Contact – Performance, Play & Design

Patrick Michael Ballard

Assistant Teaching Professor of Art, Technology and Play

paballar@ucsc.edu

Department/College/UnitArts Division

TitleAssistant Teaching Professor of Art, Technology and Play

AffiliationFaculty

Web SitePersonal
Nowhere

Primary Office Location
Theater Arts J-113

Office HoursW'26: Mon 2-4PM

Mail StopTheater Arts Center

Research Interests

Patrick Michael Ballard is a food closet filled to the brim with perforated, mummified, and erewhile leftovers. He beguiles his own navel between Santa Cruz and Los Angeles with ample mirrorgazing and lint sifting, populating the scar of his own origin with the embers of artist conch. He primarily focuses on developing techniques for revealing endangered processes of nuance in gradients of nonsense: forging speculative dowsing rods, symbolic resonators, and atmospheres for the orchestration of psychomagical parlor games and performances. He is a co-founder and co-director of SHELLGAME, a game design studio run through UC Santa Cruz with mattie brice. He also serves as a custodian of the Nowhere Lab through the nonspaces that it operates, a Creative Director of Exhibitions for the Auschwitz Study Foundation and the Mel Mermelstein Archive, and is currently set designer for Gawdawfful National Theater Company. His work has been shown nationally and internationally in galleries, theaters, artist spaces, historic architectures, cafes, parks, living rooms, birthday parties and at funerals.

Selected Exhibitions

SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
2026
(forthcoming) Pepper, Automata, Los Angeles, CA
(forthcoming) To Live a Loving Life, Bread and Salt, San Diego, CA
2025
To Live a Loving Life, Folly Tree Arboretum, East Hampton, NY (one of four unique showings)
To Live a Loving Life, Folly Tree Arboretum, East Hampton, NY (one of four unique showings)
To Live a Loving Life, Folly Tree Arboretum, East Hampton, NY (one of four unique showings)
To Live a Loving Life, Folly Tree Arboretum, East Hampton, NY (one of four unique showings)
2023
XYXYNYXYX, Indexical, Santa Cruz, CA
XYXYNYXYX, Oracle Egg, Los Angeles, CA
XYXYNYXYX, Elysian Theater, Los Angeles, CA
2022
Azguynaenquainan! UCLA Game Lab, Los Angeles, CA
2020
Fool’s Window, Livestream as a part of Automata Summer Residency, Los Angeles, CA
2019
Test Pleasures, PAM, Los Angeles, CA
2018
ENDBRINGER, Jace Space, Los Angeles, CA
2015
Return to FOREVERHOUSE, Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
2025
Ottodokki (demonstration performance), SF Art Book Fair, San Francisco, CA
2022
Tomorrow Show with Ron Lynch, Elysian Theater, Los Angeles, CA
2021
Ritual Schizophonia, Indexical, Santa Cruz, CA
Live Birth!, Elysian Theater, Los Angeles, CA
Live to Tell, Chabad Center for Jewish Life, Newport Beach, CA
The Dope Elf, The Lab, San Francisco, CA
2019
Interworveled, Processing Community Day (performative lecture), UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
The Dope Elf, Yale Union, Portland, OR
2018
When Puppets Are Your Only Friends, Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Los Angeles, CA
Duets, LAND fundraiser, Los Angeles, CA
Dog Dream, NAVEL, Los Angeles, CA
2017
PSYCHOPOMP, Labande Art Museum, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA
2016
Corps, Driveway 327, Venice, CA
Enlarged Fern, Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles, CA
2015
Les Urbaines Performance Festival, Lausanne, Switzerland
Regional, International, Extra Terrestrial, Museum as Retail Space, Los Angeles, CA
Hotel Theory, REDCAT, CA
2014
Machine Project Field Guide to the Gamble House, Gamble House, Pasadena, CA