A Conversation with Heather Christian

On 30 March 2026, TORCHES continues with a conversation with the awe-inspiring, award-winning composer and performer Heather Christian, who was most recently recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship.

Heather Christian is a 2025 MacArthur Fellow and a Drama Desk and two-time Obie Award winning composer and performer making music-centered shows and rituals. She is a 2021 Richard Rodgers Award winner, 2022 Stephen Schwartz Outstanding New Composer awardee, and Sundance Institute Time Warner Fellow. Recent composing and performing credits include her own work Oratorio for Living Things (Signature Theatre 2025, Ars Nova 2022), Terce: A Practical Breviary (HERE Arts Center and Prototype) Animal Wisdom ( the Bushwick Starr, now a motion picture) I am Sending You the Sacred Face (Theater In Quarantine/YouTube—Vulture's Top Theater Experience of 2020), Prime: A Practical Breviary (Playwrights Horizons Soundstage—IndieWire’s #1 Podcast Episode of 2020) in addition to being a lead artist on devised works Mission Drift (Nat’l Theater London), The World Is Round  (BAM). She has released thirteen records, owns and operates her own recording studio in Beacon, New York, and can be seen regularly in concert halls and dive bars as Heather Christian & the Arbornauts.

TORCHES: 30+ Years of Downtown Performance

As co-founder of HERE Arts Center—described by the Obie committee as “a lasting home for the weird and wild in downtown performance”—Kristin Marting spent the past three decades immersed in making, witnessing, and supporting groundbreaking performance in New York City. TORCHES is a much needed exploration of New York City’s unique and influential downtown performance world from the 1990s through the 2020s. Part memoir, part oral history, and part cultural inquiry, TORCHES offers in-depth video conversations with more than thirty of the most imaginative and boundary pushing artists working in the field today. TORCHES is both a living archive and an offering for the future. Learning about these artists and their work is not just looking back; it can ignite what’s coming next. They are not only inventors of form—they are keepers of community, fire-starters for our future. See more about the project on the TORCHES website at torchesnyc.org.

About HowlRound TV

HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in this community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our contribute content page.