This donation will help us with our mission to support and present the work of experimental artists in Los Angeles.

Founded in 2004, Automata is an artist-run non-profit organization. Automata incubates, creates, and presents experimental puppet theater, performance, installation art, moving image and other contemporary artistic practices at the fulcrum between object and performance, artifact and ephemera, magic and mechanics. By taking an art form (puppetry) that is frequently marginalized and locating it at the intersection of contemporary art practices, Automata seeks to radically redefine and re-contextualize the notion of object performance. 

Located in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, our intimate venue and store-front exhibitions provide inquisitive artists, audiences, and passers-by a space to explore our current culture of animated objects. We invite the public to witness works-in-progress and to gather, mingle, and enter into dialogue with artists directly. Engaging audiences in person and online, we embrace approaches to technology that expand the aura of the handmade. 

We present work from a wide range of voices, often rooted in history—especially the history,  mythology and geography of Los Angeles—to foster a sense of belonging and identification with  this sprawling and diverse city. Cultural equity is central to our mission and practice, and we have a strong interest in the ways that community is created and supported through making and gathering to experience small-scale performance. 

Automata supports work in development, collaborating with artists at all stages to realize curious, honest, and risky new directions through artist residencies, guest curatorships, virtual interfaces, and durational live events. We seek to support work that has something to say.