Artists Archive
With strong ties to the visual art community and almost boundless creative energy, Gang Gang Dance grew out of the turn-of-the-century Null New York scene, with members who played or worked with The Cranium, Actress, Russia, SSAB Songs, and Jackie-O Motherfucker. The genesis of the band was collaborative in nature, with Brian Degraw, Tim Dewit, Lizzie Bougatsos, Nathan Maddox, and Josh Diamond experimenting in tiny practice spaces. Tragically, in 2002 Maddox was struck by lightning and killed while watching a storm on the roof of his apartment building.
By 2003, the band had refined the tribal-futurism sound to its purest form. GGD samples and processes beats and melodies, looping them into pulsating rhythms that pull from ancient traditions but deliver a modern sound. Exploring dance, performance art, theatre, DJing, film, and visual art as well as music, the group regularly performs in galleries, museums, and art fairs and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Gang Gang Dance has toured with Sonic Youth, TV on the Radio, and Animal Collective; played venues and festivals worldwide; and released four albums: Revival Of The Shittest (2004), God’s Money (2008), RAWWAR (2004), and Saint Dymphna (2004), as well as the DVD Retina Riddim (2007), a multimedia project consisting of a 33-minute art film and a 20-minute audio collage, both of which were drawn from the band’s archives and authored by band member Brian Degraw.
Learn moreGare St. Lazare Players Ireland are Ireland's most travelled theatre company, having visited over 63 cities in 21 countries worldwide to perform from their repertory of over 17 Beckett productions. The group evolved out of the original Gare St. Lazare Players, an international company founded in Chicago by Bob Meyer in 1983 and based simultaneously in Ireland and France. Since 1995, Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor Lovett have been running the company. First Love premiered in 2008 in Ireland and has since toured to Argentina, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Ireland, Romania, Switzerland, Turkey and USA.
Selected Press
The Lovetts of Méricourt, Ruadhan Mac Cormaic, The Irish Times, April 10, 2010.
In Festival, Biography, Beckett and Blues, Jason Zinoman, New York Times, January 14, 2009.
Conor Lovett has a 'Love' affair with Beckett, Christina Borger, New Haven Register, June 14, 2009. Learn moreGarrick Imatani is an artist who uses performance, functional objects, or interaction to draw attention to one’s embodied subjectivity. Working across sculpture, photography, video, and installation, recent projects focus on reimagining racialized historical erasures into more believable and inspired futures. Past works have included collaborating with illegally-surveilled activists to readjust city archives, re-enacting labor on the transcontinental railroad, and working with the Grand Ronde tribe to replicate their sacred meteorite held at the American Museum of Natural History.
Learn moreGeneral Sisters is a neighborhood corner store, installation, idea, structure, studio, exchange, living architecture, meeting place, kitchen, and garden. General Sisters is facilitated by Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Dana Bishop-Root.
Learn moreGenesis Breyer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson; 1950) is an avant-garde, cultural engineer, Fluxus pioneer, groundbreaking performance artist, inventor of Industrial Music, founder of music projects COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, "wrecker of civilization," essayist and theoretician, Pandrogyne, and, most recently, as twin. In 2007 he/r partner Lady Jaye Breyer dropped he/r body. Genesis continues to represent the amalgam Breyer P-Orridge in the material “world” and Lady Jaye represents the amalgam Breyer P-Orridge in the immaterial “world” creating an ongoing inter-dimensional collaboration.
Instagram: pandrogyne
Twitter: GenesisBPO Learn moreGeumhyung Jeong is a South Korea-based choreographer, dancer and performer. Jeong studied Acting at Hoseo University in Asan, Korea, Dance and Performance at the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul, and Animation Film at the Korean Academy of Film Arts in Seoul. Her works have been presented by the New Museum, New York, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Switzerland; Malta Festival, Poznań, Poland; Brigittines International Festival, Brussels; SPIEL ART Festival, Munich; ImpulsTanz Festival, Vienna; iDans Festival, Istanbul; Contemporary Art Museum of Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; PACT Zollverein, Essen, Germany; and many others.
Learn moreGob Squad explores the point where theater meets art, media, and real life. They stage their work in houses, shops, underground stations, car parks, hotels, or directly on the street, and often ask the audience to step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators. Gob Squad began in Nottingham, UK in 1994, but is now based in Berlin. They’ve toured to all continents apart from Antartica.
Selected Press
Semiotics of the Kitchen, Amy Taubin, Artforum. February 1, 2012.
A Visit to Warhol's World, In All Its Goofy Glory, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, January 23, 2012. Learn moreGolden Retriever was formed in Portland during the year 2008 by multi-instrumentalists Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson. Focusing on the relationship of two primarily monophonic instruments—modular synth & bass clarinet—and utilizing layering with a deft balance of improvisation and composition, the duo has created an infinitely varied approach to their sound world. Their latest record, Occupied with the Unspoken, was released last year on Thrill Jockey.
Learn moreGozo Yoshimasu considered one of the most representative figures of Japanese modern literature, has published over thirty books of poetry— among them works that have been available in several languages– since the release of his first book of poetry in 1964 at the age of twenty-five. His poetry, which he challenges himself to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate, chronicles a tireless pursuit of origins. He also explores the idea of always being in movement. As a traveler his itineraries have initially followed those of the great 17th century Japanese poet Basho to widen to a more personal ‘pilgrimage’ from the isles of Japan to the American desert, Central Asia or simply common streets in most continents in the world. It’s no wonder that this constant movement— walking, driving, traveling by train or boat, is one of the foundations of his poems giving them a sense of rhythm, speed in “the pursuit of his desire to go far away”(from his poem Weaver Girl). He has also developed his poetry into other forms of artistic expression. As a performer, he has cultivated a unique style of recitation, and uses rhythm and vocal modulation to the extent that one might consider it a form of incantation. His voice—at times gentle, at times feverish—lands itself of a fascination meeting with music. His readings have been called, “electrifying revelations of the power of poetry to move the heart and mind without the air of translation.”
Learn moreGreasy Kid Stuff began in 1995 on freeform radio legend WFMU and relocated to Portland in 2004. Hailed as “the best kid's radio program of all time” by Alternadad Neal Pollack, the show strikes a cord with punk-inspired parents looking for alternatives to mass-market kiddie culture. greasykidstuff.vox.com
Learn moreGregg Bordowitz is an award-winning artist, writer, and activist. His films have shown internationally in screenings and exhibitions at museums including: The New Museum, NY; Artist Space, NY; TATE Modern, UK; and MoMA, NY. Bordowitz is the author of many books, including: The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003. He was a member of the groundbreaking AIDS activist group ACT UP, and a founding member of the 1980’s film collective Testing the Limits. He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Bordowitz is the Director of the Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He comes to Reed College as a Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Arts.
Learn moreGrump is a Los Angeles based artist/DJ. Mixing nostalgia with a fifth of whiskey and the last few episodes of Tatami Galaxy is the best way to describe his Punch Drunk style.
Learn moreGuantanamo Baywatch crawls out of their natural, basement-level habitat to perform at after their first U.S. tour, following the release of their new self-titled LP from Hovercraft and Work/Sound Records. Started in March 2009, Guantanamo Baywatch is comprised of Jason Powell, Chevelle Wiseman and Devvin Trainer. Powell and Wiseman received their BFAs from Pacific Northwest Collage of Art, where Trainer is currently a student. Guantanamo Baywatch draws their influences from piña colada lagoons, Pee Wee's Playhouse, skateboarding iguanas, Elvis films, hammerhead shark attacks and skinny dipping in the La Brea Tar Pits to create their scuzzy, high energy brand of surf-thrash R&B.
Selected Press
Totally Tubular, Ethan Jayne, Portland Mercury, June 29, 2010.
Selected Video
guantanamo baywatch from Chevelle Wiseman on Vimeo.
Learn moreHalory Goerger makes shows and installations instead of building houses or repairing animals because it’s better like that for everybody. He works on the history of ideas, because everything else was already taken by the time he came along. In most his undertakings, total destitution flirts with formal rigour, and a concern for getting out alive. Together, Julien Fournet, Antoine Defoort and Halory Goerger have co-founded l’amicale de production, a small production house in Lille / Brussels (France / Belgium
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Halory Goerger and his collaborative work with Antoine Defoort, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreRodman is a visual artist who lives and works in New York. His work has a structural/performative bent and often integrates gestural painting, diagrammatic drawing, and intense color, and he has often collaborated with others to realize “event-based group figurative sculptures.” Rodman received his BA in sculpture from The College of Creative Studies at UCSB and his MFA from Columbia University and has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally at venues including Guild & Greyshkul (New York), The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, and, in collaboration with the SFBC, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Recent shows include a solo presentation at Arte Portugal 10 (Lisbon), and group exhibitions at Laurel Gitlen (New York) and Sue Scott Gallery (New York).
Selected Press
The Wolves from Three Angles; Or, The Benefits of the Middle,, Claire Jarvis, ARCADE, January 26, 2011.
"A Room, In Three Movements,", Naomi Fry, Artforum.com, March, 2011.
The Tension of Objects in Space, Michelle Levy, ArtSlant, February 27, 2011.
Selected Video
The Navigator from Doublr on Vimeo.
This video documents two events, one year apart: The Navigator (3/26/2006) + Navigator Two (3/25/2007). The footage for both years is overlain and made transparent allowing the two events to be seen at the same time.
THREE_CLOUDS from Doublr on Vimeo.
Three simultaneously conceived improvisational sculptures of a cloud of smoke exhaled by a furloughed ill cigarette factory worker constructed as unfolding in time by or through an experimental cooperative photography workshop in conjunction with and within the premises of ohad meromi's rehearsal sculpture at art in general, 79 walker st., ny, ny on the 6th floor at 6:30pm on tuesday, feb 1st 2011 Learn moreHanako Hoshimi-Caines is an experimental and socially engaged dance artist, curator, dramaturge and guide. Her works play within the expanded fields of choreography, video and sculpture. She makes multi-scale works that mix high and low fi aesthetics into dense storytelling often probing pluricultural histories, motherhood and the spirit of error. Her collaborative and solo works for theatre and gallery have been shown at the PICA/TBA festival, OTB (US), Moderna dansteatern (SE), Fierce Festival (UK), MAI, OFFTA, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery and Galerie de l’UQAM (CA). As the outgoing co-curator at the Centre de Creation O Vertigo (CCOV), Hanako put forward a people centered approach with a focus on experimental gatherings such as Signal Vibrant: ceremony for the dead and Pen pals/Relations épistolaires. Alongside artistic practice, Hanako recently completed a BA in Western philosophy (Concordia University) and training in transformative mediation and collective trauma healing in support of resistance and transformation.
Learn moreHand2Mouth Theater (H2M) is a theatre ensemble that creates original work that is bold, accessible and inclusive. We support all forms of artistic expression and experimentation and seek to enrich the social fabric of society through our work.
Committed to fostering community through performance, engagement events and educational programs, H2M seeks genuine connections with audiences by speaking authentically from the voices and lives of our creative artists and our community.
H2M pushes for a kinder, more inclusive society where the public experiences the value and uniqueness of every life story, amplifying the voices of those historically silenced.
Learn moreHannah Krafcik is a Portland-based interdisciplinary neuroqueer artist and writer whose work emerges from ongoing reflections on social patterning and censorship, (over)stimulation, perseveration, and intuition. Their practices span dance and new media. They often create performances and teach dance in collaboration with artistic partner, Emily Jones.
Learn moreFletcher is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. He has worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over fifteen years. Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland. Selected Press 500 Words: Harrell Fletcher, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, February 1, 2010 Selected Video
Learn moreHazel Hill McCarthy III (b.1980) is a Los Angeles based artist, designer and filmmaker. After graduating in 2003 from Art Center, Pasadena, CA, she established the gallery Show Cave in Los Angeles, which presented local, national and international artists working across diverse media. During this time, McCarthy’s work was centered on exploring the Hollywood tough-guy male film star as embodied by the likes of Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas. She sought to create an altered viewing experience through re-edits of film. McCarthy’s interest in the representation of gender in mainstream culture led her to create a series of touring group shows, notably Licker License, and Gentle Jousting, both of which were presented in Los Angeles; New York City; Mexico City; London; Amsterdam; Berlin and Milan.
McCarthy is co-founder of Hazelium, a broad ranging production company for her solo and collaborative work. In 2016, she directed a feature-length film, Bight of the Twin, which explores the origins of vodoun [sic] in Ouidah, Benin with artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. The work has screened internationally in US, UK, Mexico, Germany, Poland, and Russia. McCarthy has also collaborated with P-Orridge on Thee Psychick Bible, Feral House, 2009, and Thee Psychick Bible of early Psychic TV and TOPY (Temple ov Psychick Youth) Videos from the P-Orridge archives. Her short films have screened at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, the Barbican and ICA, both London.
McCarthy’s next project, Via Cruxis, is an investigation into a one-day event held annually on Good Friday in the remote village of Carrillo Puerto, Chiapas – the southernmost state of Mexico. Documenting the lead up to the festivities as well as interviewing key participants, Via Cruxis closely films the remarkable procession that is based on the 'stations of the cross' but incorporates an intriguing blend of indigenous pageantry, Catholic faith and a local view of US consumerism/imperialism.
Learn moreHEALTH is an LA-based band. HEALTH is Benjamin Jared Miller, Jake Duzsik, John Famiglietti, and Jupiter Keyes. HEALTH is noise, music, disco, and fashion—and their shows mix, recombine, and reorient the senses. On their self-titled debut album, recorded at their favorite club, LA's The Smell, HEALTH shoots through 11 songs in 30 minutes, stretching the aural confines of post-punk rock and roll. They have been compared to Deerhoof, Black Dice, the Liars, and have opened for Nine Inch Nails on part of the Lights in the Sky tour in the fall of 2008. Part of the band's unique sound comes from the use of the Zoothorn, a permutation of microphone and guitar pedal. HEALTH says that you will love each other. HEALTH's discography includes HEALTH (2007), HEALTH//DISCO (2008), and the forthcoming Get Color (2009).
Learn moreBecoming Mexican, Helday de la Cruz | Photo credit Carly Diaz
Heldáy de la Cruz is an artist and community organizer. Through illustration and design, his work explores the identities that are lost and found within the queer and latinx diaspora. This, alongside his undocumented status, are at the very core of his community work. Heldáy's artwork and story has been shared in Milk X Magazine (Hong Kong), The Huffington Post, AIGA Portland, She Shreds Magazine, Ecotrust, Street Roots, East Oregonian, The Oregonian, ACLU of Oregon, Design Week Portland, Brand New Podcast, Social Justice League Podcast, Talking with Ghosts Podcast, Homebase Gallery, CultureStrike, and the Define American Film Festival. He also co-leads a collective called UndocuPDX that provides resources, education, and news for the undocumented community.
Learn more"Cole invites us into other people’s minds – and in doing so switches on new lights within our own” - The Guardian
Helen Cole is the Artistic Director and CEO of In Between Time. In 2001, she created the In Between Time Festival in Bristol, UK. In 2009, after three editions, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation awarded Cole a Breakthrough Award to establish In Between Time (IBT) as an independent company. In 2011, In Between Time became a National Portfolio Organization of the Arts Council of England. In 2015, IBT delivered its 6th International Festival to over 130,000 people and changed its name to IBT Bristol International Festival. In addition to her work with In Between Time, Cole is an artist. In 2008 she created the critically acclaimed installation and digital archive, We See Fireworks, described as ‘exquisite’ by the Guardian. We See Fireworks continues to tour across the world as installations, films, live performances and publications.
In December 2016, Cole will premiere her new work, Breathe at the III Venice Performance Art Festival. Breathe will gather hundreds of intimate private dances played out alone in spaces across the world. Instructed to ‘move from exuberance to exhaustion’ these dances are captured as audio and experienced as an installation of echoes. In theaters, galleries and found spaces suffused with hot white light these anonymous ‘ghost dances’ emit the tangible, poignant traces of bodies pushed to their limits, lives lived, time passing, to conjure the presence of those long since gone.
Cole mentors artists and producers, works as a writer, curator and producer and contributes to symposia and commissioning panels nationally and internationally.
Learn moreHitoshi Toyoda was born in New York City and grew up in Tokyo. He returned to the United States in 1990 on a grant from Neo Vision Co. For several years, Toyoda traveled throughout the U.S. taking photographs, before settling in New York in 1993. He has presented his work in public spaces, galleries, museums and film festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI), Images Festival (Toronto), Museum Of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo), Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo), Anthology Film Archives (NY), and graf media gm (Osaka).
Learn moreMIKA ARASHIKI AND MARI FUKUTOME formed dance duo Ho Ho-Do in 2001. Their work is created through exploring the delicate sensitivities and impulses they feel in everyday life based on the relationship between two individuals and by their various ways of communication. They adapt not only ordinary dance techniques, but also small, and some might say trivial, gestures from daily life as motifs that reveal their poetic world-view. They have collaborated with a range of artists including playwrights and musicians. Their recent site-specific series, Ho Ho-Do @***, typifies their signature style of presenting work outside of traditional performance venues, fusing ordinary places as an extension of daily life. As part of this series, they’ve performed in houses, on stairs, in corridors, on roof terraces, at cafés, and at street crossings. Ho Ho-Do has filmed their performances presented at these venues, posting the results monthly to YouTube since 2009.
Learn moreHolcombe Waller is one of America’s most distinct voices in music theater. He is a 2011 United States Artists Berresford Fellow in Music, an award which noted his mournful, folk-inflected style, and his approach to music “as total theater.” He is a Creative Capital artist, a recipient of the MAP Fund Award, and a 2013 Joan Shipley Fellow of the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Waller has been presented and commissioned by numerous theaters, arts institutions, and festivals. Holcombe Waller "Hardliners" Music Video from Two Penguins on Vimeo.
Learn moreHolland Andrews (they/them) is a vocalist, composer, clarinetist, and performance artist whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build soundscapes encompassing both catharsis and dissonance. Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, they create a realm of live performance that is boundlessly present. They have been commissioned by REDCAT, ISSUE Project Room, and the 2024 Whitney Biennial, where they created two sound installations and the performance work Speaker. Notable musical collaborations include Son Lux, Nils Frahm, JJJJJerome Ellis, Christina Vantzou, William Brittelle, Peter Broderick, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. Their work is presented nationally and internationally, collaborating with artists such as Bill T. Jones, Sonya Tayeh, Dorothée Munyaneza, Otobong Nkanga, Jenn Freeman, NARCISSISTER, Demian DinéYazhi, Oliver Beer, and Will Rawls. Andrews is a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Awardee, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awardee, and United States Artists Fellow.
Learn moreHolly Mititquq Nordlum is an Iñupiaq (Inuit) artist who comes from the northern village of Kotzebue, Alaska. Nordlum works in a variety of media, using each to best cast light on Indigenous people. Her tattoo work and traditional markings revitalization effort is based on a 10,000-year Inuit history and is a machine-free process that facilitates healing, pride, and celebration from the traumas of colonization and individual experience. She organizes trainings, using traditional patterns in in-depth sessions to foster real change for people—in the end, creating community in the marks left behind. Nordlum’s public artwork educates about the still-surviving tribes of Alaska: their stories, histories, and cultures. Holly speaks publicly about the systems which continue to oppress her people and prevent their thriving.
In 2004 she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Alaska, and in the last five years she has received a Time Warner Fellowship from Sundance, an Art Matters grant, an Alaska Humanities Forum grant, an Alaska Native Visionary Award, a Rasmuson Artist Project Grant and Fellowship, an NDN Collective Indigenous Artists Grant, and she was part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Artist Leadership Program.
Learn morehome school is a free pop-up art school co-run by manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis, in its fifth year of curriculum presenting multimedia, genre-nonconforming edutainment and creating welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art.
manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is an artist and writer from the Bronx. They received their BA in Linguistics from Reed College in 2014, and currently live and work in a garage in southeast Portland. Recent group exhibitions with Rhizome and the New Museum (online), the Cooley Gallery (Portland), Chicken Coop Contemporary (Portland), Veronica project space (Seattle), and AA|LA Gallery (Los Angeles). Recent publications in Art in America, Rhizome, CURA, SFMoMA Open Space, AQNB, et al. abreu is the author of List of Consonants (Bottlecap Press, 2015) and transtrender (Quimérica Books, 2016), and their debut collection of critical writing is forthcoming 2018.
Victoria Anne Reis (b.1982, East Meadow, NY) is trying to be a good mom and a good person. She lives with her parents and daughter, and works on a tree farm, in Boring, OR.
Learn moreIbrahim was born in Dallas, Texas and lived there for 11 years before moving to Oregon. His parents immigrated from Sudan a few months before he was born. He is a student at the Oregon Islamic academy and is involved in several local organizations. He started an initiative in which ethnic minority students in a Portland public school were given disposable cameras to express their cultures and identities through photography, and started a photography pen pal program with a local non-profit, Yo Ghana!. He is the coordinator of GPSEN's (Greater Portland Sustainability Education Network) Youth Network, initiating local efforts to promote sustainability, including economic sustainability. Late in 2016 he presented on this Youth Network in Indonesia at the Global RCE Conference, a United Nations University initiative on Sustainable Development. He is also a youth adviser for the Young Leaders in Action of the World Affairs Council. Ibrahim has a passion for language learning and is fluent in Arabic.
Learn moreMisevičiūtė is a performing artist and curator, she has performed in such venues as The Kitchen, New York; dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel; de Appel art center, Amsterdam; Center Pompidou, Paris; Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius; and Performa 09 at Swiss Institute, New York.
Selected Press
"Dream Catcher," Kate Sutton, Artforum, September 1, 2012
Learn moreIngri Midgard Fiksdal (b. 1982) is a Norwegian choreographer and performer. She is based in Oslo and has been making work since graduating from the MA in Choreography at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2006. Her work tours internationally to venues such as brut-Wien (AUS), Kampnagel (DE), Inkonst (SE), MDT (SE), In Between Time (UK), ANTI festival (FI), The Armory Show (US), LIMIT Festival (RS), HIFA (ZIM), Nordwind (DE), Baltoscandal (EST), and Homo Novus festival (LT). Fiksdal has recently been admitted into the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Program, and has from October 2013 commenced on a three-year artistic research project (PhD). Fiksdal’s work deals with perception and affectivity, and several of her pieces take shape as part performance and part live concert. The audience is always integral to the work, which aims to produce temporary collectives between performers and spectators. This notion of collectivity here refers to modes of attention and sensorial transference, rather than to interactivity. An ongoing theme within Fiksdal’s work is the ritual, and the rituals’ inherent capacity of transforming and ultimately transcending its partakers. This is approached from various angles to research how these capacities could be transferred to the performance-concerts created. Within this, the relation between cognition and affectivity, and how they operate in perception and in production of meaning, is central. Fiksdal often works in collaboration with other artists, such as visual artist, and composer Ingvild Langgård/Phaedra and scenographer Signe Becker.
Learn moreIngvild Langgård is a composer, musician and artist, educated from the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo (2006), specializing in sound art. She works in different media, and composes and performs music for stage, film, and in her own main music project, Phaedra. Phaedra released the album The Sea for Norwegian avant garde label Rune Grammofon in 2011. Phaedra´s music is a mix of folk and psychedelia with a dash of blues and soul; sacred death hymns and shimmering atmospheres, combining crystalline vocals, folk instruments and deep bass lines, with a touch of pure Scandinavian darkness. As with all of Langgård´s work it blends homegrown mythology, baroque aesthetics, and the possibility of altering the perception of the audience. Her work is shown in national and international museums and galleries, such as The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Lydgalleriet, Bergen, and and Chashama Gallery in New York. Langgård also works as a curator and co-founded the artist run gallery Rekord in 2006. Langgård has been awarded several grants for her work, and received the Norwegian State´s Working Grant for young artists twice. She currently is working on the next Phaedra album, to be released 2014, as well as upcoming Fiksdal/Langgård/Becker projects.
Learn moreIntisar Abioto is an artist working across photography, dance, and writing. Moving from the visionary and embodied root of Blackgirl Southern cross-temporal cross-modal storytelling ways, her works refer to the living breath/breadth of people of African descent against the expanse of their storied, geographic, and imaginative landscapes.
Learn moreIsabella Saavedra lives and works in Portland, OR. She originally hails from rural Northern California. Saavedra received her BS in Studio Art from Southern Oregon University in 2020 and began her MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Fall 2025. Saavedra received a 2024 Career Opportunity Grant from Oregon Arts Commission, as well as consecutive Arts3C Grants from Regional Arts and Culture Council in 2023 and 2024. She has attended residencies at ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership in Cleveland, OH, and p:ear in Portland, OR. Her exhibition record includes the Newport Visual Arts Center and Portland Center Stage. Most recently, she completed Understory, a permanent large-scale public art installation commissioned by the City of Portland’s Percent for Art in Public Places Program at the Mt. Scott Community Center.
Learn moreIsabelle Cornaro is a multi-material artist who grew up in post-colonial Africa, and studied 16th century art history before studying art at the Royal College of Arts in London and Beaux-Arts de Paris. She is currently based in Paris and represented by Balice Hertling Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions include The Whole World is Watching at Le Magasin, Grenoble (2012), FRAC-Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France (2012), and group exhibitions include Vide-Poche at Sculpture Center, New York (2011) and Rotary Connection at Casey Kaplan (2012). Cornaro was the recipient of the Ricard Foundation Prize (2010), a resident at ISCP New York (2009), and is included in the collections of Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris and Centre Pompidou, among many others.
Learn moreConsistently delivering a jaw-dropping performance experience, ISAIAH ESQUIRE is intensely emotive, athletic, and explosive, exhibiting an impressive and unique array of disciplines. He is most known for his mastery of face, character, intricate lip-sync, and absolute connection. A seasoned dancer/instructor/choreographer/creative director and internationally acclaimed entertainer, ISAIAH has over 13 years of professional experience. From studios to classrooms, universities to international festivals, ISAIAH instructs classes ranging from Hip-Hop to Jazz, African to Ballroom, Twerking to Heel-o-graphy, and more. The one consistent aspect to any Isaiah Esquire class is the confidence and self-awareness/acceptance that he inspires in his students.
Over the past year, in addition to joining the cast of the Super-Star Divas Megashow @ CC Slaughters, this powerhouse entertainer has been touring the country with Portland’s own gender fluid cabaret troupe, the Caravan of Glam, referred to by America’s Got Talent scouts as one of the top 10 traveling queer performance groups in the country. ISAIAH has been featured in multiple music videos (including “9inch Heels” By DJ Beyonda Doubt, “Quicksand” by Acoustic Minds, and “Put Em Up” By Priory). He has also appeared in film documentaries, magazines, websites, and even comic books.
You can catch ISAIAH and his partner, JOHNNY NURIEL, on stage and in life, headlining as their duo IZOHNNY every first Thursday for the mostly male spectacular: BOYeurism @ the Star Theater, a show created and produced by Isaiah himself.
ISAIAH continues to break down barriers of gender, sexuality, culture, and age. As a teacher he invites you to join in this movement and witness the magic as he shows you limitlessness self-expression through fearless art.
Learn moreIshmael Houston-Jones is an award winning choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation.
Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd. In 2020 he recieved a fourth "Bessie" for Service to the Field of Dance. Houston-Jones is the DraftWork curator for works-in-progress at Danspace Project in New York. He has curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now both at Danspace Project.
Learn moreErdal was born in Jerusalem in 1974 and moved to Canada in 1999. Since designing his first play with frequent collaborator James Fagan Tait, Erdal has designed over 130 shows for companies in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Berlin, London, and New York. He’s been nominated for seventeen awards in four different cities and won the 2003 Sam Payne Award for Most Promising Newcomer, the 2005 Associated Designers of Canada's Jack King Award, the 2007 Dora Mavor Moore Award, Best Design at the Dublin Fringe in 2008, and a Jessie Richardson Award in 2009. The Chop Theatre is an award winning Vancouver BC-based company that has been building and touring original performances since 2004. Their work is known for its sophisticated experimentation with authenticity and has consistently involved some of the finest artists throughout Canada.
Learn moreIvana Müller is a choreographer, artist and author of texts. Some of the recurring subjects in her work are body and its representation, self-invention, the place of the imaginary and imagination, notions of authorship, and the relationship between performer and spectator. Müller has dedicated a great part of her research and practice to the idea of Social Choreography throughout her own projects (While We Were Holding It Together, Playing Ensemble Again And Again, We Are Still Watching, In Common, Partituur)m as well as in various collaboration.
Müller’s choreographies, performances, installations, text works, video-lectures, audio pieces, guided tours and web works have been presented and co-produced over the last 10 years in venues and festivals such as Rotterdamse Schouwburg (NL), STUK Leuven (Belgium), Impuls Tanz (vienna), Frascati Theater Amsterdam, Kampnagel Hamburg, La Villette Paris, Wiener Festwochen, Theatertreffen Berlin, DTW New York, National Museum of Singapore, Saddler’s Wells London, Springdance Festival Utrecht, HAU Berlin, Centre nationale de danse Paris, and Kaaitheater Brussels. She performed her piece How Heavy Are My Thoughts in TBA:05.
In 2007 Müller received the Charlotte Koehler Prize from the Prins Bernhard Funds (NL) for her œuvre, as well as Impulse Festival and Goethe Institute Prize for her piece While We Were Holding It Together.Next to her artistic practice Ivana Müller curates festivals, organises debates and teaches as a guest lecturer. (in, amongst others, Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdams (MA in visual arts), School For New dance Development, Amsterdam (BA in choreography), Master of Choreography in Amsterdam, Insitut for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen (MA in Theatre) etc). Ivana Müller is Croatian born and she lives in Paris and works internationally.
Selected Press
"Claudia La Rocco Presents: Interview with Ivana Müller," Claudia La Rocco, Dance-tech.tv, April 7, 2011.
Learn moreIvo Dimchev is the author of more than 30 performances. He has received numerous international awards for dance and theater and has presented his work across Europe, South America, and North America. He has led master classes at the National Theater Academy in Budapest, the Royal Dance Conservatory of Belgium in Antwerp, Hochschule der Künste in Bern, Switzerland, DanceWeb in Vienna, Giessen University in Germany, the Bremen Academy of Art, and other institutions. Dimchev is the founder and director of the Humarts Foundation in Bulgaria and organizes an annual competition for contemporary Bulgarian choreography. Dimchev is currently an Artist in Residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels. In 2014, he opened MOZEI in Sofia, Bulgaria, as an independent space for presenting contemporary art and music.
Learn morejaamil olawale kosoko (they/he/she/jlov) is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s work in performance is rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body as a means to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.
jaamil is the recipient of awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund award, 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency, 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and consecutive 2016-2020 USArtists International awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.
Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, their book, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, was published in spring 2022.
Premiering in 2022, Black Body Amnesia (the performance reading) examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people negotiating the psychic lifeworlds of living inside the American context. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of performers including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, and DJ Maij, with sound accompaniment by Everett Saunders. In this new work, Kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a performance device. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests, and how they then archive these personal freedom narratives to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.
Their 2020 work Chameleon is a multimedia living digital art work, film, and audio transmission project that explores the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the intersection of Blackness, gender fluidity, and queerness in a pirated virtual space. Chameleon is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; the New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency program; and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, in partnership with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and Tanz im August/HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Additional development support for Chameleon was made possible, in part, with commissioning support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, through the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program.
Their 2017 work, Séancers, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in December 2017 and has toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim. Recent highlights include Mousonturm (Frankfurt, DE), FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA), Sophiensaele (Berlin, DE), the Wexner Center (Columbus, OH), Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), and Montréal Arts Interculturels (Montréal, CA), among others.
jaamil’s previous work #negrophobia (premiered September 2015, Gibney Dance Center) was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award and toured throughout Europe appearing in major festivals including Moving in November (Finland), Take Me Somewhere (UK), SICK! (UK), Tanz im August (Berlin), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (Norway), zurich moves! (Switzerland), Beursschouwburg (Belgium) and Spielart Festival (Munich).
They are a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University where they earned their MA in Curatorial Studies.
As a performer, jaamil has created original roles in the performance works of Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. In addition, creative consultant and/or performer credits include: Terry Creach, Lisa Kraus, Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, Leah Stein Dance Company, Emergent Improvisation Ensemble, and Faustin Linyekula and Les Studios Kabako (The Democratic Republic of Congo).
In 2009, they published the chapbook Animal in Cyberspace. In 2011, jaamil published the collection Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). Other publications include the American Poetry Review, the Dunes Review, the Interlochen Review, the Broad Street Review, Silo Literary and Visual Arts Magazine.
jaamil has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Baker Artists Awards, among others. From 2014 to 2020, jaamil served as a trustee on the Board of Directors for Dance/USA, the national service organization for dance professionals. jaamil is also a founding advisory board member for the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving, and currently serves as an artistic advisory member of The Field Center in Vermont.
jaamil has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center among others, and has taught and lectured at various educational institutions across the world. In Fall of 2020, jaamil was appointed the 3rd annual Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA World Arts & Cultures/Dance Department. Additionally, they lecture regularly at Princeton University, The University of the Arts Stockholm, and Exerce Master at ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France.
Learn more“Ferver’s performances are so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms.” —The New Yorker
Jack Ferver has been creating full-length works since 2007. He has been presented at The French Institute Alliance Francaise (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA), PS 122 (NYC), The New Museum (NYC), The Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Diverse Works (Houston, TX), Danspace Project (NYC), Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Dixon Place (NYC), and Théâtre de Vanves in France. Shorter and solo works have been presented at MoMA/PS1, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Dance New Amsterdam, LaMaMa E.T.C., The Culture Project, and NP Gallery (all NYC). His work has been written about in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The New Yorker, ArtForum, Modern Painters, TimeOut New York, The New York Post, The Boston Globe, and Dance Magazine. As an actor, credits include the film Gayby, Strangers With Candy (Comedy Central), and numerous other film and theatre projects. His writing has been published in the magazine Novembre. He has curated for Danspace Project, Center for Performance Research, and Dance New Amsterdam. He also teaches at NYU, Bard College, has guest taught at SUNY Purchase, and has set choreography at The Juilliard School.
Selected Press
"Laughing and Crying at Ghosts, Fictive and Real," The New York Times, December 11, 2010
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Jack Ferver and his work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreJacob Wren makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed and Polyamorous Love Song, a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2014. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize, Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.
Learn moreJaleesa Johnston; ⅓ of rise x fall
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.
Learn moreBorn in a German working-class community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during World War II, Benning studied mathematics on a basketball scholarship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; worked with migrant workers in Colorado; and started a commodity food program in the Ozarks. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, and has taught filmmaking at Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin, University of Oklahoma, UC San Diego, and California Institute for the Arts. Over the past 25 years, Benning has completed 14 feature-length films that have shown across the world. His attentive, long-take aesthetic has categorized his work as minimalistic, but inherent in his films is a career-long, deeply political awareness, informed by his life.
Selected Press
Digital Watch, Michael Ned Holte, Artforum, January 6, 2010.
Talking About Seeing: A Conversation with James Benning, Danni Zuvela, Senses of Cinema, Issue 33 2004.
Learn moreThis Actor/Dancer/Stripperformance Artist (primarily known for live work) has performed in New York & abroad since 1988. A Pioneer in the 1990s burlesque revival, Tigger! has been "acting like a stripper" since 1992 & remains a leading influence in the world burlesque scene. He won the first ever "King of Boylesque" title at Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas as well as several Golden Pastie Awards, including "Most Likely to Get Shut Down by the Law" & "Most Unpredictable Performer." He was ranked the #4 Burlesque Performer of 2010 (the only solo male) in an international online poll. Called "the Boylesque King...a heart-pounding climax" by LA Weekly, "hysterical and acrobatic" and "wickedly arch" by The New York Times, "disturbing, funny and oddly riveting all at once" by Vancouver Sun, "delightful...simultaneously hilarious and titillating" by TheaterMania, "the taboo-defying dynamo" by NEXT Magazine. He has acted in Shakespeare, Apollinaire, Wedekind, Horváth, Tennessee Williams and numerous original works with Taylor Mac, Julie Atlas Muz and other genius friends. He has recently performed in: Italy, Denmark, Cyprus, England, Hungary, Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, France, Mexico, Canada, and all around the U.S.
Learn moreJamie Isenstein was born in Portland, Oregon in 1975, and lives and works in New York City.. She has presented her work in exhibitions including It is what it is. Or is it?, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2012); MakeUp, A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy (2012); Liverpool Biennial: Touched, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK (2010); Marina Abramovic Presents, Manchester International Festival, Manchester, UK (2009); One Minute More, The Kitchen, New York (2009); Hammer Projects: Jamie Isenstein: This Way to The Egress, The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2007); Greater New York 2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2005). Her work is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Meyer Riegger in Berlin/Karlsruhe, Germany.
Selected Press
"The Lady Vanishes," Robin Tovey, Reed Magazine, March 2012.
Learn morePeople are universally intrigued by mystery and delighted by discovery and understanding. This is the essence of science and it is why we all spend at least the first 10 years of our lives exploring the unknown universe just as scientists do. But at that age, we call it play.
With good fortune, I have been able to continue the work of my inner 10 year old and to share the mystery, discovery and understanding with my students. The delight I have in teaching comes every term when I get to see the universe through their eyes and perspectives. And in reminding everyone to tap into that 10 year old scientist that lives within.
My career in science began at age 5 with a visit to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. It almost ended when I was 12 when I set fire to the basement of my house with a chemistry set! But I survived that test (and my parents never knew!). That’s when I knew I had a future in science!
My formal education includes a B.A. in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Pittsburgh.
I started teaching astronomy and physics in 1975 at various universities and have served as director of three planetariums, including OMSI’s Kendall Planetarium. At OMSI I moved into the exhibit design and development phase of my career and totally reinforced my commitment to hands-on, discovery-based learning. That is the philosophy I use in my classes at Marylhurst University where I teach now.
I have also worked for two other Portland-based science exhibit companies, Levy Design and Promotion Products, Inc. Exhibits that I have developed are here in Portland, and museums in California, Ohio, Alaska, New Jersey, Boston, Saudi Arabia and Israel, among other places.
Learn moreJane Paik took her first dance class when she was 17 years old – ballet. And loved it. She spent 2 1/2 years studying modern at the age of 19 - Martha Graham. Old school, but solid. Since then, she has continued to be mainly self-taught, though she has had the chance to take class with some excellent teachers including Stefan Wenta, Augusta Moore, Ryan Heffington, Kitty MacNamae, and Oliver Steele.
In conjunction with her entrance into the world of dance, Jane found herself as a founding member of the San Francisco theater troupe Sassymouth. Helmed by writer/director John Fisher, the troupe earned a cult following in San Francisco with its cutting-edge examinations of gender, sex, and politics. She wore many hats with the troupe including Producer, Choreographer, Dancer, and Actor and was recognized for her various roles including Joy of Gay Sex (Best Ensemble), Combat! (Mark Goodman award for Distinguishment in Acting) , and Medea, the Musical. (HBO Aspen Comedy Festival - Pick of the Festival, GLAAD choice awards - Best Play, LA Weekly, Best Play, BATCC Awards -Best Choreography, Best Ensemble Cast)
She has appeared in a handful of independent shorts and films seen in various festivals including Outfest, Ladyfest, and the South by Southwest Film Festival.
She began producing works under the name Janet Pants in 1997 and Founded the Janet Pants Dans Theeatre (later Leg and Pants Dans Theeatre) in 2001. Often hailed as a pioneer in bringing experimental modern dance to the underground music scene - in a style that has been described as "punk rock in dance form" - she continues to mash together her take on dance/film/music in various performances, videos, and sounds.
Learn morePart Screamers intensity, part Misfits anthem, part RZA samples/beats and part Lightning Bolt art/freakshow, Japanther is quite likely the most unapologetically artsy punk-related band since the early days of Sonic Youth. Utilizing microphones made out of old-fashioned telephone handsets, electronic hardware, cassette decks, a three-stringed bass guitar and a drumkit, Japanther is a more playful and even more self-conscious update on the late-'70s no-wave scene, though deep roots in the skatepunk scene keep things from getting too precious. For the past seven years Japanther has baffled unsuspecting audiences and steadily grown a cult following. They've lived out of a van all over Europe, Australia, Mexico, Canada and the US, while working in museums on all types of "Art Projects." Recent projects include a collaboration with Dan Graham for Beyond — his first American retrospective — and Japanther in 3-D, a book and film companion to the band’s interactive rock opera, commissioned for PERFORMA 07 at P.S. 122 (New York). Synchronized swimmers, illegal performances, marionettes and giant puppets have all been employed in Japanther shows — all in an attempt to redefine what bands, groups and gangs can do.
Learn moreJason N. Le (they/them) is an arts writer, critic, and cultural worker currently based in Northwest Arkansas, where they work in exhibitions planning at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Momentary. Their academic and artistic research primarily explores queer artistic navigations of human-object relationships at the intersection of performance and sculpture. They have written for BOMB Magazine, Critical Conversations (The Ford Family Foundation & University of Oregon’s Center for Art Research), Portland Monthly Magazine, Oregon ArtsWatch, and more.
Learn moreJason Traeger has released music on Kill Rock Stars and K Records, performed with the art collective Oregon Painting Society at Portland 2010: Biennial of Contemporary Art, TBA:09, Tate Modern and he has shared the stage with some of the biggest names in stand-up comedy. He resides in Portland, OR.
Learn moreJennie MaryTai Liu is an artist working across performance, choreography, video, and writing. She has worked in institutions and artist-run spaces including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources, The Mistake Room, The Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and Incubator Arts Center. She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, PICA, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited Riting, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA. She is currently organizing a 2022 performance exhibition funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation engaging LA dance artists to respond to modern dance activity in early twentieth-century LA. Jennie frequently collaborates as a performer in the work of Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group.
Learn moreJennifer Monson is an American dancer and choreographer. She has been actively creating dance work since the 1980s. She works with dance improvisation and creates choreography that is at times improvised or devised through scores, as well as collaborating with other dancers, visual artists, architects and scientists.
Learn moreReeves is a New York-based filmmaker, who has shown at the Berlin, New York, Vancouver, London, Sundance, and Seoul Film Festivals, as well as at the Whitney Biennial, Princeton University, and the Museum of Modern Art. She has made 20+ film works since 1990, pushing the boundaries of film through optical-printing, film stock “misuse,” and direct-on-film techniques including hand-painting film frames.
Selected Press
When It Was Blue, Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope, 2008.
Outward Bound, Ed Halter, artforum, October 27, 2008.
Learn moreJennifer West was born in Topanga, California and lives and works in Los Angeles. Significant commissions and special projects include High Line Art, New York (2012), 5th Biennial of the Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium (2011); The Aspen Art Museum (2010); the Turbine hall at TATE Modern (2009) and she was Artist in Residence at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2011. Solo exhibitions include Focal Point Gallery, Essex, England and Vdrome.org (2014); High Line Art, NY and S1 Artspace, Sheffield, England (2012); Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Western Bridge, Seattle and Kunstverein Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany (2010); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2008); White Columns, NY (2007). West has been included in numerous exhibitions internationally including Nottingham Contemporary, England; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunstlerhaus Graz, Austria; Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds, UK; Saatchi Gallery, London; White Columns, New York; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Drawing Center, New York; Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, New York; Tel Aviv Museum of Art ; CAPC Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; ZKM Museum for New Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and Tate St. Ives, England. West has published 12 Zines that she gives away at her exhibitions. West was shortlisted for the 2012 3rd Annual Nam June Paik Center Award in Korea. She is an Asst. Professor of Fine Arts Practice at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, Los Angeles.
Learn moreJenny Yang is a Los Angeles-based writer and stand up comedian who produces the first-ever (mostly) female, Asian American standup comedy tour, Dis/orient/ed Comedy and has been a writer and performer on the viral Buzzfeed videos "If Asians Said the Stuff White People Say" (over 8 million views), "What if Adults had Tantrums Like Toddlers?" and the "Ask An Asian" video series. Jenny was dubbed one of Los Angeles' "most fascinating people" of 2015 in LA Weekly's annual "People" issue. She was also a featured standup comic on Joan Rivers' 2013 Showtime documentary Why We Laugh: Funny Women.
Learn moreJen Rosenblit makes performance engaging bodies, architectures and ideas between New York City and Berlin. Her works focus on an improvisational approach to choreographic thought, locating ways of being together amidst impossible spaces. Recent works include Hands (upcoming, 2016, The Invisible Dog/New York Live Arts), a Natural dance (2014, The Kitchen), Pastor Pasture, in collaboration with composer Jules Gimbrone, (2013, Issue Project Room), In Mouth (2012, Dance Theater Workshop), and When Them (2010, Danspace Project). Rosenblit is a 2015-16 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a recipient of a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Emerging Choreographer for a Natural dance and was awarded the 2012 Grant to Artists from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Rosenblit was included in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York exhibition in October 2015, and has received commissions from The Kitchen, The Invisible Dog, New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, and Issue Project Room. Rosenblit has also collaborated and performed with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Young Jean Lee, Ryan McNamara, Yvonne Meier, Sasa Asentic, Anne Imhof, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K. Burns, and Kerry Downey with Joanna Seitz. Rosenblit's upcoming work, Swivel Spot, in collaboration with Geo Wyeth premiers at The Kitchen in March 2017. A new collaboration with Simone Aughterlony, Everything Fits in the Room, premieres January 2017 as a commission between HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Haus der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin as part of their 100 Years of Now festival.
Learn moreDancing has been in my blood since I can remember. It started off with hip hop dancing for my high school -- I began to recognize my skill and talent. After 4 years of that, I was introduced to the world of J-Sette by women. J-Sette historically refers to Jackson State University’s female drill team that began in the 1970s. They “created” the dance style, and thus far have made it a distinctive form of dance. I was interested in this type of dance, but not entirely until I saw a group of males performing it. At that point, I claimed the style for myself and perfected it on my body. Currently, I have my own J-Sette line, Mystic Force, and plan to increase our already considerable renown in this style of dance in our community, and eventually internationally. Previously, I served as co-captain of Dallas’ Texas Teasers. I have participated and competed in several events and competitions, including 2 SetteItOff video challenges, Atlanta Pride 2010, Tennessee Classics 2009, and Memphis Pride 2008. In 2015, I was named New Legendary by the Meet Me on the Dance Floor J-Sette council, and have gained many titles since then, such as, Best Dancer and Most Entertaining.
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by Jermone Donte Beacham in partnership with jumatatu m. poe and Jamarsa Peters.
Learn moreJesse Hayward received his MFA from California College of Art in 2002. His work has been exhibited at PDX Contemporary Art Window Project in Portland, OR; Southern Exposure and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and at The Affair at The Jupiter Art Fair. In 2006, Hayward’s work was included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in The Oregonian, PORT, PDX Magazine, Willamette Week, and The Portland Mercury. Most recently, Hayward was shortlisted for the Portland Art Museum’s Contemporary Northwest Art Award.
Learn moreJesse Hewit is a dance artist who lives in San Francisco. He has performed and had residencies with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CounterPUSLE, Z Space, KUNST-STOFF Headlands Center for the Arts, Ponderosa Tanzland, Firkin Crane, and others. Hewitt received a 2010 SFBG Goldie Award winner and was a 2011 YBCA Bay Area Now artist. He founded the THIS IS WHAT I WANT Festival with the National Queer Arts Festival, and has curated for THEOFFCENTER and Dancer’s Group/CounterPULSE’s 2nd Sundays series.
Learn moreJesse Sugarmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance, and sculpture. His work engages the automotive industry as a manufacturer of human identity, accessing automotive history as an index of both cultural identity and social development. Jesse has exhibited work in venues such as the Getty Institute, Los Angeles; el Museo Tamayo, Mexico; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; the Banff Center, Canada; Filmbase, Ireland; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Michael Strogoff, Marfa; el Museo de Arte Moderno de Santander, Spain; Drift Station, Omaha; Spirit Abuse, Albuquerque; the Knockdown Center, New York; Fugitive Projects, Nashville; the 21c Museum, Louisville; and High Desert Test Sites 2013. His work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art Papers, ART LTD, Art Cards, Art Fag City, Frieze Magazine, and The New York Times. Jesse lives and works in Bakersfield, California.
Selected Press:
"Sitting in the Back of a Car by Chip Lord," The Architect’s Newspaper, July 2014
"Doing Battle with the Remains of Industrial America by Christian Frock," Hyperallergic, May 2014
"Jesse Sugarmann," John Motley, Frieze Magazine, March 2014
"Critic’s Picks: Jesse Sugarmann," Stephanie Snyder, Artforum, October 2013
"High Desert Test Sites, a Diary by Mutual Art," Huffington Post, October, 2013
"Subverting Deadly Materials: The Work of Jesse Sugarmann," Mack McFarland, NY Arts Magazine, October, 2013
Learn moreJessica Bissett Perea (Dena’ina/Scottish American) is an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching focus on music, sound, and media studies; critical race and gender studies; Alaska Native and Circumpolar Inuit cultures, histories, and politics; Urban Indigeneities; African and Native alliances and cultural production in the Americas; jazz and improvisational musics; research ethics and methodologies; critical theory and pedagogy. She completed her PhD in Musicology from UCLA in 2011 and was awarded a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Music at UC Berkeley from 2011-2013.
Jessica was born in Anchorage, Alaska and raised forty miles north in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. She is an enrolled member of the Knik Tribe and a shareholder in Cook Inlet Region, Inc. (an Alaska Native Corporation). Her innovative dissertation research and dedication to community outreach were recognized with a 2010 Alaska Native Visionary Award, presented by the Alaska Native Heritage Month committee and board of directors.
Jessica’s writings have appeared in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, MUSICultures (formerly the Canadian Journal for Traditional Music / La Revue de Musique Folklorique Canadienne), the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd edition), and an edited volume Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries (University of California Press, 2012).
Learn moreHutchins received her BA in Art History from Oberlin College and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hutchins has had solo exhibitions in New York and Portland, Oregon, and has been shown across the US, as well as in Iceland, the UK, and Germany. Most recently, Hutchins’ work was included in 2010: The Whitney Biennial. Later this year, Hutchins will be featured in Ephemera at Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park; in Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture at the Saatchi Gallery (London), and at Timothy Taylor Gallery (London). She is represented by Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) in New York.
Selected Press
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Stuart Horodner, BOMB, Summer 2010.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, John Motley, Art in America, June 4, 2010.
Minor Miracles, Ben Davis, Artnet.com, March 26, 2010.
Critics' Picks: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Stephanie Snyder, Artforum, March, 2010.
500 Words: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Patricia Maloney, Artforum, July 22, 2009.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins' Hours and Ours at Small A, Jeff Jahn, PORT, February 1, 2008.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Chas Bowie, Portland Mercury, February 8, 2007.
Learn moreJess Perlitz’s work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. Born in Toronto, CA, she is a graduate of Bard College and received an MFA from Tyler School of Art and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently based in Portland, OR, where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of the year-long Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project and the Experimental Arts Research Forest. Perlitz was named a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, won a Joan Shipley award, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Socrates Sculpture Park, Astoria, NY; Cambridge Art Galleries, Cambridge, CA; De Fabriek in The Netherlands; and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA, as part of the museum’s ongoing artist installation series.
Learn moreJibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of three books of poems, 19 Names For Our Band (Fence, 2008), James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011), and Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2014). His art and writing projects, spanning photography, video, performance and poetry, have been exhibited and performed at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA/P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.
Learn moreJibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and author of three books of poems: Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2015); James Brown Is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011); and 19 Names for Our Band (Fence, 2008). His recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. (2014); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (2015); Jewish Museum, New York (2016); LAX ART (2016); Studio Museum in Harlem (2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); Swiss Institute, New York (2017); KMAC Museum, Louisville (2018); Ballroom Marfa, Marfa (2018); The Kitchen, New York (2018); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2019). This fall he will present a new body of work along with a selection of recent projects at Tufts University Art Galleries, as well as a solo exhibition at Magenta Plains in New York.
Learn moreJibz Cameron is a performer, visual artist, and writer living in Los Angeles, most well known for her multimedia work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag. Over the last 20 years, Cameron has combined tragedy and comedy at such institutions as MOCA, PS1, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, The Hammer Museum, and the New Museum, among others. The New York Times has heralded her as “the funniest and most pitch-perfect performance seen in years,” and New York Magazine has called her “outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative.” Cameron has written and produced seven evening-length performance pieces and countless short works that have been performed in clubs and venues internationally. She has also produced multiple video works and three albums of original music. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2020 Creative Capital Awardee, and a 2021 United States Artist. Her film, Weirdo Night, made with director Mariah Garnett, is an official Sundance Film Festival 2021 submission. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night!, a monthly experimental comedy and performance event in Los Angeles + New York. Jibz is honored to be included in 2023’s Made In LA Biennale “Acts Of Living” at the Hammer Museum. Cameron's memoir, Hell In A Handbag, is being released by DOPAMINE Books in 2026.
Learn more1. JI YANG is a PUZZLE MAKER and a FICTION BUILDER. 2. JI YANG makes art like saying “2 x 2 = 5 ?” or “ fighting with a puffy pillow.” 3. JI YANG does it underwhelmingly.
Learn moreJJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, the artist asks what stuttering can teach us about justice.
Born in 1989 in Groton, Connecticut, USA the artist lives in Norfolk, Virginia, USA with their wife, poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. JJJJJerome dreams of building a sonic bath house!
Concepts that organize the artist’s practice include: unknowing, improvisation, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, and silence. Ellis researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time.
Learn moreLifelong neurodivergent artist.
Two main pathways: abstract painting and dance/performance.
As a painter of close to 50 years, my work is equal parts improvisation and design: chance elements sometimes kinesthetically generated, a studied compositional eye, and a deep love of color, movement, architecture, and gesture. I create abstract acrylic paintings with many layers and sometimes collage elements. My studio is in The Drawing Studio in SE Portland, which I co-own with Phil Sylvester, adjoined by the Findlay/Sylvester Gallery, in which my paintings can be viewed.
As a contemporary modern dancer I have created and performed my own, mostly solo performance work. Also worked extensively for many years with these choreographers:
Beginning in 1980 with Jann McCauley Dryer in CIRQUE (formerly Portland Dance Theater), Gregg Bielemeier and Gregg Bielemeier Dance Project, Catherine Egan and Eggshell Productions, and Bonnie Merrill, who, in addition to the many works I danced over the years, choreographed a solo for me that I performed while heavily pregnant.
Helen Buckingham, Kiken Chin, Linda K Johnson, Kimi Okada, Mary Oslund, Sara Padilla, Judy Patton, Ray Terrill.
Collaborated with artists in performance: Alva Bradford, costumer/puppet maker, Cristina DeGennaro, visual/performance artist, Van Findlay, singer/violinist, Daniel Storto, fashion/costume designer, Tyrrell Sweetman cellist, Phil Sylvester, composer/musician, and painter/set designer.
Designed and constructed sets, costumes, props, and hair designs for many choreographers/directors, including Gregg Bielemeier, Jann Dryer, Catherine Egan, and Randee Paufve.
Studied visual art and dance in the 1970’s at Portland State University with instructors who were creative working artists. In addition to modern dance have studied tap, ballet, African, improvisation, jazz, flamenco, as well as piano and drums. Influential teachers include Gregg Bielemeier, modern dance; Ruby Burns, African dance; Jann Dryer, modern dance; Cathy Evleshin, modern and jazz dance; Fred Heidel painting; Jim Hibbard drawing; Michi Kosuge sculpture; and Vincent Martinez-Grieco, modern jazz dance; Bonnie Merrill modern improvisation and tap dance; Judy Patton modern dance and performance collaboration; Barbara Remington ballet; and Claire Roche, tap dance.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Brooklyn, Joan Frosch (producer/director) explores 21st century artmaking through the voices of often previously marginalized artists and thinkers, including the emergent voices of contemporary dancers and choreographers in Africa, and the African Diasporas of France and the USA. Joan's 30 year creative path encompasses making and directing dance theatre, writing as a dance ethnographer/activist, and, now, directing her first documentary feature. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts, Laban Institute of Movement Studies, and Columbia University. At present, Joan is Professor of Dance and co-Director of the award-winning Center for World Arts at the University of Florida, and a founding member of the The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium (USA).
Alla Kovgan (co-director/editor) is a Boston-based filmmaker/intermedia artist/curator, born in Moscow, Russia. Her films have been screened at numerous venues around the world including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New York Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and others. Among Alla's most recent endeavors is co-directing and editing “Traces of the Trade: a Story from the Deep North” by Katrina Browne about the role of the North in the US slave trade; co-producing with Russian filmmaker Efim Reznikov “Terpsychore's Captives II”, a feature documentary about Bill T. Jones and a Russian prima ballerina Natalia Balakhnicheva; and working with Kinodance Company, on a new intermedia performance "Denizen" that will premiere in May 2007 as a part of Bank of America Celebrity Series. Alla has been teaching and curating dance film and avant-garde cinema worldwide and acts as an International Director of St. Petersburg Dance Film Festival KINODANCE.
Learn moreJoel B. Tan is an award-winning writer/performer and an internationally recognized trailblazer in connecting arts with social justice, public health, and community development. Tan has published three volumes of poetry, edited three fiction anthologies, and his various poems, plays, essays, and short fiction on race, power and identity have appeared in numerous academic and commercial venues. Since 2004, Tan has served as the Director of Community Engagement at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where his work in the field of arts leadership has been recognized globally. Prior, he worked in Public Health for 16+ years, co-founding LA’s Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team Health Center. Tan is also Sister Baba Ganesh of the San Francisco Mother House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. As Baba, he is the creator of the widely walked “Sistoric” Castro Procession, an historical audio walking tour produced with Queer DJ collective and Honey SoundSystem. He is also the producer of Project Nunway, a fashion fundraiser that pairs Sisters with designers to create a look from recycled materials based on a theme. Nunway is currently in its 6th year in San Francisco and is now replicated in 6 other Sister cities and growing strong.
Learn moreWorking in video and photography, Finnish artist Johanna Ketola reconstructs narrative that is built upon her quotidian observations of life. This results in both fictional and autobiographical characters and stories, which often reflect her state of being as affected by a kind of sweet and absurd hopelessness about the human condition. Her work has been exhibited at Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in Holden Gallery in Manchester, UK; in Espace Croix-Baragnon in Toulouse, France; in Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in the following Finnish museums: Jyväskylä, Rauma, Oulu, and Mikkeli; and in Gallery Jangva in Helsinki, Finland, among others.
Learn moreJasperse is Artistic Director/Choreographer of the New York-based John Jasperse Company/Thin Man Dance. He has created several short works and thirteen evening-length pieces for the company, as well as various projects in collaboration with other artists. His work has been presented by festivals and presenting organizations throughout the United States and Europe and in Brazil, Chile, Israel, and Japan. Jasperse and company have received numerous prizes, grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and a “Bessie” Award in recognition of their body of work. Jasperse has created works for several companies including Baryshnikov's White Oak Project, Batsheva Dance Company, and The Lyon Opera Ballet.
Selected Press
Hamming It Up, With Pink Light, Flashes of Murakami and Flowered Bikinis, Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, June 18, 2010.
John Jasperse Company, Joyce Theatre, New York, Apollinaire Scherr, Financial Times, June 18, 2010
Dance review: John Jasperse's flirty West Coast premiere at REDCAT, Victoria Looseleaf, LA Times, April 15, 2010.
True Lies: John Jasperse collaborates in search of beauty, Valerie Jean Johnson, NewCity Stage, April 5, 2010.
Of Men Who Go Naked With Women Who Aren't, Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, June 3, 2000
Learn moreJohnny Woods is an animator, video artist, and editor based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared at the Museum of Moving Image, the Sydney Opera House, MoMA, LACMA, the Hirshhorn Museum, ICA (Philadelphia), Imagine Science Festival, Animafest Zagreb, Coachella, and Lollapalooza. Currently, Johnny is working primarily on short-form experimental films. He is co-founder of Ghosting.tv, a monthly screening event in Los Angeles featuring experimental animation and video art, programmer for Animation Breakdown at The Cinefamily, and director of Undervolt & Co., a label for experimental video artists.
Learn moreJohn Smith was born in London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art. After graduating in 1977 he became involved in the activities of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. John Smith has developed a body of work that deftly subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction.
Since 1972 John Smith has made over forty film, video and installation works and shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world. His solo exhibitions include: Royal College of Art (London), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, UK), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (Germany), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Pearl Gallery (London), and Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin). Smith’s work has been featured in retrospectives at the 2007 Venice Biennale and film festivals in Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere, Uppsala, Bristol, Regensburg, Glasgow, La Rochelle and, most recently, in the 2010 Berlin Bienniale. John Smith lives and works in London, where he teaches part-time at the University of East London as Professor of Fine Art. He is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin).
Selected Press
On the Street where You Live: The Films of John Smith, Adrian Dakes, senses of cinema, November, 2003.
Interview with John Smith, Brian Frye, Millennium Film Journal, Winter 2003.
John Smith, Michael O'Pray, LUXOnline, 2003. Learn moreJoseph Keckler is a musician, writer, and artist who often zeroes in on moments of daily life and spins them into absurd and affecting underworld voyages. His musical performances have been presented by the NPR Tiny Desk concert series, Lincoln Center, Centre Pompidou, and others. In 2019 he premiered two performance pieces—a dreamlike travelogue, Train With No Midnight, with Prototype Festival, and Let Me Die, an epic medley of operatic death scenes, with Opera Philadelphia—and toured the US as the national support act for Sleater-Kinney. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Vice, Lithub, and other publications; his debut collection Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World was published in 2018 by Turtle Point Press. This year he is an artist in residence with Dartmouth and the Ringling Museum of Art and is currently working on new videos and recordings.
"Singer with a range that shatters the conventional boundaries...The sensibility of a magician, a trickster’s dark humor and a formidable musical and literary erudition. Major vocal talent"-- Stephen Holden, The New York Times
“Tantalizing… dynamic… with magnetism and poise is so high that he seems to have been born onstage.” — The Village Voice
“Riveting and beautifully absurd, Keckler singlehandedly has the power and chops to legitimately modernize a dying art form.” — Huffington Post
“His timing is impeccable, his wit is sharp… Keckler himself is the masterpiece”– Brooklyn Rail
Learn moreJoseph M. Pierce is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th-century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the forthcoming special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, The Art Newspaper, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with SJ Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
Learn moreJoseph Rosenburger has not let hardships, tragedies, and adversities stop him from excelling in the written word. His wit matches his wisdom, both of which are plentiful beyond his years. Newly released from five years in three institutions, Joe has much to offer the people.
Learn moreJoti born and raised in Portland, Oregon is the first in his family to be born outside of India. He graduated from Roosevelt High School and will be majoring in film at Portland State University in the fall of 2017. Attending Roosevelt High School created many opportunities for Joti to use his passion for film and photography to talk about social issues he saw in his community. His first project #Teens4SocialJustice shined light on the issue feeling racially profiled in stores as a minority teen. His second project “American Nightmare” was a short film he created that consisted of many metaphors and symbols to represent what it felt like to be a minority in America. Joti hopes to one day create projects that reach audiences on a global scale that address issues in the society.
Learn moreJUDY was created as a collaboration of DJs, artists, and friends; Ana Briseño, Megan Holmes and Kayla Oh. Originally created in response to the void of queer femme DJs in dance spaces, Judy was born as a place for people to sweat, scream, make out, and throw their shirts off to music, while feeling the openness of sexual freedom and gender expression.
Learn moreJuliana Huxtable will treat opening night audiences to a dynamic experience sonically and visually. The night will play between text, sound and video, questioning the parameters between club and gallery. In her work, Huxtable explores the intersections of race, gender, queerness, and identity. She uses a diverse set of means to engage these issues, including self-portraiture, text-based prints, performance, nightlife, music, writing, and social media. Huxtable’s work has been featured in group presentations at MoMA PS1, New York (2014); White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York (2014); “Take Ecstasy with Me,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); Frieze Projects, London (2014); and2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2015); among other venues.
Learn moreJulie Atlas Muz, an internationally performing artist who is based between NYC’s Lower East Side and London, UK has been around the block more than twice. One of the most acclaimed, prolific, and experienced creators around, Julie sucker-punches the boundaries between theater, dance, puppetry, film, and burlesque with outrageously loving performances that have secured her place in the underworld of nightlife, as well as solidifying her as a bastion of the art world.
Learn moreA rising senior at Catlin Gabel School, Juma Sei has always found himself engrossed in predominantly white, privileged, and “liberal” school systems and communities across the world. As a result of this, Sei has deeply explored the more subtle aspects of oppression and prejudice his entire life - bringing a unique and somewhat introspective point of view to the work he does at Catlin Gabel and other organizations across Portland. In addition to his identity as a black male and African American, Sei’s parents are both Sierra Leonean immigrants, adding yet another perspective to his intersectional integrity. Arguably the most important aspect to any work he does is making sure to understand the context and history in which he’s operating.
Learn moreI am a choreographer, performer, and educator based between Philadelphia and New York City who grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with my siblings and cousins. My early exposure to concert dance was through African dance and capoeira performances on California college campuses where my parents studied and worked, but I did not start formal dance training until college with Umfundalai, Kariamu Welsh’s contemporary African dance technique. My work continues to be influenced by various sources, including my foundations in those living rooms and parties, my early technical training in contemporary African dance, my continued study of contemporary dance and performance, and my recent sociological research of and technical training in J-setting with Donte Beacham. I produce dance and performance work with idiosynCrazy productions, a company I founded in 2008 and now co-direct with Shannon Murphy. Previously, I have danced with Marianela Boán, Silvana Cardell, Emmanuelle Hunyh, Tania Isaac, Kun- Yang Lin, C. Kemal Nance, Marissa Perel, Leah Stein, Keith Thompson, Kate Watson-Wallace, Reggie Wilson, and Kariamu Welsh (as a member of Kariamu & Company). As a performer, I also collaborate with Merián Soto.
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by jumatatu m. poe in partnership with Jermone Donte Beacham and Jamarsa Peters.
Learn moreJunaid Sarieddeen (Beirut, Lebanon) His artistic research is oriented towards focusing on the position of the artwork within the time and space contexts of events. “Lorca” (2005), the intrusive event in the streets of Beirut, followed by the installation performance “ish ibka smu sud jud...” (2006) both carried the beginning of this artistic question for him. A question which started developing after he took part in establishing Zoukak Theatre Company in 2006 and later finishing his BA in Philosophy at the Lebanese university in 2008; which led him to consider the artwork as a political proposition. Sarieddeen is the dramaturg for Leila's Death, part of PICA's 2016 TBA Festival.
Learn moreK8 Hardy (b. 1977, Fort Worth, Texas, USA) lives and works in New York. She’s a punk rock artist who works across varied mediums, including video, photography, and sculpture.
Through her art practice, she unwittingly becomes a brand, intentionally exploiting persona and pop culture. Long before the ubiquity of the selfie, Hardy was experimenting in documenting her looks and various fictional selves. Her work takes us to the edge of “good taste.” Hardy’s materials are an assemblage of second-hand clothing, found objects, trash, and panache, evoking the world of consumption.
Learn moreKalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist currently living and working in Brooklyn. In 2007, he was named a Guggenheim fellow; in 2008 he received a Creative Capital Grant and a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. Linzy has been hailed as one of the most innovative of a new generation of queer artists, drawing comparisons to John Waters, Jack Smith, and RuPaul. Writing in The New York Times, Holland Cotter observed of Linzy, "A star is born." Born in 1977 in Stuckey, Florida, he received an MFA from the University of South Florida in Tampa.
Linzy has performed and screened work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; British Film Institute, London; and Beursschouwburg, Brussels, Belgium. Linzy's work was included in Prospect.1 New Orleans and was recently featured in a major solo exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem, comprised of more than twenty videos and several suites of drawings. He is represented by Taxter & Spengemann in New York.
Learn moreKameelah Janan Rasheed (East Palo Alto, CA) is an artist, writer, and former public school social studies teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. In her interdisciplinary and research intensive practice, she considers ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing. She has exhibited at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Project Row Houses, among others. She has been the recipient of awards including the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Print Studio, Triple Canopy Commission at New York Public Library Labs, Artadia Grant, Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship, Art Matters Grant, among others. She is a curriculum writer for NYC public schools, the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine, a contributing editor at The New Inquiry, and on faculty at School of Visual Arts. Currently, she is an artist in residence at Smack Mellon.
Learn moreKaneza Schaal is a New York City based theater artist. Her recent work GO FORTH premiered at PS122 and then showed at the Genocide Memorial Amphitheater in Kigali, Rwanda; LMCC’s River-to-River Festival; Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; Cairo International Contemporary Theater Festival in Egypt; and at her alma mater Wesleyan University, CT. Schaal received a 2017 MAP Fund award, 2016 Creative Capital Award, and is the current Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage. This spring her new piece CARTOGRAPHY will be workshopped through New Victory Theater Lab, NYU Abu Dhabi, and will show at The Kennedy Center’s New Vision New Voices. Her work with The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, Claude Wampler, Jim Findlay, and Dean Moss has brought her to venues including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, The Whitney Museum, and MoMA.
Learn moreKara-Lis Coverdale works in both acoustic and electronic media to create works that transcend reality. Driven by a patient devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Coverdale’s world-building work occupies new planes built upon a borderless understanding of electronic music rooted in the interlocking pathways of musical systems and languages. Named a unique navigator of the digital frontier with an ease and emotive sensitivity “we cannot yet comprehend” (FADER) and heralded as “one of the most exciting composers in North America” (The Guardian), Coverdale’s work has been met with consistent critical acclaim. Her most recent recorded release, Grafts (Boomkat, 2017), whilst rooted in a modal sensibility, explores the impermanence of identity signature to exhibit a highly idiosyncratic approach to ratio-based microtonality and overtone, grief, love, and the passing of time. Grafts has been described as an “arresting,” “masterful work” of “uncompromisingly distinct,” “indescribable beauty.” Coverdale’s recordings are architecturally considered and often understated, but her dynamic live shows can be unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, confrontational—symptoms that the artist is emotionally present— for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite as a highly dynamic and explorative artist; unpredictable and resistant to categorization and stasis.
Previous releases include Aftertouches (2015, Sacred Phrases), a distinct exploration of holographic sonics, container technologies, and digital ether, that explores music’s sacred histories while forging its mediated and culturally saturated frontiers. Extended harmonic resolutions of seventeenth century chromatic keyboard music are redolent of her approach to this part writing, voiced with hybrid keyboards, fractured samples, algorithmically rendered vocals, and VST miragery. Aftertouches was named a top album of the year by The Wire, NPR, and others. A 480 (2014, Constellation Tatsu), is a set of studies accompanied by .nfo scores sourced from the data-sourced voice to explore the sonic impermanence of identity signatures. Coverdale has collaborated with Philadelphia noise artist David Sutton (LXV) on their collaborative album Sirens (2015, Umor Rex), to explore disembodiment and fantasy in the digital age, Tim Hecker (Love Streams, Virgins), and her production credits include Marilyn Manson, How To Dress Well, Lee Bannon, and others. She has also presented an A/V collaboration with MFO (Marcel Weber). Coverdale has written scores with artist and writer Kara Crabb on several projects, including the writing of the score for Royal Jelly (a modern reworking of the Greek Tragedy Medea), and The Reproductive Life Cycle of a Flower. In 2016 and 2017, Coverdale performed over eighty shows in Europe, North America, and Australia, including performances that were “festival favourites” for Unsound, Semibreve, and Mutek. More recently, she presented new large scale works Marjamaa Laulud, a unique commission for Dance with the Estonian Vanemuine Theatre and choreographer Ruslan Stepanov, and VoxU, a pipe organ commission for Mutek Montreal (CALQ) that is centred around the collection and arrangement of the unique sonics of the Vox Humana stop in particular, the first record and instrument of vocal synthesis dating back to the fifthteenth century. The work weaves a narrative characteristic of this period, intersecting motives of emulation, the body, and transcendence.
Kara-Lis was born in Burlington, Canada, and began studying with the Royal Conservatory of Music from age 5. Her grandparents were immigrants from Estonia. She later went on to complete with degrees in musicology and composition, for which she wrote a Masters thesis “Sound Rhetoric, and the Fallacy of Fidelity,” a seed to Coverdale’s infatuation with the mutability of the real. Coverdale has worked as organist and music director at several churches across Canada since age 13, where she has also served as choir conductor. She is recipient of a “remising young artist” award by Canadian new music composer Ann Southam, has held residencies with GRM Paris, EMS Stockholm, FUGA Zaragoza and others, and presents original performances, commissions, collaborations, and installations all over the world including The Barbican, Theatre du Chatelet, AGO, MAC Montreal, Filharmonia Krakowska, Teatro Circo, Kraftwerk, and Elbphilharmonie.
Learn moreKaren Sherman makes performances that incorporate her background in dance, writing, theater, music, and the handyman arts. Her work has been presented nationally by P.S. 122, Walker Art Center, PICA’s TBA Festival, Fusebox Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theater, American Realness, The Southern Theater, Dance Place, Diverseworks, Movement Research, ODC, Red Eye Theater, and many others. Her honors include a 2007 “Bessie” Award for her performance in Morgan Thorson's Faker, multiple McKnight Foundation Fellowships in Choreography and Dance, a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, SAGE Awards for her work as a choreographer, performer, and scenic designer, and residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Performance Lab, Movement Research, LUMBERYARD, and the Bogliasco Foundation program in Liguria, Italy. She was a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellow in The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and is currently an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-in-Residence in its dance program. A freelance stage technician for over 20 years, she was Technical Director and Production Manager of NYC’s legendary Judson Church (1994-2004), Technical Director of both Movement Research (1994-1998) and Circus Amok (1995-1997), and she has been an overhire stage technician at Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) since 2005. Her writing, including essays and poetry, has been featured on many live, web, and print forums, including e-flux journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Criticism Exchange, Culture Bodega, and The Triumph of Poverty: Poems Inspired by the Work of Nicole Eisenman. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project about blood, astronomy, and animals. Part one, a solo visual art show opened at Hair + Nails Gallery in Minneapolis in March 2018. Part two, a dance, premieres in 2019, with part three, a book, to follow.
Selected Press
"Karen Sherman's 'One with Others,' gleefully mocks artistic hooey," Sarah Kaufman, Washington Post, April 21, 2013
Learn moreKarl Larsson is an artist, poet, and editor. These diverse positions have coalesced in an artistic practice that can be described as both editorial and literary, but differs from writing in a conventional sense in its focus on spatial experience, embodiment and activism.
Learn moreKate Bredeson is a theatre historian, translator, director, and dramaturg. Her project as a scholar is to research, document, and practice the ways in which theatre can be a tool for radical activism and protest. Her books are published by Northwestern University Press: Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May '68 (2018; finalist, TLA George Freedley Award); The Inheritor: A Play (translator, 2024); The Diaries of Judith Malina, volumes 1-4 (general editor 1-4, editor 2 and 4, 2026; winner, ADE Lyman H. Butterfield Award), and Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances by Anthony Hudson (editor, 2026). Bredeson is Professor of Theatre at Reed College.
Learn moreGilmore’s exhibitions include the 2010 Whitney Biennial; the Brooklyn Museum; The Kitchen; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Bryant Park (Public Art Fund); Locust Projects; White Columns; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Artpace; The J. Paul Getty Museum; The Rose Art Museum; Istanbul Museum of Art; Haifa Museum of Art; and PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center (Greater New York 2005). Gilmore has been the recipient of several international awards and honors, such as the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Award for Artistic Excellence, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, The LMCC Workspace Residency, New York Foundation for The Arts Fellowship, and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Residency. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Selected Press
Soft Machines Hit Hard, Kathleen Massara, The L Magazine, August 3, 2011.
Photos from Kate Gilmore's Clay-Clawing Performance at The Pace Gallery, Benjamin Sutton, The L Magazine, July 14, 2011.
Jennifer and Kate Gilmore, BOMB, March 10, 2011.
Art in Review: Kate Gilmore, Roberta Smith, The New York Times, January 9, 2009.
Kate Gilmore, Lyra Kilston, Modern Painters, March 1, 2009.
Learn moreKatherine Profeta’s longest-term credits are as a dramaturg with choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon (1997-present) and as a founding member, choreographer and occasional performer with Elevator Repair Service theater company (1991-present). She has also done dramaturgical work in dance, theater and points in-between with Julie Taymor, Karin Coonrod, Annie Dorsen, David Thomson, Alexandra Beller, Nora Chipaumire, and Theatre for a New Audience. She holds a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama in the department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. Her first book, Dramaturgy in Motion, examines the labor of the dramaturg in contemporary dance and movement performance, alongside a history of her collaboration with Lemon. Her writing has also been seen in Performing Arts Journal; Theater Magazine; Movement Research Performance Journal; Theatre, Dance and Performance Training; and TCG’s The Production Notebooks. "She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Queens College, CUNY, and currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the Yale School of Drama."
Learn moreKeioui Keijuan creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Keijuan examines, deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of the black body in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials addressing blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Keijuan earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Keijuan has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; and the United Kingdom. Keijuan was an artist-in-residence at PICA as part of the Creative Exchange Lab program in Fall 2015.
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