Alex Kahn

Alex Kahn (born April 9, 1967) is an American visual/performance artist and co-founder of the arts ensemble Processional Arts Workshop. He is most widely known for his creation of the large-scale puppet performance works that lead New York's Village Halloween Parade each year.

In 1998, Kahn and his partner, Sophia Michahelles, brought together an ensemble of artists, puppeteers, theatrical technicians, and performers to design the annual performances that lead New York's Village Halloween Parade. Originally named "Superior Concept Monsters", the group was incorporated as a non-profit in 2005 and renamed Processional Arts Workshop with a mission to create site-specific community-built processions, parades, and other open-space performances. These works are often developed through open community workshops that bring hundreds of volunteers together to build, rehearse, and ultimately perform cyclical pieces specifically for the parade. The performances typically incorporate elements of puppetry, sound, dance, costume/mask, lighting/projection and mobile architecture, an amalgam of mediums Kahn dubbed "processional art".

In addition to leading New York's Village Halloween Parade each year, Kahn's creations have appeared in venues nationally and internationally. His work, Metamorphosis, involving 20' tall pupating luna moths, officially opened the 2000 Henson International Festival of Puppet Theatre. In 2002, he and Michahelles initiated a midsummer pageant project in the Italian Alps village of Morinesio, drawing on local folklore and oral history to create a unique site-specific pageant. Inspired by the success of the now-annual tradition, they have seeded similar projects in diverse locales in Ukraine, Turkey, Italy, Texas, New York, and elsewhere. In 2006, Kahn was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Trinidad and Tobago, to study the artistic and cultural structures behind Caribbean Carnival and Trinidadian "Mas'", or costumed procession. More recent PAW works have included major commissions for Socrates Sculpture Park the NY Architectural League's Beaux Arts Ball, the PEN World Voices Festival, Houston's Buffalo Bayou Park, the Grand Opening of the High Line over Penn Rail Yards.

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