Ryan MacDonald

Ryan Alexander MacDonald (born May 25, 1977, in Kansas City, Missouri) is an American writer, sound and visual artist. He won the American Short(er) Fiction Award for his title story in 2012.

Education MacDonald earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Art and a Master of Fine Arts in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (where he was a University Fellow).

Career He is the author of The Observable Characteristics of Organisms (2014) from Fiction Collective Two. In 2012, he won the American Short(er) Fiction Award for his title story. In 2017 he was nominated for a Bessie Award in Outstanding Composition and Sound Design for Choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh's, The End of Men, Again. He has worked for over fifteen years in collaboration with his wife, Choreographer Aretha Aoki. Aoki and MacDonald's 2020 performance, IzumonookunI, a dance/punk/goth-glam/synthwave show that weaves together the lost history of kabuki and its real and imagined influences and offshoots also features their daughter, Frankie Mayfield Aoki-MacDonald.