OUR STAFF

Unearthing and elevating the legacies of Queer Ancestors

Eye Zen Presents is a San Francisco-based transdisciplinary theater company founded by Artistic Director, Seth Eisen in 2007. 

Eye Zen Presents is committed to unearthing and elevating Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People Of Color (QTBIPOC) and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual plus (LGBTQIA+) histories to better understand the diverse lineages within our community. We create innovative transdisciplinary performance, community-building events and workshops throughout San Francisco that illuminate the underrecognized legacies of our queer ancestors who have been silenced and hidden due to social and political oppression.

Eye Zen serves audiences through live theater informed by rigorous research into the rich LGBTQIA+ and QTBIPOC histories available in San Francisco’s archives, neighborhoods, community members, artwork and institutional memories. Eye Zen protects and promotes lost LGBTQIA+ histories through rigorous research, giving image to the unseen and moving the forgotten to create a lasting body of evidence of these vital legacies.

Artistic Director Seth Eisen began creating original work in 1994: his first full-length performance, Two- Fold/One Kind (1994) met at the intersection of Drag Balls, Voguing and Native American Two-Spirit traditions. For the next 15 years, Eisen staged performance pieces, street spectacles and installations at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ’Zeum and The Oakland Museum, National Queer Arts Festival.

In 2007, Eisen founded Eye Zen Presents to support the creation and production of Blackbird: Honoring a Century of Pansy Divas, and became a fiscally sponsored project of CounterPulse where we are now a House Artist. Blackbird was developed over two separate residencies at Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory in 2008 and 2010. Through puppetry and visual media this original solo performance piece explored the lives of seven culturally diverse Twentieth Century queer performers, who coped with discrimination by inventing innovative ways to be out, queer and vocal despite their outsider status. This critically acclaimed piece premiered to sold-out audiences at the 2010 National Queer Arts Festival.

In 2011-12, Eye Zen Presents produced Buffet Flats: Queering Slow Food, a series of five sold-out performance art events that took place in individual homes and at community sites such as the 509 Cultural Center’s Tenderloin National Forest. A racially diverse creative team of queer actors, musicians, performance artists, chefs, farmers, and ecology specialists staged these events. Part queer cabaret, part dinner theater, and part environmental education program, they informed the audience about the Pansy Craze of the 1920s, queer history, local food sources, and diverse culinary traditions.

In 2012, Eye Zen Presents became the artist-in-residence at CounterPulse and developed Homo File: Chronicling the Life of Samuel Steward (1929-1993). The show fused bunraku puppetry, shadow puppetry, aerial dance, live music, live drawing, and theater to tell the story of Samuel Steward, a English professor, tattoo artist, and queer rebel. After selling out the run during the work-in-progress showings and receiving a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant, Eye Zen went on to develop Homo File into an evening-length premiere. It went on to complete a sold out 3 week run, bridged multiple marginalized communities, and had critics saying: “[A] multi-media and cross-disciplinary show [Homo File] sports a formidable narrative arc and aesthetic vision as it explores the life of Samuel Steward (1909–1993), an amazingly well connected English professor, writer of homoerotic fiction, famous tattoo artist, and sexual rebel. . . . Eisen and his winning cast place Steward in a mise-en-scène equally as promiscuous, ranging over dramatic scenes, aerial acrobatics, shadow puppetry, and even a hilariously lewd application of the old teacher’s standby, the overhead projector.” – Rob Avila, San Francisco Bay Guardian

In the style and tradition of The Buffet Flats programs offered in 2011-2012, we created three Homo File Salons in 2013-2014 dedicated to present excerpts of Homo File and our research on Sam Steward to intimate audiences with dinner, art exhibits and performances.

Our 2016 work, Rainbow Logic: Arm in Arm with Remy Charlip, was a trans-disciplinary work of ensemble theater examining the life and legacy of gay Jewish San Francisco choreographer and children’s book author, Remy Charlip. Charlip worked in New York’s post-war, avant-garde art scene as a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, collaborating with luminaries John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Lou Harrison.  Artistically, Rainbow Logic was our most successful project to date on every level. Eisen worked together with performers, puppeteers, fabricators, a choreographer, a composer, visual and video artists in various groupings to devise and develop the project from extensive research materials. Rainbow Logic premiered November 2016 at CounterPulse in San Francisco with sold-out houses for the three-week run, receiving tremendous audience praise and media coverage, supporting 20 artists and reaching nearly 1100 audiences.

Our current project OUT of Site is a multi-year performance-driven queer history tour project that places audiences in physical sites of LGBTQ ancestry in various San Francisco neighborhoods.

CounterPulse supported our work through 14 seasons, co-producing some of our early productions and encouraging our growth on many levels. Thanks to this support, we have become stronger, have expanded our reach, and have created a more stable infrastructure for our programs and operations. Thank you to our CounterPulse family for all of your love over the years! We are excited to announce that we are meeting that expansion by moving our fiscal sponsorship to Intersection for the Arts as of August 2021, and joining 170 projects supported by this wonderful organization that’s been a bedrock in the Bay Area Arts landscape since 1965.

Our commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

Since its founding in 2007, Eye Zen has created multidisciplinary community-building events in SF in traditional and alternative theater spaces. Our public presentations are intersectional contributions to the larger work of ending a plethora of sexuality, race, class, and gender-based discriminations and furthering the dismantling of white supremacy. We share cultural legacies with the general public and provide space for our local QTBIPOC and LGBTQIA communities to gather and be in creative relationship with each other. We lift voices that have been silenced throughout history, drawing connections between the past, present and future to heal the wounds of generational trauma in our communities and create a culture of resilience, recovery and health. 

Equal Opportunity and Non-Discrimination Policy

Eye Zen Presents is committed to the principle of equal opportunity and is firmly committed to non-discrimination in its delivery of programs and employment practices. As an organization that champions ensemble practice and collaborative creation, Eye Zen advocates for access, inclusion, and the empowered agency of multiple voices. Eye Zen commits to the valuing of human dignity, and to the appreciation of the necessity of providing all members of the community an experience that equips them to relate to all persons and groups in the increasingly global and diverse world in which we all live and work. We are firmly committed to providing an environment in which people respect the rights of others to live, work, and learn in peace and dignity, and to have equal opportunity to realize their full potential as individuals and members of society.

For all press inquiries contact John Hill at john@johnhillpr.com