Sister Sylvester
Drinking Brecht
Theatre / Film / Performance
Performance artist and filmmaker (and occasional amateur microbiologist) Sister Sylvester works with new technologies to make cross-species collaborations, essay films, and lecture performances. Using DNA extracted from a hat worn by actors in Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, Drinking Brecht is a live, illustrated essay that explores the past and present of genetics, synthetic biology, economics ,and theatre history.
A documentary that you can drink, the work ingests worn-out scientific narratives and turns them into a new ritual for our future, and a celebration of science for the people.
The Dark: PS21’s fearless winter festival of live performance radiating across Columbia County
The Dark is a new annual festival from PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance that celebrates and elevates the depths of winter. Taking place February 16–22, 2026, the festival will unfold at PS21 and across Columbia County—in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. Featuring more than 60 international artists and over 80 performances, The Dark offers a packed week of world-class contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theatre—all exploring winter as a time of community and solitude, fire and ice, darkness and light. A major new attraction for the region, the festival positions Columbia County as a year-round cultural destination—not just a summer one.
It is a light in the dark—and The Dark is the light.
Secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now which includes tickets to every performance along with a complimentary sauna and ice skating session!
sister sylvester is a multimedia artist. Her most recent works, Constantinopoliad, won the Interactive award at CPH:DOX 2025, and Drinking Brecht, an interactive documentary, premiered at IDFA 2024. Both continue to tour internationally. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum she created the VR documentary Shadowtime, (’23) which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and toured to festivals including IDFA, GIFF, Thessaloniki Film Festival and SXSW; and the film Our Ark which premiered at IDFA (’21) and has screened at festivals internationally.
In her live work she creates visual essays and books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Most recently Constantinopoliad (live), with a score by Nadah El Shazly, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (‘23) as a site specific work in the Onassis Library, Athens, and at the Internationaal Theater of Amsterdam; and The Eagle and The Tortoise showed as a work-in-progress at National Sawdust NYC, and premiered at IDFA On Stage (‘22), and in NYC as part of Under The Radar 2024.
She is a Creative Capital fellow, a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and CPH:DOX lab. She co-teaches a bio-art class at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.
Her work has been called ‘genuinely subversive’ by Time Out NY; ‘imaginative and original’ by New York Times; ‘pulse-raising’ by Exeunt Magazine, ‘apocalyptic’ by artforum, and an ‘otherworldly, intimate, off-kilter, queer artistic orgasm’ by Life Magazine, Greece.
