Erik Moskowitz + Amanda Trager are a Brooklyn-based artist team who make video installations for exhibition in gallery and museum spaces as well as in conventional cinematic ones. Their work has been shown at numerous venues around the world including the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Participant, Inc. in New York; Museo Reina Sofia in Spain; and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Early life Moskowitz and Trager were both born and raised in New York City. When Moskowitz was 8 years old, he was selected by Spalding Gray from a pool of public school children, to play a part in The Wooster Group’s Sakonnet Point (1975). He performed in various roles with The Wooster Group until 1982; his relationship with video and performance artist Joan Jonas dates from this period. His parents are the painters Hermine Ford and Robert Moskowitz, and his grandfather was the painter Jack Tworkov. Early work Trager studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League throughout her adolescence. Her first job after studying painting at Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio) was with Telos Press, an academic journal founded in 1968. Its founder and editor Paul Piccone was a friend and mentor until his death in 2003. Trager exhibited painting, sculpture and installation before her collaborative partnership with Moskowitz, which began in 2006. From 2001-2008 Moskowitz produced low-budget syndicated Television for E!, Sony Pictures Television, MTV, and CBS Television. Simultaneously, he made video works, which have been presented at the Centre Pompidou, International Film Festival Rotterdam and 303 Gallery, NY, among other venues. In 2005, Trager appeared in Moskowitz's video, A Bit of Dirt. Collaborative work Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager began to work together formally in 2006 when invited to the Montalvo Arts Center in Northern California as part of the Lucas Artists Residency Program, where they conceived their first collaboration, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2008). The work takes its title from a failed utopia in Aristophanes' comedy The Birds and tells the story of a couple that leaves the city for an intentional living community. Using a formal device of ventriloquism, which appears in Moskowitz and Trager's other collaborative work, dialogue is dubbed and sung by a "digitally layered 'multi-voice,'" in which "the artists' voices, mixed occasionally with others are collapsed in a single harmony." The work features both Trager and Moskowitz as fictional characters and, later, as themselves in the process of editing