Artist Statement

I navigate a complex path, feeling divided and using intuition and analogy. I look for connections in small events and pay attention to coincidences, random conversations, and unusual sources of information. This helps me see deeper patterns. By blending traditional ways of thinking with symbolic insights, I notice divine and destructive forces around me. I see myself as a thoughtful skeptic, balancing logic with ancient perceptions, myths with modern ideas, and reason with imagination. I focus on observing and exploring experiences, enjoying the chaotic flow until something surprising emerges.

“Riccio's book is more than a technical or biographical study of Sophia. It offers a broad reflection on human-machine coevolution, the performative nature of robotic identity, and the philosophical, anthropological, and social issues this new symbiosis raises."

—Ester Fuoco / TDR / 2025

Immersion Performance

Indigenous Performance

Theatre

Video

Performance Ethnography

Installation & Design

Alaska Native Performance

Biography

Writer, Performance Maker, Installation Artist,

Experimenter, and Ethnographer

I grew up in a working-class Italian American neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio—steel mills, union halls, the smell of industry. I worked as a merchant seaman and got involved with the Teamsters and Steel Workers. Those were my first stages, long before the tundra of Alaska or the shamanic fires of Siberia. I carry that Cleveland grit with me everywhere: the restlessness, the stubborn belief that something vital hums beneath the surface of ordinary life.

I earned my BA in English Literature from Cleveland State University and my MFA from Boston University, then studied Performance Studies at NYU under Richard Schechner. He’d later call me “a harbinger” and “a person who incarnates the intercultural problem/opportunity.” I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but I think it has something to do with the fact that I can’t stay in one place—geographically, culturally, or intellectually.

The Journey

I’ve spent four decades moving between worlds. Fifteen years in Alaska, where I directed the Alaska Native performance group Tuma Theatre and learned what it means to make work that matters to a community. In Siberia, the Sakha honored me as a Cultural Hero—one of the strangest and most humbling moments of my life. In the Kalahari Desert, I worked with eight !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen healers to create a ritual addressing the loss of their culture. In St. Petersburg, I devised “Shadows from the Planet Fire” from pre-Christian Slavic rituals with the Metamorphosis Theatre. In Addis Ababa, Seoul, Durban, Zambia—everywhere I go, I’m searching for the same thing.

I’ve directed over a hundred plays and performances at places like LaMama ETC, The New York Theatre Workshop, the Teatro di Roma, and the National Theatre of Sakha. I served as Dramaturg and Resident Director at the Cleveland Play House, Assistant Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre, and worked as Robert Brustein’s research assistant at Harvard. I was Artistic Director of Chicago’s Organic Theater Company, where I created several experimental works that taught me how far you can push an audience before they push back.

Teaching has taken me around the world: the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, the University of Nairobi, the University of Pondicherry in India, Tribhuvan University in Nepal, Addis Ababa University, the Korean National University for the Arts, and Jishou University in Hunan, China, where I’ve spent years doing ethnographic fieldwork with the Miao people. Currently, I’m a Visual and Performing Arts professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The Dead White Zombies

In Dallas, I founded Dead White Zombies. The name says it: an attitude toward the dominant culture—already dead but still wandering around, consuming everything. With DWZ, I create immersive performances that refuse theater’s polite distance. We treat theater, ritual, performance art, installation, meditation, sound, and drama therapy as overlapping languages for the same urgent question: what does it mean to be human now?

We live in a mobile and transitory world, and the old form of theater—people sitting in the dark watching the illuminated mind—feels like a relic to me. I want to put people in the thick of it, make them examine their own value systems, and the American assumptions they’re not even aware of.

The Robot Question

People are sometimes surprised to learn I’ve spent years working with robots. From 2005 to 2011, and again from 2018 to 2019 as Creative Director, I worked at Hanson Robotics as a Narrative Engineer, developing “personalities” for their conversational social robots: Bina48, Zeno, Joey Chaos, Swami, Einstein, Jules, and Sophia. But to me, it’s the same work I’ve always done—finding what animates, what makes presence possible, whether the vessel is a Yup’ik dancer, a Zulu performer, or a humanoid machine learning to smile.

My book Sophia Robot: Post Human Being came out from Routledge in 2024. My next book, Performing Body, Space, and Place: The Cosmocentric Way, is due from Routledge in 2026.

Hubs of Memory

I call them “Hubs of Memory”—the places where ancient and modern expressions reveal themselves as the same gesture. A German newspaper once wrote that there’s something linking my work with the Inuit, the Elvis cult in Cleveland, and the tribal performances of Zambia. They called it “a split identity between old and new expressions, but they are all still, at their core, rites and idolatry trying to influence and make sense of our everyday life experience.” That’s as good a description as any.

I’ve published in the world’s leading theatre and performance journals and received various international grants, fellowships, and awards, including the International Distinction Prize in Playwriting from the Alexander Onassis Foundation. My play Rubber City was performed at the Kleist Theatre in Frankfurt. I was a fellow at UCLA’s APEX (1999), artist-in-residence at Toolik Field Station in Alaska (2003), Halka in Istanbul (2014), the Watermill Art Center (2016), and the Santa Fe Institute (2024). I served as dramaturg for Sibyl Kempson’s 12 Shouts for the Ten Forgotten Heavens at the Whitney Museum from 2016 to 2018. In 2021, I performed in a sacred cave during a residency at the Ionian Art and Culture Center in Greece—one of those experiences that makes you wonder why you ever do anything indoors.

Current Work

Right now, I’m finishing a multi-year ethnographic study with the Miao people of southwestern China. My documentary Huan Nuo Yuan has screened around the world, and I’m currently filming the Zhui Nui Water Buffalo Ritual. I also acted in Wedding Dresses (2016), a feature film in Chinese and Miao languages—my first time in front of the camera for something that wasn’t documentation. My 10-channel video installation, Dragon Eye, was displayed at SP/N Gallery in 2024. And working on Big Bird for DWZ which will premiere May 2026 in Dallas.

How It All Fits Together

My experimental performance practice blends with my work with Indigenous people, which draws on my scholarly and ethnographic research in ritual and shamanism, which then gets influenced by my work with humanoid social robots. Somehow, it all works. It’s like a non-stop party in my head. Add in our crazy world and you get fun, unexpected, mind-altering surprises with explosions of revelation.

Sometimes it isn’t easy to articulate or monetize, but I don’t care. It gives me the freedom to say and do whatever, whenever, however. I don’t worry about tastes, popularity, or approval. I do what I do.

What Others Have Said

“I am deeply intrigued by your work, and admiring of so much of it. You are a unique character with your far-reaching theatre work and travels. But you are also a harbinger. And a person who incarnates the intercultural problem/opportunity.”

—Richard Schechner, TDR/The Drama Review

“Riccio searches for different ways and means to transplant a people’s traditional performance culture into a modern expression to address existing social, political, and human concerns. He tries to find his way to the roots of a culture’s myths in search of the power and origins of a culture’s expression.”

—The Helsinki Messenger, Finland

“He asks them to search in themselves, their experiences and memories and asks them to tell him about them. The appropriate revelations are then used where necessary being worked into the structure of the play... Judging by what we were shown, it is not very difficult to make him an equal with a master.”

—The Echo, Republic of Sakha, Siberia