James Monaco

James Harrison Monaco tells stories with music. He considers that to be one of the oldest art forms in the world, and he’s always looking for new and innovative ways to do it. He’s obsessed by stories of travel, translation, immigration, borders, memory, quiet violence, quiet grace, global loneliness, and time. His work often combines extensive research in a handful of languages with an unabashed amount of melodrama. He’s also a translator of Spanish and Italian, he’s a music composer, and he writes prose fiction & non-fiction. He works solo, and he works in a lot of collaborative forms—most notably as one half of the music-storytelling duo Jerome & James (jamesandjerome.org). His theater projects have often been directed by Rachel Chavkin, Andrew Scoville, and Annie Tippe. Recent projects by James & Jerome include: The Conversationalists (The Bushwick Starr), Ink (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Under The Radar Festival, Williams College, etc.), Piano Tales (Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Joe’s Pub, La MaMa, etc.), Aaron/Marie (Under The Radar Festival, Ars Nova), and They Ran and Ran and Ran (HERE Arts). Other storytelling projects includeTravels (in development), Tales for Telling (Ars Nova) and Reception (HERE Arts, The New Ohio). He’s a New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center Theater, and he’s received residencies with The Public Theater, The Sundance Institute, BAM, The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, New York Theatre Workshop, BRIC, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, among others.