Madeline Best is a Lighting Designer, Performer, and Arts Administrator who currently lives in Long Island City, NY. Her deeply collaborative artistic practice comes from an intense interest in the articulation of emotional time and space.
She has had the pleasure of forming long-standing collaborative relationships with many artists including Ursula Eagly. Their work together began with Piece with Gaps for Each Other 2016-2018 at The Chocolate Factory Theater. In this work lighting designer and performer roles overlapped bringing the collaborative process to the foreground of the performance. Each member of the cast worked to create the piece as it unfolded in performance. Madeline found little nooks and crannies to fill with light and an interactive push and pull with the other collaborators as lighting lead one section or highlighted anothers role in the next. In Our Epithelium 2019 at Danspace Project, Madeline performed in the ensemble using her sense of felt timing as a performer to guide the pace of the work.
Other artists that Madeline has long working collaborations with include:
Heather Kravas. Projects include The Green Surround (2011), a quartet (2014), Plaything (2016), Visions of Beauty (2017). Work began in 2019 on a new piece with a residency at The Rauschenberg Foundation.
Aki Sasamoto. Projects include Centripetal Run (2012), Sunny in the Furnace (2014), Yield Point (2017), Phase Transition (2020).
Milka Djordjevich. Projects include Kinetic Makeover (2014), MASS (2015), ANTHEM (2017)
Luciana Achugar. Projects include Puro Deseo (2010) (Bessie award), An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love (2016), Brujx (2018).
Madeline has also worked with Juliana F. May/MAYDANCE both as a lighting designer for Folk Incest (2018) and as a performer in Gutter Gate (2011).
Madeline’s designs have appeared at many theaters in NYC including PS122, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, danspace project, Gibney Dance, Abrons Arts Center, NYU Skirball Center, and The Chocolate Factory Theater. Nationally and internationally at: The Fusebox Festival in Austin TX; On The Boards in Seattle WA; LAX Festival and Show Box in Los Angles; Lokomotion Festival, Skopje, Macedonia, Kondenz Festival at BITEF, Belgrade, Serbia; Impultanz, Vienna Austria; HALLO: Festspiele in Hamburg, Germany and more.
Madeline has worked with Brian Rogers co-creating three projects over the last 10 years. Madeline performed in as well as co-created Selective Memory (2010), a solo real-time video performance about nostalgia for relationships and events that never took place. Hotbox (2012) was a loud and messy follow-up to the prior work. Screamers (2015-2017) is a full-length movie written and Directed by Brian Rogers and Produced by Madeline.
Madeline is the Director of Operations at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, NY where she has worked for over 10 years. At The Chocolate Factory Theater her role as an arts administrator is heavily influenced by her artistic practice and she is able to bring the perspective of an artist to her work.
Madeline grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and studied dance and lighting design at Bennington College in Vermont. She is the mother of two young children.