Jonathan González is an artist working at the intersections of choreography, sculpture, text, and time-based media. Their practice speculates on circumstances of land, economies of labor, and the conditions that figure black and contemporary life through research-based processes synthesized through performative assemblages usually generated collaboratively.
González’s work ZERO (2018) presented the history and trauma of slave trafficking practices against the architecture of St. Mark’s Church, and was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Outstanding Production. Lucifer Landing I, a commissioned work presented at MoMA PS1 in 2019, proposed the idea of a solitary dwelling as a choreographic action. This installation with original score and film conceptualized blackness and post-anthropocentrism in the form of a geodesic dome through which visitors were encouraged to move, one-by-one.
González’s The Smallest Unit is Each Other (BRIC Arts, 2022) and PRACTICE (The Clemente/LMCC, 2022) investigated syncretic Caribbean traditions of Carnival/MAS performance through the character “Jonkonnu” and Sylvia Wynter’s scholarship on Black migration as “transplantation” through an original exhibition of film, sculpture and performance focusing on the terra-aqueous folklore of the archipelagos.
Their writings have been published by 53rd State Press, Contact Quarterly, Cultured Magazine, Movement Research Performance Journal and deem journal. González’s first book, Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, is slated for a 2025 publication date with Ugly Duckling Presse.
In 2019, González was a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” nominee for Breakout Choreographer. They have received fellowships from the Herb Alpert Award in Dance, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Art Matters Foundation and the Jerome Hill Foundation, and were an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Trinidad Performance Institute and the Shandaken Project on Governors Island.
González is a graduate of LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts and has a B.A. from Trinity College, an O.Y.P. from Trinity Laban Conservatoire, and an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Born 1991, Queens, NY. Lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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