upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024
McDonald is an interdisciplinary artist who makes performance installations, often in historic houses and gardens, that draw on the site and its stories to explore how these public places connect with personal histories and emotional states. Her performances blend singing of early music and folksong with lectures, autobiographical monologues and handcrafted costumes and textiles that she activates to transmit narrative. Through deep research and hand making, she mines social history, period fashion and historic music to reflect on the present. Her work has been presented in Berlin, Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia.