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Asa Horvitz is a performance maker, composer/musician, and choreographer from the United States. He graduated from DAS Theatre in 2021. He uses choreographic strategies to combine experimental music with elements of dance, theatre, and visual art, creating performances in which the audience, confronted by paradox, begins to imagine for themselves. Recent work has been presented by Het HEM Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Frascati, de School (NL), deSingel (BE), Musiktheatretage Wien/brutWien (AT), Goethe Institut Hong Kong, The New Museum, Microscope Gallery, The Brick, Public Records, LaMaMa ETC (NY), Living Arts (Tulsa, OK), CounterPULSE (SF), Labirynt Gallery Lublin, and in many other cultural institutions and underground contexts. Horvitz originally studied composition with Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton, as well as philosophy, dance, and performance theory. He gained further experience in the performing arts through collaborations with artists including Scott Gibbons/Romeo Castellucci, Ang Gey Pin, and Lukasz Korczak. In 2023 Horvitz composed the VR Opera SONGS FOR A PASSERBY which won the Lion for Immersive Projects in Venice and toured extensively in Europe, North America, and Asia. His record GHOST (music from the performance with Carmen Quill, Wayne Horvitz, and Ariadne Randall) was released in January 2025 to critical acclaim. He is in the editorial board of the Anarchist Review of Books, for which he writes an ongoing column. He has studied, practiced, and taught various ways of working with dreams and inner images since 2013 (with Gary F. Brown, Mala Kline, etc.) and since 2022 has studied Embodied Imagination. Horvitz has developed methods of working with performers on dreams, dances, and music in a variety of contexts, including on artistic exchanges in Indonesia, South India, and Malaysia.

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Asa Horvitz was raised in a family of musicians in rural Northern California and began playing in bands and making records and, in parallel, theatre and dance performances, as a teenager. He studied composition with Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan University (BA High Honors), where he also studied medieval music, theater, dance/performance theory, 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 his 20s defies easy categorization and is characterized by long-form experimental processes embedded in specific locations, sonic richness 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. For example, 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 in collaboration 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 irreconcilable elements, a need to work on both rigorous music and dance forms and more slippery processes, a desire to create performances that are emotionally and intuitively resonant, and ultimately overwhelming. 

He is currently at work on THE SAVED NIGHT, a performance cycle begun at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam that has been presented at major venues in Europe and North America. Each chapter – performances accompanied by other media (booklets, vinyl records, websites) – tries to set up conditions for spectators to have an experience of moving beyond being a narrow “me”, to sensitize their perception and fall into a raw feeling of being in an expanded field with (not only human) others. 

As a musician/composer 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. In 2023 he composed the VR Opera SONGS FOR A PASSERBY (dir. Celine Daemen) which won the Lion in Venice for Immersive Projects and has toured extensively in Europe, Asia, and beyond. His record GHOST was released in January 2025 to critical acclaim. 

Concurrently has has studied various ways of working with dreams and inner images since 2013, and is currently being certified to practice Embodied Imagination. He moved to Europe and founded Golden Trout Wilderness in 2019, and has lived since then primarily in Amsterdam and Vienna. He is on the editorial board of the Anarchist Review of Books, for whom he writes an ongoing column on performing arts.