Dana Salisbury is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans visual art, performance, and writing, unified by a lifelong investigation into perception, sensory experience, and the unseen dimensions of human awareness.

Her early career in visual art explored spatial disorientation and perceptual play through mixed-media installations and dimensional paintings exhibited at The Drawing Center, AIR Gallery, the DeCordova Museum, Real Art Ways, the Fuller Museum, and the Berkshire Museum. These works—ranging from Wahconah Reconstruction to Forests and X-Reflections—examined the instability of seeing and the impossibility of a fixed point of view.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Salisbury extended these ideas into dance, site-specific work, and participatory performance. Her acclaimed Dark Dining Projects—in which blindfolded guests dined in complete darkness—transformed eating into an act of heightened awareness, presented at venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Science Gallery Dublin, and KO Festival of Performance. Other major works include Unseen Dances, Stone’s War, and Whoopee in the Dark, performed throughout New York City and beyond.

She is a recipient of a New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessie”) and numerous residencies and fellowships, including those from Dance Omi, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Salisbury’s recent focus returns to language as a site of perception and transformation. Her poems and prose have appeared in LIT Magazine, Meat for Tea, The Ekphrastic Review, Nashville Review, and Months to Years. Across all forms, her work asks: how do we sense, interpret, and narrate the world—and what might happen if we learn to perceive it differently?