Shannon Rose Riley is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. As an artist she works primarily in performance art, video, installation, and sound; as a scholar her primary work is in performance studies and American studies, particularly focused on historical and contemporary relations between Cuba, Haiti, and the US. Riley’s creative approach to ethnography thus far has been to use her performance art persona, Mis(s) Translation USA, to ironically and critically position the researcher and permit a kind of fieldwork that suggests intercultural communication is largely predicated on “misfires, mistellings, misinformation, and misrepresentation.” This is particularly significant as a US scholar conducting research in Cuba and Haiti, both of which bear the scars of ongoing US economic imperialism, particularly given the lingering US embargo and travel bans against Cuba. This approach foregrounds the use of improvisation in the field. More recently, Riley has started to use more of her creative practice in audio, video and photographic documentation in her experimental “ethnographic” process. Shannon has a work of creative non-fiction titled “Loving a Hornworm in End Times” forthcoming in the Spring 2020 issue of Catamaran Literary Reader and an album, Red Summer, with the Chicago-based group, ONO (American Dreams Records, May 2020).
Email: shannonrose.riley@sjsu.edu