On Humor & Other Strategies for Survival

Reggie Watts

Reggie Watts is an internationally renowned Musician/Comedian/Writer/Actor who currently stars as the bandleader on CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden. Using his formidable voice, looping pedals, and his vast imagination, Watts blends and blurs the lines between music and comedy, wowing audiences with performances that are 100% improvised.

Watts’ first Netflix special Spatial released to massive critical acclaim, with the New York Times calling it “a giddy rush of escapist nonsense” and dubbing Watts “the most influential absurdist in comedy today.” The A.V. Club described Spatial as “signature Watts, meaning it’s alternately exhilarating, silly, exhausting and transcendent,” and Exclaim! Magazine called his performance “engaging, absurd, thoughtful and, most importantly, wholly unpredictable.”

As a solo performer, Watts brand of musical/comedy fusion has led to sold out headlining tours in the U.S. and Europe, including festivals such as Bonnaroo, SXSW, Bumbershoot, Just For Laughs, Pemberton and more.

This year, Watts released his own content app called,WattsApp,  a techno-savvy look into his life, work, and techno junk drawer. WattsApp has all original content including a show called, Droneversations where he interviews guests while it’s filmed by drones along with other fun content.

In 2010, Watts released his debut comedy special, Why Shit So Crazy? on Comedy Central Records, and is now available to stream on Netflix. Why Shit So Crazy?featured Watts in live performances at New York venues such as Galapagos, The Bellhouse, and Le Poisson Rouge, bookended with brief sketches and music videos. Later that year, at the invitation of Jack White, Watts recorded Reggie Watts: Live at Third Man Records which was released in limited edition vinyl. In 2012, Watts recorded his second comedy special, Reggie Watts: A Live At Central Park, which was released by Comedy Central.

Watts was born in Germany, raised in Montana, and currently resides in Los Angeles.

Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968, Stanford, California) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. Her video Accent Elimination was included at the 2015 Venice Biennial in the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Group exhibitions have included shows at the Serpentine Gallery, Turner Contemporary, de Appel, Palais de Tokyo, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turku Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, ICA Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and MoMA PS1. A solo museum survey of her work entitled Curiouser opened at the Blanton Museum in 2017 and traveled to the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University and the BYU Museum of Art. An accompanying monograph, also entitled Curiouser, is available from Tower Books.

Katchadourian completed a commission entitled Floater Theater for the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 2016 which is now permanently on view. In 2016 Katchadourian created Dust Gathering, an audio tour on the subject of dust, for the Museum of Modern Art as part of their program “Artists Experiment”. Katchadourian’s work is in public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Margulies Collection, and Saatchi Gallery. She has won grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Gronqvista Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Katchadourian lives and works in Brooklyn and Berlin and she is a Clinical Full Professor on the faculty of NYU Gallatin. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery and Pace Gallery.

Glenda R. Carpio

Glenda R. Carpio is Professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University. She is the author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008) and the editor of The  Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019). She is now finishing a book titled Migrant Aesthetics, a study of contemporary immigrant literature.