Reeva Wortel is a visual artist, performer, choreographer/director and teaching artist who creates narrative portrait-based projects that combine interviews, social commentary, performance enlarge scale installation. Driven by a commitment to develop the technique of portraiture beyond its traditional limits. Wortel has worked in communities as a social worker and teaching artists, honing a technique to narrate the individual stories of our time through her portraiture work, a process that involves in-depth interviewing, photography, painting, performance, dance and installation.
In 2014 Wortel completed her work on SPILL, a play based on interviews and an installation of life-size painted portraits of people affected by the Deepwater Horizon tragedy and subsequent BP oil spill in the south coast of Louisiana that occurred in April 2010. SPILL had its world premiere in the spring of 2014 in Louisiana and premiered in Chicago in the fall of 2015 and in New Your in 2017.
Wortel's recent work includes a 2016 project for the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, Oregon entitled Look Me in the Eye. For this project Wortel collaborated with the Portland City Hall to create a portrait installation and interactive performance based on interviews with Portland families about development, gentrification, as well as the disparities and similarities of family life in Portland, Oregon. Look Me in the Eye toured locally to The Armory in collaboration with Portland Center Stage's production of Our Town and was included in the Old Church's Works event
In 2014 Wortel completed her work on SPILL, a play based on interviews and an installation of life-size painted portraits of people affected by the Deepwater Horizon tragedy and subsequent BP oil spill in the south coast of Louisiana that occurred in April 2010. SPILL had its world premiere in the spring of 2014 in Louisiana and premiered in Chicago in the fall of 2015 and in New Your in 2017.
Wortel's recent work includes a 2016 project for the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, Oregon entitled Look Me in the Eye. For this project Wortel collaborated with the Portland City Hall to create a portrait installation and interactive performance based on interviews with Portland families about development, gentrification, as well as the disparities and similarities of family life in Portland, Oregon. Look Me in the Eye toured locally to The Armory in collaboration with Portland Center Stage's production of Our Town and was included in the Old Church's Works event
