Artists Archive

Adam Linder: 1 Event; Adam Linder (b. 1983, Sydney) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. He makes stage works and provides Choreographic Services. FULL SERVICE (Services No. 1 - 5) was presented by CCA Wattis Institute (San Francisco, 2018) and Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (2019), alongside a new work for the 2019 Venice Biennale. Linder will premiere a new work at MoMA New York in 2020. Recent solo or two person shows include South London Gallery, Kunsthalle Basel, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. His works have been commissioned, presented or hired by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Kampnagel, Hamburg; Sadler’s Wells, London; American Realness, NYC; MoCA, Los Angeles; 356 Mission, LA; Frieze LIVE, London; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Linder participated in the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Liverpool Biennial and Made in LA at the Hammer Museum. He has performed with the Michael Clark Company, Meg Stuart’s Damaged Goods, and The Royal Ballet London.
Adela Demetja: 1 Event; Adela Demetja is a curator and author born in 1984 in Tirana, Albania. She holds a Master's Degree in Curatorial and Critical Studies from Goethe University and Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Demetja was first trained as a painter and studied from 2002 to 2006 at Academy of Art in Tirana, Albania. She is the director of Tirana Art Lab – Center for Contemporary Art, Albania's leading independent art institution, which she established in 2010. As an independent curator, she has organized, managed, and curated numerous international exhibitions and events in a number of European countries. In 2016, she was appointed curator of Focus: Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania at viennacontemporary international art fair in Vienna, Austria. In 2015, she co-curated the Third Edition of the International Contemporary Project Biennale D-0 Ark Underground, which took place in the anti-atom shelter build by Tito in Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Other thematic exhibitions she has curated include: The aesthetic of the small act at Action, Action Field Kodra Festival in Thessaloniki, Greece and Voices of Truth in Villa Roman, Florence, Italy. As an author, she writes exhibition reviews, catalogue texts, and articles for online platforms and publications in Albania and throughout Europe.
Ahamefule J. Oluo: 1 Event; Ahamefule J. Oluo (they/them) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer, comedian, and creator of live performance. They were a founding member of the award-winning experimental jazz quartet Industrial Revelation and is a Mellon Foundation Creative Research Fellow, a Creative Capital awardee, an Artist Trust Arts Innovator awardee, and a semifinalist in NBC’s Stand Up for Diversity comedy competition. Oluo co-produced comedian Hari Kondabolu’s albums Waiting for 2042 and Mainstream American Comic for Kill Rock Stars, and the album Who the Hell is Dwayne Kennedy? by the eponymous standup legend. They have premiered two autobiographical, music-based performances at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival: Now I’m Fine, 2016, which was described by The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley as “a New Orleans funeral march orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg,” and by Time Out New York as "A day later, it's as though I grabbed a live wire; I can still feel the electricity in my skin;" and Susan, 2020, which Brantley called “virtuosic” and “crackerjack.” Oluo has written for television, including the stop motion animated comedy Santa Inc. on HBO Max, starring Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen. Now I’m Fine was adapted into the feature film Thin Skin, which Oluo wrote, scored, and starred in. Thin Skin won Best Director at the 2020 Harlem Film Festival and is now available on streaming services. They have appeared on This American Life. Oluo has been commissioned, presented, invited, or supported by Under the Radar, On the Boards, PICA, Meany Center, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Seattle Theatre Group, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre, REDCAT, MacDowell, Yaddo, Wa Na Wari, Langston, and more.
A.K. Burns: 1 Event; A.K. Burns is an artists and compulsive collaborator who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Using sculpture, video, collage and performed social actions, Burns exploits and perverts utilitarian forms, in an effort to upend the pathology of language and meaning. Burns is a founding member and co-organizer of W.A.G.E. and co-editor of RANDY, an annual trans-feminist arts magazine. Burns has shown and screened works internationally, including the Tate Modern (UK), The Brooklyn Museum (NY), Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (CA); Sculpture Center (NY), TAG (Netherlands), and Callicoon Fine Arts (NY). Burns received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
Alessandro Sciarroni: 2 Events; Alessandro Sciarroni is an Italian performing artist with an extensive background in visual art and theater. His works are featured in contemporary dance and theater festivals, museums, and art galleries, as well as in unconventional spaces and involve professionals from different disciplines.
His work goes beyond the traditional definitions of gender. He starts from a conceptual Duchamp-like matrix, makes use of a theatrical framework, and he can use some techniques and experiences from dance, as well as circus or sports. In addition to the rigor, coherence and clarity of each creation, his work tries to uncover obsessions, fears and fragilities of the act of performing, through the repetition of a practice to the limits of the physical endurance of the interpreters, looking at a different dimension of time, and to an empathic relationship between the audience and the performers.
His works have been performed in 21 European countries, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, and the United Arab Emirates. Among the main events he took part: the Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Impulstanz Festival in Wien, the Venice Biennale, the Festival d'Automne and the Festival Séquence Danse at 104 in Paris, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Juli Dans Festival in Amsterdam, and he exhibited his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the MAXXI Museum in Rome.
Alessandro Sciarroni is supported by APAP - Advancing Performing Arts Projects - and his shows are produced by Marche Teatro in collaboration with international co-producers such as the Comune di Bassano del Grappa / Centro per la Scena Contemporanea, the Biennale de la Danse / Maison de la Danse de Lyon, the Mercat de les Flors-Graner / Barcelona, Centrale Fies and the Association Corpoceleste-C.C.00# of which he is artistic director. It is also one of the artists of the Project Matilde, regional platform for the new scene in Marche. In 2015, Alessandro Sciarroni was appointed Associate Choreographer of the company of the Ballet of Rome and he is supported for his latest creation Aurora from the Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès.
alessandrosciarroni.it
Alexandria Saleem: 1 Event; Alexandria Rema Saleem is a first generation Palestinian American* artist and cultural worker. She works with individuals, communities, and the land to reclaim our right to sacred spaces through land tending, worldbuilding, dance, ritual, risk, and tenderness. Flowers are her deepest ally and main medium, working between the land as a regenerative flower farmer and her community as florist, event designer, and installation artist. She is currently co-stewarding the Black Oregon Land Trust and is the Director of Arts and Culture with the Center for Study and Preservation of Palestine.
*Saleem grapples with an appropriate way to name her locations amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects.
Alex Cecchetti: 1 Event; Alex Cecchetti is an artist based in Paris, France, who works primarily in writing and performance. Cecchetti has published several books of his writing, and performed internationally at places including: La Vatrine, Paris, France (2010); Art Pavillion, Zagreb, Croatia (2010); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France (2009); and Artists Space, New York, NY (2009). Cecchetti was an artist in residence at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2006) and SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2003).
Alex S. Vitale: 1 Event; Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults community based movements, human and civil rights organizations, and governments internationally. Prof. Vitale is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing. His academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have been published in The NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Vice News, Fortune, and USA Today. He has also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, PBS, Democracy Now, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
www.alex-vitale.info
Alex Tatarsky: 1 Event; Called a “hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” by Theatre Jones and “outrageous and profane" by The New York Times, Alex Tatarsky makes performances in the uncomfortable in-between zone of comedy, dance-theater, performance art, and deluded rant—sometimes with songs. Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt. Playing with perceptions of language and narrative structure, their live performances are highly responsive to venue and audience, often breaking the fourth wall and embracing humor to reveal vulnerability and humanity. Venues include La Mama Experimental Theater Club, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, Playwrights Horizons, The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many bars and basements. As curatorial fellow at The Poetry Project, they organized a series on the poetics of rot. Research interests include bootlegs, hellscapes, and compost.
https://tatarsky.biz/
Alfredo Jaar: 2 Events; Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021), as well as, Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).

Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017), Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2020) and SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo (2021).

The artist has realized more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020.

His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide.
alfredojaar.net
Ali Chahrour: 1 Event; Ali Chahrour (Beirut, Lebanon) is a choreographer, dancer, and graduate of the theatre department at The Lebanese University. Influenced by techniques from several European countries, he studies contemporary dance in the Arab world and movement that is related to society’s memory and its local circumstances that contribute to creating an identity for contemporary dance, whose techniques and problematics are inspired by its surroundings and history. His work examines the relationship between dancing and the body, and the religion and the sacred, relying on the Islamic and Shiite religious rituals and practices in the Arab world.
Alicia ayo Ohs: 1 Event
A.L. Steiner: 1 Event; A.L. Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of the project Ridykeulous, founding member of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her works have been featured internationally at such venues as P.S.1/MoMA, Tate Modern, The New Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Centre Pompidou, The Kitchen, REDCAT, and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, among others. Her work is included in such public collections as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Steiner is currently based in Los Angeles and is faculty at the University of Southern California.
Selected Press
The Lowdown: A.L. Steiner, Io Tillet Wright, New York Times T Magazine, May 11, 2011.
Eve Fowler & A.L. Steiner, North Drive Press #4, 2007.
Would it be okay if I kept my sweater on?, Naomi Fry, Paper Monument.
Amalia Dache: 1 Event; Amalia DacheAn Afro-Cuban American scholar, Amalia Dache is an assistant professor in the Higher Education Division. Her experiences as a Cuban refugee and student traversing U.S. educational systems—among them urban K–12 schools, community college, state college, and a private research-intensive university—inform her research and professional activities. Dr. Dache’s major research areas are postcolonial geographic contexts of higher education, Afro-Latina/o/x studies, community and student resistance, and the college-access experiences of African diasporic students and communities. She is lead editor of Rise Up! Activism as Education, published in 2019 by Michigan State University Press. Her most recent article, “Ferguson’s Black radical imagination and the scyborgs of community–student resistance,” appeared in The Review of Higher Education in 2019.
Amber Boydston: 1 Event; Amber Boydston is a Portland born Abolitionist educator, with an Irish mother and an Ethiopian father who has been teaching and facilitating trainings around social justice and equity for 25 years since she was a young teen. Her organization Spirited Justice focuses on police abolition in addition to the abolition of all anti-Black and oppressive systems. She works with businesses interested in decolonizing the way they sustain their practice within communities, in addition to teaching inside and outside of the educational industrial complex, elementary through higher ed. Amber's work focuses largely on healing the epigenetic impacts of colonialization and combating ACE's (adverse childhood experiences) that People of the Global Majority experience through the sanctioned systems of fascism and genocide. She weaves in large amounts of breath and meditation practice with her education, supporting the journey of Liberation across the Global Majority diaspora. As a parent and lifelong learner, Amber is incredibly passionate about remaining curious, using her access to open doors, and keeping the pressure on creating the kinds of worlds in praxis that we hope to one day leave behind for the youth.
Amy O'Neal: 1 Event; Amy O’Neal is a dancer, performer, choreographer, and dance educator based in Seattle, WA. For the last 15 years, she has taught and performed throughout the US, Japan and Mexico and choreographed for stage, commercials, rock shows, galleries, dance films and music videos. Her work is an amalgam of her diverse movement and life experiences presenting social commentary with dark humor and heavy beats. She is the recipient of numerous grants including awards from Creative Capital, the National Performance Network, the National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts and the James W. Ray Project Venture Award through Artist Trust and Frye Art Museum. Amy has been an artist-in-residence at Bates Dance Festival, Headlands Center for the Arts, the US/Japan Choreographer’s Exchange, and Velocity Dance Center. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, a DanceWEB Scholar, and two-time Stranger Genius Awards nominee. She has worked extensively with musician/comedian Reggie Watts since 2002 both on stage and screen. She choreographed his Comedy Central produced “Fuck, Shit, Stack” video and toured nationally in his show Disinformation. She has created commissioned pieces for Degenerate Art Ensemble and Spectrum Dance Theater and collaborated with Savion Glover and Daniel Bernard Roumain through Seattle Theater Group. She has performed in the work of Pat Graney, Scott/Powell Performance, and Mark Haim. From 2000 to 2010, she was co-director of locust (music/dance/video) with musician/composer Zeke Keeble, creating 6 evening length works and several shorter works. She teaches Contemporary Dance and Urban Styles at Velocity Dance Center and House at The Beacon: Massive Monkees studio in Seattle. She also teaches dance composition and improvisation for Seattle Theater Group’s Dance This program. She holds a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, and her dance writing has been published in Dance Magazine, City Arts Magazine, and ArtDish Forum.
Andrew Gilbert: 1 Event; Andrew Gilbert is a Los Angeles-based performer, musician, and teacher. In 2007 he co-founded Poor Dog Group, an experimental performance collective with whom he has developed six works as a sound designer and performer, performing in venues including REDCAT, the Experimental Media and Performance Art Center (EMPAC), The Getty Villa, Grotowski Institute in Poland, Bitef Theater in Serbia, and the Pula International Theater Festival in Croatia. House Music, an ongoing co-creation with choreographer Jennie Liu, is a performance for 16 guests rooted in an ongoing study of Japanese tea ceremony, and has been performed since 2014 at venues including Prelude Festival, Live Arts Exchange, HomeLA, The Mistake Room and the Printed Matter Art Book Fair. He most recently designed sound for choreographer Faye Driscoll's Thank You for Coming: Space. Andrew is one half of the band Royal Auditorium. @royalauditorium @andrewgilbertindependentartist
Andrew Schneider: 1 Event; Andrew Schneider is an OBIE award-winning, Drama Desk nominated performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist who creates original works for theater, video, and installation since 2003. Schneider creates and performs original performance works, builds interactive electronic art works and installations, and was a Wooster Group company member (video/performer) from 2007-2014. Rooted at the intersection of performance and technology, Schneider’s work critically investigates our over-dependence on being perpetually connected in an always-on world. Andrew’s original performance work in NYC includes AFTER (2018 Under the Radar Festival), YOUARENOWHERE (2015 OBIE award –The Invisible Dog, 2016 Drama Desk nom – 3LD); DANCE/FIELD (2014 – Dance Roulette), TIDAL (2013 – River to River festival); and WOW+FLUTTER (2010 –The Chocolate Factory Theater) among others.
Angélica Maria Millán Lozano: 1 Event; Angélica Maria Millán Lozano is a Portland based artist from Bogotá, Colombia. She creates abstract and figurative compositions on distressed fabrics that question the social injustices that affect Latinas in the home. She received her MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently the Curatorial Fellow for Community Engagement at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). Millán is also a co-founder at cvllejerx, a poc focused fashion, poetry, and performance collaboration. Millán has presented work at Disjecta, Williamson | Knight, Nationale in Portland, OR; Gallery Protocol in Gainesville, Florida; and Bridge Productions in Seattle, Washington.
Anna Martine Whitehead: 3 Events; Anna Martine Whitehead does performance from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires; the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi Nations; as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Meskwaki; the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, and the Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) Nations. Their solo and collaborative work has been presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Chicago Symphony Orchestra, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San José Museum of Art, CA; Links Hall, Chicago; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She has developed her craft working closely with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, among others. She has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, MAP Fund, Dance/USA, PICA’S Creative Exchange Lab, Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago, 3AP (3Arts Projects), Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Whitehead has written about Blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, Frieze, and Art Practical. They have also contributed chapters to a range of publications, including Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford University Press, 2017), Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Sobsercove, 2016), and Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (Gallery 400, 2016). Whitehead is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).

Anna Martine Whitehead Website
Anthony Hudson / Carla Rossi: 1 Event; Anthony Hudson is a Grand Ronde/Siletz artist and writer also known as Carla Rossi, Portland's premier drag clown. Hudson’s performance work—from his award-winning solo show Looking for Tiger Lily to Queer Horror at the Hollywood Theatre—have earned him national fellowships, international engagements including the US Pavilion’s drag clown in residence at the 2024 Venice Biennale, features in Hyperallergic and Art in America, and sainthood from the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. A 2023 FSG Writer’s Fellowship finalist and 2024 Tin House resident, Hudson’s writing has appeared in American Theatre, BOMB Magazine, and Arts and International Affairs. Hudson is currently adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.
Antoine Catala: 1 Event; Catala's practice, aside from making video, includes performance-based works and curating as a medium. A New York-based French artist, Catala holds a BA in mathematics and was schooled in sonic and fine arts at Middlesex and London Guildhall Universities in London. His work has been exhibited internationally at le Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Galerie Christine Mayer (Munich); GAM (Mexico); The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh); and numerous venues in Bordeaux, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Mexico, New York, Munich, Paris, Toulouse, and Saint-Etienne.
Antoine Defoort: 1 Event; Antoine Defoort tries to maintain a good atmosphere and a high level of porosity between his seasonal whims, life, as in real life, and contemporary art. He therefore often finds himself struggling with blatant contradictions that are either proudly assumed or shamefully hidden through the use of mind numbing non-sequiturs and wild digressions. Failures and accidents are welcomed with open arms and create a crispy granularity particularly appreciated by connoisseurs. Together, Julien Fournet, Antoine Defoort and Halory Goerger co-founded l’amicale de production, a small production house in Lille / Brussels (France / Belgium) For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Antonie Defoort and his collaborative work with Halory Goerger, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Ariel Osterweis: 1 Event; Ariel Osterweis (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) recently joined the faculty of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she will teach dance history, aesthetics, and pedagogy. She has also taught at Skidmore College, Wayne State University, and UC Berkeley. Osterweis earned her PhD in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley and her BA in Anthropology at Columbia University. Her book manuscript, Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity (working title), is under contract with Oxford University Press and examines issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary dance. Osterweis also researches Sub-Saharan African dance and mixed-race, feminist, and transgender performance that disavows dance-based virtuosity. Publications appear in Dance Research Journal, TDR/The Drama Review, Women and Performance, e-misférica, Theatre Survey, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Choreographies of 21st Century Wars (Oxford University Press, 2016). Osterweis danced with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Mia Michaels R.A.W., and Heidi Latsky, choreographs, and has served as dramaturg for John Jasperse and Narcissister. She is on the Board of Directors of the Society of Dance History Scholars and is Book Reviews Editor for Dance Research Journal.
Ashley Stull Meyers: 1 Event; Ashley Stull Meyers (she/her/hers) is a writer, editor, and culture worker. She has curated exhibitions and public programming for a diverse set of arts institutions along the West Coast, including those in San Francisco, CA, Oakland, CA, Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR. She has been in academic residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE) and the Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta). She has served as Northwest Editor for Art Practical and has contributed writing to BOMB, Rhizome, ARTS.BLACK, and SFAQ/NYAQ. In 2017 Stull Meyers was named director and curator of The Art Gym and Belluschi Pavilion at Marylhurst University, and the following year was made co-curator of the 2019 Portland Biennial. Currently, she is program director for the Multicultural Resource Center at Reed College, and is contracting as an independent curator.
Ashot Danielyan: 1 Event; Musician, poet, and performing artist Ashot Danielyan advocates art as an instrument for social change, a new and unfamiliar concept in Uzbekistan. The repressive political regime in Uzbekistan over the past three decades has resulted in isolation in artistic and social life leading to severe stasis. The dominance of the academic art school inherited from the Soviet past ensures that the local art community follows conformist self-censorship and aggressively rejects new ideas or socially engaged art practices.
Ashot’s project A Man With The Stool addresses many of these issues through performance, poetry, music, photography, and video. Having introduced the project in the major cities of Uzbekistan, Ashot is planning to tour it around Central Asian republics to build cultural bridges among these disconnected nations.
During his ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residencies), Ashot met professional and civic communities and explored cross-cultural experiences and socially engaged art practices which emerge from poetry, alternative music, and theater. Sharing interest and practice in Japanese history, language, culture, experimental poetry, performance, and book-making, Ashot and his US collaborator Mami Takahashi of PICA, launch a series of poetry readings, artist talks, and conversations. The multi-city cultural exchange resulted from Ashot’s and Mami’s virtual residency in 2020 and takes place at PICA and other cultural and educational institutions in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago in 2021.
Autumn Knight: 2 Events; Autumn Knight is a New York-based, Texas-born interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, sound, and text. Drawing from her training in theater, group dynamics, and psychology, Knight makes performances that reshape power structures and upend audience expectations of live experiences. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions, including Human Resources, Los Angeles; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Shedhalle, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, New York; Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Performance Space New York, NY; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired to the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors, and fellowships, including an Art Matters Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Back to Back Theatre: 1 Event; Back to Back Theatre comprises an ensemble of six actors considered to have developmental or intellectual disabilities. The company explores how respect is withheld from outsiders—the disabled or unemployed—who society deems “unproductive.” Since 1987, the ensemble, based in the small regional center at Geelong, Australia, has transformed the theater experience by exploring prejudices associated with the notion of “other.” The group’s past performances include Mental (1999); Dog Farm (2000); and Soft (2002). small metal objects received a 2008 Bessie Award after its performance at Under the Radar Festival, and a 2007 Zurich Theatre Festival Appreciation Prize for extraordinary achievement in theater. In 2005, the ensemble received the Sydney Meyer Performing Arts Award for their long-standing contribution to the development of Australian theater.
bart fitzgerald: 2 Events; bart fitzgerald (b. 1991) is a pastor, scholar, and cultural critic.
Beacon Sound: 1 Event; Beacon Sound is a record store, label, and event space located in North Portland dedicated to connecting the sometimes-disparate dots of contemporary music both locally and globally. By design, Beacon Sound is as much a cultural node as a record store: a gathering place for like-minded people, a home for all sorts of events and happenings, a facilitator/instigator of unexpected connections and modes of production.
Bebe Miller: 2 Events; Bebe Miller’s vision of dance and performance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty. Her aesthetic relies on the interplay of a work’s idea, its physicality, and the contributions of company members to fashion its singular voice. She has collaborated with artists, composers, writers and designers along with the dancers who share her studio practice and from whom she has learned what dancing can reveal. Seeking to expand the language of dance, Bebe Miller Company’s work encompasses choreography, writing, film, video and digital media.
A native New Yorker, Bebe first performed her choreography at NYC’s Dance Theater Workshop in 1978. She formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985 to pursue her interest in finding a physical language for the human condition. Since then, Bebe has created more than 50 dance works for the company that have been performed in nearly 400 engagements worldwide. BMC has been commissioned and presented by leading venues including 651 ARTS, BAM Next Wave, DTW, Jacob’s Pillow, Joyce Theater, PICA, REDCAT, Walker Art Center and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her choreography has been performed by Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M. (Abraham In Motion), Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, Salt Lake City’s Repertory Dance Theater, the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company, PACT Dance Company of Johannesburg, South Africa, and a host of colleges and universities.
Over the last decade the Company has produced a variety of digital archive projects that share the company’s creative practice with artists and audiences. Committed to keeping dance available to a wide spectrum of people and to further the conversation about the role of arts and creativity in our culture, BMC is dedicated to providing access to the creative process and expression to diverse communities.
Named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center in 2005, Bebe has been a Movement Research honoree, has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards, the David R. White Award from New York Live Arts, United States Artists and Guggenheim Fellowships, honorary doctorates from Ursinus College and Franklin & Marshall College, and is one of the inaugural class of Doris Duke Artist Award recipients. Bebe is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance and lives in Columbus, OH.
Becca Blackwell: 1 Event; Becca Blackwell is a NYC based trans actor, performer and writer. Existing between genders, and preferring the pronoun "they," Blackwell works collaboratively with playwrights and directors to expand our sense of personhood and the body through performance. Some of their collaborations have been with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok, Richard Maxwell, Sharon Hayes, Theater of the Two Headed Calf and Lisa D'Amour. Recently seen in Erin Markey's tour of A Ride on the Irish Cream and Richard Maxwell's Samara. Becca is a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award 2015.
Big Art Group: 1 Event; Big Art Group is a New York-based experimental performance ensemble founded by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson in 1999. The company pushes the formal boundaries of theater, film, and visual art through the use of technology and experimental methods of communication. In its history, the company has grown from an underground performance group to an internationally recognized ensemble with invitations from leading festivals and presenters including Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Festival d’automne à Paris, La Vie de Festival Rome, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and The Kitchen in New York.
Selected Press
10 years of Big Art Group, Justin Bond, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2010
Big Art Group: 'The People' Shaped by Local Views, Nirmala Nataraj, San Francisco Chronicle, September 15, 2011.
Black Aesthetic Studio: 2 Events; The Design Collaborative know as the Black Aesthetic Studio (BAS) is led by artist duo Cleo and Kayin Davis, in conjunction with Professor of Architecture Robert Alexander Clarke, and historian Kimberly Moreland. They will investigate policing through the lens of Oregonian historically anti-black urban politics and policies. And how these systems of policing affected Black Folks' ways of living, being, and seeing throughout time.
BAS aims to uncover how past, present, and future policing histories have imprinted African Americans' psychology and aesthetic throughout time. They will construct temporal gateways that will encapsulate specific periods which will draw the audience into black space, thus illuminating the user on how we see our histories and futures which has been policed by white authorship from the founding of our nation. These constructed visions will be critique on Oregon racist history and policies, allow one to understand how migration and oppression has transforms black identity and its expressions.
Cleo Davis started his education in architecture at the University of Oregon further changing to industrial design at San Jose State. He is an artist whose work takes a critical view of the social, political and cultural issues and through his work, he continues to reconstruct the cultural view modernizing while also highlighting traditions. Although he engages with multiple subjects and mediums his methodology remains consistent. He also has started the screw loose Studio the Mayo House project and most recently, the archives project in collaboration with Kayin.
Kayin Talton Davis started off in an artistic direction from a very young age, but later learned her love for math and science and pursued a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering at Portland State University. Her design projects were always influenced by a drive to be accessible to all. She started the soapbox theory in 2001, as a way to express herself creatively. And through these mediums, her interest is always in creating something that is positive, helpful and accessible to all but especially children from culturally underrepresented communities.
Robert Alexander Clarke is a designer, educator, and theorist practicing at the intersection of culture, identity, and architecture. His work aims to develop and canonize black aesthetics, thus authenticating it as a lens through which to practice architecture. His design office, BAS (Black Aesthetic Studio) was founded by Clarke, Cleo Davis and Kimberly Morland; their studio explores how to unearth new aesthetics that are immensely specific to African American culture, experience, and identity. Before joining as Activist in Residence at UCLA’s City Lab, Clarke held posts as a Wilson Smith III Design in Spatial Justice Fellow at the University of Oregon’s College of Design. As well as Research Fellow at Newlab under the supervision of architect and New York University Associate Professor of Practice Mitchell Joachim. Before opening his practice, Clarke worked for many years at architectural firms across the globe, including HOK, Terreform ONE, Gensler, and Archi-Union.
Kimberly Stowers Moreland, MBA, MURP, is wife of Michael L. Moreland and the mother of four amazing young adults: Katherine, Mike Jr., Kristen, and Karina. She owns Moreland Resource Consulting and has over 25+ years of experience in the public sector, urban and historic preservation, community development, and urban planning in Portland, Tacoma, and Salem.
Moreland serves as the President of the Oregon Black Pioneers, and their mission is to preserve the history of Black Oregonians. On behalf of the Oregon Black Pioneers, she authored Images of America: African Americans of Portland (Arcadia Publisher). She is the Vice-Chair of the Portland Historic Landmark Commission and a member of the Portland Landmark Commission.
As a community historian, Kimberly began documenting Portland's Black history for over 30+ years. As a city planner with the City of Portland, she worked with the community advisory committee and local historians to produce the History of Portland's African-American History (1805 to the Present). She was on the project team that produced Cornerstones of Community: The Buildings of Portland's African American History, published in 1995. She was subsequently involved in the Multiple Property Documentation (MPD) history project, which builds on the Cornerstones research to produce African American Resources in Portland, Oregon, from 1851 to 1973. This research brings attention to sites related to Portland's Black history so they can be listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
As owner of Moreland Resource Consulting, Moreland worked with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and Home Forward, former the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP), to better understand how their past policies unjustly impacted African Americans. Since, 2021, she has teamed with the City of Portland and Architectural Resource Group (ARG) on successfully approval of four National Historic Landmark Register nominations significant to Portland's Black history, including Dean's Beauty and Barbershop, Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, Golden West Hotel, and Dr. John D. Marshall Building. In 2023, with Constructing Hope, Moreland co-authored Building Legacy: BIPOC Construction Trailblazers in Oregon, which highlighted twenty-three construction trade pioneers.
In 2023, she partnered with Robert Clark and Cleo Davis to establish Black Aesthetics Studio LLC (BAS). The firm explored how to unearth new aesthetics specific to African-American culture, experience, and identity.
Blue: 1 Event; JaJa PDX is a performance art space, wood shop, ceramic studio, healing space, and a collective of creatives.
We have formed a group of diverse, like-minded individuals who come together to share ideas, learn from each other, build community, and create a new reality for artists in the Pacific Northwest to cement the bases for the future of Sustainable Arts Collectives.
Our 20,000sf warehouse is housed in the Central East Side Industrial sector of Portland. We are comprised of makers and creators of all types.
We have formed a partnership with The Haven, an incredible artist collection, who joined us and moved their community inside the walls of JaJa PDX.
Through this partnership, we are striving to build unity within the creative community of Portland. We are encouraging people to live outside of their comfort zone. JaJa PDX is rapidly morphing into a factory of peoples' dreams.
BodyCartography Project: 1 Event; As co-directors of the BodyCartography Project, Olive Bieringa (NZ) and Otto Ramstad (USA) investigate empathy and the physicality of space in urban, domestic, wild and social landscapes through dance, performance, video, installation work and movement education. Their works range from intimate solos for the street, stage, or gallery, to large site-based community dance works, short experimental films, to complex works for the stage. They have created performance works, short films and installations across the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Europe, Russia and South America and were recently named “Dance Company of the Year” by the Twin Cities City Pages. They are featured artists in the first book about site dance in the USA published by University of Florida Press entitled Site Dance, the Lure of Alternative Spaces.
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of BodyCartography Project and their work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Bouchra Ouizguen: 2 Events; Born in Ouarzazate, Morocco, and educated in France, Bouchra Ouizguen has been performing in Marrakech and France since 1995. In 2002, with Taoufiq Izeddiou and Saïd Ait El Moumen, Ouizguen founded ANANIA, a contemporary dance company in Marrakech, and created the On Marche dance festival. She also collaborated that year in forming the Al Mokhtabar contemporary dance company. Her choreographic works include AnaOunta (2002); Fina ken’ti (2002); Mort et moi (2005); Déserts, desires with Taoufiq Izeddiou (2006); Aïta with Naïma Sahmoud (2007); and Madame Plaza (2008-2009). Ouizguen has performed throughout Morocco and France, including at the prestigious Montpellier Dance Festival, and in New York at the 2010 FIAF Crossing the Line Festival in NYC. Since 2007, Ouizguen has been a co-organizer of the annual festival Recontres Chorégraphiques in Marrakech.
Selected Press
"A Moroccan Tradition in Full Cry," Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, September 23, 2010.
Boyzie Cekwana: 1 Event; Boyzie Cekwana (Durban, South Africa) is a performing artist and choreographer. Along with some of his continental peers, he is part of an artistic noise for developing a voice for contemporary dance practice and scholarship in Southern Africa. Together with Desiré Davids, he founded The Floating Outfit Project in 1996, where he remains Artistic Director, Choreographer and performer. He works across disciplines and his work has been shown across various platforms around the world. He is part of the on-going African guerrilla thought-factory, developing and shaping ideas for artistic self-expression in the Southern African region.
Brian Rogers: 1 Event; Brian Rogers is a theater and film director, video and sound artist, and performing arts curator. Since 1997, Rogers has created films, performances, albums, and other time-based projects including Small Songs (2023-2024); Screamers (2018); Hot Box (2012, co-presented with FIAF’s Crossing The Line Festival, PS122’s COIL Festival, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center and supported by a MAP Fund grant); and the Bessie-nominated Selective Memory (2010). Rogers composed the soundtrack for Shaun Iron & Lauren Petty’s film Standing By: Gatz Backstage and has collaborated as a sound and video artist with numerous experimental dance and theater artists in New York and elsewhere. Rogers is a MacDowell Fellow and has had residencies at Yaddo and Mount Tremper Arts.
Rogers is the Co-Founder and Artistic Executive Director of The Chocolate Factory Theater, an internationally recognized venue for experimental dance, theater, and interdisciplinary performance based in Queens, NY. Now in its twenty-second year, Rogers serves as chief curator of The Chocolate Factory Theater’s artistic programming and leads its artistic and administrative operations.
Rogers has taught at Kenyon College, University of Michigan, University of Colorado, The School at The Art Institute of Chicago, St. Johns University, Carnegie Mellon University, Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, New York University, Princeton University, and others. He has served as a panelist/recommender for New York State Council on the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, Fresh Tracks, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, Pew Charitable Trust, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Yaddo, Macdowell, MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim, and others. Rogers is a graduate of Bennington College.
chocolatefactorytheater.org/brianrogers
Britt Hatzius: 1 Event; Britt Hatzius works in film, video, sound, and performance, exploring ideas around language, interpretation, and the potential for discrepancies, ruptures, and (mis/)communication. Her work has been shown internationally at galleries, institutions, and performance and media arts festivals. Recent collaborations include the cinematic installation Micro Events (2012) with Tom Kok, the interactive performance This Is Not My Voice Speaking (2013) with Ant Hampton, and a sitespecific installation As Never Before, As Never Again (2014) with Ant Hampton.
Brook Colley: 1 Event; Dr. Brook Colley (Wasco, Warm Springs, Eastern Cherokee; Enrolled: Eastern Band of Cherokee) is an associate professor and chair of the Native American Studies program at Southern Oregon University. Colley’s research is focused on federal Indian law and policy, Oregon Tribes, intertribal relations and conflict, and community health and healing. Her book Power in the Telling: Grand Ronde, Warm Springs, and Intertribal Relations in the Casino Era was published in 2019 by the University of Washington Press and it was a finalist for the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction. In 2014, she received her PhD in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis, and is currently working on an intertribal Indigenous-led collaboration to enhance first food access and first food production in Southern Oregon. She lives in Jackson County with her daughter and two pups named Honey and Leonard Cohen.
Candace A. Avalos: 1 Event; Candace Avalos is a first-generation American “Blacktina”, daughter of Black Americans from the south and Guatemalan immigrants. Mi nombre en español es Candis Ávalos. Originally from Virginia, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Foreign Languages, with a focus on Spanish and Italian, and Master of Education degree in College Student Personnel Administration from James Madison University. Prior to her current career as a nonprofit executive leader, she started her career as an educator and worked at Portland State University for 8 years providing civic engagement education and advising support for student leaders. She lives in East Portland and is an active member of her community, previously serving as chair of the Citizen Review Committee and Charter Review Commission for the City of Portland, as well as currently on the boards of the Coalition of Communities of Color and Street Roots. Her hobbies include perfecting her Guatemalan recipes, reading social justice literature, playing kickball in her fast pitch league, and exploring Portland's parks.
Carissa Dez: 1 Event; Carissa Dez: Dedicated advocate for social justice and policing reform. With a background in investigative journalism and involvement in community organizing, Carissa would like to promote accountability, equity, and transparency in law enforcement practices. As a panelist, Carissa brings a wealth of experience and insights to the discussion, aiming to drive positive change and foster safer, more equitable communities for all.
Website: https://carissadez.com/
Carlos Motta: 1 Event; Carlos Motta | Photo by Cory Rice
Carlos Motta’s (b. 1978, Colombia) multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.
Motta's work was the subject of the survey exhibitions Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia (2017) that traveled to Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2018); and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015). His solo exhibitions at international museums include, The Crossing (2017), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Histories for the Future (2016), Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; Réquiem (2016), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano the Buenos Aires (MALBA) (2016); Patriots, Citizens, Lovers (2015), PinchukArtCentre, Kiev; Gender Talents (2013), Tate Modern, London; La forma de la libertad (2013), Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; We Who Feel Differently (2012), New Museum, New York; Brief History (2009), MoMA/PS1, New York; and The Good Life (2008), Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia; among others.
In 2020, Motta will participate in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and the Yerevan Biennial, and he will have solo exhibitions at Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery—University of California Santa Cruz, and at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA).
Carlos Motta’s first 20-year career monograph, Carlos Motta: History’s Back Rooms was published by SKIRA in June 2020. He won the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise (2017); the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008).
Motta received grants from Art Matters (2008), NYSCA (2010), Creative Capital, and the Kindle Project (2012).He was appointed tenure-track Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department in 2019.
Carrie Mae Weems: 1 Event; Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Determined as ever to enter the picture—both literally and metaphorically—Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for over thirty years. During this time, Carrie Mae Weems has developed a complex body of art employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.
In a New York Times review of her retrospective, Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible."
Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.
Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, The Alpert, The Anonymous was a Woman, and The Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.
In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur “Genius” grant as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also received the BET Honors Visual Artist award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art photography, was one of four artists honored at the Guggenheim’s 2014 International Gala, a recipient of the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography, The WEB Dubois Award from Harvard University, as well as Honorary Degrees from: California College of the Arts, Colgate University, Bowdoin College, the School of Visual Arts and Syracuse University.
She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London.
Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008, and is currently Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone who is Executive Director of Light Work.
carriemaeweems.net
Chase Biado: 1 Event; Chase Biado (b. 1985) is an artist based in his native Portland, Oregon. His varied output including sculpture, video, painting and writing has been exhibited at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Ulsan; Rocksbox, Portland, OR; sophiajacob, Baltimore, MD; Appendix Project Space, Portland OR; Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; Gaite Lyrique, Paris, FR; The Front, New Orleans, LA; among others. He received a BFA from Portland State University.
Chisao Hata: 1 Event; Chisao’s grandmother, Chisao Tajima, came to Oregon as a “picture bride” in 1890. In1942 her mother, Kasae (Kay) Tamiyasu married Tadashi (Ted) Hata in the Poston concentration camp in Poston, Arizona. Arts training and artists teachers in Iowa shaped Chisao’s early life. Moving to Oregon from Iowa, her years at the University of Oregon fueled her Asian American activism, community organizing and pursuits as an artist. Chisao connected to the Portland dance community where she eventually established a school and company. A life changing study in Japan solidified her artistic vision and commitment to exploring how artful practices could address social issues and create change. In the Japanese American community her early leadership led to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and inspired her personal research and artmaking. Her studies in the Portland State Dance program, abruptly ended with the decimation of the program. However, new opportunities thrust her into arts in public education where her teaching philosophy as a dance educator influenced curriculum design and integrated arts programming schoolwide and impacted hundreds of students.
Her personal work incorporate community engagement, social action and includes omitted histories on themes of identity, culture, social action and legacies. DrumSouls and We Are You were intercultural and intergenerational works visioning an inclusive America. Harmos, The Human Flag project created for Hiroshima Day performed throughout Portland and Remember Us were community based performances on a citywide scale. Gambatte-An American Legacy, The Assembly Center Project and We are Still Here incorporate Japanese American history, oral histories through the fusion of text, poetry, music, dance and visual storytelling. Additionally Ms. Hata has designed and directed numerous art driven programs like Move Backs and Move On classes.
Her training in modern dance, expressive arts, physical theater, healing through the arts, community facilitation, poetry, taiko drumming and classical Japanese dance integrate with her peace and justice work in diverse communities. Her original choreo poems and artistic collaborations root her artist voice. “There's not one group she hasn’t touched with her activism through art. Her themes are exigent for our times and urge participants to ponder their worldview and take action for change.” Chisao’s vision has consistently created innovative programs, artistic works and shaped community partnerships. Chisao is also an Artist Organizing for Change with the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, Maryland where the scope of her work develops intergenerational institutes, mentors socially engaged artists, creates cross-cultural programming rooted in the philosophies held at the Dance Exchange. This work continues to inspire her work as an Oregon Humanities Conversation Leader, community activist artist serving multiple organizations throughout the city of Portland and beyond.
Chris Riser: 1 Event; Chris Riser is a human, husband, father, and educator living and working on the stolen lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Kalapuya, Kathlamet, Molalla, Multnomah, Tualatin, and other peoples who have been here since time immemorial. He works in the field of education as a means of planting the seeds for a world that does not yet exist. He currently serves as the Administrator of HOLLA School in East Portland, with a mission to change the academic narratives for Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth.
Clare Croft: 1 Event; Clare Croft is a historian, theorist, and dramaturg, working at the intersection of dance studies and performance studies. She specializes in 20th and 21st century American dance, cultural policy, feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory. In all of these areas, Croft considers how dance is a way of thinking and a mode for asking questions. What does it mean to acknowledge that people have bodies and that they use their bodies to make meaning, create community, and critique social structures?
Croft's current book project, Funding Footprints: Dance and American Diplomacy (Oxford University Press), examines the history of U.S. State Department funding of international dance tours. Croft's approach to writing dance history emphasizes the role of dancers in performance, asking how history might look differently if dancers, audiences, and choreographers were seen as equal partners in the creation of meaning in dance. Croft is also editing the anthology Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance, which brings together artists and print scholars in a written volume of essays and manifestos, as well as a website of performances, documented in Michigan's Duderstadt Video Studio.
Croft's writing about dance has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics, and is forthcoming in Dance Chronicle. From 2002-2005, Croft was a regular contributor to The Washington Post, and from 2005-2010, she covered dance, as well as theatre and musical theatre, for the Austin American-Statesman. Her performance criticism has appeared in other popular press venues, including The Baltimore Sun, Dance Magazine, and The Houston Chronicle.
At the University of Michigan, Croft teaches courses in the BFA and MFA dance programs, as well as in the BFA interarts program. Her courses include Approaches to Dance Dramaturgy, Dancing Women/Dancing Queer, Fantasies and Anxieties of Racial Integration in 20th Century American Performance, Problematizing Theory and Practice, and Reading and Writing Dance Criticism. She also has a keen interest in helping students develop as choreographers and dramaturgs.
Croft holds a PhD in theatre history and criticism with an emphasis in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas-Austin and an MA in performance studies from New York University. From 2010-2013, Croft was a postdoctoral scholar in the University of Michigan's Society of Fellows.
Claudia Meza: 1 Event; Meza is a Portland-based artist and composer who studied music composition and digital music production at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She has recorded and toured with Japanther and Explode Into Colors, and has performed her own work in clubs, basements, dance halls, ballrooms, art galleries, and music festivals internationally. Meza started the young series New Musics to support new classical music and working avant-garde composers within the Portland music scene.
Clayton Lee: 1 Event; Clayton Lee is a Canadian curator, producer, and performance artist. He currently serves as the Artistic Director of Fierce Festival in Birmingham, UK. From 2019–2023, Clayton was the Director of Rhubarb Festival!, Canada’s longest-running festival of new and experimental performance, and previously served as the Curatorial Associate at the Luminato Festival. His performance projects have been presented in venues across Canada, the US, the UK, and New Zealand. He was one of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Artists-in-Residence in 2023. As part of the Living Room Collective, he represented Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Cleo Davis: 1 Event; Cleo Davis started his education in architecture at the University of Oregon further changing to industrial design at San Jose State. He is an artist whose work takes a critical view of the social, political and cultural issues and through his work, he continues to reconstruct the cultural view modernizing while also highlighting traditions. Although he engages with multiple subjects and mediums his methodology remains consistent. He also has started the Screw Loose Studio, the Mayo House Project, and most recently, the archives project in collaboration with Kayin.
Cornell Alston: 1 Event; Cornell Alston is a long time member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a not-for-profit that uses the arts as a springboard to teach life skills to individuals both inside and outside of state correctional facilities. He initiated the Youth Empowerment Through the Arts initiative that launched in Queens NY, and he continues to work as an arts-in-education advocate. He is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award. Alston performed and collaborated with Kaneza Schaal on PLEASE, BURY ME at Baryshnikov Arts Center and GO FORTH during a Performance Space 122 RAMP residency. Other performance highlights include: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 12 Angry Men, and the title role in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
C. Riley Snorton: 1 Event; C. Riley Snorton is a scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender, sexuality, and race. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (U Minn Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (U Minn Press, 2017). Snorton is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago.
Crispin Spaeth: 1 Event; Crispin Spaeth offers private coaching, workplace trainings, and group classes that champion the beauty of our human design and its intrinsic relationship to confidence, connection, and freedom.
Her work is deeply informed by Integrative Alexander Technique (IAT), an experiential learning process that allows you to access your natural coordination so that you can move, think, and communicate more effectively and in line with your true wishes.
Crystal Quartez (Cortez): 1 Event; Crystal Quartez (Cortez) is a Portland based musician & creative technologist. Through field recording, synthesis and self-built instruments they create “Restorative Noise”; sculpting drones and rhythms of mechanical life, natural voices, and digital timbres to form a texture rich electronic dance music. The resulting sonic landscapes offer windows into shared networks of reality, often separated by borders of space, time, and perception. Recently, their work has involved the collection of live biodata from plants and static data from climate change, to translate these numbers and electrical impulses into sound.
crystalcortez.com
d.a. carter: 2 Events; d.a. carter is a writer, teacher, and cognac sipper. He is co-editor of The Iconic Obama, 2007-2009: Essays on Media Representations of the Candidate and New President (2012). He is currently completing Obscene Material, a book examining black girlhood and scandal in 1919 Washington, D.C. and is also a member of the Queering Slavery Working Group, an interdisciplinary scholarly collective that uses Tumblr to place black queer studies in conversation with the history of enslavement: http://qswg.tumblr.com and http://qswgremix.tumblr.com. He is an assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, with research interests in 20th Century African American History, gender and sexuality studies, and black cultural studies.
Dana Michel: 1 Event; Dana Michel is a choreographer and performer based in Montreal, Canada. Her practice is rooted in exploring the disorderly multiplicity of identity using intuitive improvisation and image creation. Before entering the BFA in Contemporary Dance program at Concordia University in her late twenties, she was a marketing executive, competitive runner, and football player. In 2011, She received a danceWEB scholarship, allowing her to deepen her research process at ImPulsTanz (Vienna, Austria). She has been making and internationally touring work for the past nine years.
Michel’s newest solo, Yellow Towel, premiered at the 2013 Festival TransAmériques (Montreal) to critical acclaim. The work featured on the “Top Ten” 2013 dance moments in Dance Current Magazine (Canada) and was recently singled out as one of the most remarkable productions at the 2014 American Realness Festival (New York City) by The New York Times. In August 2014, she received the ImpulsTanz Award for artistic excellence in life.
Dance Truck: 1 Event; Atlanta, Georgia, is a hotbed of contemporary art with an abundance of choreographers and performance artists seeking affordable and accessible venues. Recognizing this scarcity of performance space as an opportunity, curator and lighting designer Malina Rodriguez founded Dance Truck: a mobile project that uses the back of a rental truck as a stage. With its inventive technical direction, diverse artistic lineup, and stunning visual platform, Dance Truck has been an enormous success in “bringing dance to the people” at festivals, museums, parks, and streets throughout the Dirty South.
Selected Press
Dance Truck Pulls into the Contemporary, Andrew Alexander, Creative Loafing Atlanta, February 9, 2011.
Dan Handelman: 1 Event; Dan Handelman is a co-founding member of Peace and Justice Works and its police accountability project group Portland Copwatch. In 1991 he also helped co-found Flying Focus Video Collective, which has produced a program on cable access every week on social justice topics. Dan attended nearly every police oversight meeting in the City since 1992 (PIIAC 1992-2001/Citizen Review Committee 2001-present). He was appointed to sit on four City commissions looking at the oversight system - Mayor Katz's Work Group in 2000, on stakeholder groups in 2010 and 2016, and the Police Accountability Commission in 2021-2023. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform.
Daniel Barrow: 1 Event; Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial, and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to manual forms of animation by projecting, layering, and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors. Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), The International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), and the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). Barrow is the 2007 winner of the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton award and the 2008 winner of the Images Festival’s Images Prize. Barrow is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.
Danielle Kelly: 1 Event; Danielle Kelly is a Las Vegas-based artist and writer, who received her BA from Beloit College and her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Working in disciplines ranging from installation to performance, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Portland.
Dao Strom: 1 Event; Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, and visual—to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song, and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Although separate, these elements are unified by a shared (under)current that transposes itself through or despite its conduits, and endeavors toward “re-membering” and attempting to synchronize the divided ‘languages’ within the self and concerning the self as placed in the world.
Strom is the author/composer of several hybrid works, including the music/poetry project TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS (2025), and INSTRUMENT (2020), which won the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion of song-poems, TRAVELER’S ODE. She co-curated and co-edited the hybrid-literary anthology and exhibition, A Mouth Holds Many Things (2024), and released an album of ambient-folk songs, Redux (2022). She is also the author of a bilingual poetry-art collection, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, Ford Foundation, Precipice Fund, NEA, and others. She is the co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese women writers and artists making polyvocal poetry-art works; and de-canon, a literary social art project centering BIPOC writers. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevadas of northern California and now lives in Portland, OR.
Darren O'Donnell: 1 Event; Darren O'Donnell is an artist, writer, actor, and city planner. He is the director and founder of Mammalian Diving Reflex, and the author of Social Acupuncture (Coach House Books, 2006), a manifesto calling for a more socially and politically profound art and theater. His art is often described through the lens of relational aesthetics. O'Donnell is the Artistic and Research Director of Mammalian Diving Reflex (which presented projects for TBA during 2007 and 2014), a "research-art atelier" that produces performances, community-based events, and theoretical texts. The organization fosters dialogue and audience participation, and creates activist performance described by the group as "ideal entertainment for the end of the world." Its programs work to dissolve boundaries between art and life in an attempt to create an aesthetic of civic engagement.
David Eckard: 2 Events; David Eckard is an artist, educator, and performer based in Portland, Oregon. His practice as a visual artist includes fabricated objects, drawings and prints, installations and performances. Through these varied approaches and diverse presentational strategies, Eckard fabricates residual, fictive artifacts, creates biomorphic, sexualized schematics, assembles arrested moments and orchestrates transient theatrics and temporary monuments for incidental audiences in civic spaces. Futility, authority, theatricality and persona enter into his creative explorations as notions to investigate, critique, utilize and exploit. Solo shows include Kim Foster Galley, New York; Fassbender Gallery, Chicago; Consolidated Works, Seattle; and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland. He has performed at PICA’s TBA Festival in 2004, 2006, and 2011, and for Northwest New Works at On The Boards, Seattle, in 2005. Eckard was awarded the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship for 2010, was one of the inaugural recipients of the Hallie Ford Fellowship in Visual Arts for 2010, and was a Juror’s Award recipient at the 2006 Oregon Biennial. Selected Press David Eckard's Liveries (summer stock) at Mark Woolley Gallery, Jeff Jahn, PORT, July 28, 2007.
David Thomson: 1 Event; David Thomson is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice borders on choreographic situations and installations centered around questions of identity, unconscious narratives, and the expression of presence and absence as performative states.
He has been supported or presented by The Kitchen, Movement Research at Judson Church, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC Arts, Performance Space NY, The Invisible Dog, Mt Tremper Arts, The Yard and Danspace Project, among other institutions.
His work has been recognized with awards and fellowships including a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artist Award (2022), Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2018), Yaddo (2016), MacDowell (2014), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography (2013), and the US Artists Ford Fellowship (2012).
Thomson has worked across the fields of music, dance, film, theater, and performance with Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Tracie Morris, Marina Abramović, Meg Stuart, Grisha Coleman|Hot Mouth, Yvonne Rainer, Sekou Sundiata, Maria Hassabi, Yanira Castro, and Okwui Okpokwasili, among others.
He has served on the faculties of Movement Research, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, Barnard, Bennington, Pratt and Middlebury. In 2017, he and Kate Watson-Wallace initiated The Sustainability Project, which serves as a platform for expanding the discourse surrounding financial, artistic, and personal empowerment within the arts community.
Thomson received an interdisciplinary B.A. from State University of New York at Purchase.
www.davidhamiltonthomson.com
Dawn Kasper: 1 Event; Dawn Kasper is an interdisciplinary performance artist. Kasper's work has been exhibited widely; The Migros Museum, Zurich (2005), Human Resources, LA (2011), Tramway, Glasgow (2012), 2012 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2012) Redling Fine Art, LA (2014) David Lewis, NY (2014) Kasper lives and works in New York.
DB Amorin: 2 Events; DB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an interdisciplinary media artist who explores audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience. He frequently emphasizes the generative role of error as an opportunity for creation, resulting in media-centered projects driven by DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations, and persistent, inquisitive experimentation with available materials.
His work has garnered awards from esteemed organizations including the Jersey City Arts Council, Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Precipice Fund grant funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation and administered by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). His visual art, performances, curatorial & collaborative programming have been presented internationally at A4 Arts Foundation; the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival; Onassis Foundation; ICA at MECA&D; Luggage Store Gallery; Soundwave ((7)) Biennial; PICA; Portland Art Museum; the Honolulu Museum of Art; Honolulu Biennial 2019.
dbamorin.com
Deborah Hay: 1 Event; Deborah Hay is an American choreographer, dancer, dance theorist, and author working in the field of experimental postmodern dance. She is one of the original founders of the Judson Dance Theater.
Demian DinéYazhi´: 1 Event; Demian DinéYazhi´ (born 1983) is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero-cis-gendered communities post colonization. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupy and refuse to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.
Instagram @heterogeneoushomosexual
Dontavious Body: 1 Event; Dontavious Body, Meet Me On Da Floor Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Dontavious Body is the young urban professional who had the forethought to establish MEET ME ON DA FLOOR, Inc., a 501c3 nonprofit company, as well as the courage to use his company to embark upon the journey to be a positive force of enlightenment, change, and inclusion for society. Prior to him establishing this company, he served in corporate America for both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations; most notably Microsoft and with Forever family, Inc. While at Microsoft, Body served as the company’s Product Advisor and Community Development Captain where he was responsible for introducing the world of MICROSOFT to corporate partners and non-profit agencies, launching new product lines, and facilitating corporate education. He has earned a number of Microsoft certifications.
Don’t Shoot Portland: 2 Events; Don’t Shoot Portland is an arts and education organization that promotes social justice and civic participation. Our year-round programming allows us to advocate for community members facing racism and discrimination by providing legal representation and direct advocacy. Since our inception in 2016, Don’t Shoot Portland has hosted its own dialogues, community forums and workshops focusing on history, archiving and social culture. The art proponent of our work acts as a communicative tool to facilitate discussions about race in America while providing educational assets to those most affected by discrimination in public policy.
As we uplift and amplify social movements around the world, your solidarity and commitment to change is the impact needed. We must continue to evolve alongside one another to extend this work. Our community action plan provides direct essential resources, legal advocacy and more to support communities that have been systemically marginalized. Our programming will remain free and low-barrier to keep our resources accessible to all.
Teressa Raiford is a community organizer, philanthropist and fourth generation Portlander. Her experiences with gun violence inspired her to demand accountability from leaders and lawmakers surrounding public safety. In 2016 Teressa established a human rights organization, Don’t Shoot Portland, focusing on civic education, art and nonviolent direct action while providing legal access to vulnerable communities.
Tai Carpenter (she/her) is a writer, gallerist and community archivist with a passion for social impact in the realms of art and civil rights. She is also the founder of Compose Yourself Magazine, an independent online publication spotlighting music, culture and social justice. She has curated political art installations, facilitated panel discussions and organized artmaking workshops centered on civic action with Portland Art Museum, University of Oregon’s Special Collections and University Archives, Society of American Archivists, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Shift Collective and Documenting the Now, among others.
Her work allows her to intersect two passions, art and civil rights, to create a more equitable and creative world by utilizing critical research to facilitate dialogues around art in relation to current social movements.
Tai is currently the Board President of Don’t Shoot Portland, a community-based advocacy nonprofit and Director of The Black Gallery. Most recently she was Gallery Coordinator for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, Gallery Manager at HOLDING Contemporary and an Archives & Records Management Coordinator at the City of Portland Archives.
Dorothée Munyaneza: 2 Events; Dorothée Munyaneza (Marseille, France) is a singer, writer and choreographer who spent her childhood in Rwanda. Her style of creating and performing on stage is directly inspired by what life has so intensely given her. Her artistic research draws from the diversity of her cultural heritage but more so by her appetite for encounters. In all her projects, the human dimension is especially of great importance. Her artistic curiosity and interest for a dialogue between music and other modes of expression blossomed through her participation in François Verret’s shows. In 2013, she created Compagnie Kadidi to start developing her own work, including “Samedi Détente,” her first work as a choreographer which has been presented 100 times touring all over Europe and in the USA.
Drew Michael: 1 Event; Drew Michael was born in Bethel, Alaska, and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. He started his art career at the University of Alaska Anchorage in a carving class with Joe Senungetuk in 1997. From there, his practice has developed through the study of other artists' work and through his own experience in trial and error. He has learned under the guidance of Kathleen Carlo and Larry Ahvakana in Anchorage, AK.
His art is deeply influenced by the people and events he has encountered in his life. Currently, his work uses imagery of religious iconography blended with traditional mask making with the hopes of bringing to light different ways of healing. His work is created with a focus on using new materials and combinations of mixed media. He uses carving as a form of expression, to draw understanding and compassion from within, and is constantly using new materials to broaden the form of his work.
"With everything I create I aim to exemplify my thoughts on how our humanity exists within this world, emotions about my relationships with others, perceptions of energy in all things and the constant acceptance into balance. As I learn about my own path I blend my traditional knowledge with everyday living experience and somehow try to connect with that ancestral wisdom that I see us all having within and around."
Dr. Juniper L. Simonis: 1 Event; Dr. Simonis has a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University and is the Owner & Lead Scientist of DAPPER Stats, a Portland, OR-based quantitative ecology consulting company. They are also the Founder & Director of the Chemical Weapons Research Center, a research, education, and activism organization focused on understanding the impact of chemical weapons on people, communities, and the environment.
When not working, Dr. Simonis plays competitive roller derby, and is a current member of the four-time, currently defending world champion and #1 ranked Rose City Rollers Wheels of Justice. Alongside competing, Juniper has been recognized for their activism and advocacy for inclusion of transgender athletes.
Website: https://www.juniperlsimonis.com/
Dylan Mira: 2 Events; Dylan Mira is an artist moving between video and text, recording how language makes bodies within the limits of representation and the thickness of time. Her recent projects have been presented at Performa, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, and Human Resources. She holds an MFA in New Genres from University of California Los Angeles and a BFA in Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ed Purver: 1 Event; Ed Purver, a Brooklyn-based artist who integrates digital media into public spaces, has recently created artworks for the Liverpool Biennial (UK), Seoul Institute of the Arts (South Korea), and the Manhattan Bridge.
Eiko Otake: 1 Event; Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. After working for more than forty years as Eiko & Koma, she began performing her own solo project A Body in Places in 2014. In 2017 she launched a multi-year Duet Project that she directs and performs with a diverse range of artists.
After studying with Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata in Japan and Manja Chmiel in Germany, Eiko and Koma relocated to America and went on to create 46 interdisciplinary performance works, two career exhibitions, and numerous media works. Their durational performance living installations were commissioned by the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and MoMA. Their Retrospective Project (2009 to 2012) culminated in a comprehensive monograph, Time is Not Even, Space is Not Empty, published by the Walker Art Center. Eiko & Koma were honored with the first United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and Doris Duke Artist Awards (2012). Among many other awards and honors, they were the first collaborative pair to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996) and the first Asian choreographers to receive the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award (2006).
Eiko’s solo project began with a twelve-hour performance at the Philadelphia Amtrak station. Since then, Eiko has performed variations of the project at over forty sites. In 2016, Eiko was the subject of the 10th annual Danspace Platform, a month-long curated program that brought her a special Bessie citation, an Art Matters grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In November, co-presented by Performa 2017 and Met Live Arts, Eiko occupied on each of three Sundays the three Metropolitan Museum of Art sites: For each of these daylong durational installations, Eiko created and performed in conjunction with hours-long video distillations of William Johnston’s photographs, “staining” the walls of each instillation with haunting images of herself dancing in ruined Fukushima.
Eiko teaches Delicious Movement in communities, colleges, and art schools. Using movement study as a means of inquiry along with readings and media studies, she also teaches interdisciplinary college courses about the atomic bombings and other environmental disasters. In 2016 Eiko was named Artist-in-Residence for its Dignity Project at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Eiko was a think tank fellow in Wesleyan’s College of the Environment.
Eileen Isagon Skyers: 2 Events; Eileen Isagon Skyers has worked with contemporary art and nonprofit arts organizations including the Whitney Museum, David Zwirner, Rhizome, the New Museum, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, PICA, and the Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA). Her first book, Vanishing Acts, was published by LINK Editions (Brescia, Italy) in 2015, and her writing has been published in the New Museum Catalogue Trigger: Gender as a Tool and Weapon, NATASHA, Wreath, Glass Press of the Future, Web Safe 2k16, Printed Web, and New World UNLTD, among others. Her moving image work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Mexico. Skyers holds a BA in philosophy and a BFA in studio art from the University of South Florida (Tampa, FL) and an MA in critical studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR).
https://eiskyers.com/
Eisa Jocson: 1 Event; Eisa Jocson is a contemporary choreographer and dancer from the Philippines. Trained as a visual artist, with a background in ballet, she won her first pole-dancing competition in Manila in 2010, and also started pole ‘tagging,’ and other public interventions in Manhattan and various cities. Under successive residencies in Belgium, Eisa developed an artistic praxis that probes the stereotype and context of the female pole dancer. Her Death of the Pole Dancer solo toured Berlin, Brussels, Zurich, Vienna and Ljubljana. Eisa then trained in ‘macho dancing,’ a popular night-club entertainment form, and premiered the solo Macho Dancer in spring 2013 which then toured 4 important European summer festivals: Impulstanz, Noorderzon, Tanz im August, and Theater Spektakel in Zurich where she won the Zürcher Kantonalbank Acknowledgement Prize.
Selected Press
"Macho Macho Woman: Interview with Eisa Jocson," ArtAsiaPacific, April 23, 2014
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Eisa Jocson and her work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Elbow Room: 1 Event; Founded in 2020, Elbow Room is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community art studio and gallery dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. More than 30 participating artists visit Elbow Room’s SE Portland studio (and satellite community art programming) each week to develop their creative practice, experiment with new materials, cultivate their portfolio of finished artwork, and to build community through friendship and collaboration. Elbow Room provides art materials and mentorship in painting, drawing, creative writing, sewing, digital media/video, music, hand tool woodworking, ceramics, and many other forms of art making. Participating artists pay no out-of-pocket expenses for materials or studio access, and they have opportunities to show and sell their work through Elbow Room’s gallery and through Elbow Room’s efforts to network with other contemporary art spaces.
Elbow Room and PICA have fostered an ongoing community partnership since 2022. Through weekly studio arts programs hosted by PICA, Elbow Room artists have access to PICA’s library of art books for inspiration and immersion into contemporary art, and can work with a wide range of artistic media in PICA’s Resource Room.
Elisa Harkins: 1 Event; Elisa Harkins is a Native American (Cherokee/Muscogee) artist and composer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work is concerned with translation, language preservation, and Indigenous musicology. Harkins uses the Cherokee and Mvskoke languages, electronic music, sculpture, and the body as her tools. Harkins received a BA from Columbia College, Chicago, and an MFA from CalArts. She has since continued her education at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited her work at Crystal Bridges, documenta 14, The Hammer Museum, The Heard Museum, and MoMA. Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is a dance performance with Hanako Hoshimi-Caines and Zoë Poluch that features music by Harkins. With support from PICA and Western Front, songs from the performance have been collected into a limited-edition double LP which can be found on Harkins’ Bandcamp. Harkins resides on the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation and is an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
Elisheba Johnson: 1 Event; Elisheba Johnson is a curator, public artist, and administrator. Johnson, who has a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, was the owner of Faire Gallery Café, a multi-use art space that held art exhibitions, music shows, poetry readings, and creative gatherings. For six years, Johnson worked at the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture on capacity-building initiatives and racial equity in public art. Johnson is currently a member of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Network advisory council and has won four Americans for the Arts Public Art Year in Review Awards for her work. She currently co-manages Wa Na Wari, a Black art center in Seattle’s Central District that uses the arts to build community and resist displacement.
www.wanawari.org/
Elizabeth LeCompte: 1 Event; LeCompte, a founding member of the Group, has directed all of the company’s works. Her honors and awards include a NEA Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in American Theater, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a US Artists Fellowship and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. Abbas has worked with The Wooster Group since 1999 as a technical director and sound engineer. He received a Drama Desk Nominee for the Group’s To You, The Birdie! (Phédre).
Elliott Young: 1 Event; Elliott Young is a Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. Professor Young is the author of Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII, and Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, as well as co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is a co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, the Migration Scholar Collaborative (MiSC), and the Migration and Asylum Lab (MAL) at Stanford University. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 600 asylum cases and was a co-chair of the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing (PCCEP).
Emily Johnson / Catalyst: 1 Event; Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Originally from Alaska, she is currently based in Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, history, and role in community. Her work is currently supported by Creative Capital, Map Fund, a Joyce Award and The Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts. Emily is a 2013 Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at the University of Minnesota, a 2012 Headlands Center for the Arts and MacDowell Artist in Residence, a Native Arts and Cultures Fellow (2011), a MANCC Choreographer Fellow (2009/2010/2012), a MAP Fund Grant recipient (2009/2010/2012/2013), and McKnight Fellow (2009). She received a 2012 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performance for her work, The Thank-you Bar, at New York Live Arts. Her current work, Niicugni, is touring to Florida State University/MANCC/Seven Days of Opening Nights, Coil Festival/PS122/Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC), Redfern Arts Center at Keene State (NH), Arizona State University, Tigertail (Miami), Northrop Auditorium (MN), PICA (Portland, OR) and Bunnell Street Gallery (AK).
Selected Press
"Shedding Light on the Last Frontier," Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, January 4, 2013.
"Emily Johnson in Conversation with Ain Gordon," Movement Research Critical Correspondance, January 9, 2013.
Call & Response: Spandex and Basketballs, Emily Johnson, Mental Contagion, July/August 2008.
Emily Roysdon: 1 Event; Emily Roysdon (1977) is a New York and Stockholm based artist and writer. Her working method is interdisciplinary and recent projects take the form of performance, photographic installations, printmaking, text, video, curating, and collaborating. Roysdon developed the concept "ecstatic resistance" to talk about the impossible and imaginary in politics. The concept debuted with simultaneous shows at Grand Arts in Kansas City, and X Initiative in New York. She is editor and co-founder of the queer feminist journal and artist collective, LTTR. Her many collaborations include costume design for choreographers Levi Gonzalez, Vannesa Anspaugh and Faye Driscoll, as well as lyric writing for The Knife, and Brooklyn based JD Samson & MEN. Recent solo projects include new commissions from Performance Room, Tate Modern (London), If I Can't Dance (Amsterdam), PICA's TBA Festival, Visual Art Center (Austin), Art in General (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Konsthall C (Stockholm) and a Matrix commission from the Berkeley Art Museum. Roysdon is a recently appointed Professor of Art at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden.
Erika Vogt: 1 Event; Erika Vogt (b.1973, East Newark, New Jersey) is a Los Angeles based artist represented by Overduin and Kite in Los Angeles and Simone Subal Gallery in New York City. She received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from New York University. Solo exhibitions include: The Engraved Plane, Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2012); Geometric Persecution, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles (2010); Room Gallery, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA (2010); and Daniel Hug, Los Angeles, CA (2008). Selected screening and group exhibitions include: Affective Turns at Pepin Moore, Los Angeles (2012) and Made in L.A. at The Hammer, Los Angeles (2012), Foam, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2011); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2011); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2010); Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (2010) and Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY (2009).
Ethan Seltzer: 1 Event; Ethan Seltzer currently serves as the Interim Director of the School of Art+Design, and as a Professor in the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. He served as Director of the Toulan School from 2003 through 2009. From 1992, through August, 2003, he was the founding director of Portland State’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies, created to better connect the resources of higher education to the needs and issues of the communities in the 6-county, bistate Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region. Prior to joining Portland State University, he held positions as the Land Use Supervisor for Metro, the regional government in the Portland area, as an assistant for planning and budget issues to Portland City Commissioner Mike Lindberg, and as the Assistant Coordinator for the Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Program. Current scholarly interests include regional planning, regional development, and Cascadia. He has been a resident of the Portland metropolitan area since 1980 and has served as president of the board of the Oregon Environmental Council, the City of Portland Planning Commission, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and the 40-Mile Loop Land Trust.
Faustin Linyekula: 1 Event; Linyekula lives and works in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he runs Studios Kabako, which fosters the debuts of young Congolese artists in the fields of dance, theater, music, and video by providing training and producing works. Through the Studios, he has presented ten pieces and toured extensively in Europe, United States, and Africa. Linyekula is a member of the Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne, Germany, and he has received the 2007 Principal Award of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development.
Faye Driscoll: 1 Event; Faye Driscoll (b. 1975, California, lives and works in New York) is an award winning art and performance maker who uses an alchemy of bodies and voices, objects and live sound to conjure worlds that are, like ourselves, alive and forever changeable. She creates immersive worlds of sensorial complexity and perceptual disorientation aimed to rile up the passive, numb, screened-out body. These interventions come in the shape of intimacies: a performer holding your hand, death metal song made through recording your stomping feet, a place to rest and a private guided choreography in your ear.
In Thank You For Coming, her recently completed trilogy of performance works—Attendance (2014), Play (2016), and Space (2019)—each took a distinct genre blurring while summoning the unnamed forces that surge between the viewer and the viewed. For her first solo exhibition, at Walker Art Center, Driscoll brought the immersive experience of theater into the exhibition space, inviting viewers to become active participants through a series of prompts and subtle directives from her series of audio works, Guided Choreographies for the Living and the Dead.
She is currently the Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, and is the recipient of a Doris Duke Award, Guggenheim fellowship, a Bessie award and the Jacob’s Pillow Artist Award, among many others. Select presentations include Kunstenfestivaldesarts, La Biennale di Venezia, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Walker Art Center, Melbourne Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires.
Forensic Architecture: 1 Event; Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations. FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists, to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organisations, to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence.

Our investigations employ cutting-edge techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, open source investigation, digital modelling, and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews, and academic collaboration. Findings from our investigations have been presented in national and international courtrooms, parliamentary inquiries, and exhibitions at some of the world’s leading cultural institutions and in international media, as well as in citizen’s tribunals and community assemblies.
forensic-architecture.org
Gabel Eiben: 1 Event; Gabel Eiben, from Codorus, PA, now lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. He has worked and toured extensively with OBIE Award-winning New York-based performance group Nature Theater of Oklahoma on their 10 episode piece Life and Times since 2008. He earned a BFA from Shenandoah University and studied and performed with SITI Company in NYC. He and dancer Tale Dolven will premiere their second piece, That catastrophe is a fire this fall in Trondheim, Norway at the Bastard Festival. It is a theater performance exploring the magic and danger of understanding the physical world through the thoughts of Richard Feynman.
Gare St. Lazare Players: 1 Event; Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland are Ireland's most travelled theatre company, having visited over 63 cities in 21 countries worldwide to perform from their repertory of over 17 Beckett productions. The group evolved out of the original Gare St. Lazare Players, an international company founded in Chicago by Bob Meyer in 1983 and based simultaneously in Ireland and France. Since 1995, Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor Lovett have been running the company. First Love premiered in 2008 in Ireland and has since toured to Argentina, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Ireland, Romania, Switzerland, Turkey and USA.
Selected Press
The Lovetts of Méricourt, Ruadhan Mac Cormaic, The Irish Times, April 10, 2010.
In Festival, Biography, Beckett and Blues, Jason Zinoman, New York Times, January 14, 2009.
Conor Lovett has a 'Love' affair with Beckett, Christina Borger, New Haven Register, June 14, 2009.
Garrick Imatani: 1 Event; Garrick Imatani is an artist who uses performance, functional objects, or interaction to draw attention to one’s embodied subjectivity. Working across sculpture, photography, video, and installation, recent projects focus on reimagining racialized historical erasures into more believable and inspired futures. Past works have included collaborating with illegally-surveilled activists to readjust city archives, re-enacting labor on the transcontinental railroad, and working with the Grand Ronde tribe to replicate their sacred meteorite held at the American Museum of Natural History.
https://www.garrickimatani.com/
Gerard Minaya: 1 Event; Gerard has worked for BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and danced for jumatatu m. poe & Donte Beacham’s “Let ‘Im Move You: This Is A Formation”, Ballet Hispanico’s BHdos, and Baker + Tarpaga Dance Project, to name a few.
Gerard Minaya (all pronouns respectfully) born and raised in The Bronx, is a Dominican-American, first-generation, Queer and Gay Latina artist whose focus, as of late, has been in movement, healing, and storytelling. They obtained their BFA from University of the Arts, and since then have delved into performance and arts administration to different capacities. Gerard is currently, solely, a freelance dancer artist.
Gregg Bordowitz: 1 Event; Gregg Bordowitz is an award-winning artist, writer, and activist. His films have shown internationally in screenings and exhibitions at museums including: The New Museum, NY; Artist Space, NY; TATE Modern, UK; and MoMA, NY. Bordowitz is the author of many books, including: The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003. He was a member of the groundbreaking AIDS activist group ACT UP, and a founding member of the 1980’s film collective Testing the Limits. He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Bordowitz is the Director of the Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He comes to Reed College as a Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Arts.
Halory Goerger: 1 Event; Halory Goerger makes shows and installations instead of building houses or repairing animals because it’s better like that for everybody. He works on the history of ideas, because everything else was already taken by the time he came along. In most his undertakings, total destitution flirts with formal rigour, and a concern for getting out alive. Together, Julien Fournet, Antoine Defoort and Halory Goerger have co-founded l’amicale de production, a small production house in Lille / Brussels (France / Belgium
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Halory Goerger and his collaborative work with Antoine Defoort, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Harrell Fletcher: 1 Event; Fletcher is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. He has worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over fifteen years. Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland. Selected Press 500 Words: Harrell Fletcher, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, February 1, 2010 Selected Video
Holcombe Waller: 2 Events; Holcombe Waller is one of America’s most distinct voices in music theater. He is a 2011 United States Artists Berresford Fellow in Music, an award which noted his mournful, folk-inflected style, and his approach to music “as total theater.” He is a Creative Capital artist, a recipient of the MAP Fund Award, and a 2013 Joan Shipley Fellow of the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Waller has been presented and commissioned by numerous theaters, arts institutions, and festivals. Holcombe Waller "Hardliners" Music Video from Two Penguins on Vimeo.

Artists Archive

Adam Linder

Adela Demetja

Ahamefule J. Oluo

A.K. Burns

Alessandro Sciarroni

Alexandria Saleem

Alex Cecchetti

Alex S. Vitale

Alex Tatarsky

Alfredo Jaar

Ali Chahrour

Alicia ayo Ohs

A.L. Steiner

Amalia Dache

Amber Boydston

Amy O'Neal

Andrew Gilbert

Andrew Schneider

Angélica Maria Millán Lozano

Anna Martine Whitehead

Anthony Hudson / Carla Rossi

Antoine Catala

Antoine Defoort

Ariel Osterweis

Ashley Stull Meyers

Ashot Danielyan

Autumn Knight

Back to Back Theatre

bart fitzgerald

Beacon Sound

Bebe Miller

Becca Blackwell

Big Art Group

Selected Press

Black Aesthetic Studio

Blue

BodyCartography Project

Bouchra Ouizguen

Selected Press

Boyzie Cekwana

Brian Rogers

Britt Hatzius

Brook Colley

Candace A. Avalos

Carissa Dez

Carlos Motta

Carrie Mae Weems

Chase Biado

Chisao Hata

Chris Riser

Clare Croft

Claudia Meza

Clayton Lee

Cleo Davis

Cornell Alston

C. Riley Snorton

Crispin Spaeth

Crystal Quartez (Cortez)

d.a. carter

Dana Michel

Dance Truck

Selected Press

Dan Handelman

Daniel Barrow

Danielle Kelly

Dao Strom

Darren O'Donnell

David Eckard

David Thomson

Dawn Kasper

DB Amorin

Deborah Hay

Demian DinéYazhi´

Dontavious Body

Don’t Shoot Portland

Dorothée Munyaneza

Drew Michael

Dr. Juniper L. Simonis

Dylan Mira