Deke Weaver

Deke Weaver is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and producer of unusual events.

His life long project, The Unreliable Bestiary, is presenting a performance for every letter of the alphabet, each letter representing an endangered animal or habitat.  With choreographer/performer/director Jennifer Allen and trusted collaborators, they have produced MONKEY (2009), ELEPHANT (2010), WOLF (2013), BEAR (2016), TIGER (2019), and 2023’s CETACEAN (The Whale).

A Guggenheim Fellow and Creative Capital grantee, his interdisciplinary performances and videos have been presented in experimental theater, film/video, dance, solo performance, and broadcast venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center, The Berlin Video Festival, MoMA/NY, PBS, Channel 4/U.K., the Museum of Contemporary Art/LA, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Dixon Place, HERE, PS 122, The Moth, Roulette, Judson Memorial Church, Tonic, Galapagos, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 21c Museum Hotels, and many others including livestock pavilions, national parks, night clubs, backyard sheds and living rooms. A resident artist at Yaddo, Isle Royale National Park, the Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center, the Momentary, a three-time resident at Ucross, and a six-time fellow at MacDowell, he has been awarded commissions and grants from the city of San Francisco, the states of New York and Illinois, the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), and other public and private foundations.

In addition to the Bestiary, he works on related projects including the short film The Bear in the Valley and Bob Paris’ podcast Fearful Symmetry.  His work is included in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (edited by Holly Hughes and Una Chaudhuri, 2014, University of Michigan Press).  His “Polar Bear God” performance was highlighted in Chaudhuri’s chapter in Readings in Performance and Ecology (edited by Theresa May and Wendy Arons, Palgrave MacMillan). Chaudhuri and Joshua Williams co-wrote “The Play at the End of the World: Deke Weaver’s ‘Unreliable Bestiary’ and the Theatre of Extinction” which is included in The Cambridge Companion of Theatre and Science (2020). Lisa Woynarski’s Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance, and Climate Change (2020) includes a chapter on WOLF. Weaver’s “Carnivore Questions” is part of Unserious Ecocriticism: Humor, Play & Environmental Destruction in Art & Visual Culture (edited by Jessica Landau and Maria Lux, Amherst College Press, 2026).  Video documentation of Bestiary performances are held in the libraries of Princeton, New York University, University of Michigan, University of Iowa, University of Georgia, Texas A&M University, and University of Kentucky.

He is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with appointments in the School of Art & Design, the Department of Theatre, the Department of Dance, and faculty affiliation with the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies.

Research Interests

• Ecology
• Biodiversity
• Climate
• Story
• Performance
• Film/video
• Sound
• Presence

Campus Affiliations

• Department of Theatre
• Department of Dance
• Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative

Courses Regularly Taught

• Performance
• Time Arts 1: Introduction to Time Based Media
• Time Arts 2: Documentary
• Time Arts 2: Compositing
• Time Arts 2: Video Installation
• Storytelling Strategies
• Graduate Studio