Suzanne Stein’s recent publications and performance documents include The Kim Game (Area Sneaks), TOUT VA BIEN (Displaced Press), and Passenger Ship (Ypolita). Poems, talk performances, and prose have appeared in War and Peace, On: Contemporary Practice, Counterpath; and at New Langton Arts, the Poetry Project, the Berkeley Art Museum, and elsewhere; audio performances are archived at PennSound. Her work is often site- and context-specific, collaborative, and interactive, joining examinations of visual and performance arts with lyric and somatic exploration. Other texts in this vein include Three-Way (2nd Floor Projects, 2009), HOLE IN SPACE (Omg, 2009), and Orphée (Minor/American, 2007).
Suzanne is also the founding editor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's digital publication Open Space. She joined the staff of SFMOMA in 2006, initially working in the education and publications departments. In 2008, she was appointed SFMOMA’s community producer, the first role of its kind at an American art museum, where she defined and shaped Open Space, building a popular, community-centric blog and then transforming it into a lively art and literature publication, collectively authored and managed. In her tenure as editor-in-chief (2008-2016) she presented the work and thinking of hundreds of writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, critics, curators, and others—in venues digital, print, and real. In 2012, she was promoted to head of community engagement for the museum. Her major public programs for SFMOMA include 75 Reasons to Live, organized for the museum’s 75th anniversary, and Living Room, in conjunction with the exhibition The Steins Collect. She is the co-editor, with Judy Bloch, of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 360: Views on the Collection (2016). She left SFMOMA in 2016, after relaunching Open Space with a new platform and design, welcoming Claudia La Rocco as the magazine’s second editor-in-chief.
She has organized numerous public dialogue and performance projects, independently and in collaboration. With David Brazil, she ran the first season of the Berkeley Art Museum’s RE@DS poetry series. With Brazil, Brandon Brown, Sara Larsen, and Alli Warren, she organized the first two-day gathering of the Poetic Labor Project (2010). From 2005-2010 she edited and published the Oakland-based micro poetry press TAXT, committed to the free distribution of work by Bay Area writers and artists previously underrepresented in print. And from 1994-1998 she was co-director and film curator at { f o u r w a l l s gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Suzanne is a regular poets’ theater performer, and has appeared in nearly a dozen plays by poet and playwright Kevin Killian, alongside his legendary band of artist and poet players. Favorite roles include Mary Oppen, wife of George; Countess Cholnaky, Hungarian refugee; Anais Nin; and Snowy, royal white tiger of Siegfried and Roy.
