Anita Cheng and Ronaldo Kiel are artists who collaborate in digital media to create installations, videos and performances. Cheng is a choreographer and Kiel is a visual artist. They work with ideas on the perception versus reality. Their artistic contributions explore the connections between the object, its representation and the viewer.
In collaboration with Ronaldo Kiel, Anita has been an artist-in-residence at Dance Theater Workshop's Media Lab in NYC, the Joyce Theater Foundation's Joyce SoHo and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy. Cheng's choreography and media work has been presented in theaters, galleries, on DVD and the internet. In 2004, her modern dance company, Anita Cheng Dance, was commissioned and presented by Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church as part of their City/Dans series, and by the Mulberry St. Theater in their series "Ear you the Ground"(2007). Cheng received numerous scholarships, including a "Fulbright Grant" in choreography for Hong Kong (1991) and a "Fulbright Grant" for the Federal University of Rio De Janeiro (2007) to teach digital art in the School of Communications (ECO). She received two Experimental Television Center Grants for her dances with video. Other honors include performances in the 8th and 9th Biennial Art and Technology Symposiums at Connecticut College. In 2001 she was one of four emerging choreographers invited to the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival to take place in a joint workshop with compositional fellows at Tanglewood Music Center. Cheng holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Michigan.
Kiel's work was chosen to participate in festivals, exhibitions and symposiums of art and technology such as the "Prix Ars Electronica" in Austria and the "International Media Art Biennale" in Poland. He has shown his works in Austria, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Paraguay, Poland, the Ukraine and throughout the United States. His video installations were presented in international exhibitions like "Improbable Movements" (2003) cured by Philippe Dubois and Ivana Bentes, and "In Time, Without Time" (2004) curated by Daniela Bousso. He created site-specific works in collaboration with Anita Cheng for the Brooklyn Public Library (2005), and in a collaboration including Regina Silveira, for the opening of the "Cultural Institute Telemar" (2005). Cheng&Kiel works were shown in the gallery Laura Marsiaj (2006). He received a "Artist's Fellowship in Computer Arts" from the "New York Foundation of the Arts" (2003) in collaboration with Anita Cheng. He is currently faculty in the City University of New York (CUNY), teaching digital art in the Department of Art at Brooklyn College.