The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a Performance Grant to Mary Prescott for her upcoming multidisciplinary project, Ancestral Table.

In Ancestral Table, Thai-American interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer Mary Prescott pairs a shared meal with live performance to examine the connections between ecology, migration, cultural inheritance, and maternal legacy through her mother’s Thai recipes.

Through travel, interviews, archival investigation, and culinary research, Prescott explores her mother’s recipes to retrace the obscured legacies and migrations of her maternal Asian ancestors, investigating how foodways, ecological shifts, and historical and political events shaped their culture and lived experiences.

These findings are channeled into an evening-length solo performance presented alongside a 5-course communal meal. As each course is served, audiences are enveloped in original music overlaid with text and film, emerging directly from her ancestors’ stories, heritage, and cuisine. Combined with the conviviality of a shared meal, the performance transports audiences to the sounds, environments, time, and places of Prescott’s ancestors. Through this multisensory design, Ancestral Table provides multiple points of entry into the intersections of new music, cuisine, ecology, politics, migration, personal history, and memory.

Friday, January 15, 2027 & Saturday, January 16, 2027
Roulette Intermedium.

Mary Prescott’s output includes several large-scale interdisciplinary performances, improvised music, opera, sound journaling, solo and chamber concert works, and documentary film. Featured in “21 for ’21: Composers and Performers Who Sound Like Tomorrow,” The Washington Post describes her work as “a bright light cast forward... uncompromising,” and “masterfully envisioned.”

Prescott is an awardee of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in Music, Princess Grace Award in Theater, McKnight Composer Fellowship, National Performance Network Creation and Development Fund, Café Royal Foundation Performance Grant, American Composers Forum Create Commission, and many others. She has been commissioned by the LA Phil, Roulette Intermedium, Public Functionary, The Great Northern Festival, White Snake Projects, The American Opera Project, Living Arts of Tulsa, BRKFST Dance Company, and others. Her residencies include Bogliasco, Camargo, Loghaven, VCCA, and Lanesboro Arts.

Mary Prescott is a Steinway Artist.