Artists Archive
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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.
Learn moreAmber 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.
Learn moreBack 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.
Learn morebart fitzgerald (b. 1991) is a pastor, scholar, and cultural critic.
Learn moreBeacon 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.
Learn moreBebe 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.
Learn moreBecca 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.
Learn moreBig 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.
Learn moreThe 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.
Learn moreJaJa 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.
Learn moreAs 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!
Learn moreBorn 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.
Learn moreBoyzie 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.
Learn moreBrian 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.
Learn moreBritt 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.
Learn moreDr. 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.
Learn moreChase 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.
Learn moreWinnipeg-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.
Learn moreDontavious 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.
Learn moreGregg 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.
Learn moreDancing has been in my blood since I can remember. It started off with hip hop dancing for my high school -- I began to recognize my skill and talent. After 4 years of that, I was introduced to the world of J-Sette by women. J-Sette historically refers to Jackson State University’s female drill team that began in the 1970s. They “created” the dance style, and thus far have made it a distinctive form of dance. I was interested in this type of dance, but not entirely until I saw a group of males performing it. At that point, I claimed the style for myself and perfected it on my body. Currently, I have my own J-Sette line, Mystic Force, and plan to increase our already considerable renown in this style of dance in our community, and eventually internationally. Previously, I served as co-captain of Dallas’ Texas Teasers. I have participated and competed in several events and competitions, including 2 SetteItOff video challenges, Atlanta Pride 2010, Tennessee Classics 2009, and Memphis Pride 2008. In 2015, I was named New Legendary by the Meet Me on the Dance Floor J-Sette council, and have gained many titles since then, such as, Best Dancer and Most Entertaining.
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by Jermone Donte Beacham in partnership with jumatatu m. poe and Jamarsa Peters.
Learn moreKate Bredeson is a theatre historian, translator, director, and dramaturg. Her project as a scholar is to research, document, and practice the ways in which theatre can be a tool for radical activism and protest. Her books are published by Northwestern University Press: Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May '68 (2018; finalist, TLA George Freedley Award); The Inheritor: A Play (translator, 2024); The Diaries of Judith Malina, volumes 1-4 (general editor 1-4, editor 2 and 4, 2026; winner, ADE Lyman H. Butterfield Award), and Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances by Anthony Hudson (editor, 2026). Bredeson is Professor of Theatre at Reed College.
Learn moreLydia Brawner is the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at New York’s Performa. She holds a Ph.D in Performance Studies from New York University, where she also received her M.A. She is the current assistant editor of Performa Magazine, and previously was the managing print editor of the San Francisco Arts Quarterly (SFAQ), and the reviews editor of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, New York University and the College of Staten Island, serves on the advisory committee for the Center for the Arts and Religion at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, and much of her research focuses on the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary performance.
Learn moreMarc Bamuthi Joseph is an inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, the winner of the 2011 Alpert Award in Theater, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. He is the founding Program Director of the exemplary non-profit Youth Speaks, and is a co-founder of Life is Living, a national series of one day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks through hip hop arts and focused environmental action. Mr. Joseph recently premiered the Creative Time commission “Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos” in New York’s Central Park, and is currently completing new works for the Chautauqua Symphony, the Philadelphia Opera and South Coast Repertory Theater while serving as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. His evening length piece “/peh-LO-tah/” has been commissioned by the Kennedy Center and will premiere at YBCA in the Fall of 2016.
Learn moreMuscles. Beads of sweat. Surrender. Inversion. Agency. Resourcefulness. These images/ideas are linked for Maria Bauman. A Blackqueerwoman dancer, not-quite-southern belle who grew up poor, clear ideas of physical labor, beauty, and body presentation are each held in her every movement.
Maria Bauman is a multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL. She founded her dance company MBDance in 2009 and co-founded ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity) in 2015. Her choreography, generative scores, writing and building for MBDance are based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and fascination with intimacy. She brings the same tenets to organizing to undo racism in the arts and beyond with ACRE. In particular, her dance-writing-installation work centers the non-linear and linear stories and bodies of Black queer people in non-proscenium performance ritual settings.
Bauman's art has been celebrated both formally and informally. She is a 2021 Redtail Artist in Residence and BRIClab residency winner. Bauman won a 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance with Skeleton Architecture. She is currently a Choreographic Fellow with the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Initiative, as well as being a 2019-20 Gibney Dance in Process resident artist. She and her company were awarded a 2020 Dance Advance grant from Dance/NYC and a 2020 Brooklyn Arts Foundation creation grant. She was an Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange from 2017 to 2019 and was also 2017 Community Action in Residence at Gibney Dance. Bauman is also a mentor with Queer l Art. Some of the best recognition she has gotten is from teenagers in New Haven’s Black and Brown Queer Camp who, upon seeing her dance exclaimed “Ooooooooo! She baaaad!“
As a cultural organizer, Bauman has partnered with various kinds of groups to lift up important social issues and calls for justice via art. She and the other two co-founders of ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), a grassroots community organizing group dedicated to ensuring racial equity within the performing arts, were honored with the 2018 BAX Arts and Artists in Progress Award for “the work you do to undo racism in our daily lives while lifting up the work and lives of your membership.” Bauman has facilitated community engagement workshops for El Puente, Chorus America, Ramapo College, Rider University, and has helped create cultural campaigns with various locals of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). She has been a keynote speaker and core facilitator for the 2018 Day of Learning on Equity & Inclusion, Camille A. Brown’s 2016 Black Girl Spectrum Convening, several Cultural Organizing for Community Change symposiums, and for NOCD-NY’s From the Neighborhood Up Roundtable. She is a Core Trainer with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond working closely with them on Understanding and Undoing Racism workshops for arts communities, and is a WOW Café Theatre collective member (theater space by and for women and transgender artists). Bauman is a founding member of the Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts Working Group (NOCD-NY).
Learn moreMaster Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. is Black, Italian, Queer, Non-Binary, Neurodyvergent, and practices primarily in america. Their collaborative approach results in artwork by and for the people.
Stevenson’s practice has been dedicated to supporting young people ages 4 to 18 in developing the necessary skills to encourage advanced imaginative thinking and self-confident expression. In 2019 they developed the Afro Contemporary Art Class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School which has had many forms since, including Afro Futurist February, and three years of Fred Hampton Summer Camp. Supporting community efforts as well, taking the shape of support for the effort to Save Dr. Martin Luther King School from being displaced by the expansion of Interstate 5 which has triggered the need to move Harriet Tubman Middle School. Stevenson is currently working in the Albina community to develop a Living Archive at Jefferson High School with students, community, and the architectural design team. Stevenson also has a robust portfolio of artist projects centering food and gathering around it, projects involving sculpture, drawing, and photography, and new work in collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated folks. These include Tin Can Phone, a podcast all about life in and outside of prison, and Gallery Blue, a curation and exhibition project both of which are owned and operated by formerly incarcerated individuals. Stevenson pursues these professional and creative goals passionately because they believe that empowered and open-minded young people and communities are the best and most direct way toward ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future for all.
Learn moreMorgan Bassichis (they/them) is a comedian and writer who has been described as “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker. They are the author of The Odd Years and co-editor with Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky of Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, both published by Wendy’s Subway. Recent shows include A Crowded Field (Abrons Arts Center, 2023), Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue, 2022), and Don’t Rain on My Bat Mitzvah (Creative Time, 2021). Morgan’s exhibition, More Little Ditties, was co-presented by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.
Learn moreMyles de Bastion, Artistic Director, Musician, and Creative-altruist who develops technology and art installations that enables sound to be experienced as light and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. He has built large scale installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding.
A dual citizen of the UK and the United States, Myles grew up in England where he obtained a BA from the University of Teesside (UK), focusing on computer science & animation, and was the chairman of the Musician's Society for two years. He has taught at Austine School for the Deaf (VT) and at the world's first Deaf Music Camp (MI), where he developed the curriculum and was responsible for the music and sound program. In 2012 Myles moved to Portland OR and founded CymaSpace, a non-profit that facilitates arts & cultural events that are inclusive of the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing, where Myles further develops his technological artistic works that translate sound into visual mediums. In 2015 Myles took his concepts into the commercial sector and founded Audiolux Devices, a technology company that now produces professional products featuring the synergy of light and sound. Myles continues to live in Portland with his partner Kimberly and CODA daughters Zebra & Juniper.
Learn moreMyles de Bastion develops technology and art installations that enable sound to be experienced as light and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum, and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. He has built large format installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding.
Myles is the founder of CymaSpace, a non-profit that facilitates cultural events inclusive of the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing; and Audiolux Devices, which produces products featuring light and sound synergy. 2018 Director of the first Northwest Deaf Arts Festival. Myles mentors Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing youth, has developed curriculum, and taught workshops in music and sound for Deaf schools, camps, and communities.
A current project, The Ikigai Machine, is a multimedia visual narrative with interactive installations and live performances that he is developing into a feature-length, touring production for disability hubs and art institutions. Myles has received support from Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Cultural Trust, Oregon Cultural Foundation and Randall Charitable Trust.
Learn moreBorn in Algeria, Nacera Belaza has been living in France since the age of five. Following her studies in modern literature at the Université de Reims, Belaza created her own dance company in 1989. In January, 2015 she was appointed Knight of the order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. She enters dance as a self-taught interpreter, and develops a choreography that originates in an inner progress—a sensible awareness of the body, of space and of the emptiness inside herself. Her path resembles a quest, and tends towards the enhancement of the direct bond between the dancer and the spectator, open to the sense of the infinite of the stage. Each element of her pieces—light, space, time, body—responds to each other on stage to develop their own designs. With the repetition of the gesture, its infinite slowness, the stretching out of time, Belaza's pieces all explore movement as one would explore a calm, a profound and continuous breath. Belaza's desire to share and pass on has become focused on the relationship between the audiences and their territories.
Learn moreArtist, musician, engineer, teacher, mentor... Reese is an accomplished, multi-disciplinary designer with nearly two decades of experience designing, testing, and building products for the technology industry. His personal work has been exhibited in Portland at galleries like PDX Contemporary and Disjecta, and he has been performing across genres in electronic music at multiple venues across the city (S1, Holocene, Disjecta, Ace Hotel, KEX, the NW Film Center...).
His various works, prototypes, writings, and music performances are showcased at reesebowes.com.
Learn moreBass is a visual artist and musician who lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally at institutions and galleries including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), The Kitchen (New York), James Cohen Gallery (New York), The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), The Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, Scotland), and The Contemporary Art Center of Tel Aviv (Israel). Musical compositions include the score for Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Hugo Boss Prize Exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Bass is currently producing a hip-hop album intended for release in 2012.
Selected Press
500 Words: Ronnie Bass, Miriam Katz, Artforum.com, December 9, 2009.
2009, A Space Odyssey-Ronnie Bass at Marginal Utility, Libby Rosof, The Artblog, November 8, 2009.
Art in Review: Ronnie Bass, Ken Johnson, New York Times, October 17, 2008.
Selected Videos
Learn moreRose Bond creates work at the juncture of expanded cinema and experimental animation. Her large-scale animated installations navigate the allegories of place and illuminate urban space with fragments of the often overlooked – the ‘other’. With roots in frame-by-frame, hand drawn animation, she has since turned her focus towards public media performances. Her current work-in-progress, Earths to Come, an interdisciplinary collaboration with composer inti figgis-vizueta and Roomful of Teeth, pushes her cinema-born aesthetic into the spatialized terrain of VR and domes. Earths to Come, was developed in part at a Multi-disciplinary residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in NYC and at the 2024 Venice Biennale Immersive College.
Recent work includes large-scale, multi-screen live projections for symphony with works by avant-garde composers Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, 2020 and Olivier Messiaen‘s Turangalîla- Symphonie, 2016. Other animated installations include: two pieces for the permanent collection at the Portland Chinatown Museum, 2018; Illumination No.1 reprise at Portland’s Old Town Society Hotel, 2014; a prototype for a media installation in the Smithsonian’s Arts & Industries Building, 2012;Broadsided! at Exeter Castle, 2010; Intra Muros, shown during the 2007 Platform International Animation Festival and reprised for the Holland Animation Film Festival, Utrecht, 2008, and Nuit Blanche, Toronto 2011.
Bond’s paint-on-film animated films have been presented at major international festivals and are held in the MoMA Film Collection. She has received support from The Princess Grace Foundation, Bloomberg LP, Prince Bernhard Culture Foundation, Creative Heights Oregon Community Arts, the National Film Board of Canada, Arts Council England, the Canada Council for the Arts, American Film Institute, and the National Endowment for the arts. Her work has been cited in numerous publications including Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art, Re-imagining Animation: The Changing Face of the Moving Image, The Animation Bible, Experimental and Expanded Animation: New Perspectives & Practices, and the Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital. Rose Bond is a Canadian born media artist based in Portland Oregon.
Learn moreSamiya Bashir’s books of poetry: Field Theories, Gospel, and Where the Apple Falls, and anthologies, including Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, exist. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. She lives in Portland, Ore, with a magic cat who shares her obsession with trees and blackbirds and occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
Samiya Bashir is the author of Field Theories (2017), as well as Gospel (2009), and Where the Apple Falls (2005), which were both Lambda Literary Award finalists. She is also the author of the chapbooks Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring (1999), American Visa (2001), and Teasing Crow (2006). She is also the editor of Black Women’s Erotica 2 (2003) and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art (2002), with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana. Her work has been most recently featured in Poetry, Drunken Boat, World Literature Today, Portland Monthly, Tuesday, An Art Project, The Offing, Ecotone, HOAX, Poet Lore, Callaloo, and The Encyclopedia Project. Samiya also collaborates with a variety of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Field Theories in Light, Sound, & Movement, with Roland Dahwen Wu and Keyon Gaskin, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, currently on exhibition at L.A. Louver. Bashir is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent. Bashir lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches creative writing at Reed College. “Breath,” Bashir says, “is everything.” Bashir’s work helps to remind us not only to breathe, but how, and why, and together.
Learn moreSanchel Brown is a mother/performer/choreographer/medicine woman originally from Baltimore, MD. She has worked professionally in commercial, concert, and theatre primarily in New York and Philadelphia. She obtained her B.F.A from Virginia Commonwealth University, and since then has continued her studies at L’Ecole De Sable in Senegal West Africa, with Rhapsody James in Los Angeles, and Rhythm One Acting with Ozzie Jones. She began her career as an apprentice with Urban Bush Women. Her performance career continued on with highlights such as World of Dance Philadelphia, The Kimmel Center's 2018 Jazz residency, Davido’s Coming to America Tour, Theatre Horizon's Black Nativity (Barrymore Win!), and Let 'Im Move You: This is a Formation (National Tour). Her choreography highlights include Theatre Horizon's "The Color Purple" Regional PREMIERE ( nominated for Outstanding Movement/Choreography) and Yale University Dramat's "Dreamgirls". Recently, she has shifted her focus into her self-produced healing works including her hit dance play "Home To Homeland” and musical titled “Wheelz of Life”. Sanchel currently teaches her original “AfroClub “ dance class fusing Baltimore House and West African Dance Forms.
Learn moreSpencer Byrne-Seres is an artist, preparator and culture-worker based in Portland, ORE. His activities range from woodworking and custom fabrication to administrative and curatorial project management for museums, non-profits, commercial galleries, colleges, small alternative spaces and for himself.
Spencer has been making research based and socially engaged projects that look at the intersection of broad systems with the daily and the personal. Spencer is interested city infrastructure, international time standards, and submarine cables. These often opaque or invisible structures allow us to connect, and inform how we think about and move around to built environment.
He currently co-runs a conceptual art club called Sunday Painters Group in collaboration with Roz Crews, and maintains 2xfourtune, a library of recycled dimensional lumber for recycle and reuse by artists around Portland.
He has recently been experimenting with kite mapping on the Oregon coast, planting signs on college campuses, and cultivating an obscure vlog personality.
Learn moreMy art is born from the everyday dance of life—landscapes, encounters, history, politics—and from the soul stories we tell each other—crystalline moments in time that hold a myriad of meanings, summoned through the nature of re-membering and witnessing. Movement & images & sounds & words are all at play in the experiments that form the choreography of a story. The eye of life comes alive through body imagination, in memory places where life and art intersect.
Collaborations with fellow poets of memory and history define the varying SO&SO&SO&SO projects, on-going since 1976. SO&SO dance and theatre works have been performed on stages, in studios, schools, and found spaces in the US and abroad. In collaboration with four other artists, I opened the doors to Dreams Well Studio, 1990-2002, a modest, lively petri dish for performance experiments and body-mind practices. Memorable offerings of dance, theatre, multi-media storytelling, kids’ performances, poetry, music, and community ceremonies came forth from this activated dream space/laboratory.
The creative lab is the bedrock of my teaching methods in universities, classrooms, and studios over the years and of continuing practice as a writer, choreographer, and community activist.
No Strangers Here Today (premier 2008) and The Hillsboro Story (premier 2010) are multi-voiced investigations that illuminate the role my hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio, played in American civil rights history and the journey to encounter that history directly. Both theatre works, with soundtracks and live music scores by David Ornette Cherry, toured nationally and are expanded into a non-fiction book, The Hillsboro Story/A Kaleidoscope History (Spuyten-Duyvil Press, NYC).
Nu History, an educational model designed to empower students to investigate history directly, and Great Serpent, a multimedia performance score, are in development in concert with Mr. Music/theme & thought, featuring the collaborations and vision of jazz/world music composer, the late David Ornette Cherry.
I am deeply grateful to walk this path and give thanks to the great teachers who have led the way and the collaborators with whom I have shared and continue to share this journey. I believe that creative practice is essential to nourishing and understanding oneself in relationship to the natural and social worlds. The intention is to awaken the senses, embody the voice, ignite the action, and enjoy the process.
“We are not condemned to accept the future. We may invent it.”
--Eduardo Galeano
Learn moreSutapa Biswas was born in Santinekethan, India, in 1962. Her poignant films and poetic artworks have been shown in museums and art galleries worldwide. Biswas studied at the University of Leeds from 1981-85, at the Slade School of Art from 1988-1990, and at the Royal College of Art between 1996-1998. She works in a wide range of media including installation, film and video, drawing and painting. Her works are conceptual and since the mid 1990s Biswas has been interested in exploring themes of time and space particularly in relationship to gender, identity and desire.
She has exhibited extensively internationally, and her recent solo shows include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2000), Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (2004), and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon (2006). She has shown at numerous group exhibitions including: From Tarzan To Rambo, Tate Modern, London (2002-2003), Art Through the Eye of A Needle, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2001), The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (1998), and the 6th Havana Biennale, Cuba (1997), Melbourne International Arts Festival (2006). Biswas was a Fellow at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1990 and 1992. She is currently a Reader at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London and lives and works in London. Biswas is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, USA.
Learn moreMELISSA DYNE is a conceptual, installation and performance artist, with a focus on the physics of sound and light. Her large scale installations have shown at The Museum of The City, in Mexico City, and Para/Site, in Hong Kong. Her installation, Glass, in which a window from a skyscraper balanced for three months on a gallery wall, was exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Craft in 2008. She studied optics at UNAM in Mexico City, art at College of Santa Fe, NM and completed a degree in accoustics at SAE Institute in New York. Dyne has been peforming and collaborating with The Blow since 2009, and recently officially joined the band, expanding her investigations of sound waves into the field of popular music. melissadyne.com
KHAELA MARICICH is a performance artist, writer and pop musician. Under the name, The Blow, she has made albums and narrative performance works, interweaving the elements of one within the framework of the other. At TBA 2004 she performed the pop opera Blue Sky vs. Night Sky, as well as a fictional corporate presentation about a mental health maintenance system called Remosch. She has presented her work nationally and internationally in a broad range of venues, from art centers to house parties to concert halls, including such venues as The Kitchen, On The Boards, Henry Fonda Theater, and Great American Music Hall. She lives and works in New York City. khaelamaricich.com
Since coming together in collaboration on The Blow in 2009, Dyne and Maricich have performed at The Wexner Center, Joe's Pub, and The Warhol Museum. They have lectured on their collaboration at PICA, The Henry Gallery, Seattle, and Residency Unlimited, in Brooklyn, NY. Their new album, The Blow, is being released on Kanine Records in October 2013.They first met at the TBA festival in 2004. theblow.org
The Delicate Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Khaela Maricich, The Stranger, June 26, 2013.
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