Malik Gaines works with performance. He has made decades of live, media, and installation work with his collaborators in the performance group My Barbarian, which was the subject of a survey exhibition and performance series at the Whitney Museum, New York and ICA Los Angeles in 2021-22. Their work has been presented internationally and is in the collections of The Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gaines composes music for performance and is an artistic director at The Industry opera company, which produced his opera Star Choir at the Mt. Wilson Observatory north of Los Angeles in 2023. Gaines writes frequently about art and performance. He is the author of the book Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (NYU Press, 2017) and is working on a new book about large-scale artworks and their territorial claims, supported by an Andy Warhol Foundation writer’s grant. He is professor of visual arts at UC San Diego and currently serves as PhD director in Art History, Theory, Criticism, and Practice.