02/06/2026
LONGITUDES RESIDENCIES
Artist in Residency | Garrett Obrycki
Garrett Obrycki’s life and interdisciplinary career are driven by an ongoing exploration of how people create, learn, connect, and repair. Raised in a conservative, evangelical environment where his queerness clashed with absolute certainties, Obrycki turned to deep questioning as both a refuge and a guide, eventually allowing those questions to dictate the path of his professional journey.
His initial pursuit of how people create led him to the Eastman School of Music, resulting in a decade-long national career as an opera singer and collaborative artist. Seeking to understand how people learn, lead, and think together, he later transitioned to the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School. This shift propelled him into producing civic and arts projects across the United States, Europe, and Central America.
Obrycki applied this expertise as the Creative Lab Director for the Grammy-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird, where he developed artistic residencies at the Yerkes Observatory. He also co-founded qima, a consulting practice that helps executive leaders design complex initiatives combining systems thinking, community connection, and the arts.
Now training as a clinical social worker in Minneapolis, Obrycki's focus increasingly centers on questions of breakdown, care, psychosis, institutional life, and relational repair in an era of fragmentation and accelerating complexity. His particular interests lie in group process, therapeutic presence, systems dynamics, and the fragile human conditions that make collaboration, meaning-making, and repair possible.
Across mediums including sound, facilitation, writing, research, watercolor, and participatory performance, Obrycki continually returns to a small, vital constellation of questions:
- How do people create?
- How do people learn?
- How do groups hold together?
- What happens when systems break down?
- How do we repair?
Supported by República Portuguesa – Cultura, Juventude e Desporto / Direção-Geral das Artes
