Asa Horvitz is performance maker, composer/musician, and choreographer.

He presents his own work internationally and develops projects with other artists. 

Since 2021 he has been working on THE SAVED NIGHT, a performance cycle on non-human presences (dreams and images, the dead and AI, animals). Each chapter sets up conditions for spectators to have an experience of disorientation, to forget to be a “me”, to fall into a raw feeling of being with (not only human) others. 

Recent work has been presented by Het HEM, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, deSingel, The New Museum (NYC), Musiktheatretage Wien/brutWien, Frascati, Microscope Gallery (NYC), Goethe Institut Hong Kong, The Brick (NYC), LaMaMa ETC, Living Arts (Tulsa, OK), CounterPULSE (SF), Labirynt Gallery Lublin, and in many other cultural institutions and underground spaces. He graduated from DAS Arts/DAS Theatre in 2021 and lives and works between Amsterdam and Vienna. 

Horvitz was raised in a family of musicians in rural Northern California and began playing in bands and making records and performances as a teenager. He studied composition with Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan University (BA High Honors), where he also studied medieval musicology, theater, and dance, and made experimental performances. He later lived in Warsaw, Poland, and in New York City where he was active in the underground/DIY scene, worked odd jobs, and studied psychoanalysis and various ways of working with dreams. His artistic output from this period defies easy categorization and is characterized by long-form experimental processes embedded in specific locations, sonic lushness and visual spareness, personal narratives, references to current and historical events, art history, and an interest in the conditions under which things become things rather than in things themselves. A year-long performance project in collaboration with a Zen Center in which performers and visual artists worked with Zen Koans, a performance/concert in memory of a dead friend released as a record and website, a performance/installation with 50+ members of an American religious singing community, a lecture on mass shootings and Aby Warburg ending in a game of baseball, a theatre piece freely inspired by Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle. Each work tried to create conditions under which spectators, confronted by paradox, begin to imagine for themselves. These works led to an ongoing fascination with choreographic and compositional strategies as a way to organize seemingly irreconcilable elements, a need to work on both rigorous forms and more slippery processes, a desire to create performances that are emotionally and intuitively resonant, and ultimately, overwhelming. 

As a musician he has released eight albums, from 2005-2024, on Het HEM, Shatter Your Leaves, Hope For the Tape Deck, and other experimental labels. Collaborations include Carmen Quill, Scott Gibbons/Romeo Castellucci, Wayne Horvitz, Pavel Zustiak, Lukasz Korczak, Adrian Knight, Anthony Vine, Anna Webber, Ben Seretan, Kalup Linzy, and many more. In 2018-2019 he received a grant from RSF Social Finance to take part in artistic exchanges in Kerala (IN), Kuala Lumpur, and West Java (ID). He has received numerous awards including Fulbright, Camargo, and MacDowell fellowships, and the Grand Prize for Immersive Projects in the 2023 Venice Film Festival/Venice Biennale for the VR Opera “Songs for a Passerby” (dir. Celine Daemen). He moved to Europe and founded Golden Trout Wilderness in 2019. He is on the editorial board of the Anarchist Review of Books, for whom he writes an ongoing column.