Ilya Vidrin

I am an Assistant Professor of Creative Practice Research and core faculty at the Institute for Experiential Robotics at Northeastern University. Born into a refugee family, I grew up navigating the nuances of cultural expectations, language barriers, and diverging political ideologies. This experience of code-switching fuels my research and artistic practice to examine social ethics in physical interaction, including intimate labors of care, cultural competence, and social responsibility. As an interdisciplinary research-practitioner, my work draws on concepts and methods in social epistemology, performance philosophy, ethics of care, and cognitive psychology. Most recently, I was featured as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” (2022), and was an artist-in-residence at the BallettxSchwerin, Harvard ArtLab, L.A. Contemporary Dance Company, North Atlantic Ballet, Ballet Des Moines, Jacob’s Pillow, and the New Museum (NYC).