Micaela Brinsley

Micaela Brinsley was born in Tokyo, Japan. Vowing to live as a witch at age 5, she's since slid through other covers and titles. A singer at 10, bartender at 16, labour organiser then Peter Pan at 17, in her 20s a cashier to multiple bakers while all along an assistant to artists, periodically. She likes asking questions she can’t answer, is obsessed with form. She writes, loves rum. Former editor of the now defunct column Wonderings, she’s an editor of fiction, essays, and interviews as well as co-editor-in-chief of La Piccioletta Barca.

Pessoa long ago wrote a sentence she eventually read, recognizing in it something she’d considered before. But she’d forgotten of it until she read his, her expression. Now impossible to catch in its entirety, she’s lingering in the memory of its shade. In a different chord Lispector. Rilke. Wollstonecraft, Ahmed. More Machiavelli and Lacey, recently. Swirling Salomon with Carter, Woodman, Oliver, Yamaguchi. Susan Faludi, a former teacher. Fred Moten too. Richard Schechner, a former boss. 

A graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, in university she trained in arts criticism, directing, and performance theory. Her thesis, In Search of Home, examined the relationship between artmaking and exile, framing criticism as an artistic practice and entrypoint, for locating subjectivity within experiences of displacement. She once tap danced for a classroom of high school girls in Afghanistan, over Skype. She conducts independent research and has written dozens of articles for various publications, from artistic to academic. She is currently working on something.