Laine Rettmer

Laine Rettmer is a video artist and opera director whose work has been presented in museums, galleries, theaters, film festivals, academic institutions, concert venues, barns, fields and the occasional bar. Their work reinterprets and investigates history, mythology, storytelling and notions of a Western utopia by imagining new interventions or concentric, nonlinear and non-hierarchical narratives. Venues include the Brooklyn Museum’s Brooklyn Artist’s Movie Night, curated by Enrique Mendia; Vizcaya Museum in Miami with IlluminArts; Manifesta 11, curated by Christian Jankowski; MoMA Public, curated by Mel Logan and Jakob Boeskov; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; CreaTures Festival, Seville, Spain; MassArt, Brant Gallery, curated by Hellen Miller; Silvermine Gallery, QueerWerks, curated by Stamatina Gregory; Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum for the exhibition, Hot Steam; the Illuminus Festival; the Yuan Art Museum; Yve Yang Gallery; Perkins and Ping; Present Company; NADA NY, NADA Presents; and AREA gallery, among others.

Alongside their visual artwork, Rettmer maintains a dual practice in opera direction. For the past decade, they have reinterpreted and championed classical and contemporary opera as a medium for critical feminist and queer dialogues. Their operas have been praised as “wickedly smart” and “devastatingly funny” by The New York Times and “not only profound but also shattering” by the Observer. Most recently, Jennifer Pyron wrote for OperaWire, “Rettmer’s work is making a huge difference in the world of performance art right now.” Their first La bohème was named one of the best operas of the decade by the Observer, while their most current La bohème, a feature film adaptation co-produced by Opera Omaha and Boston Lyric, enjoyed a commercial run across Japan this past October through Toho Cinemas. This January, they directed the premiere of Adoration by Mary Kouyoumdijian and Royce Vavrek, produced by Beth Morrison Productions for the Prototype Festival, which tours to LA Opera next season.

Awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, a Warhol Foundation Grant, and a MAP Fund grant for Standby Snow: Chronicles of a Heat Wave and the multimedia opera Ellis, constructed from first-person accounts of immigration to the US. Rettmer has also been awarded an Art Alliance Fellowship from HFBK Hamburg and a research fellowship from the Center for Arts Design and Social Research, and they have been an Invited Artist in Residence at MassArt in Boston, Vermont Studio Center, Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts in Iceland, and Robert Wilson's Watermill Foundation on Long Island.