With support from the California Arts Council, Dohee Lee Puri Arts will continue to produce, perform and tour contemporary performance art grounded in traditional Korean ritual practices and informed by BIPOC community members’ experiences in California today, and to provide visual and performing arts workshops that promote self-expression, community engagement and holistic healing, primarily for East Oakland immigrants, refugees and asylees.
Artistic Director, Dohee Lee was born on Jeju Island in South Korea. She trained at the master level in Korean dance, Korean percussion, and vocals rooted in Shamanism. Her organization focuses on integrating these traditional ritual forms with contemporary influences into programs and services that emphasize the mythical, experimental, ritualistic, historical and healing aspects of performance and installation, catalyzing new relationships between identity, nature, spirituality, and the political.
Programs and services include:
-Workshop and leadership development program with Oakland-based immigrant and refugee organizations leading up to public, multidisciplinary performance rituals around the Bay Area.
-Land and Us: Future Ritual, a new narrative dance project in development with Asian immigrant and refugee communities around California and the U.S.
-SingingBody Workshop series, offered live and online, exploring sound to create a mystical and universal language. These workshops expand participants’ expressive vocabularies of feelings, energies, memories and stories from the current time to the past ancestral time to merge together and create a new art practice and learning scoring process to facilitate ritual or teaching purpose.
-National and international touring of Dohee Lee’s multidisciplinary performance works.

