The 2023 Lucille Lortel Grant recipient is Tess Howsam, an international director and installation artist. An artistic maverick, Howsam has worked as a multi-hyphenate artist, director, and curator in NYC for over a decade. Central to Howsam’s work are questions of gender roles, audience integration, and building collaborations across artistic mediums. Howsam is a reoccurring Co-Director on projects with a German company Das Letze de Klinode.

As Founding Artistic Director of the interdisciplinary immersive theater company Exquisite Corpse Company (ECC), Howsam leads the development of ekphrastic immersive theater. ECC’s interactive piece, ZOETROPE, was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and was featured in The New Yorker Magazine. Howsam has held artist residencies at Guild Hall (East Hampton), El Centro de las Artes de Querétaro (CEART) Querétaro, Mexico, and Town Stages (NYC). Her work has been featured throughout NYC at venues such as: The Barrow Group, Governors Island, SoHo Rep, and HERE arts center. She has an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts: Goddard College, Washington, and a BA in Theater: Bard College, New York.