Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Performance, writing, video, translation
Website: christianrileynagler.substack.com
Christian Nagler is a performer, writer, and translator based in Oakland, California. He holds an MFA in literary arts from Brown University and completed graduate research in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, where he pursued a PhD examining the speculative political economy of Silicon Valley through five years of critical ethnographic fieldwork in think tanks, research institutes, and venture capital firms. He subsequently joined the UC Berkeley faculty, teaching performance writing and research courses in the Theater, Dance and Performance Studies department.
Nagler was an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito in 2012, returning as an Affiliate from 2013 to 2014. In 2017 he was selected as an ARC Fellow in the Graduate category at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. His writing and criticism have appeared in Fillip, Aufgabe, Performance Research, Art Journal, and the anthology Six Lines of Flight (UC Press, 2012), and he has published essays and columns through SFMOMA’s Open Space platform, where he served as Columnist in Residence. His experimental novella Human Capital: A Life was published by Publication Studio as part of its Forms series.
Nagler’s interdisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of bodily movement, economic theory, and social critique. Working in performance, participatory instruction, video, and prose, he uses the conventions of fitness culture, therapeutic practice, and corporate pedagogy as raw material to examine how global financial logics shape everyday embodied life. His performances often take the form of structured group exercises — aerobic warm-ups, yoga sessions, movement workshops — that reframe market abstractions (liquidity, derivatives, human capital) as kinesthetic experiences, inviting audiences to inhabit economic concepts rather than merely analyze them.
His work is collaborative and frequently site-specific, performed alongside artists including Anna Halprin, Isak Immanuel, Yuko Kaseki, and the Open Experiments Ensemble. Video documentation and single-channel works extend the performances into gallery and museum contexts, while his writing — including translations of Latin American political economists, novelists, and psychoanalytic theorists — deepens the same preoccupations through literary and critical prose.
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