About Us
Mixing Cultures, Sharing Cultures, Showing Cultures
“Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don’t.” — FitzRoy Somerset
Founded in 1999 by performance artist Brian Shapiro, San Francisco-based CultureWorks is an expansive performance art company that works with multiple mediums to present original productions that suggestively and humorously highlight the role culture plays in shaping human behavior—how generations interact, how professions come to define us, how politics become personal.
CultureWorks collaborates with actors, dancers, musicians, video artists, and professional organizations to create highly entertaining, intellectually stimulating, and aesthetically diverse interdisciplinary performances. Audiences are entertained while simultaneously gaining insights into their own behavior choices.
CultureWorks has collaborated with artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Austin and Paris, and has performed in theatrical, professional, and non-traditional venues.
About Brian Shapiro, Artistic Director
“Through the use of mime, dance, and spoken word, Shapiro takes us on a journey. It is easy to become enamored of the talent this man displays.”
— The New York Theatre Experience
Brian Shapiro has written and performed original shows since 1995. He has performed and collaborated across the United States and abroad, including San Francisco, New York, Austin, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, San Diego, and Paris. Brian brings a populist approach to his work, making efforts to engage a wide audience demographic. His performances arouse audience awareness of the one cause for our behavior: culture.
Influences include performers Spaulding Gray, Anna Deavere Smith, Eric Bogosian, and Danny Hoch; choreographers Pina Baush and Bill T. Jones; and cultural scholars Edward T. Hall and Huston Smith.
Brian holds both a BA (San Diego State) and MA (San Francisco State) in Communication Studies, and attended a PhD program in Performance Studies (University of Texas, Austin). He is also the founder of Shapiro Communications, a communication facilitation and training company.