Deke Weaver’s interdisciplinary work has been presented at the Sundance Film Festival, 21c Museum Hotels, NY Video Festival (Lincoln Center), the Berlin Video Festival, PBS, Channel 4/U.K., the Museum of Contemporary Art/LA, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Dixon Place, HERE, the Moth, Roulette, Judson Memorial Church, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, livestock pavilions, forests, prairies, and living rooms.
A Guggenheim Fellow and Creative Capital grantee, with residencies at Yaddo, Isle Royale National Park, Ragdale, and Ucross, he has been awarded commissions and grants from the city of San Francisco, the states of New York and Illinois, and other public and private foundations.
He is currently 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.
At MacDowell in 2001, Weaver worked on three plays (The Belly of the Beast; Boiling the Frog; Untitled), a website, and a video installation. In 2004, he focused on the first draft of a camio interdisciplinary monologue, "The Land of Enchantment" and completed three shorter pieces. In 2007, he continued work on “The Palimpsest Project,” an interactive video installation, began writing a new performance piece, and began collecting video footage for a theatrical projection design for a production of Mary Timmerman's Metamorphoses. During his 2015 Fellowship, he worked on Bear, the next performance in his lifelong project, “The Unreliable Bestiary.”
During his sixth MacDowell Fellowship in 2023, Weaver worked on Cetacean (The Whale), the sixth performance from “The Unreliable Bestiary.”
