Holly Bass is a multidisciplinary performance and visual artist, writer and director.

She currently has work on tour as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s 2022 Outwin Triennial. Her creative output includes durational performances lasting from five to 12 hours, as well as video, installation and photography. She has received numerous Artist Fellowships from the DC Arts Commission and was a 2019 Red Bull Detroit artist-in-residence and a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow. She is a 2020–2022 Live Feed resident artist at New York Live Arts and a 2021–22 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. A Cave Canem fellow, she has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies.

As an arts journalist early in her career, she was the first to put the term “hip hop theater” into print in American Theatre Magazine. A gifted and dedicated teaching artist, she directed a year-round creative writing and performance program at the D.C. juvenile detention center for four years. She is currently the national director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program which strategically uses the arts to transform schools facing historic inequities.