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Jon Bernson

Jon Bernson is a playwright, musician and interdisciplinary artist from San Francisco. He is a former artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum and a current member of the Resident Playwrights Initiative at Playwrights Foundation. Bernson has written four plays for StoryWorks, each based on extensively researched investigations: A Guide to the AftermathNorth by InfernoOvernighters is Over, and When Lighting The Voids, which was featured in the 2018 Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Bernson’s work tends to be site-specific and exploratory. In Distant Future Symposium (de Young Museum), he fused science fiction, live music and repurposed YouTube footage. PDX to OAK (Amtrak) is an interactive play, written for six actors and fourteen passengers on an overnight train trip from Portland to Oakland, Logbook(iTunes/ Spotify) is a 50-minute audiobook, which is comprised of twelve pirate broadcasts that interrupted the programming of international television stations between 1986 and 2009.

Outside of his theater career, Bernson has released more than twenty albums under several names, including Exray’s, whose music was featured in David Fincher’s Academy-Award winning film, The Social Network. Recent art installations include Sound Affects, a large-scale multimedia collaboration at the Sonos Studio in Los Angeles and Beautification Machine, his sound-sculpture with Andy Diaz Hope, which opened at Catherine Clark Gallery before it was collected by the Nevada Museum of Art. god(s)(dess)(es) - another collaboration with Hope - was voted Best-in-Show at Richmond Virginia's 2016 InLight Festival. His most recent pursuit is Third Eye Moonwalk, an interdisciplinary work that integrates site-specific theater, music, guided meditation, and audio-visual installations. HIs installations have been exhibited at Catharine Clark Gallery, The Growlery, and Minnesota Street Project. Developmental readings of Third Eye Moonwalk have been hosted by Playwrights Foundation at Custom Made Theatre and Stanford University.