Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, Obie-winning playwright, performing artist, and translator. Her books of poetry include The Cow (2006), winner of the Alberta Prize, Coeur de Lion (2007), Mercury (2011), The Origin of the World (2014), based on a 2013 performance at Stuart Shave / Modern Art, and A Sand Book (2019), winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. Her newest books are Wave of Blood (2024) and The Rose (2025).
Her Obie-winning play Telephone was commissioned by the Foundry Theatre and has been performed and published in Norwegian translation (2017) and at KW Berlin (2018) among others. Recent performance and teaching projects include Divine Justice (2022), a 25-hour durational performance inspired by Medea at Performance Space NY, and Gnostic Poetics, a seminar/workshop on The Nag Hammadi Library held at Scripps College In 2022. Other performances and theatrical works include: Mortal Kombat (2015), commissioned by Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne and performed at The Whitney Museum, New York, and Gallery TPW, Toronto and Lorna (2013) at Martin E. Segal Theatre, New York, both in collaboration with Jim Fletcher. With Oscar Tuazon she presented PUBIC SPACE at Stuart Shave / Modern Art in 2016.
Reines is the translator of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (Mal-o-mar, 2009), TIQQUN's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (Semiotext(e) 2011), and The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal by Jean-Luc Hennig (Semiotext(e) 2011), and her poetry, essays, & interviews have appeared in Artforum, Art In America, The Believer, The Boston Review, Bomb, Granta, Harpers, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry. She has composed texts for and interviewed artists including Nicole Eisenman, Niki de Saint Phalle, K8 Hardy, Seth Price, Allison Katz, Justine Kurland, Liz Larner, Anna Sew Hoy, Carol Rama, Mondongo, Izhar Patkin, Sanya Kantarovsky, and more.