Named one of Flavorwire's 100 best living writers and "a crucial voice of her generation" by Michael Silverblatt on NPR, Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, Obie-winning playwright, performing artist, and translator. Her newest books are The Rose (Graywolf 2025) and Wave of Blood (Divided 2024). A SAND BOOK (Tin House 2019), won the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize & was longlisted for the National Book Award. Other books include THE COW (Alberta Prize, Fence 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar 2007/Fence 2011), and MERCURY (Fence 2011), and The Origin of the World (2014) from Semiotext(e). Her Obie-winning play TELEPHONE (2009) was commissioned by The Foundry Theatre and has been performed in Norwegian translation (2017), at KW Berlin (2018), and PETE Ensemble Portland (2026), among others.
Her most recent major performance is DIVINE JUSTICE (2022), a 25-hour theatrical environment based on Medea at Performance Space New York. Other performances & theatrical works include: MORTAL KOMBAT (2015), commissioned by Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne & performed at The Whitney Museum, New York, NY, USA, & Gallery TPW, Toronto, CA, and LORNA (2013) at Martin E. Segal Theatre, New York, USA, both with Jim Fletcher, The Origin of the World (2013) at Modern Art, London UK, & many others. Two-person and group exhibitions include PASSAGES curated by Kathrin Bentele at Friart Fribourg (2026), SPERM CULT curated by Hamza Walker at LAXART 2019 (now THE BRICK), PUBIC SPACE (2016), in collaboration with Oscar Tuazon at Modern Art in London, UK, EXHAUST (2016) curated by Erin Sickler at Contemporary Art Tasmania, AU, and JANE DARK (2014) curated by Jesse Birch at Western Front, Vancouver, Canada.
Reines is the translator of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (Mal-O-Mar, 2009); Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (Semiotext(e) 2009); and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young- Girl (Semiotext(e) 2012). She has taught at Columbia University, the European Graduate School, NYU, Tufts, Naropa, The New School, Yale & many others. In 2009 she was Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley & in 2021 was Distinguished Poet in Residence at Wichita State University, and the Mary Routt Chair in literature at Scripps College.
Her poetry, essays, & interviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The Believer, The Boston Review, Bomb, Granta, Harpers, The Los Angeles Review of Books, POETRY, & many others. She has composed texts on many artists and art institutions, including Niki de Saint Phalle, Allison Katz, Isabelle Albuquerque, Lauren Quin, Kate Millett, Sriwhana Spong, Nicole Eisenman, Seth Price, Justine Kurland, Liz Larner, Anna Sew Hoy, Carol Rama, Mondongo, Sanya Kantarovsky, & more.
Reines has been a MacDowell Fellow, a resident at the TS Eliot House, a fellow at The Center for the Humanities at Tufts, a Brown Foundation Fellow at the Dora Maar House, the Poetry Fellow at the University of East Anglia, the Annette Dignam Residency in Literature at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, has judged the National Poetry Series, The White Review Poetry Prize & been a nominator for the Foundation for Contemporary Art. In 2012 she created ANCIENT EVENINGS, an innovative platform generating creative writing through ancient texts, and kept a thriving astrology practice for fourteen years. In March 2020, while a Divinity student at Harvard, she started close-reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies on Instagram, which led to the founding of INVISIBLE COLLEGE, a hub for poetry, art, & sacred study online.
“Ancient medicine always involved language and incantation,” says Ariana, “and I have always preferred to teach poetry as magic than as literature. My studies at Invisible College have taught me that poetry -- the very existence of poetry on the planet Earth-- testifies to the reality of exalted experience and true wisdom. I forget many times a day that these things are very real. Creativity rooted in such experience, such wisdom, has the power to carry the human soul through tribulation and despair.”
