“The frame—whatever it may be—simply cannot contain all the questions, life experience, and language Hartman and his actors jam into it. It fills to overflowing and explodes.”
— Janet Sarbanes, American Theatre 🔗
Asher Hartman
Asher Hartman is a visual artist, writer, director, and creator of boundary-pushing live performances that confront social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. As the founder and director of Gawdafful National Theater Company, Hartman has developed a distinctive artistic voice characterized by poetic, embodied texts infused with clown and cringe humor, trance elements, and psychic journeying—all staged within immersive installations designed to disorient and provoke powerful emotional responses.
Hartman’s recent works include “The Mommy Leaks the Floor” at New Theater Hollywood; the international presentation “Blessed with Switch” with Jasmine Orpilla at ICA/LA (2026), the TBA Festival (2025), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2024), and “It’s Better to Start Out Ugly” at JOAN in Los Angeles and The Lab in San Francisco (2023). Other critically acclaimed Gawdafful performances include “The Dope Elf” at Yale Union in Portland (2019) and its reimagined version “Organized Around the Erotics of Doing You In” at The Lab (2021). His work has been featured at prestigious institutions including the Hammer Museum, LACMA, Hauser & Wirth, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the MAK Center for Art & Architecture. Beyond performance creation, Hartman is an established voice in critical discourse with publications including “Mad Clot on a Holy Bone” (X Artists’ Books, 2020) and “Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers” in TDR (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With his late collaborative partner Haruko Tanaka, he conducted numerous workshops on intuitive practice at institutions worldwide, including Crystal Bridges, Gasworks London, the Pulitzer Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center. Hartman has taught at prominent institutions including CalArts, Otis College of Art and Design, Pomona College, and USC.
From 1999-2005, Hartman co-directed Crazy Space, a performance art venue that featured artists such as Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Johanna Went, Mariel Carranza, Liz Young, Jamie McMurry, Paul Zaloom, Dark Bob, Mario Gardener, and Kristina Wong.
Productions (as Cast):
Productions (as Creative):
Annie Okay, Bad Thing, Blessed with Switch, Sorry Atlantis, Eden's Achin' Organ Seeks Revenge, Purple Electric Play, The Mommy Leaks the Floor, The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance, It's Better to Start Out Ugly, The All Stars of Non-Violet Communication, Gawdafful Films, See What Love the Father Has Given Us, Mr. Akita
“By refusing to flatten psychic struggle into a mere aesthetic gesture, Hartman brazenly attempts to stage the unstageable. […] Life, as Hartman stages it, is an endless loop of affective drama — hysterical, libidinous, ecstatic, and undetermined”
— Hannah Tishkoff, Artillery 🔗
“a critically generative practice” that “relies on the notion that reality can only be reverse engineered”
— Rossen Ventzislavov, X—TRA 🔗
→ "Sorry Atlantis, Eden's Achin' Organ Seeks Revenge"
“the experiential onslaught of an Asher Hartman play doesn’t diminish upon repeats. It grows into something more powerful, the way poetry learned by heart does”
— Neha Choksi, Riting 🔗
“As Hartman and the Gawdafful National Theatre uncomfortably and self-reflexively merged the scripted and improvisational, ‘The Dope Elf’ transgressed the boundaries of theatrical space and the unspoken ugliness within us all.”
— Genevieve Quick, 48 Hills 🔗
Jasmine Orpilla, performer, composer, singer, and pre-colonial martial artist, plays Chet, a duende, a slayer of hidden folk in one of a six-part short film series about the psychological effects of white supremacy. In interviews, actions, and written text, Orpilla describes the spirit of the times where those who must avenge injustice prepare.
Writer, director, interviewer: Asher Hartman. Featuring: Jasmine Orpilla, in their own words and performing written text. Shot by: Jasmine Orpilla under the direction of Asher Hartman and lighting director Chu-Hsuan Chang. Outdoor-indoor photography by Ian Byers-Gamber. Father sculpture by Brian Getnick. Handcrafted masks by Joe Seely. Titles by Jinha Song.
→ "Gawdafful Films", Brian Getnick, Chu-Hsuan Chang, Ian Byers-Gamber, Jasmine Orpilla, Jinha Song, Joe Seely
Excerpts from Asher Hartman’s Purple Electric Play! Video by Ian Byers-Gamber and David Fenster. Edited by Asher Hartman and Ian Byers-Gamber
→ "Purple Electric Play", Ian Byers-Gamber
Lost Privilege Company rehearsing for a new work inspired by John Cassavetes’ film Husbands, thinking about love, the permeability of bodies, masculinity, whiteness, loss and inexpressible desire. This film, once so important to me as a barometer of freedom and masculinity, now registers as an inability to register violence, to admire it, normalize it and equate it with beauty.
→ "The Lost Privilege Company", Arne Gjelten, Brian Getnick, Tim Reid
Brian Getnick, Arne Gjelten, Tim Reid, and Asher Hartman (director) came together as The Lost Privilege Company in 2018 to interpret four poems from Blunt Research Group’s “The Work-Shy.” The Lost Privilege Company presented its performance at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute in an evening of performances by scholar and historian Miroslava Chávez-García, writer M. Nourbese Philip, literary historian Caleb Smith and poet and scholar Daniel Tiffany. Video by Ian Byers-Gamber. This work has been recreated and filmed in the artist’s studio.
→ "The Lost Privilege Company", Arne Gjelten, Brian Getnick, Tim Reid
“Great actors are not only great thinkers but accomplished conduits. They allow themselves to be mirrors of the times in which they live and channels to information beyond our usual apprehension.”
— Asher Hartman, in conversation with José Luis Blondet, LACMA Unframed 🔗
→ "The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance", José Luis Blondet
