Honora Foà is a multimedia artist. She is currently developing a cycle of 7 Frequency Operas entitled RecombinantDNA, which explore different frequency spectra through two lenses – science and myth. Each opera is a love story exploring polarities as marriages rather than conflicts with an eye for the glory of the natural world and our human relationship within it.
In 2014, her multimedia opera, The Birth of Color: A Marriage of Darkness and Light with Lucio Ivaldi and David Brendan Hopes, was recorded in Budapest with a chorus of 60, solo singers, percussionists and actors. In 2016, it was performed as an official selection of the Budapest International Arts Festival, in an immersive environment at the Kiscelli Museum of Art.
The 2nd Frequency Opera in the cycle, Field of Desire, is now an immersive film experience. The next 5 Frequency Operas in the cycle are in development. Blood&Breath, the sixth in the series, is to be performed in venues around Italy in 2023. The third, Mr&Mrs Hades and sixth, Blood&Breath, Frequency Operas are currently in production as both films/VR and performances.
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As a pioneer in multidisciplinary art, Foà’s New York based dance theatre company with partner Keith Hill, incorporated movement/dance, voice, music, food, art installation, film and media projection. The company was a grant recipient from the National Endowment for the Arts.
After ten years with the New York company, Ms Foà’s son was born, inspiring an interest in education and the developmental perception of children. An MFA from the University of North Carolina in Dance and PhD studies in Education followed.
She created and collaborated on two notable performance cycles, Water Murders, with playwright Bradford Riley, and her own RecombinantDNA, which is the core of her ongoing focus. A collaboration with artist Amy Landesberg produced a full gallery show at the Sandler-Hudson Gallery in Atlanta.
Forming a partnership with her husband, Dahlan Foah, she became Creative Director of Visioneering International and in this capacity, served as chief designer and producer of two World’s Fair pavilions for the United Nations (Genoa, Italy; Taijon, Korea), work for the Hayden Planetarium, installations for Fernbank Science Museum, and video art installations throughout Augusta Children’s Hospital and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s Emory Hospital. Many elements of her projects are films.
In 2003, as co-President of Mythic Imagination Institute, Foà began work on Mythic Journeys, a performance festival and conference held in 2004 and 2006. Bringing together more than 150 presenters, speakers, artists, and performers, Mythic Journeys used the great archetypal stories, sacred traditions and folk tales as a ground from which new art in consonance with interdisciplinary conversation can create a context for contemporary events. Psychologists, scientists, poets, scholars, politicians, business people, artists and musicians brought their expertise and creativity to bear on the experiences and issues of our time.
In 2005, Mythic Journeys was the subject of a two-hour documentary on National Public Radio. Mythic Imagination has also produced two Human Forum conferences for The Alliance for a New Humanity. A feature-length film about Mythic Journeys was released in the spring of 2010.
In 2013, the film Banaz, A Love Story, for which Ms Foà was a writer and story developer, won a Peabody and an Emmy for Best International Documentary. She continues to consult on various films.
The Creativity in Captivity project, a collaboration with Francesco Lotoro and Dahlan Foah, is an ongoing series of narrative performances that Foà writes and directs in which musicians play music written in the concentration, internment and prisoner of war camps of World War II. They have been performed in Puebla, Mexico, Atlanta, Georgia and in Washington DC at the State Department.