Artists Archive

Morgan Thorson

Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis, MN) is a dance-maker. Morgan’s recent work addresses how the body shapes time; and how time influences our perception and expression of the body in spaces where labor, coordination, identity, movement and image can flourish and decay as well as redefine our notion of dance, sexuality, belonging and life. Morgan has received support from The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (2009, 2011 and 2015), and The National Dance Project (2008, 2012, and 2015). She is a United States Artist (2012), Guggenheim (2010), and McKnight (2002, 2009) Fellow and has received multiple Sage Awards for Outstanding Choreography. Currently, she is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University.

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Moya Michael

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Moya trained in ballet under the direction of Dianne Sparks. She studied contemporary and African dance at the Tswhane University, and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. In 2003, she was nominated for a best dancer award at the “ITS” festival, and was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for dance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa. In 2005, Moya became a member of the ROSAS Dance company. Moya has worked on commissions in India, China, Germany, South Africa, and Austria. Her latest work includes “Darling,” in collaboration with Igor Shyshko which premiered at Stuk Leuven, and “A_part” which premiered in Sommerszene Salzburg in 2015. She currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

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Myles de Bastion

Myles 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.

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Myles de Bastion / CymaSpace

Myles 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.

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Nacera Belaza

Born 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.

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Narcissister

Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer whose work spans performance, video art, experimental music, and photography. She has presented work at The New Museum, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center, and at many nightclubs, galleries, and other alternative art spaces. Narcissister has also presented her work internationally at the Music Biennale in Zagreb Croatia; at Chicks on Speed’s Girl Monster Festival; at The City of Women Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia; and at the Camp/Anti-Camp festival in Berlin, among many others. Her art videos have been included in exhibitions and film festivals worldwide, including on MOCATV. Her film, The Self-Gratifier, won “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at the 2008 Good Vibration Erotic Film Festival and her film, Vaseline, won the main prize in 2013. Interested in the troubling divide between popular entertainment and experimental art, Narcissister appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. Narcissister had her first solo gallery exhibition, Narcissister is You, at envoy enterprises in February 2013. She was nominated for a 2013 Bessie Award for her evening-length piece, Organ Player, and has received awards from Creative Capital, Theo Westenberger, and United States Artists.

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Nature Theater of Oklahoma

Nature Theater of Oklahoma is an OBIE Award-winning New York-based performance group under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Since Poetics: a ballet brut, their first ensemble piece, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has been devoted to making the work they don’t know how to make, putting themselves in impossible situations, and working from out of their own ignorance and unease. Using readymade materials, found space, overheard speech, and observed gesture, and through extreme formal manipulation, and superhuman effort, they shift our perceptions of everyday reality. Selected Press Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, December 21, 2009. 'Romeo And Juliet': Just As You Misremembered It, Robert Smith, NPR, December 29, 2009. Deconstructing Romeo and Juliet, Hilton Als, The New Yorker, January 11, 2010. Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2009. Stage Notes: Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet, Tom Murrin, papermag, December 16, 2009.

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Neal Medlyn

Neal Medlyn, now residing in New York City, has performed in a variety of films, bands, dance pieces and plays, designed sound scores, been a model and a go-go dancer and continues to do some of these things. But most importantly, he is a Performer who presents his programs in New York City, having at some time or another appeared in numerous U.S. cities and in Berlin Germany. He also performs as Champagne Jerry, a rapper. His performance work, primarily built around pop music, has appeared at the New Museum for Contemporary Art (THE NEAL MEDLYN EXPERIENCE LIVE! a re-enactment of Beyonce's 2007 concert DVD), the Andy Warhol Museum, the Kitchen (Wicked Clown Love), Dance Theater Workshop (...Her's a Queen), the Chocolate Factory (Brave New Girl), Joe's Pub (where he was a co-host and co-creator of Our Hit Parade, which ran for four years), PS122, Fez (Neal Medlyn, the Paris Hilton of Performance Art), Ars Nova (Neal Medlyn's Lionel Richie Opera), the Knitting Factory, Galapagos Art Space (Neal Medlyn's Coming In The Air Tonight), on tour across the U.S., Canada, Berlin, and in London as a resident performer at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. He won a 2010 New York Dance and Performance Award for his sound design for Miguel Gutierrez' Last Meadow and has also designed sound for a joint project between Gutierrez and Jenny Holzer at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. He was honored with the title of Mr. Lower East Side in 2004. He co-starred opposite Karen Finley in "George and Martha" in New York and various places across the U.S. He's also collaborated with Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys), Bridget Everett, Kenny Mellman, Adrienne Truscott and has been discussed in the Onion, NPR's Here and Now, Gothamist, the Austin Chronicle, and the New York Times, in which he has appeared several times without his shirt on. His original Internet TV show NEAL MEDLYN'S LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE was a cult sensation on Nerve.com. His dance moves have been featured in the work of choreographers Adrienne Truscott and David Neumann. He has written for New York Magazine's website and Nerve.com about various things including but not limited to R. Kelly, Blind Date, bisexuality, and Days of Our Lives (with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Lisa Carver) among others. His book, Sexual Buttocks and his albums have been purchased by at least 10 people.

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NIC Kay

NIC Kay is from the Bronx, currently occupying several liminal spaces. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity/meaning gleaned from the shifting of perspective. NIC’s current transdisciplinary projects explore movement as a place of reclamation of the body, history, and spirituality.

NIC has shown work, spoken on panels, and hosted workshops at numerous venues throughout the United States, and Internationally. In 2016, they developed a web series called the Bronx Cunt Tour around their debut solo performance lil BLK for Open TV, which premiered in April, 2016. NIC Kay was a 2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Van Lier Fellow in New York City.

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Noelle Stiles

As a dance artist, Noelle Stiles is interested in how and where experience is held in the body. This interest provides a framework for extracting the corporeal language that both intimately connects and individuates us. Stiles has a BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts and completed her graduate studies in dance at The Ohio State University. She has performed and presented work at venues such as the PICA's Time-Based Art Festival (2010), On The Boards, PWNW, Dance New Amsterdam, and Links Hall. Stiles' interest in teaching has taken her to places such as The Ohio State University, the Governor’s School of North Carolina and she co-founded the community focused dance class series Heavy Rotation with Kathleen Keogh of Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner. Her work has been supported by Caldera's Artist Residency program, PICA's Resource Room Residency, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the ACA Associate Artist Residency program and was selected by PICA and the NDP to travel to the Dublin Dance Festival as part of a pilot international exchange program. In 2010, Stiles merged her work as a graphic designer with her work in dance to co-create a dance publication entitled FRONT. Based out of Portland, Oregon, FRONT is Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Robert Tyree. FRONT utilizes the old-school tactics of the broadsheet newspaper to explore the new, current, future energy of dance theory and practices in the field.

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Nora Chipaumire

For the past ten years, Zimbabwe-born and New York-based Chipaumire has investigated Africa and her own personal iconography. Her performances complicate, implicate, and destroy the concept of the African female body as a subjugated, colonial, and tribal unknowable. Chipaumire is a recipient of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and two New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards.

Selected Press

Nora Chipaumire: Body and Soul Podcast, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Infinite Body Podcast, April 25, 2008.

Platform 2012: Parallels, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, April, 2012.

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Offsite Dance Project

Offsite 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.

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Okwui Okpokwasili

Okwui Okpokwasili is a New York-based writer, performer, and choreographer. Deemed “a magnetic performer” by The New York Times, Okpokwasili has worked with Ralph Lemon, Julie Taymor, Nora Chipaumire, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Dean Moss, and others.  Bronx Gothic is her second solo performance project, after pent-up: a revenge dance. Both projects are collaborations with visual designer, filmmaker, and director Peter Born. Together they create award-winning multidisciplinary experiences of raw intimacy—a collision of body, image and sound. Okpokwasili ‘s accomplishments include MANCC Choreographic Fellow; Artist in Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Park Avenue Armory, and LMCC’s Extended Life Program; Foundation for Contemporary Arts grantee. Her current work Bronx Gothic enjoyed a sold-out run in PS122’s 2014 COIL Festival and continues to tour nationally and internationally.

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Omar Willey

Born in Seattle when the last person leaving was supposed to turn out the lights, Omar Willey has been an experimental filmmaker and photographer since 1989. He has made six feature films and a dozen shorts that have been shown locally as well as broadcast internationally. He is currently finishing up a five year project in hyperphotography dealing with the human use of public land.

In 1988 he began writing about performing arts for KCMU radio (now KEXP). Shortly thereafter he started his first magazine, Free Forum, dedicated to literary arts and cultural analysis. After this he began another zine, Lines of Sight, dedicated to photography and film and featuring interviews and articles about contemporary artists as well as photography. After this he moved on to freelance writing for Earshot Jazz, 5/4 Music, Tablet Magazine, and other local magazines. In 2010, he joined the staff of the online blog, Seattlest, where he remained till it shuttered.

For the past three years, he has been known as the publisher of the online journal of arts and culture, The Seattle Star, in which he has continued his interest in writing about performing arts, science, experimental film, and open culture.

Mr. Willey is an alumnus of both Western Washington University and the University of Washington. He volunteers time to open source software movement, Project Gutenberg, and Creative Commons projects across the country. He teaches free workshops in critical writing and photography around town. He is interested in everything.

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O’Necia Ford

As an alumni Prancing J-Sette of THEE Jackson State University. I always stay ready, so I don’t have to “Get Ready” Hi! I’m O’Necia Ford hailing originally from Eldorado, Arkansas. In high school, I cheered all of my life and danced for the Southern Belles Dance Company where I was captain from 2014-2016. I then went to finish my matriculation at JSU where I graduated in May 2020 with a bachelor's in Criminal Justice and Correctional Services. In college I of course danced with the Prancing J-Settes along with the JSU Dance Ensemble and other organizations. I’ve participated in dance throughout my life with different genres such as tap, ballet, hip hop, jazz, and majorette. Some of my best accomplishments throughout my journey of cheering and dance have been performing on ESPN, NBA halftime games, opening for Big Freedia, and being a part of music videos that featured big stars such as Trina and Big Krit. 

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Pablo de Ocampo

Pablo 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.

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Paul Clipson

Paul 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.

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Pepper Pepper

Pepper 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

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Peter Ksander

Peter 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.

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Peter Simensky

Peter 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.

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Philippe Quesne / Vivarium Studio

Born 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

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Phoebe Davies

Phoebe 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

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Rachel Carrico

Rachel Carrico is a scholar and practitioner of dance and performance. She holds a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California–Riverside and an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU. She has published her research on second lining, an improvisational dance form rooted in New Orleans's African diaspora parading traditions, in TDR: The Drama Review, TBS: The Black Scholar, and several anthologies. Fellowships and awards include the Society of Dance History Scholars' Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for excellence in dance scholarship, the UC Center for New Racial Studies Research Grant, and the Center for Gulf South Research Global South Fellowship at Tulane University. Also a practitioner, Carrico completed the Limón Institute's dance teacher training. In 2008, she co-founded Goat in the Road Productions in New Orleans, with whom she has directed two international artist residencies and launched Play/Write, a youth playwriting festival, in New Orleans schools.

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Rachid Ouramdane

Rachid Ouramdane is a French choreographer of Algerian descent at the forefront of Europe’s conceptual dance thinkers. His projects reassess the definitions of “performer” and “choreographer” and question modes of producing and circulating artwork. Prior to founding L’A. in 2007, Ouramdane collaborated with artists such as Emmanuelle Huynh, Meg Stuart, Christian Rizzo, Alain Buffard, and choreographer Julie Nioche, with whom he co-founded Fin Novembre in 1996. Ouramdane has worked with institutions also focused on visual art, including FRAC Champagne/Ardennes, Manège de Reims, and the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris. Besides choreography, Ouramdane regularly leads artistic workshops and moderates international encounters with artists.

Peripheries

The Purple Shall Govern, Daniel Fernández Pascual, deconcrete, June 8, 2011.

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Raimund Hoghe

Inspired to perform by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s injunction to "Throw your body into the fight," Hoghe was born in Wuppertal, Germany, and began his career as a writer. Until 1990, he worked as dramaturge for Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. In 1994, he produced his first solo for himself, Meinwärts, which together with the subsequent Chambre séparée (1997) and Another Dream (2000) made up a trilogy on the 20th century. Since 2002, Hoghe has choreographed group productions or duos that reinterpret classic dance pieces, including Swan Lake, 4 Acts (2005); Sacre — The Rite of the Spring (2004), with Lorenzo De Brabandere; Boléro Variations (2007) and L'Après-midi with Emmanuel Eggermont (2008).

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Raja Feather Kelly

Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, a director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory. He is a three-time Princess Grace Award winner (2017, 2018, 2019), two-time Lucille Lortel Award nominee (2019, 2020), and 2019 Chita Rivera Award nominee. In 2020 he was the Obie Award winner and Outer Critics Circle Award honoree for choreography for the Pulitzer-winning musical A Strange Loop. In 2019 he was an SDCF Joe A. Callaway Award finalist for both A Strange Loop and the Pulitzer-winning play Fairview. Raja is also the 2019–2020 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2019 Creative Capital award recipient. He is a current fellow of HERE Arts, the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School. Over the past decade, Kelly has created fifteen evening-length premieres with his company the feath3r theory as well as directing and choreographing extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City. His choreography has also garnered a 2018 Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) and the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and he was Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College.

www.thefeath3rtheory.com

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Ralph Pugay

Ralph 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.


www.worldofralph.com instagram.com/ralphpugay

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Raquel Andre

Raquel André was born in Caneças, Portugal in 1986. Her artistic path began early on. In 2009, her first performance was created out her the discovery of a box full of handwritten letters from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. André has since cultivated an interest in collecting—particularly in the performing arts—and in 2016, she completed her master’s thesis at University Federal of Rio de Janeiro on the subject.

In 2011, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where a five-month artistic residency in Companhia dos Atores turned into five years. There, she began working with director and actress Bel Garcia on several theater productions. André also worked with actor, curator, and director César Augusto in Galpão Gamboa, where she co-programmed and produced theater, dance and music. André studied in the Theater and Film School of Lisbon, and worked with several Portuguese artists from different artistic languages. Her work has been shown on television, and in Portugal, Spain, Poland, Cuba, Argentina, and Brazil.

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Raven Chacon

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of a United States Artists fellowship in music, a Creative Capital award in visual arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.

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Reese Bowes

Artist, 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.

https://reesebowes.com/

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Reggie Watts

Reggie Watts made his name playing and singing in the band Maktub, a central part of the Seattle music scene throughout the 1990s. Embarking on his solo career in 2004, Watts has focused on developing a unique comedic style that synthesizes elements from R&B, beatboxing, alternative theatre and video. A prolific artist, Watts has completed projects with The Yes Men, collaborated with SOULLIVE and Yunchen Lhamo, and appeared at SXSW, the Montreal Comedy Festival, Cape Town and Edinburgh Comedy Festivals, TBA Festival in Portland, The Fuse Box Festival in Austin, Bonaroo, Sasquatch Festival, plus several BBC live radio events. He is winner of the 2005 Malcolm Hardee Oy! Oy! Award and the 2006 Andy Kaufman Comedy Award. In 2006 he was also a recipient of the Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award.

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Reuben Tomás Roqueñi

Reuben Tomás Roqueñi

Director of National Artists Fellowships

Native Arts and Cultures Foundation

Reuben is a nationally respected arts administrator with over 15 years in progressive program development, management, artist-centric support systems and grantmaking experience. He is currently Director of National Artists Fellowships at Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, serving Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian artists, organizations, and programs across the US. Previously, Reuben was Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area, one the nation’s largest arts and culture funders. Formerly, Reuben served as Grants Program Director at the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. Reuben is a board member at MAP Fund in NYC and a former a board member at PICA. Reuben is of mixed Yaqui/Mayo/Chicanx ancestry and is currently living in Portland, Oregon.

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Rian Dundon

Rian Dundon (b. 1980) is a photographer in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of the books Protest City (2023), Fan (2015), and Changsha (2012), and the recipient of a 2020 Magnum Foundation fellowship. Dundon is a contributing photographer at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. He teaches photography at Clark College in Vancouver, WA.

Website: https://riandundon.com/

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rise x fall

rise x fall is an in-progress multimedia collaboration between rubén garcía marrufo, maximiliano, and Jaleesa Johnston. Conjured from liminal space, this work considers the rise and fall of an empire, and the possibilities between stability and instability. Taking inspiration from the ocean’s crashing waves against the earth, rise x fall simultaneously inhabits the space between the pain and fear of death, as well as the hope and growth of rebirth.

ARTISTS' BIOS

mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist working in BLKwvv, a generative multimedia mythos: a Black reclamation rococo aesthetic and agenda based in exploring and expanding the multiplicity and fluidity of the Black self through pleasure, desirability, innocence, and imagination as performance, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, and publications.

https://maximiliano.info/

rubén garcía marrufo is a border artist.

https://rubengarciamarrufo.com/

Jaleesa Johnston is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and arts administrator currently living and working in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has been the recipient of the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency, and Open Signal’s New Media Fellowship.  She has exhibited her work in cities along the West Coast, including San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, and she occasionally facilitates workshops and classes in new media and performance art. Jaleesa also organizes public programs as Programs Lead in the Learning and Community Partnerships Department at the Portland Art Museum. 

https://jaleesajohnston.com/

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robbinschilds

robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins) have presented choreographed and video works since 2003, in venues including P.S. 122, Marfa Ballroom, The New Museum, and Autumn Skatebowl. Most recently, robbinschilds was commissioned to create original choreography for David Byrne and premiered a new work, Sonya and Layla Go Camping, at The Kitchen.

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Robert Alexander Clarke

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.

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Robert Mackey

Robert Mackey is an investigative journalist who joined Forensic Architecture in 2023. Before that, he was a senior writer at The Intercept and a reporter for The New York Times. His visual investigation of how Fox News and the Trump White House used deceptively edited video of Black Lives Matter protests to smear racial justice protesters won a Mirror Award in 2022.

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Robert Quillen Camp

Robert Quillen Camp is a theater artist and scholar whose current research focuses primarily on the ways in which expanded dramatic practices intersect with contemporary post-conceptual visual art. His other research areas include European modern drama and the phenomenology of performance.

He has written extensively for the stage, including writing the text for Pig Iron Theater Company’s OBIE-award winning CHEKHOV LIZARDBRAIN, which has toured internationally and been published by 53rd State Press. His most recent play, ALL HANDS, a collaboration with the Hoi Polloi Theater Company, premiered at NYC’s Incubator Arts Project in 2012, directed by Alec Duffy, with music by Dave Malloy and choreography by Dan Safer. Another collaboration with Pig Iron, the Barrymore Award nominated PAY UP, returned to the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in the fall of 2013. His plays and performance works have been produced at many venues in the US and abroad, including the Public Theater Under the Radar Festival, the Ohio Theater, the Ontological-Hysteric, Peak Performances at Montclair University, The Empty Space, Prelude Festival, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and HERE. His plays have been published in the literary journals Conjunctions, Chain, Conundrum, Factorial, and Play A Journal of Plays.

He currently teaches in the theatre department at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR.

BA Reed College, MFA Brown University, PhD University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Robert Trafford

Robert Trafford is a journalist by training, and an assistant director with Forensic Architecture, a human rights research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, with whom he has worked since 2017. There, he leads investigative research projects, writes and edits for exhibitions and publications, and supports other team members to bring investigations to publication, and to think about how their research can be activated across a range of forums in pursuit of accountability. His work with Forensic Architecture has covered the extrajudicial killing of civilians by Cameroon’s special forces, chemical weapons attacks by the Assad regime, and counter-protest violence by US police. He has jointly led investigations into the 2020 right-wing terror attack in Hanau, Germany, the 2011 killing of Mark Duggan by London’s police, and the agency’s acclaimed TRIPLE-CHASER investigation, which premiered at the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York.

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Robin Deacon

Robin Deacon (born 1973 Eastbourne, England) is a British artist, writer and filmmaker currently based in the USA. Active from the 1990’s, his work explores questions of memory, absence and fiction in performance, through a constant reconfiguration of his role as an artist - as journalist and biographer, operator and technician, imposter and stooge. His recent research projects have explored histories of video documentation and outmoded media formats, and the practice and ethics of performance re-enactment. His live and screen based work has been commissioned and programmed throughout Europe, the US, and Asia. A MacDowell Fellow, he has been a recipient of a variety of awards and fellowships from organizations such as the Delfina Foundation, British Arts Council, Live Art Development Agency and Franklin Furnace Inc.

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Robin Lane

Robin Lane began studying dance, gymnastics, theater, and visual art as a child. At fourteen, she created her first evening-length performance at the Robert Frost Auditorium, combining her high school gymnastic team with the dance club and creating an original score with the school orchestra playing office equipment. As a director/choreographer/writer, her focus has always been telling stories, linear and nonlinear, bringing to life the visual images, metaphors, and stories she sees in her head. She uses whatever vocabulary the images demand. Her intent is always to hone each new work to communicate and connect with her audiences. Exploration, collaboration, and ensemble building are core elements of her creative process.

In 1977, Lane founded Do Jump to explore her unique genre. Lane has created 19 original, full‐length works and countless smaller site‐specific pieces, events, and spectacles.

In 1983, Lane and company renovated the Echo Theatre in southeast Portland, OR, creating a permanent home for Do Jump! The following year she opened the Do Jump Physical Theatre School, sharing her unique teaching style with children and adults, providing a training ground for the company. Lane has toured extensively with Do Jump, including multiple extended runs in the New Victory Theater in NYC, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. “That Happened,” Lane’s first feature film, just had its first screening at PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon  

Robin is the recipient of the Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship in Dance, three creativity grants from the NEA, and the 2010 Regional Arts and Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Performing Arts. Lane attended a joint program between Reed College and the Portland Museum Art School. She studied the LeCoque Method and was a member of Theatre Elan Company. In 1973, Lane studied aerial dance with Terry Sendgraff in San Francisco and Bill & Arnie Zane in NYC. In Portland, Oregon, she created and choreo/directed original works for Storefront Theater, Tygres Heart Shakespeare, Portland Family Circus, and others.

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Roland Dahwen Wu

Roland Dahwen Wu is a filmmaker whose work explores migration, race and memory. His films and installations have been shown at CalArts, Portland Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival, Northwest Film Center, and numerous galleries. His films span nonfiction, experimental, and narrative genres, and are commonly marked by poetry: from his first documentary about the whistling language of the Canary Islands (There are no birds in the nests of yesterday) to his recent short film about 20th century Asian migration (Haft-Seen).

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Ronnie Bass

Bass 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



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Rose Bond

Rose 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.

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Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE) has performed rituals at the Guggenheim Museum, Under the Radar Festival, FringeArts, Under the Radar’s Incoming! Series, Gibney Dance Center, Kate Werble Gallery, Special Effects Festival at Participant Inc., Prelude Festival, AUNTS Arts@Renaissance, and JACK. ROKE received a 2016 Creative Capital award for The Art of Luv series, and has been awarded a Franklin Furnace Fund grant (2013) and a BAX Space Grant (2014). They were part of the Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group and PS122’s RAMP residency program. They spent the summer of 2014 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and were 2015 CUNY Hunter Artists-in-Residence in ceramics. The Art of Luv (Part 1): Elliot is created with support from The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group, Gibney Dance Center, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and a residency at CUNY City Tech. Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble is supported by Immediate Medium’s AGENCY program, which provides financial, administrative, and equipment support to emerging artists. The Art of Luv is a project of Creative Capital.

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Roy Pérez

Roy 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.

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rubén garcía marrufo

rubén garcía marrufo is a border artist and ⅓ of rise x fall.

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Rude Mechs

Since 1995, Rude Mechs has created a mercurial slate of 23 theatrical productions that represent a genre-defying cocktail of big ideas, cheap laughs, and dizzying spectacle. What these works hold in common is the use of play to make performance, the use of theaters as meeting places for audiences and artists, and the use of humor as a tool for intellectual investigation. The company tours these performances nationally and abroad; maintains The Off Center, a performance venue in Austin for arts groups of every discipline; and operates a year-round arts mentoring program for teenage girls.

Selected Press

The Rude Mechs' "The Method Gun" at DTW, Jeremy M. Barker, Culturebot, March 3, 2011.

Many Methods to Collaborative Madness, Joan Anderman, The New York Times, February 22, 2011.

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Sacha Yanow

Sacha Yanow is a New York City-based artist and actor. Her solo performance works include: Dad Band, New Museum, NYC (2015); Silent Film (in development), The Lab, San Francisco, Pieter, Los Angeles, and MAPP/Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY (2015), Dixon Place, NYC (2014), and Movement Research Festival, NYC (2013); and The Prince, Dixon Place, NYC (2013). Her residencies and awards include: LMCC Process Space (2016); SOMA, Mexico City (2015); Dixon Place, NYC (2014); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2012); and The Field, NYC (2011). She was creative consultant for Elisabeth Subrin’s feature film A Woman A Part (2016), and co-director and dramaturge for Dynasty Handbag’s performance piece Soggy Glasses (The Broad/REDCAT 2016, Brooklyn Academy of Music 2014). Yanow received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a graduate of the William Esper Studio Actor Training program.

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Sahar al-Sawaf

Sahar al-Sawaf (she/her) is an Iraqi-American filmmaker, visual artist, and photographer based in Oregon. Born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Lebanon and Iraq, she fled to California just before the Gulf War. Her work explores war, displacement, and fragmented family memory shaped by her experiences in Iraq and the United States. Her short films “Uncle Ma’an,” “Um Abdullah,” and “Shadow of Paradise” have screened internationally, including at DOC NYC, Chicago International Film Festival, and Animafest Zagreb. She was a Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center in New York, NY, and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Video/Film. Most recently, she completed a photogravure intensive at Mullowney Printing, supported by a Regional Arts Cultural Council grant. Her photo-performance work is featured in the 2026 Artists’ Biennial, The Price of the Ticket, at Oregon Contemporary.

https://www.salsawaffles.com

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Sam Hamilton

Sam Hamilton (Sam Tam Ham) is an independent, working class, interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent based in Portland, OR. After 20 years of working independently and professionally across experimental music and sound art, moving and still image, painting, writing, performance, stage, cinema, and curatorial projects, Hamilton's practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but verdant garden full of old and new growth, hidden places, edible arrangements, toxic weeds, garden parties, frolicking, and most importantly, the life-affirming ferment of deep existential entanglement. What physically emerges in any given season through the confluence of this garden depends most simply on what vessel(s) best serve the idea at hand. 


The long song

a meandering garden path

Both an entrance and an exit


Hamilton's work has existed in a wide range of contexts, including Converge 45, Portland; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Portland Art Museum, OR; Transmediale, Berlin; Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival; Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland; as well as a research station in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, an active volcanic island crater, a billboard, a functioning Shinto shrine in Japan, an anarchist squat in Athens, Greece, the Australian outback desert, a dank underground parking lot, some dude’s apartment in Lima, Peru, and on the radio. 


In addition to their solo work, they have collaborated extensively with artists across Aotearoa New Zealand, Sāmoa, Australia, Kiribati, the US, Finland, Japan, and Peru, including ten years spent working with the internationally acclaimed Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, touring major works to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAB; Ruhrtriennale, Ruhr; KVS; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; and more. 


Their work has been recognized with a Creative Capital Award, Oregon Community Foundation's Creative Heights Award, and an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award, among others.

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Samita Sinha

Artist and composer Samita Sinha creates multidisciplinary performance works that investigate origins of voice. She synthesizes Indian vocal traditions and embodied practices to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation. Sinha's works have been commissioned and presented by Asia Society, Performance Space 122, Danspace, Rubin Museum, Queens Museum, Western Front, and Gibney Dance, among others. Sinha teaches voice extensively.

www.samitasinha.com

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Samiya Bashir

Samiya 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.

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Sampada Aranke

TBA:16 Guest Scholar Sampada Aranke (PhD, Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in Art Journal, Equid Novi: African Journalism Studies, and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. She’s currently working on her book manuscript entitled Death’s Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics.

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San Cha

San Cha is a Mexican-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice blends rancheras, electronics, cumbia, and pop to explore themes of identity, power, and liberation. Born Lizette Gutierrez to Mexican immigrant parents, San Cha's artistic journey began with singing in the Catholic Church choir and evolved within the vibrant Bay Area queer drag nightlife scene. This formative period fostered a unique fusion of musical influences, including Catholic hymns, Mexican corridos, rancheras, cumbias, and punk queer electroclash, shaping her distinct artistic voice.

Rooted in the DIY, punk, and queer nightlife cultures, San Cha's work is driven by a commitment to personal, social, and political liberation. Her creative process is fueled by community narratives, lucid dreams, and cultural exploration. A transformative experience living on her aunt's farm in Jalostotitlán, Mexico inspired her to reimagine traditional ranchera music through a queer lens, subverting established forms and cultural signifiers.

San Cha's early work, such as the Capricho del Diablo EP (2018), received critical acclaim, with Bandcamp Daily naming it Album Of The Day. Her 2019 album, La Luz De La Esperanza, earned an 8.0 rating on Pitchfork and recognition as one of The Advocate's "Women Of The Year" in 2020. Her music has been featured in the Starz TV series Vida and Kacey Musgraves' film Star-Crossed: The Film, with the Los Angeles Times declaring, "San Cha sings from a divine place." Her ongoing Processions (2024) mixtape, released through Ballroom Marfa, further demonstrates her artistic versatility and commitment to exploring complex narratives.

San Cha's practice extends to collaborative projects in classical music and opera. She has engaged in projects, performances, and residencies with Performance Space New York, New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; lumber room, Portland, OR; The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Red Bull; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; Denniston Hill, Glen Wild, NY; Oak Head; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; Movimiento de Arte y Cultural Latino Americana, San Jose, CA; KQED; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Portland, OR, and more. Her work has also been supported by the California Arts Council.

Recent awards and accolades include the National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund Grant (2023), National Performance Network Documentation & Storytelling Grant (2024), Los Angeles Performance Practice Research & Development Award (2024), a 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. San Cha's work consistently pushes artistic boundaries, utilizing music and performance as powerful vehicles for sociopolitical change and liberation.

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Sanchel Brown

Sanchel 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.

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Sandy Rodriguez

Sandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is a Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher. Her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Her works are in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; Amon Carter Museum, TX; The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, CA; Denver Art Museum, CO. She was awarded the 2023 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency, Creative Capital Award, and Migrations Initiative from Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell. Rodriguez and her work have been featured in BBC News: In The Studio, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Spectrum News 1, and others.

Check out a behind-the-scenes video of Sandy Rodriguez's work in Policing Justice.

studiosandyrodriguez.com

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Sarah Dougher

Sarah Dougher is a musician, composer, and university professor. She has performed for over twenty years, including at PICA’s TBA festival and has received commissions from the Classical Greek Theater of Oregon, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Multnomah County Library, and the Cooley Gallery at Reed College.

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Sarah Farahat

Sarah Farahat is a transdisciplinary Egyptian American* artist, cultural worker, teacher, and abolitionist dreaming of a more collective future for all beings. She holds a BA in Psychology from Occidental College, a BFA in Intermedia Studies from PNCA, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has trained in auricular acupuncture at the historic Lincoln Recovery Center in The Bronx, and participated in Beirut's Homeworkspace program on the coattails of the Arab "Spring." She teaches art at local colleges and for kids in her community, and is a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. For the past 16 years, Farahat has monitored the body within the sociopolitical landscape in the US and abroad, intervening with works that explore grief, connection, assimilation, storytelling, and engagement. Grassroots movement building informs her work. She finds joy in reading speculative fiction, talking with plants, cooking, and DJing. Her work lives in protests, archives, public and digital spaces, and is in the permanent collections of JustSeeds Collective, Pittsburgh; Arab American National Museum, Dearborn; Charles Voorhies Fine Art Library, Portland; Palestine Poster Project, Silver Spring; and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Culver City. She has been featured in publications including ArtforumThe OregonianL'Orient-Le Jour, and The Daily Star. As a nomadic child of diaspora, Farahat plants portals through taste, smell, and sound while continually attempting to live in reciprocity with the land wherever she creates home. She is a co-founder of the SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center in Portland.

* Farahat grapples with an appropriate way to name her location amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects.

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Sarah Gilbert

Sarah Gilbert (she/they) is an artist and educator based in what is currently called Los Angeles, CA (Gabrileño/Tongva/Kizh Lands), where she is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Affiliate Faculty in Gender and Feminist Studies at Pitzer College. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Brown University, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Idaho.

Gilbert’s work explores craft and collectivity—how the sticky relationality of material transformation can open spaces for thinking and feeling together in more-than-human worlds. Joining a wide range of materials and processes, her promiscuously interdisciplinary practice moves between art and science, synthesizing traditional craft techniques with emerging technologies. Often unsettling clear boundaries between past and present, her work draws on material memory and tensions between figuration and abstraction as springboards for contemplating our experience of time. Moving us away from narratives of material mastery or maker-movement individualism, Gilbert's practice highlights the ethical particularities of encounters with difference, and the radical potential of embodied attunement to reorient us towards collective care.

Gilbert has exhibited widely throughout the US and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include BREAKING AND BENDING, curated by Stephanie Snyder at the Edith Feldenheimer Gallery at Reed College, Portland; GOOSEBUMPS, an interactive sound installation as part of the 7th Tallinn Applied Arts Triennial, Estonia; and TURNINGS at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including WOMEN ON THE FENCE in Desert Hot Springs; GENERIS01: COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION at Bushwick Expo, Brooklyn; BORN/MADE at Tartu Art House, Estonia; GLASSAC 17 in Lisbon; WHITHER THE AMERICAN DREAM at Punch Gallery, Seattle; and IMAGINED COMMUNITIES at Gallery Project, Ann Arbor.

In 2014, Gilbert was awarded the inaugural 4Front: Innovation From All Angles Residency at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has been a Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America, Millville; and a Resident Artist at Faro Tláhuac, Mexico City; Olustvere Mõis, Estonia; Glazenhuis, Lommel; and the LC36-Kunstverein, Cologne.

Her published writing includes:

“A Widening Chromaticism: Learning Perception in the Collective Craftwork of the Encounter” in Material Perceptions, Documents of Contemporary Craft no. 5, edited by Knut Astrup Bull and André Gali, Arnoldsche Art Publications, Stuttgart, Germany, 2018.

“Understories: A Common Ground for Art and Science,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in the Museum Catalog for Alma Heikkilä’s Exhibition: ‘ , ‘ /mediums,.’_ ” bodies,.’_ ” ° ∞ logs,∞ ‘ , ‘ /~` ‘ holes, .’ `-. ` .’ — °habitats / /`‘ * ‘-‘ . ‘ , ‘ /~`want to feel (,) you inside | * . . * * | ..* . . *./..-. ~ .’ ‘ , ‘ /~` ❅ ☼ ~, curated by Satu Oksanen, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, 2019.

“Process Epistemologies for the Careful Interplay of Art and Biology: An Afterward,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in Drawing Processes of Life: Cells, Molecules, Organisms, edited by Gemma Anderson and John Dupre, Intellect Press, Bristol, United Kingdom (forthcoming, 2023).

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Sarah Hennies

Sarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY. Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice in a subversive examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and performance art. She has presented her work in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes (NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan), and Second Edition (Stockholm). Hennies is currently a member of improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music.

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Sarah T. Hamid

Sarah T. Hamid (she/her/no preference) is an immigrant, Muslim, and abolitionist working at the intersection of technology and global/domestic warfare. Currently the PDX Lead Organizer for Freedom to Thrive, she co-founded and helps advise the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, an archiving and knowledge-sharing network for organizers building community defense against the design, roll-out, and experimentation of carceral technologies, and serves on the coordinating team for the inside/outside research collaboration, the Prison Tech Research Group. Sarah also sits on the board of the Lucy Parsons Lab in Chicago, and helped create the #8toAbolition campaign: a police and prison abolition resource built during the 2020 uprisings against state violence.

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Sara Krajewski

Sara Krajewski is the newly appointed Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum. Krajewski was previously the Director of INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she curated an array of interdisciplinary exhibitions and performances with artists such as Xavier Cha, Mateo Tannatt, and Morgan Thorson. In 2012, Krajewski was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for research into emerging transdisciplinary artistic practices in visual art and performance. Krajewski was curator at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle from 2004 - 2012 where she focused on solo artist projects and group exhibitions exploring photography's impact on visual culture.

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Sara Magenheimer

Sara Magenheimer (b. Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York: Art in General + Kim?, Riga, Latvia; COR&P, Columbus, Ohio; JOAN, Los Angeles; Recess, New York, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, and DOCUMENT, Chicago. Her videos have been screened at venues such as Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Images Festival, Toronto; and The New York Film Festival. Her work has been in group shows at White Columns, New York; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston; and Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague.

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Sara Siestreem

Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, 1976-) is a master artist from the South Coast of Oregon. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators; her training began in the home. Her lifelong mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakima). Her weaving teachers are Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation). Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. She has been represented by Augen Gallery since 2010.  

Her studio work is multi-disciplinary and branches into education and institutional reform. These concepts directly influence and are reflected in her artwork and public presence. Siestreem created and runs a weaving program for the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people. She teaches collegiate studio arts and theory at PNCA. Her work in institutional reform relates to curatorial and educational practices regarding Indigenous fine art and critical race theory. She is director of the Present Future Action Lab at the OJMCHE.  

Siestreem's work has been widely supported through grants, residencies, and fellowships. It has been shown in museums and institutions regionally, nationally, and internationally. Locally, her work has been on near constant public display for over a decade. Her work figures in public and private collections around the world.  

She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon

 https://www.augengallery.com/artists/artists/siestreem/ 

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Seba Calfuqueo

Seba Calfuqueo are from Mapuche origin. Their work appeals to their inheritance to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural, and political status of the Mapuche subject in contemporary Chilean society and in Latin America. It includes installations, ceramics, performances, and video art that explore cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes produced from the cross between Indigenous and Western ways of thinking. Their research also has the purpose of making visible feminist and sexual dissidence issues. Seba Calfuqueo is part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, which edits YeneRevista, an online magazine of art, thought, and writing in Wallmapu and AbyaYala language.

https://sebacalfuqueo.com/

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Shawna Lipton

Shawna Lipton is Chair of the MA in Critical Studies Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). She received her Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a literary scholar whose work is fundamentally informed by interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies.

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SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY

SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. SHAWNÉ was a 20-21 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Queer Theatre & Performance Resident and is currently teaching across the New Arts Journalism and the Film Video New Media and Animation departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

www.shawnemichaelainholloway.com

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sidony o’neal

sidony o’neal is an artist and writer working from interdisciplinary research and pre- to post- machine computing. o’neal’s practice treats conceptual art and mathematics as related forms of industrial culture that have shaped human relationships to objects, labor, and technology over time.

Recent solo exhibitions include Et al. (SOFTMAX HARD HASP), San Francisco, CA; Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, (The Pudding Butcher), Princeton, NJ; Dracula’s Revenge (NOT TALKING UNTIL BAD COMPANY JOINS), New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Enchiridion: Aisle, Spline, Resort), Portland, OR; and Veronica (AuguRing), Seattle, WA. Duo and group exhibitions include Third Born (Continuous Dimensional Thorax), Mexico City, Mexico; ICA at Maine College of Art and Design (ENTER:), Portland, ME; and SculptureCenter (In Practice: Total Disbelief), Long Island City, NY. o’neal has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Banff Centre, Banff, AB, among others. o’neal is the co-founder of INFANT design firm. Performances as a part of DT have been presented with Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, and Performance Space New York. o'neal is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Oregon Arts Commission's Joan Shipley Award and a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. In 2023, o’neal was awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship.

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Simon Liu

Simon Liu (b. 1987, Hong Kong) is an artist filmmaker working between alternate documentary forms, abstract diary films, 16mm projection performance, and video installation. He has exhibited at film festivals and institutions globally including the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, British Film Institute, The Shed, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Cinéma du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, “Dreamlands: Expanded,” and a solo-presentation at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Mondays series. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s quadruple 16mm projection “Highview” with other recent works for their Permanent Collections. Liu is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art, and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. Liu is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.

https://www.liufilmsliu.com/about

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S.J Norman

S.J Norman (b. 1984) is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. His career has so far spanned 18 years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between Australia, Germany, the UK, and the United States.

His practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. Working extensively with durational and spatial practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks, Norman's primary medium is the body. Drawing on embodied ancestral lineages of ceremonial praxis, Norman frequently utilises relational and process-based choreographies as a mode of structural critique: reflected in his work is an abiding interest in the space of co- and inter-corporeality, the forces that suffuse it, and how the live act might be utilised as a mean to examine, disrupt and re-inscribe prevailing systems of social power.

Norman has received major commissions from the Biennale of Sydney (AU), Performance Space New York (US), Dark Mofo (AU), The National Gallery of Australia (AU), Venice International Performance Week (IT), Spill Festival of Live Art (UK), Fierce Festival (UK), In Between Time (UK), Arnolfini (UK), Liveworks (AU), Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AU), Unsound Festival (PL), Fusebox Festival (US), Melbourne Festival (AU), Tarnanthi Festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art (AU) and Tate Modern (UK), the Science Gallery London (UK), Die Fabrikanten (AT), and the Festival of Live Art (AU), to name a few. He has received numerous awards for his work including a Sidney Myer Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship, two of Australia's most prestigious honors for art.

Aside from his artistic and curatorial practice, he is also a writer of fiction, essays, and poetry. He has won or placed in numerous literary awards, including: The Peter Blazey Prize, The Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award, The ABR/Elizabeth Jolley Award for Short Story, and the Overland/Judith Wright Prize for Poetry. His award-winning debut short story collection, Permafrost, will be published by the University of Queensland press in 2021.

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Spencer Byrne-Seres

Spencer 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.

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Stephanie DeGooyer

Stephanie DeGooyer (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is Assistant Professor of English at Willamette University. Her work focuses on the intersections of law, politics and aesthetics. She is co-author of The Right to Have Rights (forthcoming from Verso Books) and is completing a manuscript titled The Aesthetics of Democracy. Beyond the academy, DeGooyer writes for the art magazine frieze. She is also co-organizer of Moonlighter Presents, a lecture series that invites scholars to speak on topics outside their field of expertise.

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Stephanie Snyder

Stephanie Snyder is the Anne and John Hauberg Director and Curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, a position she has held since 2003. Snyder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College and completed her graduate studies in Art History and Art Education at Columbia University. In 2008, Snyder received a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation, and in 2014 she was a Fellow in the Getty’s Museum Leadership Institute. In 2013 she received an award for her critical writing from the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the CUE Foundation, New York. The author of numerous catalog essays and other writing projects, she is a regular contributor to Artforum.com.

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Stephen Slappe

Stephen Slappe is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the South Carolina State Museum; The Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; The Sarai Media Lab in Delhi; Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco; and The Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR. Slappe was the recipient of a Couture award from the New American Art Union in Portland for his 2009 exhibition entitled Shelter in Place.

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Sterling Cunio

Sterling Cunio, is an award winning author, playwright and poet. An Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Pen America Arts for Social justice Fellow, and a World Yes Jammer whose work has been published in The Marshall Project, L.A. Book review and performed by various artist including Grammy award winning musician Antino Sanchez. Sterling sits on the board of Directors of Oregon's Transformative Justice Community and acts as lead facilitator for Regroup, a support and empowerment network of Returning Citizens that played an instrumental role in abolishing the authorization of slavery from Oregon's constitution. Along with currently working for Church at The Park in Salem serving its houseless community, Sterling also works as a lead consultant on the Ubuntu Climate Initiative, a global climate resilience movement focusing on Reuniting people and planet through joy, art and sustainability.

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Storm Tharp

Tharp was raised in Ontario, Oregon, and presently resides in Portland. He received his BFA from Cornell University. His work was featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has been acquired by The Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright Knox Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Reed College. He is represented by PDX Contemporary Art (Portland), Nicole Klagsbrun (New York) and Galerie Bertrand & Gruner (Geneva). Selected Press Critic's Pick: Storm Tharp, Stephanie Snyder, Artforum.com, August 3, 2010. Perfect in the Middle, Matt Stangel, Portland Mercury, June 24, 2010. Storm Tharp's eighth show at PDX Contemporary Art features latest work, 'Hercules', John Motley, The Oregonian, July 30, 2010. Storm Tharp, Richard Speer, art ltd., May 2010. Interview with Storm Tharp, Bean Gilsdorf, Daily Serving, January 4, 2010. Virtuoso Vindicated: Storm Tharp at PDX Contemporary, Jeff Jahn, PORT, January 10, 2007. Storm Tharp: Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black, Stephanie Snyder, PLAZM, September, 2008. Selected Video Storm Tharp Artist Talk at the Portland Art Museum. Storm Tharp on OPB Art Beat

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Susan Grace Banyas

My 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

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Sutapa Biswas

Sutapa 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.

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Symara Sarai

Symara Sarai, a Portland, OR native currently residing in Brooklyn, NY, has immersed herself globally in interdisciplinary and choreographic studies with deep recognition. Named Dance Magazines’ 2025 “Top 25 to Watch,” a 2023 Bessie Winner for Breakout Choreographer, and a recipient of the Dai Ailian Foundation Scholarship based in Trinidad and Tobago, she is known to be a courageously committed performer and maker. The New York Times stated, “Sarai is a daring solo improviser, and her uninhibited spirit infuses.” Sarai is a 2019 graduate of the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, State University of New York. She was most recently a MoMA PS1 Greater New York Artist and was commissioned in 2025 by Danspace Project and BOFFO. Between 2024 and 2026, they were a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and an Abrons Arts Center Performance AIRspace Resident. She participated in Live Artery Festival 2025, Triple Canopy Symposium 2025, and more. Their work as a performer and maker has been reviewed and featured in prominent publications such as The New York Times and Brooklyn Rail. She has most notably danced with Urban Bush Women, Joanna Kotze, and Ogemdi Ude, among others.

https://symarasarai.com/

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Tai Carpenter

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.

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Takahiro Yamamoto

Takahiro Yamamoto is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer based in Cowlitz, Clackamas, and Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (Portland, Oregon). His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He has received support from New England Foundation for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, MacDowell, National Performance Network, Japan Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium, and others. His performance and visual art works have been presented at Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Diverseworks, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, The Henry Art Gallery, and GoDown Arts Centre Nairobi, among other venues. Yamamoto holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. He is part of the Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.

takahiroyamamoto.com

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Tanya Tagaq

Calling Tanya Tagaq an Inuit throat singer is like calling Yo-Yo Ma a cello player. Sure, it’s accurate, but it’s not the whole of what he does. Like Ma, Tagaq is the best of what she does – innovative, inspired.     —The National Post, Canada

Born in Canada’s high arctic, Tanya Tagaq is a contemporary performance artist who utilizes the ancient traditional Inuit art of throat singing to mesmerize audiences around the world. She is considered a Canadian national treasure whose music defies description. Alternately called primal, orchestral, and free form, her performances are improvised and dialed to a one-of-a-kind frequency. The end result is a staggering array of performances that portray, in full-colour sound, the scope of her life experiences. Tagaq’s commitment to stretching her musical boundaries has led to visionary projects across all mediums and with groundbreaking artists such as the Kronos Quartet. As a solo artist, Tagaq has released two critically acclaimed albums with her band, Sinaa and Auk/Blood, both of which were nominated for Juno Awards (Best Aboriginal Recording) and (Best Instrumental Recording). The albums additionally took first place in several categories at the 2005 and 2008 Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, including Best Female Artist (2005).

For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of  Tanya Tagaq 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!

 

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Taylor Mac

A playwright, actor, and singer-songwriter hailed by Time Out New York as “one of the most exciting theater artists of our time,” Mac has performed his work around the world. Mac’s plays include The Walk Across America For Mother Earth, The Young Ladies Of, Red Tide Blooming, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, and The Lily’s Revenge, a five-hour, 36-cast-member show that was named the best play in 2009 by Time Out New York and Paper Magazine and made the top ten lists of The New Yorker and The New York Post. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, such as a Sundance Theater Lab Residency, a Rockefeller MAP Fund Grant, a Creative Capital Grant, The James Hammerstein Award for playwriting, The Edinburgh Festival’s Herald Angel Award, and three GLAAD Media Award Nominations. Mac’s upcoming projects include touring The Lily’s Revenge across the US and UK, the creation of a two-man theatrical concert with Mandy Patinkin, and a festival of full-length plays inspired by Greek classics.


Selected Press

Taylor Mac at the Soho Theatre London W1, Donald Hutera, June 3, 2010.

Comparison is Violence, Arched, Glasgow, Mary Brennan, Herald Scotland, June 14, 2010.

Gig Review: Taylor Mac, Jay Richardson, The Scotsman, June 13, 2010.

Glamming it Up with Taylor Mac, Caridad Svich, American Theater Magazine, November 2008.

Red Tide Blooming: The Discomforting Spring of Taylor Mac,, Brian Boyles, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2006.

Reminding us of Our Humanity: An Inclusive Interview with Taylor Mac, JT Ross, Minor Progression, March 11, 2011.


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Tetsuya Umeda

From capturing environments, architectural structures, sound, light and human behavior, the source of Umeda’s work ranges widely. Working actively both in and outside of Japan, the artist remodels installations out of daily products, engages viewers with his interactive performance pieces, and collaborates with musicians using his own originally-produced implements. He has held a number of significant solo exhibitions including “Criterium 73: Tetsuya Umeda”, Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito (2008), “Hotel New Osorezan”, Ota Fine Arts Singapore, Singapore (2013), “Age0”, Breaker Project, Osaka (2014), and “Science of Superstition”, SonicProtest Festival, Montreuil (2015). Umeda has also participated in the “1st Aichi Triennale 2010: Arts and Cities”, Nagoya (2010); “Double Vision: Contemporary Art From Japan”, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow / Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa (2012); “Simple Interactions. Sound Art from Japan”, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Roskilde (2011); and is recently featured at “RhythmScape”, Gyoenggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyoenggi (2015) and “Sounds of Us”, Trafó Gallery, Budapest (2015-2016).

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The Blow

MELISSA 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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The Javaad Alipoor Company

The Javaad Alipoor Company (TJAC) is a contemporary theater company that makes work for a changing world and a global audience. Rooted in experimental and multiplatform practice, their work asks the most pressing questions we all face. With a commitment to internationalism, complexity, diversity, and fun, they make work for the twenty-first century, transforming what people think theater can be and what it can do.

Javaadalipoor.co.uk

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The Negro Problem

STEW: 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.

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The Wau Wau Sisters

With legendary bits like their signature audience participation costume changes and Guns n Roses trapeze act, The Wau Wau Sisters are widely recognized by their peers for revolutionizing circus aesthetics and carving out a new niche for circus events – where high physical skill, comedy chops, burlesque and outright nudity mix with just the right splashes of chaos and irreverence are so close and palpable you can see the tear in their fishnets, the sinew of their muscles and the sweat on their skin! Don’t miss them as they fly through their trapeze routines with all the adrenaline and abandon of a rock concert, deconstruct the humor and paradigms of country and heavy metal music, while playing matching guitars and barely sitting on one another’s shoulders! They do it all in a festive, freewheeling hour that keeps the audience guessing every second, who’s in control and for how long?!

They have made appearances at these fantastic festivals and venues: The World Famous Spiegeltent,(VAC, Edinburgh, Auckland, Sydney, NYC), Lincoln Center (NYC), The Mayan Theater (Los Angeles), The Roundhouse (London), Olivia Cruise Lines, Feast Festival (Adelaide), Soho Bar (London), El Cid (Los Angeles), The Grammys (Los Angeles Staples Center), Irving Plaza (NYC), The Palms (Las Vegas), CBGB’s (NYC), The Hammerstein Ballroom (NYC), Joe’s Pub (NYC), The Bowery Ballroom (NYC), The Henry Fonda Theater (Los Angeles), The Pica Festival (Portland, OR), Edinburgh Fringe Festival/The Pleasance (Scotland), The Jermyn St. Theater (West End, London) , The Art House, Crown & Anchor (Provincetown, MA), Philadelphia Fringe Festival (Philadelphia, PA), Sydney Festival, Auckland Festival among countless other cities and venues!!

They’ve been profiled or featured in the pages of: The Village Voice, The New York Post, Time Out New York, Time Out London, The New York Times, Jane, BUST and New York Magazine, The Guardian, Metro, VENUS, The Sun, LA Weekly, GONYC, French Vogue, Spectacle, The Australian, The Times (London, Scotland), Sydnay Morning Herald and countless others!

Television & Film exploits include the feature film “Shortbus” by John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), the film “Who’s the Top?” by Jenny Livingston (Paris Is Burning), ABC Australia’s “Sideshow”, Nipon TV’s “Good Morning Japan”, “The Isaac Mizrahi Show” w/ Rosie Perez, NPR’s “The Next Big Thing”, “Live From Downtown”, “The Sharon Osbourne Show”, and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

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The Wooster Group

The Wooster Group is an ensemble of artists who make new work for the theatre, dance and media. The Group has created over 40 pieces since its first in 1976.

Elizabeth LeCompte, a founding member of The Wooster 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.

Selected Press

Two Experimentalists Under One Roof, Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, March 26, 2010.

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Tim DuRoche

Tim DuRoche is a jazz and sound artist living in Portland whose work ranges from live performance to installation, including projects with Tere Mathern Dance, Linda K Johnson, and Cydney Wilkes.

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Timothy White Eagle

Timothy White Eagle is a mixed race artist. He graduated from the University of Utah with a BFA in theater.  His art practice rises from a decades-long exploration of traditional ritual and embodiment practice. His preferred mediums include objects, photography, durational performance, storytelling, and installed space. 

He has served as an artist-in-residence at Town Hall and On The Boards in Seattle, as well as La Mama ETC in NYC. Timothy was the recipient of the WAA/AIP Launch Pad award in 2019 as well as a Seattle City Artist award in 2020.

Timothy toured internationally as one of the artistic directors and a performer with MacArthur Fellow Taylor Mac’s Pulitzer Prize finalist “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.”

Timothy’s new ritual performance work, “What To Do When The Air Returns,” will premiere at LaMama in November 2021.

http://www.whiteeagle.me

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Tim Smith-Stewart

Tim Smith-Stewart is a queer interdisciplinary artist based in Seattle who uses text as his primary medium for creating installations, performances and zines. For the past seven years, Tim has primarily been creating work in collaboration with artist/electrical engineer Jeffrey Azevedo. They are currently developing Salvage Rituals: a dance set on six piezoelectric tiles to premiere in the fall of 2019. Visual and durational iterations will be presented at various locations including Seattle University in the fall of 2018.

Most recently they premiered Awaiting Oblivion—Temporary Solutions for surviving the dystopian future we find ourselves within at present at On the Boards in February 2017 and The Perpetual Insurrection of Claude Cahun at the Henry Art Gallery in October 2017.

Selections of Awaiting Oblivion... have been presented at: On The Boards NW New Works festival (SEA), Risk/Reward Festival (PDX), Velocity Dance Center (SEA) and Fresh Oysters Performance Research (MSP). Tim and Jeffrey have presented multiple installations including their video/paper tapestry installation Queer City Lost at New Tomorrow, Erasure (curated by the Lion’s Main Art Collective), and the Velocity Dance Center Big Bang. They also presented Stained glass in my replacement church at the 2014 Lofi Arts Festival.

From 2010-2013 Tim & Jeffrey co-created The Eternal Glow Project—a four part performance/installation which premiered work at The Seattle Center Next50 (The Eternal Glow of Electric Hearts), On the Boards NW New Works Festival 2013 (Ω<1),and Lofi Arts Festival 2013 (Less than red, more than violet).

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Tina Satter / Half Straddle

Half Straddle is an Obie-winning, Brooklyn-based ensemble of performers and designers that makes plays, performances, videos, and music led by Artistic Director Tina Satter. This critically acclaimed company began in 2008, and has toured its shows to cities throughout U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Tina Satter is an American writer, director, and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn-based, Obie-winning theater company Half Straddle. She is a recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award; a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Award, and was named an Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York. She has written and directed 9 full-length shows and a number of smaller performance and video pieces with Half Straddle that have premiered in New York City. Tina’s work has been presented at theaters and festivals in Europe, Asia, Australia, and other U.S. cities. Tina has had residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, LMCC, The Performing Garage, Kitchen L.A.B., MASS MoCA, and New Museum for Contemporary Art. She’s been a visiting artist at Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Reed College, and Fordham University—and a visiting playwriting professor at the University of Michigan. Drawing on her recent teaching work, Tina has been developing and leading generative writing and directing workshops to participants from a range of backgrounds and experience. Tina attended Mac Wellman’s graduate playwriting program at Brooklyn College and received an M.A. from Reed College and a B.A. from Bowdoin College. Her first collection of plays, Seagull (Thinking of you), was published by 53rd State Press in 2014.

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Tony Monroe

Native of Shreveport La, but Baton Rouge La did all the  "raising". Monroe has resided in Dallas since finishing legislative work for the State of Louisiana in 08 (Tony graduated from The Southern University A&M College in Fall of 08 with a B.S. in marketing). After working with AT&T &  the Marketing Arm of Dallas, he quickly learned that the networking and rapport building skills learned on the Yard would play to his advantage in the Obama recession right out of SU. Pivoting from the ad agency sector to the nonprofit realm was no easy feat. Now working as a custom Suiting Stylist entrepreneurially, and Scholarship Program Director currently, the trajectory has been filled with lessons and educational hurdles!

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Trajal Harrell

Trajal Harrell’s work has been presented in New York and across the US at venues including New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, American Realness Festival, ICA Boston, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122, and Walker Arts Center, among others. Internationally, his work has toured in France, Switzerland, Portugal, Japan, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Poland, Croatia, Brazil, and Mexico, and has shown his performances in visual art contexts such as Performa, Fondation Cartier (Paris), The New Museum, The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Art Basel-Miami Beach, as well as galleries in Tokyo, Berlin, and New York. His latest works have been seen in 2013 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and MoMA PS1.

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Travis Stewart

Travis Stewart is a contemporary Northwest artist of Chinook, Rogue River, and Kalapuya descent. He lives in Grand Ronde, Oregon, and works in a variety of mediums to depict stories defined by the cultural landscape and design of the Willamette Valley and Columbia River people. He also works as a curator at Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center (Grand Ronde, OR) and has devoted his life to the preservation of the art and culture of the tribes of Western Oregon. Travis is a founding member of the Shawash Ili?i Kanim Tilixam, which is a nonprofit cultural preservation group and canoe family that works to impart traditional teachings to at-risk tribal youth through song, dance, language, and art.

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Tristen Edwards

Tristen Edwards is an attorney at Metropolitan Public Defender, where she represents individuals charged with major felony crimes and works on policy issues related to promoting the use of restorative justice as an alternative to prosecution. Tristen is a Coordinating Committee Member of the Restorative Justice Coalition of Oregon and leads the coalition’s legislative advocacy efforts. She also serves on Governor Kotek’s Racial Justice Council’s Criminal Justice Reform Committee and chairs the Council’s Subcommittee on the Department of Corrections, which focuses on supporting restorative justice efforts led by incarcerated men. Tristen holds a strong commitment to diversity and is the founder and chair of the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. Tristen has been recognized for her work amplifying the voices of marginalized people and promoting effective and compassionate responses to harm by the Oregon New Lawyers Division, the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association, and Oregon Women Lawyers.

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Tyler Wallace & Nicole Dill

Tyler Wallace is a Portland-based artist working in video, installation, and performance to investigate concepts of identity and personal history. Nicole Dill is a Portland-based artist whose work interrogates the function of celebrity culture in contemporary society through photography, performance, audio, sculpture, and installation. Both Wallace and Dill recently defended their theses at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and received their BFAs in May 2009.

"Between Us," Leah Bobal, PNCA UNTITLED.

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