Machine Dazzle

Creative provocateur Machine Dazzle has been dazzling stages via costumes, sets, and performance since his arrival in New York in 1994. An artist, costume designer, set designer, singer/​songwriter, art director, and maker, Machine describes himself as a ​“radical queer emotionally driven, instinct-based concept artist and thinker trapped in the role of costume designer, sometimes.” Machine designs intricate, unconventional wearable art pieces and bespoke installations.

As a stage designer, Machine has collaborated with artists from the New York downtown scene and beyond. Machine’s costumes and sets were featured in Taylor Mac’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (a documentary film about which is currently streaming on Max). In 2019, Dazzle was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund to create Treasure, a rock and roll cabaret of original songs with an accompanying fashion show, which debuted at Joe’s Pub in New York City in the fall of 2022. That same season, he opened his first solo exhibition, Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle, at New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design. He won the 2017 Henry Hewes Design Award, was a 2022 United States Artists Fellow, and most recently won the 2023 Obie for sustained achievement in design.

Machine is the recipient of 2023 – 2024 Roman J. Witt Residency, and has been commissioned by UMMA and Stamps to create his first major museum commission, a new sculptural installation called Ouroboros. The sculpture will evolve over three chapters from March through July 2024, and use trash recovered from local waterways as its primary material to contemplate our own extravagant cycles of life, death, waste, and rebirth.

This program is presented in partnership with the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Series presenting partners: Detroit Public Television and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Radio.