Barnett Cohen is a Brooklyn-based artist and choreographer whose work proposes a kaleidoscopic queer surrealism. Their performances fracture linear time, gender identity, and sexuality through precise yet disjointed forms, engaging bodily shapes, and calls for subversive political action. Each performance originates out of text-based scores that Cohen composes. The scores merge their writing with found language accumulated from research, personal conversations, and digital encounters. These inputs–ranging from texts and dating app exchanges to speculative fiction and queer theory–are footnoted in chapbooks that are freely distributed to audiences with each performance. Mirroring the accumulative nature of the scores, the choreography in the performances emerges from a rich tapestry of movement vocabularies: modern and post-modern dance, stage combat, video games, quotidian domestic activity, cheerleading, beauty pageants, the rave scene, Tik Tok, and the somatic subconscious impulses of Cohen’s regular collaborators. Staged in the round, the performances ensure close contact between performers and audience, reducing passive spectatorship while amplifying collective world-building. Their aesthetic is enriched by monochromatic yet evocative lighting inspired by DIY raves as well as fashion-forward outfits, enhancing the atemporality and transformative potential of the work.

Cohen has presented their work at The Centre Wallonie Bruxelles as part of Performissima, Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Projects as part of Performa 2023, Judson Memorial Church (as pat of Movement Research and JUF), The Center For Performance Research, The Exponential Festival, International Objects, The International Center of Photography, JDJ, The Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, JOAN, LAXART, Human Resources, The Box, and REDCAT, City Limits, Rupert, and The Onassis Foundation (online.) In 2021, Open Space/SFMOMA published a collection of their poems alongside those of artist and collaborator Simone Forti. Cohen has been in-residence at Skowhegan, MacDowell, NARS, Rupert, and Denniston Hill. They are a grant recipient from The Foundation For Contemporary Arts, and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2020. Their work has been reviewed and featured in BOMB, The New Yorker, The New York Times, T Magazine, Artforum, hyperallergic, Cultured, The Financial Times, and Riting among others.

In 2017, Cohen founded the Mutual Aid Immigration Network (MAIN), a trilingual free assistance hotline for people detained in immigration detention centers across the United States. MAIN connects people who call with bond funds and legal services that can accelerate their freedom from incarceration.