the performance of a television corporation, SoftPantsStudios, which creates Sad Girls Club TV and the new Mad Girls aka MAGGOTS Club TV. Theory and research cycle through my solo work and Mia+Máire, creating a circuit—further testing ideas and perspectives by prioritizing collaboration and resisting the singular authoritarian perspective.

In teaching, I believe that facilitating a class culture that encourages challenging and supportive discussion is crucial. I strive to bring my passion and respect to class with me in order to inspire others to do the same.

 

Work

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course will explore the conventional divisions between Theater and Performance Art. What is behind the oft-heard claim from Marina Abramovic that ¿to be a performance artist one has to hate theater¿ and the assertion that Performance Art is ¿real¿ whereas theater is ¿fake?¿ Where did this seemingly hard edge between 'Theater' and ¿Performance Art¿ come from and has it in some cases discouraged cross-pollination between communities and disciplines? Artists and practitioners in both disciplines are making groundbreaking work that prompts urgent discussion. What potentials can arise if we create a space where practitioners of this inherently interdisciplinary medium, Performance, explore its close relative, Theater, as more than its uncanny sibling or oppressive ancestor.

Students will look at artists and theorists on both sides of the 'divide' as well as those who cross lithely over the boundaries or refuse to acknowledge them at all. Students will read scripts by playwrights theorists and practitioners such as Brendan Jacobs-Jenkins, Young Jean Lee, Annie Baker, Bertolt Brecht, Katori Hall, Lynn Nottage, Samuel Beckett, Mickle Maher and Theater Oobleck, Anna Deveare Smith and others. We will look at performances by Wooster Group, Robert Wilson, My Barbarian, Terry Adkins, Colin Self, Curious Performance, Paul Chan, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Forced Entertainment, Jacolby Satterwhite and others.

Students will examine and experiment with modes and practices such as: linearity; abstraction; text, script and score; the ensemble and the individual; direction; rehearsal; narrative; acting and action; music and dance; and more. The course will culminate in a collaborative performance that is devised from a text. In effect, students, having experimented with modes of presentation and formation throughout the semester, will mount a 'performance' of a 'play' that may or may not look anything like a play or a performance. While creating a collaborative work, students will have the agency to decide how collaborative, linear, abstract, experimental, textural, 'real' or 'fake' this culminating presentation might be.

Class Number

2305

Credits

3