ECC’s Mission

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The mission of the Exquisite Corpse Company (ECC) is to develop and produce new work by emerging theater artists, visual artists, and musicians, in a supportive and inclusive environment utilizing the technique of ekphrastic creation and the surrealist concept of “collective assembly.” As a company comprised of queer, women-identifying, and non-binary artists, central themes to our work reflect contemporary issues of gender, sociological, political, and ecological themes. 

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Vision

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Founded in 2012, the vision of ECC is to build a supportive community across artistic mediums, investigating the line between artistic boundaries, audience integration, and new modalities for telling stories rooted in addressing social justice issues. 

ECC has three central pillars to facilitate this vision: ekphrastic creation, Surrealist collective assembly, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Typically known to generate poetry, ekphrasis is at its root a method to create a (typically written) response to a preexisting visual artwork. ECC employs this technique to center projects and create a shared starting point for artists across mediums. True to our namesake, ECC is founded on the belief that it is through collaboration that we build our most meaningful works. 

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Recently ECC’s production of Zoetrope(2021) received critical acclaim as a New York Times Critic’s Pick and was featured in New Yorker Magazine. 

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CLLIC + ECC 

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Thanks to a residency with Culture Lab LIC, ECC will develop its Spring Writers Lab inspired by Culture Lab LIC’s May and June gallery shows. In the Spring, six playwrights are selected from an open call for applications to join the Lab. For one month, the writers create individual one-act plays based on collective ekphrastic writing prompts and the gallery. This free one-month Writers Lab encourages new voices and furthers ECC’s mission to foster emerging artists.