Bass was born in New York City in 1984 and lived on the Upper West Side. In 2002 she moved to New Haven to pursue a BA in Theatre Studies at Yale University. Two labor strikes in 2003, including a dining hall workers' strike, strongly affected Bass's undergraduate experience, and influenced her later involvement with organizing. She completed her MFA in Performance and Interactive Media at Brooklyn College in 2011.
Career
Bass moved to Bushwick in 2006, after her undergraduate degree programme. In Bushwick she became a co-lead organizer of Arts in Bush-wick, and helped to organize Bushwick Open Studios, a project of which she is now critical, saying that "ultimately the damaging effect has been greater than the fun." While living in Bushwick, Bass worked to register the area's voters and, as a result of a displacement mapping project, gained a seat on Community Board Four, which she held until 2012. In 2011, she moved to an apartment in Bed-Stuy, where she currently lives. In 2014 she was the Create Change resident for The Laundromat Project in Bed-Stuy, creating a work called "The Department of Local Affairs". For this work she collected information in the form of writing, drawing, and conversation by and for locals, examining what this looked like in contrast to information collected by companies for advertising or tourism. Her ongoing eight-chapter project exploring individual social interactions, The Book of EverydayInstruction, has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art and other venues. Chapters from this work have included creating poetic installations in bathrooms and inviting gallery goers to smell jars of spice. Her work has been exhibited at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Cooper Union, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Knockdown Center, and Momenta Art, amongst other venues. She is the recipient of residencies at The Laundromat Project, Bemis Center, Triangle Arts Association, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Counsel Workspace residency, and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. In 2019 the Studio Museum in Harlem commissioned her first institutional solo exhibition, Wayfinding at St. Nicholas Park.
