William Ruiz Morales
I am an artist, dramaturg, and cultural strategist, based in Los Angeles. Through Ouow Studio, I connect performance and institutional practice, collaborating with artists, collectives, and cultural organizations to shape projects, design programs and initiatives, and create the conditions for creative work to thrive.
Dramaturgy is the core of my approach. It’s how I work on narratives that support sustainable creative life, something I think of as an infrastructural poetics.
Alongside my administrative and producing work, I maintain an artistic practice that moves between performance, writing, and research. I draw on the resourceful and collaborative tactics of survival shaped by my Cuban cultural heritage and immigrant experience, allowing vulnerability and joy to guide how I engage with audiences. As a researcher, I focus on non-state forms of governance and network-based collaboration in live arts communities, paying attention to how people sustain their work as traditional national institutions struggle.
Below are some of my initiatives and projects.
INSTITUTIONAL / PRODUCING PROJECTS
I currently lead Field Initiatives at Los Angeles Performance Practice, where I work on programs that respond to what artists and communities actually need in the moment. Much of this happens in partnership with institutions, funders, and organizations that share a commitment to supporting artists in lasting ways.
Right now, this includes BRIDGE THE GAPS, a wildfire relief effort that mixes direct funding with residency support; New Music Inc – Los Angeles, a program for ten artist-led music organizations; and next year, the Individual Artist Fellowships with the California Arts Council, which we administer for Los Angeles County.
Festival making has also been a big part of my producing life. I think of festivals not just as places to present work, but as cultural events that shape how communities gather, imagine, and create together. In Cuba, projects like tubo de ensayo and Espacios Ibsen offered rare spaces for experimentation and opened doors for artists working outside the traditional circuit. Later, in New York and Miami, Living Away continued this spirit through site-responsive projects and gatherings that brought diasporic and experimental practices into dialogue.
ART PROJECTS
My artistic work has been shifting over the years. I began as a theater director, staging full productions in Havana from 2007, and gradually moved toward dramaturgy and embodied performance practices that are quieter, more distilled, and more attentive to the present moment.
The ongoing series Lectures by The Idiot is an exploration of hybrid performance-lectures that weave movement, philosophy, and installation. The Idiot is a figure I return to often, someone who thinks out loud, gets lost, and invites the audience into that wandering as a shared experiment. The series had recent presentations in Berlin in 2024 with On Work, and I am currently developing a new iteration with On Self for 2026.
Before that, Derrotero (2023) and the earlier series Bojeo (2016–2020) mapped my interest in geography, diaspora, and ruins, using movement and language to trace what remains after histories of displacement and survival. These works explore how Caribbean and immigrant experiences inform the ways we move through, adapt, and make meaning within the places we inhabit.
I’ve also collaborated closely with musicians and performers, including with Nina Fukuoka in Story of O (2025) and Restless (2022), and as a dramaturg with San Cha’s Inebria Me (2025), Gabriela Burdsall’s MENEO (2025), and Anoche by Alexandro Segade (2024). In these collaborations, I support the artist’s voice while shaping a dramaturgical conversation that helps the work grow and settle into its own form.
Earlier in my work, I directed theater in Havana, where I staged more than twenty pieces, including Idomeneo (2013), Woyzeck (2012), and Suvenir (2012). Those years taught me resourcefulness and collective problem-solving, skills that continue to anchor my work today, even as my practice has shifted into more minimal, social, and experimental forms.
RESEARCH
For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on Chasing Fireflies, an action-research project I co-develop with Fanny Martin (Arts of Festivals). As part of this work, we undertook a European Festival and Podcast Production Tour in the summer of 2024. Over the course of a month, we visited festivals and creation spaces across Europe dedicated to new performance, meeting with producers, artists, and cultural workers. We approached the tour as a way to observe governance networks in practice, how people organize, collaborate, and share responsibility within artistic communities.
These conversations are the foundation of a forthcoming podcast reflecting on regional production practices and the evolving ecology of contemporary performance.
Chasing Fireflies is developed with support from CIPA (Creative & Independent Producer Alliance) and co-produced by Ouow Studio and Arts of Festivals.
CONTACT
2024 Ouow Studio
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