About the author
Moaya Scheiman
Artist, filmmaker, writer
Moaya Scheiman is a German-born artist, filmmaker, and writer of Choctaw and Jewish heritage. Working across poetry, performance, documentary, and bookmaking, he explores family memory, migration, bodily experience, and the uncertain work of return.
His early artistic education began in New York City’s East Village, where he studied with the American Abstract Expressionist Don Stacy, first in Stacy’s studio and later at The New School.
Moving from New York to California, Moaya encountered the human potential movement, studying psychodrama, biofeedback, and aspects of transpersonal and humanistic psychology.
While attending Johnston College at the University of Redlands, he met performance artist Barbara T. Smith, who became the subject of an early documentary he made. He also studied film at Sherwood Oaks Experimental Film School in Hollywood.
In 1980, Moaya relocated to South Asia and later Southeast Asia, pursuing documentary work concerned with communities and ways of life undergoing profound change. This work raised enduring questions about witnessing and representation: what a record can preserve, what it leaves outside the frame, and what should remain private or unspoken.
His writing and bookmaking carry these questions into poems, fragments, images, and performance scores, leaving room for uncertainty, refusal, and the unfinished.
Rooms of Water brings together The River Is Already Carrying Us, Twenty-Five Permissions, and The House of Ordinary Weather. Through poetry and intimate performance scores, the omnibus invites readers into encounters with memory, care, and absence.