Nicholas Monsour
 
biography
 
  Nicholas Monsour is a filmmaker, theater maker, writer,
musician and artist currently living in Chicago, Illinois. He has created performances, video work, music and art pieces which have been exhibited in multiple cities in the United States and abroad. He is a co-founder of Weather Talking Theater Company, an active member of several organizations including the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom and the National Anti-Vivisection Society, and is the founder and director of the Center for Decorporative Research.
   
  Nicholas Monsour was born in Los Angeles in 1980. During high-school at Crossroads School for the
Arts and Sciences he studied art and music, and played bass in the band The Cairo Gang. After high school he studied set design at Otis Art School, and then worked as a production assistant on feature films including Man On The Moon, directed by Milos Foreman. In 1999 he volunteered at Dakshinayan, an environmental and social justice non-profit organization in New Delhi, through which he worked on a watershed develop-ment program in a tribal village in Madhya Praddesh for three months.

 
  After returning from India, Nicholas Monsour studied installation and contemporary art theory at Santa
Monica College for one year before applying to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was accepted and awarded the Presidential Scholarship. In the summer of 2000 he had his first gallery exhibition with Becca Mann, entitled New Sacred Instruments at the Upstairs at the Market Gallery in Los Angeles..
 
In 2001 Nicholas Monsour interned at the Curious Theater Branch during the production of Round and
Round, written by Jenny Magnus and directed by Beau O’Reilly, and assisted in the preparation of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival. From 2001 to 2003 he played bass in the band The Planck Length.
 
  After two years at the Art Institute, Nicholas Monsour took two years off from school to work at the Fund
for Public Interest Research, where he trained canvassers in fund-raising and did campaign work for Greenpeace. Also during this time, he worked on several performances with Brian Torrey Scott as a composer, performer and artistic director, In 2004, he co-founded the Weather talking Theater Company with Brian Torrey Scott, Sam Wagster, Donovan Sherman, Jeff Harms and Tiffany Bullard, which created and premiered the performance Discarded Landscape at the 2005 Performing Arts Chicago PAC/edge festival. He also collaboratively wrote, directed and performed a segment of the Neo-Futurists performance Alice with Jeff Harms and Brian Torrey Scott in 2005. In the summer of 2005, his video piece The Machine Age and his internet project Digital Bricolage were official selections at the Version Festival in Chicago.
 
  Having returned to the Art Institute to complete his Bachelors in Fine Arts in 2006, Nicholas Monsour
has recently co-created the performance Cook County Clare which was performed at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaugan, Ireland in the summer of 2006, and was the First Assistant Director for the feature film Good Dick, directed by Marianna Palka, which was shot in the fall of 2006. He is currently the bassist in the band Cola Wars, and has a solo music project called the Slav Melancholy.