Artists Archive
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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!
Learn moreDon’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.
Learn moreEd 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.
Learn moreGare 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. Learn moreJamarsa Peters, Meet Me On Da Floor President
Jamarsa Peters is a business professional with an astute financial acumen, an empathic heart, and a strong sense of business and personal responsibility. These qualities were shaped largely by his family dynamic. He is the oldest of two siblings. It was after the death of his mom that he assumed paternal responsibility for his younger siblings. With this responsibility, he decided to become this paragon for positivity and for excellence that his siblings could emulate. Because he wanted to be that example for his family, he chose to pursue higher education at Grambling State University where he majored in Business Information Systems; subsequently, earning his Bachelor of Science degree in 2006. In college, he was a member of the collegiate cheerleading team and received technical dance training while being a part of the Orchesis Dance Company under the direction of Dianne Maroney-Grisby, former Alvin Ailey dancer. In addition to his business acumen, he is an extremely powerful choreographer, dancer, and producer having danced with LGBTQ underground Legendary male J-Sette teams like Grambling X-Men, Memphis Elite, and the Texas Teasers where he currently resides in Dallas. Currently, he is recognized as an Icon in the Meet Me On Da Floor dance community where he now serves as President while continuing to change the narrative and making a difference one 8 count at a time!
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by Jamarsa Peters in partnership with Jermone Donte Beacham and jumatatu m. poe.
Learn moreJess Perlitz’s work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. Born in Toronto, CA, she is a graduate of Bard College and received an MFA from Tyler School of Art and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently based in Portland, OR, where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of the year-long Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project and the Experimental Arts Research Forest. Perlitz was named a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, won a Joan Shipley award, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Socrates Sculpture Park, Astoria, NY; Cambridge Art Galleries, Cambridge, CA; De Fabriek in The Netherlands; and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA, as part of the museum’s ongoing artist installation series.
Learn moreJoseph M. Pierce is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th-century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the forthcoming special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, The Art Newspaper, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with SJ Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
Learn moreI am a choreographer, performer, and educator based between Philadelphia and New York City who grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with my siblings and cousins. My early exposure to concert dance was through African dance and capoeira performances on California college campuses where my parents studied and worked, but I did not start formal dance training until college with Umfundalai, Kariamu Welsh’s contemporary African dance technique. My work continues to be influenced by various sources, including my foundations in those living rooms and parties, my early technical training in contemporary African dance, my continued study of contemporary dance and performance, and my recent sociological research of and technical training in J-setting with Donte Beacham. I produce dance and performance work with idiosynCrazy productions, a company I founded in 2008 and now co-direct with Shannon Murphy. Previously, I have danced with Marianela Boán, Silvana Cardell, Emmanuelle Hunyh, Tania Isaac, Kun- Yang Lin, C. Kemal Nance, Marissa Perel, Leah Stein, Keith Thompson, Kate Watson-Wallace, Reggie Wilson, and Kariamu Welsh (as a member of Kariamu & Company). As a performer, I also collaborate with Merián Soto.
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by jumatatu m. poe in partnership with Jermone Donte Beacham and Jamarsa Peters.
Learn moreKendra Jayne Patrick directs an itinerant, eponymous art gallery based in New York City. The program is focused on exhibition-making and symbology related to the twenty-first century avant-garde, specializing in post-conceptual and post-internet sculpture, digital, photography, and painting. Since opening in late 2017 the gallery has shown a range of international artists and practices including Ivan Argote, Lap-See Lam, Kenya (Robinson), Jo Shane, and Arden Surdam. Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick has been featured in Artsy, Vulture, ARTnews, Barron’s, the San Francisco Chronicle, and DAZED Magazine.
Learn moreLalo Perez (b.Bakersfield, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR. Their practice investigates the intersections of identity through social environments, creating attention to the fragility of familiar cultural connections by grounding their practice in the action of construction and deconstruction. Through rituals, Lalo creates a dialogue between material, language, and imagery, developing a visual archive that reflects the inherited faith that leads them. Lalo has participated in artist residencies at Casa Lü in Mexico City, MX; Jupiterfab in Guadalajara, MX; and Caldera a.i.r in Sisters, OR, and has been awarded grants by The Nat Turner Project and Regional Arts and Culture Council. They are currently pursuing a BFA in Intermedia at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Learn moreMariano Pensotti (Buenos Aires 1973) is an Argentine author and theater director. He studied cinema, visual arts and theater in Buenos Aires, Spain and Italy. He is a graduated from Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Rogelio Yrurtya (Buenos Aires) and was a fellow studient at Casa de América (Madrid) and La Loggia CISD (Italy). In theater, as an author and director, he created more than fifteen performances in the past ten years.
Among his latest creations are Cineastas (Filmmakers) (2013) premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) and presented in Wiener Festwochen, HAU Berlin, Holland Festival and Theaterformen, El Pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal) (2010/2012) premiered at Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires and presentd at Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Festival de Otoño (Madrid), Theaterformen (Hannover), Hebbel am ufer (Berlin), Auabirlewen (Bern), Norwich & Norfolk Festival (England), Kampnagel Festival (Hamburg), Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zürich), Tempo Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Fiac (Bahia), Rotterdamse Schowburg (Rotterdam), Frascati Theater (Amsterdam). Sometimes I think I can see you (2010/2011) premiered in Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer as part of Ciudades Paralelas Festival and presented in Buenos Aires, Cologne, Brussels, Zürich, Warsaw, Salamanca, Copenhage, Helsinki, Girona and Paris. Encyclopaedia of unlived lives (2010) premiered at Schauspielhaus Graz (Austria) and presented during Steirischer Herbst Festival and La Marea (2005/2011) premiered at the V Buenos Aires International Festival and later on invited to the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Hebbel am Ufer Theater (Berlin), Homo Novus Festival (Riga), Dublin Festival (Ireland), Festival Automne en Normandie (Rouen), Carrefour International de Théâtre (Québec), Festival Transamériques (Montréal), Yokohama (Japan), Festival Temporada Alta (Girona), Norfolk & Norwich Festival (England), Metropolis Copenhague (Denmark) and Push Festival (Vancouver).
Pensotti has become one of the most noted experimental directors throughout the world. He has been heralded as one of Latin America’s brightest theater talents and he and his company tour extensively throughout the year.
He formed the Grupo Marea together with set designer Mariana Tirantte.
For his work he received several awards worldwide. His texts has been published and translated to more than twenty languages. In his work he developed two different lines, one composed by stage performances where he write his own very literary texts and the play is strongly based in the work with the actors, and in paralell he produced several site specific performances where the main intention is to create a particular contrast in between fiction and reality with fiction placed in public places.
Selected Press
"Macklin Kowal interviews Mariano Pensotti," Macklin Kowal, THE OFFCENTER, February 16, 2012.
Learn moreGutierrez is a New York-based dance and music artist who makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. His work has toured internationally to festivals and venues including American Realness Festival in New York; Festival d’automne à Paris; Antipodes Festival in Brest, France; Out There Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; UNAM in Mexico City; and ImPulsTanz in Vienna. He is the winner of three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards.
Learn moreOffsite Dance Project was started in 2008 to pioneer alternative approaches to arts presentation through site-specific performance in locations such as trains, parks, and museums. Offsite also produces an annual community forum, We dance, to stimulate Japan’s contemporary dance scene by bringing artists from various genres together in unusual circumstances that generate new ways of approaching their art.
Learn morePablo de Ocampo lives in Vancouver where he is Exhibitions Curator at Western Front. He has curated screenings, exhibitions, and performances at galleries, cinemas, and festivals internationally. From 2006 to 2014, de Ocampo was Artistic Director of the Images Festival in Toronto, and in 2013, served as the programmer of the 59th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, History is What's Happening. He was a founding member of the collective screening series Cinema Project in Portland, OR.
Learn morePaul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance.
Learn morePepper Pepper is a Portland, OR-based multidisciplinary artist. His work transforms vulnerability into spectacle - using artifice, technology, and camp to metabolize trauma into luminous, often magical performance worlds. Pepper has presented performances on stages and at festivals including Risk/Reward, the Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), Performance Works Northwest, NCECA, and internationally at OFF! Biennale Budapest. Their visual and installation work has been exhibited at Oregon Contemporary, Linfield University, Seattle Central College, and The Budapest Art Fair.
Pepper has incubated new experimental works at residencies like MacDowell, Monson Arts, Playa, Caldera, Signal Fire, and PonderosaTanz (Germany), Pepper’s practice bridges experimental performance and nightlife legacy. With over 20 years in cabaret and drag production, Pepper has appeared at and been featured at The Austin International Drag Festival, OUTstages (Victoria, BC), and is co-host of The Portland Drag Theatre Festival alongside frequent collaborator Anthony Hudson.
His ongoing project Pink Moment explores PINK as queer energy, ritual, and resistance while hybridizing performance, photography, and installation into an evolving archive of embodied glamour.
@thepepperpepper
www.thepepperpepper.com Learn morePeter Ksander is a Stage Designer who holds a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Previously he has lived and worked in Brooklyn NY , Chicago IL, Iowa City, IA and Los Angeles, CA.
Design credits include scenic and/or lighting designs for: Man in a Case (Big Dance Theater, Hartford Stage,) The Brothers Size (The Public Theater, The Studio Theater in Dublin, The Old Globe), There There (Kristin Kosmas / Chocolate Factory, On The Boards,) Othello (Theater for a New Audience, Intiman Theater), On the Levee (Lincoln Center Theater 3), The Scarlet Letter, Arms and the Man(Intiman theater), A House In Bali (Bang on a Can/ Cal Performances), The Misanthrope (Portland Stage Company), Making of Americans (Walker Art Center), Laude in Urbis (Compania di Colombari, Orvieto Italy), This Place is a Desert (w/ Jay Scheib, Institute of Contemporary Art, Under the Radar Festival, MIT), Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (The Theater of a Two-Headed Calf), Stanley 2006(HERE Art Center w/ Lisa D'Amour), Saint Joan of the Stockyards (Stillpoint/PS122) and several productions for the California Institute for the Arts, including Baal, The House of Bernarda Alba and...Or the Whale (an operaic adaptation of Moby Dick by boxer Julie Crocket) His design work has appeared in the Buanos Aries in Translation Festival, at The Maison des Arts de Creteil and The Ontological Hysteric Incubator, PICA's Time Based Art Festival, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2008 he won an Obie award for the scenic design of Untitled Mars (this title may change), created and directed by Jay Scheib and presented at PS122 and the National Theater of Hungary.
In 2014 he won a Bessie award along side the other designers for the visual design of This was the End.
Over the years he has worked with Richard Foreman (Bad Behavior, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, Astronome: a Night at the Opera, Idiot Savant), Erik Ehn (Ideas of Good and Evil, ICE: Cry me a river...), Karin Coonrod (Laude in Urbis, The Blackamoor Angel, Love's Labors Lost, Orfeo), Mark Wing-Davey (1:23, Small Tragedy, Behind the Eye, Pericles,) and Robert Woodruff (Oedipus).
Between 2001-2004 Ksander was associate scenic designer to Douglas Stein, working on projects both nationally and internationally. In 2006, Stein and Ksander begun co-designing projects, which have included: Carson Kreitzer's Behind the Eye and Lemon Andersen's County of Kings.
In 2005 Peter was a recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program, through which he spent two years investigating how experimental theater ideas are explored at all levels of production in the United States.
In 2006 He joined the curatorial board of the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator and for the next five years served as a curator of new and experimental work. At that time he worked along with co-curator Brendan Regimbal to develop the SHORTFORM program, a residency for artists to explore serial and sequential performance works.
In 2011 Ksander relocated to Portland OR to take up a teaching position in Scenography at Reed College. In 2013 he was on the selection panel for the Risk/Reward festival and began working with Portland companies Hand2mouth, The Portland Playhouse and the Portland Experimental Theater Ensemble.
His work as a generative performance artist includes creating, in collaboration with other artists, performances including: Seeing the Elephant, and The Sleeping Dane Effect (a collaboration with animator Melissa Chimovitz). He is co-founder of Tiny Elephant, whose first piece, The Stupid Butterfly Project, was presented by Arts at St. Ann's, as part of Puppetlab. He is a member of TENT, a company rooted in image and performance-based ensemble generated work that questions theatrical tradition. Most recently TENT developed Ugly Children do not get Cake, a rooftop performance exploring the distance between an individual and the dreams contained in the architecture of a city. Previous projects with TENT include: Zero Winter, Oh Sweet Captain or the Ahab Stomp, Your Shipwreck is No Disaster, KG: Life in a Tin Can, and He bent his head and watched his steps, for this helped him avoid thinking.
Peter also has continuing artistic relationships with the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, The Object Collection, Lear DeBessonet, Jay Scheib, Quinnopolis NY, Restless NYC, and Banana Bag and Bodice.
Learn morePeter Simensky’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum 52, New York; The Swiss Institute, New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston. Selected group exhibitions at Sculpture Center, NY; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mass Moca, North Adams; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York among others. Simensky’s Gold Dust was recently featured in Cabinet’s, Money Issue. He has received awards and grants from LMCC, NYFA, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He lives and works in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY.
Learn moreBorn in 1970, Philippe Quesne received his education in Visual Arts. For 10 years he designed sets for theater, operas and exhibitions. In 2003, he created the Vivarium Studio Company, and directed his first show, La Démangeaison des ailes, based on the acts of taking off and falling down. Philippe Quesne hunts the marvelous, the tiny, and pushes to the extreme experiences of our daily lives as well as the relationship between mankind and nature. As he did as a child, collecting insects, he now works and studies small communities under his microscope. The scenography is used as an ecosystem in which he immerses his actors into. His shows, such as La Démangeaison des ailes (2003), Des expériences (2004), D’après nature (2006), L’Effet de Serge (2007), La Mélancolie des dragons (2008), Big Bang (2010), Swamp Club (2013), Next Day (2014), compose a repertory that tours all over the world. In addition to his work for the theater, he creates performances and interventions in public spaces or natural sites, and displays his installations in the context of exhibitions. Since January 2014, he has been serving as the co-director of Nanterre-Amandiers, National Dramatic Center. In 2016, he will create Caspar Western Friedrich at Kammerspiele in Munich and Welcome to Caveland! at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels
BIO PAGE IMAGE/S:
La Mélancolie des dragons 1 @ Martin Argyroglo
La Mélancolie des dragons 5 © Pierre Grosbois Learn morePhoebe Davies (London) is a Welsh artist and researcher based at Somerset House Studios. Working across video, sound, performance, and print, her practice investigates how people perceive their social framework, often working with—and in response to—individuals, and communities, generating work through collaboration, collective action, and DIT (Do It Together) strategies. She currently co-facilitates two research groups, Synaptic Island, a London-based, womxn and non-binary sound collective, and Art is Action, a UK-based social practice research group. Phoebe Davies Website
Learn moreRalph Pugay is an artist who was born in the province of Cavite, Philippines, and has resided in Portland, OR for the majority of his adult life. He creates imaginative and thought-provoking tableaus that prompt viewers to contemplate the boundaries of cultural norms, identity, and social perception. His works have been exhibited at various venues, including Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Seattle Art Museum, Upfor Gallery, Marinaro, Webb Art Gallery, Vox Populi, AA|LA, and King School Museum for Contemporary Art. Pugay is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award, a Betty Bowen Award, and an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship among others. He has also been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Joan Mitchell Center, the Rauschenberg Residency, Vermont Studio Center, PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab, Crows Shadow, and the University of Oregon’s Center for Artistic Research.
Learn moreRoy Pérez teaches and writes about gender, sex and race in contemporary literature, art, and performance. He is an associate professor of English, American Ethnic Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. His poems and essays have appeared in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017), Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (OSUP, 2017), Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, the Best of Panic! poetry anthology, Bully Bloggers, and FENCE Magazine, and he is co-editor with Kadji Amin and Amber Musser of "Queer Form," a special issue of ASAP/Journal. He is writing a book titled Proximities: Queer Configurations of Race in Latinx Literature and Performance.
Learn moreSTEW: Guitars/Vocals, Text/Music
THEATER: Book, Co-Composer and Lyricist for Passing Strange (2008 Tony—Best Book, 2-time 2007 Obie (Best New Theater Piece and Best Ensemble ), Family Album (2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Notes of a Native Song (Spring 2015 Harlem Stage), Wagner, Max! Wagner! (Fall 2015 Kennedy Center) The Total Bent (Public Theater 2016), Making It (Spring 2010 St. Anne’s Warehouse), Brooklyn Omnibus (Fall 2010 Brooklyn Academy of Music) Resurrection City (2016 Studio Theatre), Chicago Omnibus (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 2012) FILM: Spike Lee’s Passing Strange. ROCK AND ROLL: Stew and The Negro Problem. Albums: Post Minstrel Syndrome, Joys and Concerns, Guest Host and The Naked Dutch Painter (both called Album of the Year by Entertainment Weekly), Welcome Black, Something Deeper than These Changes, Making It and the cast album of Passing Strange. Numerous Lincoln Center appearances, United Nations, Symphony Space.: Guest Host and Album of the Year by Entertainment Weekly TV: Stew is co-composer (w/ Heidi Rodewald) of “Gary Come Home,” for SpongeBob SquarePants. ARTS EDUCATION: Doctor of Humane Letters, Oshkosh University, Wisconsin; California Inst. of the Arts; New School; Stanford; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of the Arts, Philly. Stew is a Sundance Institute Alum and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence.
Heidi Rodewald is the Tony Award nominated, Obie Award winning co-composer of the musical Passing Strange, which transferred from The Public Theater to Broadway in 2008. Rodewald composed music for Karen Kandel's Portraits: Night and Day (2004); Brides of the Moon by The Five Lesbian Brothers (2010); and co-composed music for Shakespeare's Othello and Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet (2010-12). Rodewald joined the band The Negro Problem in 1997, where she began a longtime collaboration with singer songwriter, Stew. She has collaborated with him in a range of capacities -- as a co-composer, producer/arranger and performerSheis. the co-composer with Stew of the musical Family Album which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival during the 2014 season, Notes of a Native Song, at Harlem Stage in 2015, Wagner, Max! Wagner!! at the Kennedy Center in 2015, and The Total Bent at The Public Theater,May 2016.Heidi is the composer of The Good Swimmer, with librettist Donna DiNovelli, presented by Prototype Festival January 2016 at the space HERE in NYC,and scored her first film I Dream Too Much, which had it's world premiere at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival.
Learn moreVivian Phillips is Director of Marketing and Communications for Seattle Theatre Group, the largest performing arts organization in the Puget Sound Region, where she serves as chief spokesperson and oversees all marketing and communication functions for more than 750 annual events presented by STG. Vivian chairs the Seattle Arts Commission and previously served as Director of Communications to Seattle Mayor Paul Schell, overseeing citywide public information and emergency operations communications functions including WTO.
As a seasoned broadcast professional, Vivian produces and hosts award-winning arts programming for King County television, and previously hosted public affairs programs for the ABC and PBS affiliates in Seattle. She regularly hosts/moderates live conversations, most recently moderating a conversation with best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates for a sold out crowd of 2900. Other noted interviews/conversations, live and for television, include: Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Sherman Alexie, Magic Johnson, Charles Johnson, Alex Rodriquez, Mechell Ndegeocello, Dan Savage, Terry McMillan, Jesmyn Ward, Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Congressman John Lewis, among others.
Vivian has represented the Seattle Theatre Group to the Africa Consortium for 11 years.
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