Participatory > America's Next Top Performance Art Superstar 2017!!

America's Next Top Performance Art Superstar 2017 was a reality-television based performance art workshop and experience that happened in collaboration with my Performance Art students at Carnegie Mellon University.

I functioned as the overall designer of the experience, judge, and host of the show. I had a co-host/judge and another guest judge (artists Adam Milner and Hannah Epstein) who helped give the competitors feedback and ultimately evaluated their mini performances throughout the day. Competitors (students in the class) included Anna Azizzy, Nick Crockett, Becca Epstein, Samir Gangwani, Kianna Gonzalez, Orianna Green, Kasem Kydd, Patrick Miller-Gamble, Gwen Sadler, and Leavitt Summer.

Here's some of my opening monologue at the beginning of the show:

"Hello and welcome to America’s Next Top Performance Art Superstar 2017! I’m your host, performance artist and founder of the America’s Next Top Performance Art Superstar franchise, Angela Washko. I’m very excited to be able to welcome two very esteemed artist judges today. We have our regularly appearing judge and co-host, artist Adam Milner here today....and I’m also very excited to introduce our guest judge, pop culture hacker, artist and overall badass, Hannah Epstein.

So I’m sure you’re all dying to know what we’re going to do today right?
wait for feedback!

Ok so let’s get into it.
How does America’s Next Top Performance Art Superstar 2017 get crowned?
What are the criteria?
What are the competitions going to be like?

You are going to have a set of challenges that will test your Endurance, Charisma, Ability to Collaborate with other performers, your ability to transform yourself visually, your ability to create new interpretations of existing pop cultural materials, and finally your stage presence. Each challenge will be inspired by a performance artist and an existing reality tv show challenge. Each challenge will offer a different number of points and the competitors with the most points at the end will be crowned AMERICA’S NEXT TOP PERFORMANCE ART SUPERSTAR 2017!!! WOW!!!

(And just like in reality television, you will have very little time to come up with something very interesting and sophisticated. YAYYYYY!)"