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Asa Horvitz was raised in a family of musicians in rural California. He later studied composition with Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton. He had formative encounters with the NYC DIY/underground scene, medieval philosophy, and post-dance. Since 2013 has studied and practiced various ways (analytic, somatic) of working with dreams and inner images. In his performances, Horvitz combines elements of choreography, theatre, visual art, and music/sound to set up conditions so that the audience, confronted by paradox, begins to imagine for themselves. Collaborations include Romeo Castellucci/Scott Gibbons and the VR Opera SONGS FOR A PASSERBY which won the Lion for Immersive Projects in Venice in 2023 and toured worldwide. His record GHOST (with Carmen Quill, Wayne Horvitz, and Ariadne Randall; music from the performance of the same name) was released in 2025 to critical acclaim. Asa graduated from DAS Theatre in Amsterdam in 2021. His work has been presented internationally, at venues such as deSingel, Bozar, Het HEM, Muziekgebouw, deSchool, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, brutWien, The New Museum (NYC), Public Records (NYC), and in many underground spaces. A former Camargo, Fulbright, and MacDowell fellow, he is on the editorial board of the Anarchist Review of Books. 

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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/DAS Arts in Amsterdam that has been presented 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. 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 worldwide. His record GHOST (with Carmen Quill, Wayne Horvitz, and Ariadne Randall) was released in January 2025 to critical acclaim. 

He has studied various ways of working with dreams and inner images since 2013, and is currently being certified to practice Embodied Imagination. He has developed experimental 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 (supported by an RSF Social Finance grant). 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 on performing arts.