A.S.M. Kobayashi is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid, interactive work mixes documentary and fiction through video, performance, installation and illustration. Her critically acclaimed performance, Say Something Bunny! based on found audio recordings, was heralded as “The best new theater experience in town” by Vogue and a NYTimes critics’ pick. Additionally, SSB! was listed in Time Out’s 2017 top ten productions and BOMB’s Best of Performance in 2018. Kobayashi is a 2024 Creative Capital Awardee, 2006 recipient of the Trinity Square Video Artistic Vision Award and 2007 Marty Award. She has received nominations for a 2018 Drama Desk award, 2019 United Solo Special Award and received grants from the Canada Council, Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council. Her video work and performances have been exhibited internationally at museums and film festivals including; The Lincoln Center, GTA24, The Power Plant, Gallery TPW, Nuit Blanche, BFI London Film Festival, Jakarta International Film Festival and Damascus Video Art Festival. She was a fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar and the 2026 Brakhage Symposium and has received prestigious residencies and commissions from Les Subsistances, Toronto International Reel Asian Film Festival and Mercer Union. Kobayashi was the founding art director of the documentary journal, World Records (2018-2021) and produces Special Projects at UnionDocs, Center for Documentary Art. She is based in Toronto where she is producing her documentary performance Electric Neon Clock. The first chapter of this work was described by the Sense of Cinema as “elegant and hard-hitting. The short film File No. 2034 is an example of how going back and simply looking at the past, and an archive, with fresh eyes, can be transformative.”
To source archival material Kobayashi has met strangers in bars, ventured across the US to sift through hundreds of radio scripts and viewed an 1970s erotic film in the middle of a public library.