Carmina Escobar

With Madeline Falcone, Escobar is the co-founder and co-director of Boss Witch Productions, "an artistic production company focused on the intersection of experimental sound art, ritual performance, video art, and transmedia collaboration with natural landscapes and unusual performance sites." Some of the projects that Boss Witch Productions has produced include Bajo la sombra del sol (2021-2022), Vox Clamantis (2021-2022), CalArts Gala at REDCAT (2022), among others.

An equally or perhaps more ambitious project, Bajo la sombra del sol / Under the Sun's Shadow, a Boss Witch Production, premiered in 2021 also in REDCAT and it consisted of a immersive installation and film projection alongside live performance by an ensemble of artists from different disciplines: music, voice, dance. As described on the REDCAT's website, Bajo la sombra del sol "is a performative hypertextural scenic work by Carmina Escobar that is staged, makes communion with, and gathers multimedia material at the natural landscape of Mono Lake, California." This multimedia material gathered can be considered an experimental film that Escobar directed in Mono Lake under great duress, the Covid-19 pandemic and the fires that raged throughout California during the summer of 2021. But the locale of Mono Lake, which has been "relentlessly whittled into its current state of environmental calamity by humans," was the perfect site to explore one of Escobar's artistic and philosophical interests, the "concept of darkness, of the shadow, of inhabiting shadows and casting shadows." For Bajo la sombra del sol Escobar brought back two key collaborators, Jerónimo Naranjo who constructed a series of instruments, including a large-scale drum that stands as proxy for the sun, and Dorian Wood who is a central character in the piece, both the film and live version, alongside other past and new collaborating artists.

Feast of Beams, Keepers of Light (2020), co-edited with Madison Heying and Laura Steenberge. Indexical Incorporated. [2]

Beyond her teaching and production practice, Escobar has gained national and international recognition for her vocal, scenic, electronic music, and filmic work. Until the organization and community events space went defunct in 2018, her work was shown regularly with the Los Angeles based Machine Project. One of the pieces that was produced by Machine Project was Escobar's large-scale site-specific performance spectacle Fiesta Perpetua! a communitas ritual of manifestation in Los Angeles's Echo Park in 2017, which was later re-staged as part of Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA in 2018, funded by the Getty Foundation and organized by REDCAT. Of Fiesta Perpetual! Yxta Maya Murray has said that Escobar "mesmerized a crowd of onlookers with a series of esoteric songs" as she was "accompanied by the 40-member Oaxacan youth brass band Maqueos Music, conducted by Yulissa Maqueos" and the dancer Oguri.

In 2018 Escobar premiered her performance piece, Pura Entraña / Pure Gut, developed during her residency at MacDowell and in collaboration Mexican instrument maker and musician Jerónimo Naranjo who known for his Piano Suspendido (Suspended Piano). Escobar and her collaborators, which consisted of musicians, instrumentalists, and dancers--among them Naranjo, Dorian Wood, the Oaxacan youth brass band Maqueos Music, Oguri, Roxanne Steinberg--activated the installation of the Piano Suspendido that hovered 6 feet above Los Angeles' REDCAT's stage floor and created a surrealist sonic and visual journey into the entrails of the installation for the spectators.

Escobar has been awarded several grants and residencies including the Performer's Grant by the National Endowment of the Arts in Mexico twice, the 2014 NFA Master Artist Grant, the MacDowell residency in 2018, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in Music/Sound in 2020, the National Performance Network Creation Fund Award in 2020, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts residency in 2021.

Escobar is also widely known for her body resonance work known as Massagem Sonora, which Fernando Vigueras has described as "a sort of exercise that analyses and reflects upon the body, understanding it as a space that reveals, measures and recognizes itself throughout its resonance." Massagem Sonora, or Sonic Massage, gained attention through its role in a large scale collaborative project in 2013 through the Getty Foundation's funded Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. and in tangent with The Machine Project Field Guide to LA Architecture.

Escobar is the co-founder and was a long-term vocalist of LIMINAR, a contemporary music ensemble based in Mexico City. As noted by Alejandro Madrid in his book In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13, Escobar was instrumental in LIMINAR's performance of Julián Carrillo's Preludio a Colón, which is said to best exemplify Carrillo's microtonal music theory known as Sonido 13. Their first performance of the piece took place on July 4, 2013 in Mexico City. LIMINAR's United States' performance of this landmark piece, along with other Carrillo and Carrillo inspired compositions, took place in Los Angeles's REDCAT on December 11-12, 2015. Of Escobar's performance Mark Swed wrote: "the greatest novelty is heard in a soprano part that could be the soundtrack for a séance and was sung with startling expressivity and purity by Carmina Escobar."

Carmina Escobar (born 1981) is an experimental vocalist, improviser, performance artist, multimedia artist, and educator from Mexico City who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Jeffrey Fleishman from the Los Angeles Times has written that Escobar "can make her voice sound like insects dancing on dry leaves or a rocket ship dying in space." She is on the VoiceArts faculty of the California Institute of the Arts where she teaches on "voice technique, experimental voice workshops, contemporary vocal music, and interdisciplinary projects regarding the voice".