Grant Recipients Grants to Artists Dance 2026

Anh Vo

Anh Vo gestures forward with one hand, captured mid-performance with their mouth open. They are wearing a white fur vest over a long sleeve black dress with printed gold chains running up and down. The room is dimly lit, creating shadows and a purple hue in the background.
Photo by Keshia Eugene.
  • 2026 Grants to Artists
  • Dance
  • Choreographer, Performance Artist, and Writer
  • Born 1995, Hanoi, Vietnam
  • Lives in Brooklyn, NY and Hanoi, Vietnam
  • He/They
  •  
  • Additional Information
  • anhqvo.com

Artist Statement

Foregrounding the unruliness of the body, my work unravels intolerable feelings, wounds, memories, and pleasures. How can difficult histories be collectively felt with direct emotional charge, subtle provocation, sacrilegious playfulness, and earnest responsibility? The intensity of war draws me into the survival space between life and death, where life is contingent and death feels imminent. This intensity is heightened by my experience surviving chronic illness. My work weaves together the erotic thrill of violence and the tenderness of care to push forth a burning desire to be alive.

I am occupied with the task of making present the unrepresentable. I am indebted to dance, psychoanalysis, and Vietnamese folk shamanism—three traditions that contend with the unknown and the unknowable via three different mediums: the body, the unconscious, and the dead. In the pursuit of the unknown and the unknowable, I prioritize bodily logics that resist direct representation. Throughout my practice, the body is less a discrete physical entity than a sensuous vessel of emptiness, with the capacity to channel otherworldly forces.

- December 2025

Biography

Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilizes the naked body, in its variations, to make explicit the entanglement of power and ghostly forces that cut across flesh. Vo’s work emerges from unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental dance, Hanoi performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. They are indebted to Miguel Gutierrez's unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evans' speculative commitment to interiority, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngọc Đại’s guttural sonic landscapes of postwar Vietnam.

Vo’s work foregrounds an obsessive attraction to Western ideals of freedom, democracy, and individual expression—values that once promised an escape from Vietnam’s suffocating amalgam of Confucian ethics and a tightly surveilled social order. While increasingly disillusioned with these liberal ideals, Vo continues to grapple with the rigid and largely imagined dichotomy between the West as freedom and Vietnam as control, a tension that remains generative within their practice. In Possessed by Capital (2025), a self-produced guerrilla performance staged in front of the Apple Store in Downtown Brooklyn, Vo treated the storefront as a contemporary site of worship, drawing on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to implicate bodies, spectatorship, and technological dependence in shared rituals of consumption.

Within their practice, nudity becomes a charged site that frames the body between liberation and exploitation, concealment and disclosure. Rather than resolving these binaries, Vo mobilizes them as a choreographic engine, testing oscillations between composition and improvisation, formal constraint and formless expression.

Vo’s performances have been presented at institutions and sites including The Kitchen, New York, NY (2023); Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2025); the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (2023); Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, PA (2025); and the Nổ Cái Bùm Festival, Hội An, Vietnam (2024). In 2026, Vo’s solo exhibition, Song and Sex: Before the Revolution, will be presented at Participant Inc., New York, NY.

Vo has received the Art Matters Artist2Artist Fellowship (2025), the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art (2024), a USArtists International Grant (2024), and the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2023). They are also a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Creative Research Grant (2025) and two Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants (2024, 2021).

Vo earned an M.A. from New York University (2019) and an A.B. from Brown University (2018), and has served as an Adjunct Instructor at The Cooper Union.

Two musicians play amplified violins outside in the evening, facing away from the camera and towards three dancers, who are in front of a brightly lit Apple Store in downtown Brooklyn. The store has a tall glass facade, which overwhelms the center of the image. Audience members watch the performance from outside of the store and the street.

Performance still from Possessed by Capital at Downtown Brooklyn Apple Store, Brooklyn, NY, 2025. Performed by Kristel Baldoz, Anh Vo, Justin Cabrillos, Jessica Pavone, and gabby fluke-mogul. Photo by Rachel Keane.

Captured mid-performance, three dancers move in a line on the sidewalk towards the camera. Behind them are a blurred tall pole with surveillance cameras, Brooklyn Academy of Music’s neon red “BAM” sign, nighttime city lights and traffic signage.

Performance still from Possessed by Capital at the Downtown Brooklyn Apple Store, Brooklyn, NY, 2025. Performed by Kristel Baldoz, Anh Vo, Justin Cabrillos, Jessica Pavone, and gabby fluke-mogul. Photo by Rachel Keane.

Facing away from the camera, Anh Vo holds their right hand up in front of three black megaphones on stands. In the center of the image, in front of Vo, Kristel Baldoz is on the ground on all fours, writing with chalk asymmetrically. Behind Kristel is additional writing in chalk, which appears to be the same words written over and over again. Audience members are seen throughout the sides and back of the room.

Performance still from Untitled (Break Fast) at Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, PA, 2025. Performed by Anh Vo, Kristel Baldoz, and Isaac Silber. Photo by Albert Yee.

A long exposure shot of Anh Vo performing at The Kitchen. They are in the center of the image, facing to the side, encircled by four large plugged-in steam cookers. Anh Vo is only wearing underwear. Audience members are seated against the white wall. Bright white lights hang from the ceiling grid.

Performance still from Two Little Kids at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, presented as part of The Kitchen's Dance and Process series, New York, NY, 2023. Performed by Anh Vo, Ethan Philbrick, and Isaac Silber. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

Anh Vo in nude underwear and an amplifier backpack, shouting into a black megaphone on the sidewalk in front of the American Numismatic Society building. Their legs are spread out, with the wire from the megaphone falling behind and in between. To the left and behind of Anh Vo is Ethan Philbrick, wearing all black and playing the cello.

Performance still from Two Little Kids, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, presented as part of The Kitchen's Dance and Process series, New York, NY, 2023. Performers: Anh Vo, Ethan Philbrick, and Isaac Silber. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

Excerpt from Possessed by Capital at Downtown Brooklyn Apple Store, Brooklyn, NY, 2025. Performed by Kristel Baldoz, Anh Vo, Justin Cabrillos, Jessica Pavone, gabby fluke-mogul.

Excerpt from Common Fetish, Shisanwu Warehouse, Glendale, NY, 2024. Performed by Kristel Baldoz, Anh Vo, Kris Lee, Nile Harris, Ethan Philbrick.

Excerpt from Two Little Kids, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, presented as part of The Kitchen's Dance and Process series, New York, NY, 2023. Performed by Anh Vo, Ethan Philbrick, Isaac Silber.