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.

Human-to-human interaction, isn’t that what life and happiness are all about? Reward and success are understood in terms of emotional, physical, and mental effort. And that’s exhausting, fulfilling, and rewarding. That is what is lacking, what humanity is losing, and what is being taken from us by technology, consumerism, materialism, and urbanization. People sharing with other people. It is very simple, and in that lies beauty and hope. Conversing, sharing, caring, and working together to create something that leaves the world better than we found it. The more you give, the more you receive. Sharing and giving to others, to your part of the earth, to elders, ancestors, animals, and to the needs of the present. A thought, a word, a feeling, or an action is an interaction with the world, which is simple and constant rewards and happiness. My belief in the world’s goodness keeps me going and makes me a lucky guy.

I grew up in the 1950s as a fan of classic horror and sci-fi during the peak of American Dream propaganda. I experienced the rise of the American Zombie. Every Saturday, I went to the Madison Theatre, where for twenty-five cents, I could scream and be scared, later having nightmares. They showed Three Stooges shorts between movies, blending horror, comedy, and absurdity in my mind. I was raised in a working-class ethnic neighborhood of Cleveland, surrounded by factories and plants. Life felt like a mix of horror, sci-fi, and ethnic humor, which is why I appreciate the post-industrial vibe of West Dallas—a place of strange, heartbreaking beauty. Cleveland, often called the mistake on the lake, is where the Cuyahoga River caught fire twice and became known as part of the Rust Belt. We lived near a beach on Lake Erie, which was once declared dead from pollution and decay, filled with dying fish. We would sit on a large pipe for amusement, waiting for raw sewage to overflow. These experiences and images are ingrained in me, inspiring the Dead White Zombies…

As with much of DWZ's work, the immersive aspect forces audiences to examine their own value systems. 'In this country, we have mythical American values we're not even aware of, Riccio ventures. 'DWZ shows put you in the thick of it.'

—American Theatre Magazine

Biography

Writer, Performance Maker, Installation Artist, Experimenter, and Ethnographer.

Thomas Riccio is from Cleveland, Ohio, where he grew up in a working-class Italian American area. He worked as a US Merchant Seaman and was involved with the Teamsters and Steel Workers unions. He earned his BA in English Literature from Cleveland State University and his MFA from Boston University. He studied Performance Studies at NYU under Richard Schechner. Currently, he is a Visual and Performing Arts professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and was previously a Theatre Professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He lived in Alaska for fifteen years and directed the Alaska Native performance group Tuma Theatre. He has experience as Assistant Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre and as Robert Brustein’s research assistant at Harvard University. He also served as Dramaturg and Resident Director at the Cleveland Play House and Artistic Director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, where he created several experimental theatre works. He has directed over one hundred plays and performances at venues like LaMama ETC, The New York Theatre Workshop, the Teatro di Roma in Italy, and the National Theatre of Sakha in Siberia.

“Riccio searches for different ways and means to transplant a peoples 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

Visiting Professorships: the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania); the University of Pondicherry (India); the University of Nairobi; the Korean National University for the Arts; Tribhuvan University (Nepal); Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Ethnography, Jishou University, Hunan, China (2016-2020);  and Visiting Professor of Drama Therapy, California Institute of Integral Studies. 

“His projects connect the cults and rites of natives with modern theatrical expression. For Thomas Riccio all of his travels and theatre work in the remote parts of the world have something in common. What he calls “Hubs of Memory”. There is something that links his work with the Eskimos and between the Elvis cult in Cleveland and the tribal performance of Zambia. It is not a reduction but rather a split identity that has developed between the 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.”

Märkische Oder-Zeitung, Frankfurt

As Founder and Artistic Director of Dead White Zombies, a successful performance group based in Dallas, he wrote, designed, and directed immersive performances. Riccio specializes in Indigenous performance, ethnography, rituals, and shamanism, conducting fieldwork in countries like South Africa, India, and Russia, where he was honored as a Cultural Hero of the Sakha. He created and directed "Shadows from the Planet Fire" for St. Petersburg's Metamorphosis Theatre, drawing from Slavic rituals. With the !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, he developed a healing ritual involving eight traditional healers to address the loss of their culture. At the Korean National University for the Arts, he created "Twelve Moons," which evolved traditional performance styles. In Ethiopia, he directed "Andegna" for Lul Theater, blending traditional and modern elements.

“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)

He has published work in a top theatre and performance journal and received several international grants, fellowships, and awards. Notably, he won the International Distinction Prize in Playwriting from the Alexander Onassis Foundation. His play Rubber City was performed at Kleist Theatre in Frankfurt. He was a fellow at UCLA’s APEX in 1999, an artist-in-residence at Toolik Field Station in 2003, Halka in Istanbul in 2014, and the Watermill Art Center in 2016. He collaborated with Sibyl Kempson and was the dramaturg for 12 Shouts for the Ten Forgotten Heavens at the Whitney Museum, NYC, from 2016 to 2018. He performed in a sacred cave during his residency at the Ionian Art and Culture Center in Greece in 2021, participated in the 2022 NEH Summer Seminar in Tibetan Buddhism at UC Berkeley, and was a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in 2024.

“Humans, the most enabled and greatest beneficiary of earth’s magnificent offering, are responsible for its maintenance and balance. Theater has the ability to shape thoughts and feelings, to prod and provoke a new consciousness, explore and reveal a re-conceptualizing our relationship, role, and obligations to create a world of inclusion, gratitude, and healing. Theatre, its content, form, function, and expressions, can be a vital part of a co-evolutionary process, enabling an emergent narrative of place where the voices of humans, animals, flora, spirits, all the elements of the environment, and ancestors “speak” each in their in their own way. Our survival as a species depends on it.”

from Narrative of Place

He worked as a Narrative Engineer and Creative Director for Hanson Robotics, developing robot "personalities" for top conversational social robots, including Bina, Zeno, Joey Chaos, Swami, Einstein, Jules, and Sophia. He served as Creative Director from April 2018 to 2019. His visual work—photographs, videos, and installations—has been showcased at international festivals and on television, appearing in installations, publications, and gallery exhibits. He is currently finishing an ethnographic study with the Miao, a minority group in southwestern China. His documentary on the Miao, Huan Nuo Yuan, has been shown worldwide, and he is working on a film about the Zhui Nui Water Buffalo Ritual. He acted in Wedding Dresses (2016), a feature film in Chinese and Miao languages. His 10-channel video installation, Dragon Eye, was displayed at SP/N Gallery in 2024. His book, Sophia Robot: Post Human Being, was published by Routledge in June 2004.

“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