Henry Zander

Henry Zander

[BFA] Interdisciplinary Studio Art 

[Minor] Dance + English

incomprehensible body of effort no.1 for wrench, hatchet and timespace explores how games and life both exist in the tension between structure, choice, and randomness; how they inform, depend upon, and deepen one another. My work is a game with rules that dictate my improvisational, and indeterminate creation of a dance and a mask, the last in a set of five. Wood carving represents the quiet, careful, intentional practice of seated zazen meditation, which contrasts a masked dance making visible the ways in which I fail to take what I learn from my buddhist practice into the real world. Together they make up an endurance performance microcosming what it means, and how it feels to be alive, in the peace, in the mess, in the ugly, in the joy, and in everything we don’t notice or can’t name.

Henry Zander is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, music, poetry, photography, wood carving, and dance, pursuing a BFA in studio art with an interdisciplinary option from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with an expected graduation of December 2024. Born, raised and currently residing in Lincoln, he serves on the board of the Lincoln Zen Center, has spent time on staff at the Angel City Zen Center in Los Angeles, and gives regular talks at both centers. Henry has received the Captain Irby F. Woods Prize for Poetry, and is a Caniff Scholar. He has collaborated with Michael Sakamoto, Veronica Santiago Moniello as a dancer, and Little House Dance Company as a composer. His work was published in Laurus literary magazine in 2019 and 2020, and included in the 35th and 36th Juried Undergraduate Exhibition at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.