Artists Archive

Keith Hennessy: 2 Events; Keith Hennessy dances in and around performance. Born in northern Ontario, he lives in San Francisco since 1982 and tours internationally. His performances engage improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and public action as tools for investigating political realities. Practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, post/Modern dance, activist art, the Bay Area, wicca, punk, contact improvisation, and queer-feminism motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s work. Keith’s 2016 collaborators include Peaches, Meg Stuart, Scott Wells, Jassem Hindi, and the collaboratives Blank Map and Turbulence. He teaches in universities, independent studios, and festivals including Ponderosa, Fresh, HZT, Movement Research, Portland State University, Sandberg Institute, and Impulstanz. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artist Fellowship, a NY Bessie, multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, and a Bay Area Goldie. Keith's writings have been published in Contact Quarterly, Movement Research Journal, Performance Research (UK), Society of Dance History Scholars Journal, Dance Theatre Journal (UK), Itch, Front, and In Dance. Hennessy directs Circo Zero and was a member of Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann. He earned an MFA and PhD from UC Davis.
Keith Hennessy / Circo Zero: 8 Events; Hennessy is a San Francisco-based performer, choreographer, teacher, organizer, and PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis. He directs Circo Zero and co-founded 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE in San Francisco. Hennessy tours extensively including Queer Zagreb, New York Live Arts and American Realness Festival in New York, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, and YBCA in San Francisco, among others. He has received multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie), and the United States Artist Kjenner Fellowship.
Kelly Pratt: 3 Events; Kelly Pratt is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and arranger. From 2006–12, he was a full-time member of indie-pop outfit Beirut, contributing arrangements, brass/woodwinds, and vocals. He has performed and recorded with hundreds of artists including Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Coldplay, The War on Drugs, and Passion Pit. In 2012 and 2013, he collaborated with David Byrne and St. Vincent, providing arrangements for their album “Love this Giant”, as well as serving as arranger and musical director for their world tour. In 2015 he was the arranger and brass/woodwind player for Contemporary Color, a multimedia tour curated by Byrne featuring contemporary pop stars accompanied by color guards. Pratt is also the chief songwriter and vocalist of the band Bright Moments, whose debut NPR called “a wildly creative album, packed with energy.”
Kemi Adeyemi: 1 Event; Kemi Adeyemi (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is working on a manuscript that explores how black queer women manipulate sound and the body to reorganize the racialized networks of pleasure in the nightlife scenes of gentrifying neighborhoods. Her work has appeared in Palimpsest and Sounding Out!, and she is co-editing the first collected volume on queer nightlife studies. Kemi received a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Kendra Jayne Patrick: 1 Event; Kendra Jayne Patrick directs an itinerant, eponymous art gallery based in New York City. The program is focused on exhibition-making and symbology related to the twenty-first century avant-garde, specializing in post-conceptual and post-internet sculpture, digital, photography, and painting. Since opening in late 2017 the gallery has shown a range of international artists and practices including Ivan Argote, Lap-See Lam, Kenya (Robinson), Jo Shane, and Arden Surdam. Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick has been featured in Artsy, Vulture, ARTnews, Barron’s, the San Francisco Chronicle, and DAZED Magazine.
Kenny Mellman: 1 Event; Tony-nominated Kenny Mellman was the co-creator and “Herb” half of the internationally acclaimed duo Kiki and Herb. His solo show “Kenny Mellman is Grace Jones” has played NYC, London, Portland, Philadelphia, and both Melbourne and Sydney Australia. At Least It’s Pink, the show he co-wrote with Bridget Everett and Michael Patrick King (Sex and The City) was one of TimeOutNY’s top 10 Cabaret shows of 2006. He is an Obie, Bessie, Glammy, Glaad Media and MAC award winning performer. in 2009, he was named one of TimeOut New York’s 40 favorite people in NYC. He performed with The Three Terrors (Stephin Merritt, LD Beghtol and Dudley Klute) and played the piano for Bob Mould’s vocal on He Didn’t, a track on The 6ths record Hyacinths and Thistles.
He is now a member of The Julie Ruin with Kathleen Hanna (Le Tigre, Bikini Kill) and Kathi Wilcox (Bikini Kill) and they are set to release their debut album in early 2013.
Kevin Holden: 3 Events; Kevin Holden (Diné, Irish, German, and Norwegian)
Kevin Holden is an artist and composer based in and around Portland, Oregon.
keyon gaskin: 8 Events; keyon gaskin. this is not a thing (genius, genius, genius, at Central Public Library, Portland, OR) Photo Courtesy of Robert Duncan Gray
keyon gaskin (Portland, OR) prefers not to contextualize their art with their credentials.
Kim Laughton: 1 Event
Kinski: 2 Events; Kinski bears comparison to Acid Mothers Temple, Oneida, and Tool, and it just so happens that Kinski has toured with all three of these prog-rock juggernauts. Comprising Chris Martin (guitar), Lucy Atkinson (bass), Barrett Wilke (drums), and Matthew Reid Schwartz (guitar, keyboards, flute), the band has released six full-length albums, four on the seminal Seattle label Sub Pop.
Kite: 1 Event; Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an award winning Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, composer and academic raised in Southern California, known for her sound and video performance with her Machine Learning hair-braid interface. Kite holds a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road).
Knowledge of Wounds: 2 Events; Knowledge of Wounds is the collaborative curatorial practice of S.J Norman (Wiradjuri) and Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation). Since its first iteration in Lenapehoking/NYC in 2020, and currently operational as a hybrid live/digital program, KoW is continually evolving in its mission to foreground the work of Indigenous creators and knowledge workers across hemispheres and disciplines. www.knowledgeofwounds.com / IG: @knowledgeofwounds
Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree sound artist approaching sound as a mode of connection. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
DB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an artist addressing audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience, often focusing on the role error plays as a generative opportunity. His media-centered installations are the result of DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations, and persistent, inquisitive experimentation of available materials.
Kole Galbraith: 2 Events; Kole Galbraith is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on sound, audio-visual, and found-object installation. Based in Seattle, WA, Kole Galbraith has been active in the underground experimental music community for the past decade performing throughout the US and Europe. Sonically, the sonic studio compositions are informed by early 20th century French musique-concrète, harsh-noise, black metal, free jazz, and contemporary composition. Thematically, the compositions are influenced by interior Salish folklore and contemporary indigenous experience. Galbraith mixes materials found in nature with electronic techniques to uncover both latent sonic capabilities and latent histories. Galbraith has released albums on his own label, Obscure & Terrible, and other labels such as SIGE, Titania Tapes, and Krim Kram. Galbraith has worked with musicians including Lori Goldston, Greg Kelley, Jessika Kenney, Jason Lazer, Steve Moore, Catherine Guesde, Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow), Nathan Young (Delaware), Patrick Wurzwallner, Maja Osojnik, morher, and Noel Kennon.
Kole Galbraith is an enrolled member of the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma and the COUSIN indigenous film collective.
kolegalbraith.bandcamp.com
Kota Yamazaki/Fluid Hug-Hug: 3 Events; Yamazaki was introduced to butoh in 1977 through the teaching of Akira Kasai. From 1996 to 2001, he created a dozen works with his first company, rosy co., and in 2002 he founded Kota Yamazaki/Fluid Hug-Hug. He has performed around the world at the TBA Festival, Bank Art, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, and Danspace Project, among others. Through residencies in Senegal, Yamazaki created FAGAALA with Germaine Acogny, which received the 2007 New York Dance and Performance Award in choreography. He is director of Body Arts Laboratory and organizer of the Whenever Wherever Festival in Tokyo.
Selected Press
Glowing among the shadows, Martha Sherman, Dance Review Times, May 3, 2012.
Face Time: Kota Yamazaki, Betsy Momich, Carnegie Magazine, Spring 2012.
Fluid Hug-Hug: ‘(glowing)’ @ EMPAC, 4/6/12, Tresca Weinstein, Albany Times Union, April 9, 2012.
Kristan Kennedy: 13 Events; Kristan Kennedy is an artist, curator, and educator, who has been involved with PICA since its founding in 1995. Kennedy began working with PICA as a volunteer, then was supported by the organization as an exhibiting artist, consequently served the organization as a board member, and joined the staff in 2003. She is currently Artistic Director, Curator of Visual Art at PICA. Kennedy works collaboratively alongside co-artistic directors Roya Amirsoleymani and Erin Boberg Doughton to set the artistic vision for the organization, curate the Time-Based Art Festival, manage the Precipice Fund and create public programs. Kennedy currently directs PICA's year-round Exhibition Program, where she focuses on commissioning and developing large-scale projects, publications, and happenings with artists that exist at the borders of genres. She is a working artist who is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary Art, here in Portland Oregon. Kennedy writes and lectures about art praxis, curatorial practice, and artist‐centric ethics within and outside of institutional frameworks. She has taught in various MFA programs across the country for the last decade as an Associate and Visiting Professor teaching Contemporary Art seminars, mentoring, and developing visiting artist programs. Kennedy sits on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and is a founding member of Common Field.
Krystal South: 2 Events; Krystal South is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and writer from Portland, Oregon who has been online every day since she was 12. South has been included in group exhibitions and projects at Recess Gallery, Carhole Gallery, and Portland Art Museum, as well as in B.Y.O.B. at New American Art Union and Wieden+Kennedy in Portland. Her writings have been featured in Bear Deluxe Magazine, YA5, and September, a project of artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen at the 2011 TBA Festival.
Selected Writing
"Observations on the Uncertain," Krystal South, September, September 16, 2011.
Selected Press
"Mirrors, Punching, Walking, Dancing," Lisa Radon, Oregon ArtsWatch, August 21, 2011.
Kumari Suraj: 3 Events; Suraj, coined as the "The Queen of Waacking Nouveau ", is also the Queen of many historical firsts. The first Waacking choreography videos on YouTube, influencing everyone in the industry the world over. Now, Whacking is seen in countless stage shows, concerts, commercials, music videos and more, with much of the style’s visibility tracing back to Kumari’s tireless promotion of the dance style in the 2000s. Suraj is the first Waacking choreographer to explicitly introduce the dance style to mass media by creating dance content for the FOX reality hit TV show So You Think You Can Dance. Suraj is the founder and CEO of LA's International Waack/Punk/Pose Festival (Waackfest), the first festival in the world solely devoted to the cultural education and preservation of Waacking, Whacking, Punking and Vogue. Suraj is considered as the “go-to” expert for this underground dance from the 70s, serving as an international ambassador of its history, culture and technique.
Kunu Bearchum: 1 Event; Kunu Bearchum (Northern Cheyenne & Ho-Chunk Nation). Based in Oregon, recently producing award-winning documentaries for native-owned non-profit Wisdom of the Elders and releasing his debut Hip-Hop Album titled "Through The Battle Smoke" with local and regional mainstays in the music scene. Kunu creates his work as a tribute to traditional Native American storytelling but with a contemporary lens and toolkit.
Kurt Vandendriessche: 1 Event; Kurt Vandendriessche is an actor, dancer, performer and scenographer.
He worked for television, the film industry and as an independent stage artist, both as a freelance performer, and in creating work through collaboration.
Together with Charlotte Vanden Eynde he created MAP ME, an intimistic evocation of the cycle of life, which won the choreography award of the SACD and toured extensively through Europe and the United States. With Dolores Bouckaert he conceived several performances and installations, as well as providing the video- and light design and dramaturgical support for her latest piece GALOP. For several productions he joined Troubleyn, the company of Jan Fabre, playing the role of Prometheus in PROMETHEUS: Landscape II a.o. Furthermore, he has worked with Jan Decorte, Emio Greco, and so on. In 2012 he played one of the lead parts in WELCOME HOME, Tom Heene’s debut movie, which was selected for the International Film Festival of Venice. Throughout his career he did puppetry, street theatre, experimental video design and has an overall experience in many fields of the arts, led by a desire to fuse and be influenced by a broad experiential domain.
He invited Sibran Sampers and Jürgen de Blonde in 2017 to join him in a project entitled THE BODY ELECTRIC (referencing Walt Whitman’s I sing the body electric).
The initiative was an attempt to resource his personal experiences both as a spectator, as in being on stage, in need of reduction of context and meaning. Perhaps as a way of liberating the mind from imposing paradigms in order to experiment with shape, matter and definition as the standards of a universal connectedness. Since then they have presented performative happenings, non-voiced audiovisual sensory experiences, that aimed to share the perception of basic phenomenologies, initially starting from simple principles of molecular cooking, later developing to a macro-/microscopic form of land art.
Kye Alive: 1 Event; Kye Alive (Kye Grant Kauffman) is a Portland-based performer awkwardly approaching middle age whose work has been described as “Madonna meets Hey Arnold meets Michael Alig meets Grace Jones meets infinity.” Their practice traverses music, dance, vocal experimentation, and collaborative social art, and has taken the form of a pedestrian parade with 5th grade crossing guards; Planet Lloyd, a community newspaper about Lloyd Center Mall; open invitation dance ensemble Public Acts of Dance Company; genre-fluid performance party CLUB ALIVE; an Only Child Support group, and the ten year alien pop star persona Jennifer Vanilla. They have performed at MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, and hundreds of other venues across the continents. Kye received an MFA in Art + Social Practice from PSU and recently debuted their existential fever dream solo show, TIMES SQUARE LAS VEGAS, to an audience of five at a Fringe Festival. Please send thoughts and prayers.
kyealive.club @kyealive
Kyle Abraham / Abraham.In.Motion: 3 Events; Kyle Abraham, a professional dancer and choreographer, began his training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh. He continued his dance studies in New York, receiving a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. As a performer, Abraham has worked with acclaimed modern dance companies including David Dorfman Dance, Burnt Sugar Dance Conduction Continuum, Nathan Trice/Rituals, Mimi Garrard Dance Theater, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Dance Alloy, The Kevin Wynn Collection, and Attack Theatre. In addition to performing and developing new works for his company, Abraham.In.Motion, Abraham also teaches his unique approach to postmodern dance in various schools and studios throughout the United States.

Abraham.In.Motion (AIM) is an ensemble of dancers whose work is deeply rooted in personal experience. As choreographer, Abraham intertwines his sensual and provocative movement with a strong understanding of music, creating an avenue for personal investigation. Abraham has received tremendous accolades and awards for his dancing and choreography, including a 2010 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for The Radio Show, a 2010 Princess Grace Award for Choreography, a BUILD grant, and an individual artist fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2009 he was honored as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch.”

Abraham’s work has been presented throughout the United States and abroad, most recently at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, Harlem Stage, Fall for Dance Festival at New York’s City Center, and The Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh. Abraham’s most recent work, The Corner, commissioned by Ailey 2, is currently touring internationally with great reception.

Selected Press

Sending Signals with Songs, Struts, and Static, Claudia La rocco, The New York Times, February 27, 2010. (PDF)

Owning it: Kyle Abraham in fast and slow motion, Julie Potter, San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 18, 2011. (PDF).

Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, March, 2010. (PDF)

Selected Video

The Radio Show Promotional Video from Kyle Abraham/Abraham.in.motion on Vimeo.

Solo Exceprt of Live! The Realest MC (work-in-progress) Part 4 from Kyle Abraham/Abraham.in.motion on Vimeo.
Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol: 4 Events; Founded by Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez in 2003, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a young Mexican theater company reflecting the new dynamics of contemporary Mexican culture. They develop their multimedia stage productions as mechanisms to link work and life and give voice to overlooked moments in social and political historical. Lagartijas has toured widely throughout Mexico and Europe and has received awards from the Impatience Festival and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
Related Content
El Rumor del Oleaje
Lalo Perez: 1 Event; Lalo Perez (b.Bakersfield, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR. Their practice investigates the intersections of identity through social environments, creating attention to the fragility of familiar cultural connections by grounding their practice in the action of construction and deconstruction. Through rituals, Lalo creates a dialogue between material, language, and imagery, developing a visual archive that reflects the inherited faith that leads them. Lalo has participated in artist residencies at Casa Lü in Mexico City, MX; Jupiterfab in Guadalajara, MX; and Caldera a.i.r in Sisters, OR, and has been awarded grants by The Nat Turner Project and Regional Arts and Culture Council. They are currently pursuing a BFA in Intermedia at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Lapalux: 1 Event; In a world in which upstart DiY talent is flooding the gates of electronic music, a few recent voices have been so strong as to be startling. Lapalux – AKA 25-year-old Stuart Howard – is certainly one such. As singular as a brilliant artist always should be, his instinctive understanding of the atmospheric power of texture grips the ear immediately on listening.
Lapalux was raised in rural Essex, midway between countryside and town; the classic, isolated hinterland that’s produced many a distinctive British voice. There’s a yearning sense to the record that it’s tempting to relate to the young Howard’s dreams about what his eventual escape into larger life might be. He certainly had a dream start when a shot-in-the-dark email to electronic hothouse Brainfeeder was immediately answered by label head Flying Lotus himself, who quickly moved on to sign him. To this day, Lapalux remains the only British artist on the Los Angeles based label.
Having made fans out of Diplo and SBTRKT, remixed everyone from Lianne La Havas via Crystal Fighters to Bonobo, Tawiah, AlunaGeorge and Speech Debelle, as well as supporting FlyLo and playing the main stage at Sonar and in Japan with Clark. Lapalux released his second full length on BRAINFEEDER this past April.
Larry Bamburg: 1 Event; Larry Bamburg was born in 1974 in Houston, Texas. Selected exhibitions include: Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Austin, (2017); TalctoTile, PL’d to MDO, Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY, (2016); Talctotile, Talctotire, Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2015); UR, Room East, New York, NY (2012); It’s Endless Undoing, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY (2012); Science on the back end, Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY (2012); Heel gezellig, GRIMM, Amsterdam, NL (2011); Bamberg (sic.), GRIMM, Amsterdam, NL (solo) (2011); And the fair Moon rejoices, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA (2009); Hi, Low, and In Between, GRIMM, Amsterdam, NL (2009), Fruit Farm Film Festival 2008, McMinnville, OR (2008); Only Connect, Art in General at Bloomberg LP., New York, NY (2008). TBA:07, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2007); Stubborn Materials, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY (2007); You Are Here, Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX (2005); Exit Biennial: The Reconstruction, Exit Art, New York , NY (2003).
Larry Krone: 1 Event; Larry Krone was born in Chicago, IL in 1970, was raised in St. Louis, MO and now lives and works in New York City’s East Village. Krone has been exhibiting drawings, sculptures, installations and videos since the early 1990s, most notably at The Contemporary Baltimore, The Museum of Contemporary Craft in conjunction with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), The Whitney Museum of American Art Philip Morris Branch (New York), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Drawing Center (New York), and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis who, in 2006 presented “Larry Krone: Artist/Entertainer,” a ten-year retrospective of Krone's visual and performance work.
As a performer, Krone has appeared at music and art venues in New York including Joe’s Pub, La MaMa, Dixon Place, PS 122, Starlight Bar & Lounge, and the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as Mercer Union (Toronto), Croxhapox (Gent), Blueberry Hill (St. Louis), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Better Days Project (Hamburg), and Someday Lounge (Portland, OR).
His costume design and fabrication for his own performances has led to the creation of House of Larréon, their line of custom gowns and stage costumes, outfitting cabaret performers, dancers and rock singers including Bridget Everett, Neal Medlyn, Adrienne Truscott, and Kathleen Hanna.
He is a 2019 Caldera AIR, a 2011, 2012, and 2018 MacDowell Colony fellow, a 2017 Yaddo Fellow, a 2013 Millay Colony fellow, and a 2009 and 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow.
Larry/Laura Arrington: 5 Events; Laura prefers being called Larry. She is Bay-Area based artist/performance maker. Her work has been presented at PICA's TBA Festival, Austin's Fusebox Festival, and New York's American Realness. She is a core member of Keith Hennessy's Turbulence and regularly collaborates with her brother, Jesse Hewit. She has been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, CounterPULSE, Kunst STOFF Arts, and ODC. She created and curates the SQUART performance series.
Lars Jan / Early Morning Opera: 1 Event; Lars Jan is a director, writer, visual artist, and the founding artistic director of Early Morning Opera (EMO), a genre-bending performance + art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience. He is the son of émigrés from Afghanistan and Poland.
Jan has received multiple commissions from the Whitney Museum and developed his recent projects with major commissioning and residency support from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). His works have been also presented by The BAM Next Wave Festival, Sundance Film Festival, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Symphony Space, Kirk Douglas Theatre, Ringling Museum of Art, Pasadena Museum of California Art, and Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival.
His work has been supported by multiple awards from the NEA and Center for Cultural Innovation; Rauschenberg Foundation; MAP Fund; Adam Mickiewicz Institute; Surdna Foundation; NEFA’s National Theatre Project; NPN’s Creation Fund; New York State Council on the Arts; and the Sherwood Award. He has spoken at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Performa, and the 92Y, and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Princeton Atelier; CalArts; and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, where he was an inaugural artist-in-residence.
In August 2015, EMO’s lecture performance ABACUS will be presented by Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe, and in October 2015, the public performance spectacle HOLOSCENES will be presented by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco, prior to an exhibition of related video works at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in January 2016. Jan is a TED Senior Fellow.
Laura Gibson: 1 Event; LAURA GIBSON is a multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter who grew up in a small isolated logging town called Coquille, in the South Coast region of Oregon, the daughter of the town’s kindergarten teacher and a forest ranger. Gibson has had a wide-ranging performance career, ranging from two years of weekly gig at an AIDS hospice, to receiving a standing ovation from an auditorium full of prison inmates, to a 3 1/2 hour improvised performance art piece with sound artist Ethan Rose and filmmaker Ryan Jeffery as part of the 2009 Time-Based Art Festival. Over her career, she has recorded three solo albums and a joint venture with Ethan Rose, and worked with members of Calexico, The Dodos, The Decemberists, and Menomena, among others. Gibson recently released her third album, La Grande, on Barsuk records.
Laura Heit: 1 Event; Miniature raconteur Laura Heit performs some of the smallest puppet shows around. Atop matchbox stages, her uncanny micro-plays come to life with fire, hand-cranked action, and pop-up paper engineering. Heit is a filmmaker, performer, and puppeteer whose work has been seen at REDCAT, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; Great Small Works Toy Theater Festival at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; the Jim Henson International Festival of Puppetry; and Puppetropolis, Chicago; as well as on PBS and at international film festivals. She was co-director of the Experimental Animation program at Cal Arts until 2011.
Laura Ortman: 2 Events; Photo: Sarah Marguier
Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a Brooklyn, NY composer, musician and artist. She produces solo albums, live performances and film/art soundtracks and frequently collaborates with artists in film, music, art, dance, multi-media, activitism and poetry, such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Caroline Monnet, Michelle Latimer and Martha Colburn. She plays violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, pedal steel guitar, sings through a megaphone, and makes field recordings. Ortman’s notable performances includes venues at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, MoMA P.S. 1, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, SF MoMA, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The Knitting Factory, CBGB’s, St. Marks Church, Dia Art Foundation, the Wave Farm, amongst countless other established and DIY venues in the US, Canada and Western Europe.
Lauren Davis Fisher: 1 Event; Lauren Davis Fisher (Los Angeles, CA) works between sculpture, installation, architecture and performance. She has recently performed and exhibited at The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Performa15 (New York), Parkview (Los Angeles), MoMA PS1 (New York), Shanaynay (Paris), Chapter (New York), Disjecta (Portland), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and EMPAC at RPI (Troy, NY).
Laurie Anderson: 1 Event; Anderson works as a visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. In 1980, O Superman launched Anderson’s recording career, rising to number two on the British pop charts and appearing on Big Science, the first of her many albums. Anderson has toured internationally with shows ranging from simple, spoken-word performances to elaborate multimedia events, and has collaborated with Wim Wenders, Jonathan Demme, Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, and Robert LePage, among others. In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA, and in 2007 she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
https://laurieanderson.com/
Led Er Est: 1 Event; Led Er Est - Divided Parallel
Led Er Est - Bladiator (at Room 205)
Leila Haile: 1 Event; Leila Haile is a community organizer, tattoo artist and dancer serving and celebrating the Queer and Trans Communities of Color in Portland for the last 10 years. They currently organize with Sankofa Collective Northwest, Q Center, Black Lives Matter PDX, the Disability Arts & Culture Project and tattoo at Kuroo Tattoo in SE Portland.
Leilah Weinraub: 1 Event; Born in Los Angeles, USA in 1979, Leilah Weinraub currently lives in New York. She is an artist and director and also CEO of the Hood By Air fashion label. Her work focuses on the themes of race, class and gender with a particular interest in queer communities and people of color.
Libby Werbel/Portland Museum of Modern Art: 4 Events; Founded in 2012 by Libby Werbel, Portland Museum of Modern Art (PMOMA) is an investigative project focused on the lack of major contemporary and modern art institutions within a growing metropolis. PMOMA has produced more than 50 exhibitions and events within the context of a self-actualized and community-grown modern art museum.
Ligia Lewis: 1 Event; Ligia Lewis is a dancer and choreographer. She has worked in multiple contexts, including those of the theatre and museum. Engaging with affect, empathy, and the sensate, her choreography considers the social inscriptions of the body while evoking its potentiality. Her work can be described as experientially rich and complex. Within her practice, Lewis continues to provoke the nuances of embodiment. In 2017, Lewis was awarded a Bessie for Outstanding Production for her latest stage work, minor matter and was awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe for her work Sorrow Swag. In 2018 she was granted a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award in the field of dance. Both her stage works minor matter (2016) preceded by Sorrow Swag (2014) continue to tour internationally. Her work has been shown at various venues and festivals including the following - Abrons Art Center/American Realness (NYC), Flax/Fahrenheit (LA), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), TATE Modern (London), Stedelijk Museum/Julidans Festival (Amsterdam), REDCAT/Pacific Standard Time (LA), and Tanz im August presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). As a dancer, Lewis has performed and toured extensively for artists including Ariel Efraim Ashbel, Mette Ingvartsen, and Eszter Salamon. She has collaborated with visual artist Wu Tsang, musical artist Twin Shadow, and with the DJ collective NON Worldwide. Ligia Lewis is currently managed and produced by HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and she is a factory artist at tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf.
Like a Villain: 1 Event; In early 2010, Holland Andrews began a solo project behind the alias of Like a Villain. She pulls her influences from notable minimalist composers such as Arvo Pärt, contemporary vocalists including Diamanda Galás, modern experimental musicians like Björk, and is heavily influenced by broadway and opera music. By creating tapestry of live loops using her voice, clarinet, and glockenspiel, her aim is to put emphasis on the roots of organic sounds, and to create an emotional realm of sonic healing and magic.
Selected Press
"Holland Andrews (HA) of Like a Villain," Cameron Clowers, Bridge.Town.Low.Down, April 11, 2010.
Selected Video
May 1st | Like a Villain
Lime Rickey International: 1 Event; Leyya Mona Tawil (Lime Rickey International) is an artist working with sound, performance, and hybrid transmissions. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Tawil uses voice, transactive choreography, interactive surfaces, and electronics to build hybrid performances and sound compositions. Her work has been presented in over 40 cities throughout the states, Europe, and the Arab region. She was nominated for a Bessie Award in Music for Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith, commissioned by Abrons Arts Center (NYC) and KONE Foundation (Helsinki). Recent residencies and exhibitions include Wysing Art Centre/British Council (UK), Arab American National Museum/JAM3A Festival 2021, FUSEBOX Festival 2022, and the Tarek Atoui Sound Residency at Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE). As a curator/producer, Tawil is on the team of Live In America Festival, Southern Exposure Gallery, TAC (Temescal Art Center), and was also the 2020 ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow for her NOMADIC SIGNALS series, which continues into 2022. She is the founding director of Arab.AMP.
Linda Austin: 2 Events; Linda Austin deploys movement, sound, text, visuals, and props to create non-linear, poetic works laced with an eccentric wit, teetering on the edge between the immediately reprehensible and resolutely mysterious. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of Performance Works NW, a Portland non-profit dedicated to the cultivation of experimental performance. Awards include a 2019 Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship, the 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Merce Cunningham Award, and a 2015 RACC Performing Arts Fellowship. Austin has presented work at Performance Space 122, the Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, PICA’s TBA Festival, the Risk/Reward Festival, and On the Boards NW New Works Festival, among others. Her work has been supported by residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. Current projects: Ordinary Devotions (solo), a world, a world (ensemble project), and The Thief & the Traveler (collaboration with Allie Hankins.)
Selected Press
"Stop Making Sense: Linda Austin's 'A Head of Time'," Bob Hicks, Oregon Arts Watch, March 26, 2011.
Linda K. Johnson: 5 Events; Oregon native and Portland resident Linda K. Johnson has been a professional dance-based, transdisciplinary artist for 40 years. Over these decades of creative practice, Johnson has taught, performed, choreographed, curated, and produced extensively, influencing and forwarding the development of infrastructure (studios and dance programs), funding (support), and conceptual networks (information and training) for professional colleagues and students. Hybrid in her practice, Johnson’s concerns as an artist are social and environmental—curious equally about both the human and nonhuman, addressing our collective relationship to site, place and community. Since creating her first site-based, large-scale interdisciplinary performance in 1992, Finding the Forest, Johnson has gone on to author over 17 major dance/movement installations, most recently Mycelium Dreams, 2022 and Polka Dots/Pioneer Square, 2020, which have utilized forests, intersections, waterways, derelict lots, neighborhoods, green spaces, warehouses, and galleries, as well as formal performance spaces, as staging grounds for presentation. A recipient of the 1999 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, Johnson’s work has been consistently funded and commissioned by public, private, and individual sources, and has received critical review in many venues, including Dance Magazine, Landscape Architecture, NPR’s Living on Earth, Oregon ArtsWatch, and Metropolis Magazine. She has been awarded residencies at the Rauschenberg Artist Residency at Captiva, Yaddo, Caldera Arts, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology to further the development of her work. She is honored to be one of six international custodians of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal postmodern dance work Trio A, and to have been included in Kristin Timken’s 2015 book The New Explorers: Making Meaning in the 21st Century American Landscape, which includes a forward by Lucy R. Lippard. Now considered a “mother tree” (from Suzanne Simard’s work on forest ecosystems) in her community, Johnson’s current practice is devoted to advancing networks of inclusion and collective memory (Mycelium Dreams).
Lisa Jarrett: 4 Events; Lisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is: What will set you free? Her current work connects an interest in tracing lost histories and homelands to the Beauty Supply store and Beauty Salon as critical spaces of Black cultural production with their own sets of aesthetics, desires, and complications.
Lisa is also co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and the art collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. She is a professor at Portland State University where she teaches classes in art and social practice.
Lisa Radon: 2 Events; Lisa Radon makes poems that may be publication, object, essay, installation, website, performance. Her books include The Plumb and The Wave (2014), Prototyping Eutopias (2013), An Attempt at Exhausting a Place (2013), The Book of Knots (c_L, 2013), A Reading (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, 2012), Sentences on Sentences on Paragraphs on Paragraphs (Publication Studio, 2011). Her work has been presented recently in solo exhibitions at Pied-à-terre, Littman Gallery, and White Box, as well as in exhibitions at Hedreen Gallery and LxWxH, and publications for MK Gallery, Disjecta, and Appendix Project Space. Radon publishes the journal EIGHTS.
Little People: 1 Event; Little people makes downtempo electronic music.
It is part beats, bleeps and snippets of other people's music... real live instrumentation.

Selected Video:

Selected Press:

"Marley Carroll 'First Thought, Best Thought (Little People Remix)'," XLR8R, by Melkorka Licea, April 18, 2014

"Listen to a New Jiberish Mix, Curated by Little People," HYPETRAK, by Petar Kujundzic, May 13, 2014
Liz Harris/Grouper: 3 Events; Liz Harris lives and works on the Oregon Coast. She has been recording, performing, and releasing solo material under the name Grouper since 2005 on various imprints including Kranky, Type, and her own YELLOWELECTRIC. Her work is characterized by a fascination with paradox, literal and impressionistic experience of environment and human behavior. Her music compositions have been commissioned and shown across Europe and the United States, including Galerie Zdb in Portugal, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, and Issue Project Room in NYC. She has recently completed art and music residencies in Lisbon, Marfa, TX, and the Bunya Mountains, and was awarded residencies in 2014 with Signal Fire and The Ucross Foundation.
locust: 3 Events; locust is the performance brainchild of musician and composer Zeke Keeble and performer/choreographer Amy O’Neal. Since 2000, they have created Leave me Inside (2001), Left-out (2002), DEFACE (2004), convenience (TBA 2005), and mockumentary (2006). locust performs in theaters, nightclubs, galleries, and streets and has been presented in Seattle by On the Boards, the Seattle Art Museum, Experience Music Project, Northwest Film Forum, Seattle Theater Group, Bumbershoot, and Velocity Dance Center. Nationally, they have performed at Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out (MA), The Myrna Loy Center (MT), Joyce Soho (NYC), SUSHI Performing Arts (CA), and Bates Dance Festival (ME). locust has been described as the avant-garde garage band of the Seattle dance scene.
Lola Arias: 3 Events; Lola Arias is a writer, director, performer, and songwriter from Argentina, and founder of the interdisciplinary Compañia Postnuclear. Her works include Striptease (2007), El amor es un francotirador (2007), Mi vida después (2009), Familienbande (2009), and That Enemy Within (2010). Together with Ulises Conti, she composes and plays music, and has release two albums. In 2010, Arias and Stefan Kaegi founded Ciudades Paralelas, a festival of site-specific urban performance projects in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Zurich, and Singapore. Her performances have been staged at festivals including Festival d’Avignon, In Transit Festival in Berlin, We are here in Dublin, Spielart Festival in Munich, Alkantara Festival in Lisbon, and Radicals Festival in Barcelona.
Selected Press
"An interview with Lola Arias," Brighton Festival, April 16, 2013.
Lori Goldston: 1 Event; Lori Goldston plays written, traditional, and spontaneous work on the cello and works as a composer, teacher, producer, bandleader, and prolific, widely varied collaborator.
Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, self-described as “semi-feral,” her voice as a cellist is singular, deeply textured, and original, investigating thresholds, instability, and connections between far-flung modes of thought. She travels throughout the US and abroad, often working in artist-run spaces with an eye for bridging communities.
Well known for her work touring with Nirvana and contributing to their Unplugged In New York live album, she works prolifically and with composers, film makers, writers, theater directors, choreographers, visual artists, orchestras, and bands including Earth, BBC Scottish Symphony, Black Belt Eagle Scout, Ya Tseen, Judith Hamann, Mirah, David Byrne, Jem Finer, Jessika Kenney, Lonnie Holley, Trimpin, Stuart Dempster, Shelley Hirsch, Maya Dunietz, Michael Hurley, Chris Cochrane, Laura Cannell, Ilan Volkov, Charles Hayward, Jem Finer, Embryo, Josephine Foster, Mik Quantius, Jooklo, Ghedalia Tezartes, Senga Nengudi, Ellen Fullman, Lynn Shelton, Terry Riley, and many, many others. She’s composed and performed live scores with dozens of experimental and early silent films throughout the US, Europe, Australia, and Mexico.
Her solo and collaborative work has been released by Mississippi Records, Nyahh, Relative Pitch, Eiderdown, Yo Yo, K Records, Sub Rosa, Second Editions, Sub Pop, PIAPTK, Full Spectrum, Marginal Frequency, and Broken Clover, among others; in 2026, she will release an album on ESP-Disk.
Lo Steele: 1 Event; Lo Steele is a singer, songwriter, and award winning actor and poet from Portland. Known for her frank lyrics and simple melodies, like that in her most recent single “Insecurities”, she aspires to make art “that makes people feel seen”. You may have recently seen her in the one-woman-show Queens Girl in the World at Clackamas Repertory Theatre for which she won a Drammy for “Outstanding Solo Performance”. Check out her website or follow her on social media to find out what she has been creating while in isolation.
Lovers: 1 Event; Since 2001 songwriter Carolyn Berk has established her unique voice as Lovers, with four acclaimed, haunted and heart-broken releases. The addition of waveform artist Kerby Ferris and multi-talented instrumentalist Emily Kingan (of the hardcore duo, The Haggard) focuses three wildly ambitious and boldly sincere artists on hooky beats and interactive performance. Their first CD release together will be available in September 2010 on the label Badman.
Selected Press
Leak: Lovers, "Figure 8," Dark Light (Badman Recording Co.), Casey Jarman, wweek.com, July 12, 2010.
luciana achugar: 1 Event; luciana achugar (b. 1970) is a latinx immigrant from Uruguay; grew up mostly in Venezuela in political exile and developed her voice as a choreographer between New York and Montevideo, Uruguay. She makes work from the rage of being a LatinAmerican living in the belly of the Empire in a post-colonial world. She makes work as a practice of growing a new body; an uncivilized body, a decolonized body, a utopian body. She makes work as a practice of building a new theater, another/other theater, OTRO TEATRO, a utopian theater. She makes work as a practice of growing as one would grow a plant. She makes work with a desire to escape the oppression of the arrow of time; to arrive at a place of beyond time, ritual time, body time…
Since 2013 she has been developing her Pleasure Practice, a deeply sensorial embodied practice to allow for other knowledges to emerge from the knowing in the body, an embodied rebellion by practicing being in pleasure; a practice that she teaches internationally and that continues to inform her creative process and her relationship to making work as resistance and as a possibility for healing and mysticism.
Her work has been shown in most contemporary dance venues in NYC and many venues across the US such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN and the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX; as well as in a few Festivals in Europe, in Mexico, Cuba and in Uruguay. She was a two time Bessie Award recipient plus once nominated; and has received numerous accolades such as the Alpert Award in Dance, the Creative Capital Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Lucky Dragons: 2 Events; "lucky dragons" means any recorded or performed or installed or packaged or shared or suggested or imagined pieces made by Luke Fischbeck, Sarah Rara, and/or any sometimes collaborators who claim the name.
the name "lucky dragons" is borrowed from a japanese fishing boat caught in the fallout of hydrogen bomb test at bikini atoll in the 1950's. the crew stricken ill, and the boat itself contaminated, the "lucky dragon" became a crystalizing symbol for the previously diffuse worldwide anti-nuclear sentiment. eventually the boat was painted black, renamed the "dark falcon", and put into reuse as a fishing vessel, until it was retired and disposed of on the man-made trash island "dream island", where it remains today.
lucky dragons are about the birthing of new and temporary creatures--equal-power situations in which audience members cooperate amongst themselves, building up fragile networks held together by such light things as skin contact, unfamiliar language, temporary logic, the spirit of celebration, and things that work but you don't know why. There have been hundreds of these simple yet shifting and unpredictable instances--with audiences ranging from the intense intimacy of one person to the public spectacle of thousands of people. At the heart of it all is playing together--building up social collectivities, re-engaging the wonder and impossibility of technological presence. It sounds--and looks--like simple and ancient patterns coming together and falling apart in a sincere attempt to let wires and screens and words become clear and crystal.
Fischbeck and Rara have presented interactive performances and installations in a wide variety of contexts--including MOCA Los Angeles, The Smell, Smithsonian's Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), The Kitchen and PS1 in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, REDCAT and LACMA in Los Angeles, Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle, ICA London, ICA Philadelphia, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
lucky dragons' sister projects include "sumi ink club"--a weekly collaborative drawing society, and "glaciers of nice"--a small press and internet community.
Lucy Cotter: 1 Event; Lucy Cotter is an independent writer, curator and trained artist, holding a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. A regular contributor to journals such as Mousse, Flash Art, Frieze and Third Text, her edited book Reclaiming Artistic Research was published in 2019. She was curator of the Dutch pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale 2017, presenting artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Cotter was formerly director of the Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She is currently based in Portland, Oregon and working on new projects that experiment with the boundaries of the artistic, the curatorial and the theoretical.
Lucy Raven: 1 Event; Lucy Raven was born in Tucson, Arizona in and lives in New York City and Oakland, California. Her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings internationally at Berlinale, Berlin (2013); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); Whitney Biennial, New York (2012); MoMA, New York (2010); and PS1, New York (2010). Raven is a contributing editor to BOMB magazine, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, and October. She has curated projects for the Goethe Institute, New York (2010); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2008); and was the co-creator of Bump City, a series of online documentaries for the Oakland Museum of California (2012).
Selected Press
"Lucy Raven," Jason Simon, BOMB, Fall 2012.
"Greater New Yorkers | Lucy Raven," Kevin McGarry, T Magazine, May 13, 2010.
Luis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio: 1 Event; Luis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio was a Mexican playwright.
Luke George: 7 Events; Luke George is an artist working in dance and performance. He grew up in Tasmania and is based between Melbourne and Brooklyn. George makes his own performance work, as well as collaborates and performs with other artists. George has a BA from the Victorian College of the Arts and has been in the works of many artists including Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, Phillip Adams BalletLab, Chunky Move and Jo Lloyd. George received Melbourne's Greenroom Award for Best Male Dancer (2011) and recently performed with the Swedish band The Knife. George’s own works have been widely presented internationally. George was the recipient of the Melbourne Fringe Awards and the Russell Page Fellowship. George collaborates across disciplines on projects in theatre, film, live-art, socially engaged practices, and in queer club nights. George also works as a dramaturge and co-curates a regular Melbourne dance and discussion night called First Run.
Selected Press
"Dance Massive: Sunstruck, NOWNOWNOW," Theatre Notes, March 20, 2011
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Luke George, collaborator Hilary Clark, and their work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Luke Gutgsell: 1 Event; Luke Gutgsell is a Portland-based dancer and dance maker. Gutgsell graduated from The Ohio State University with a BFA in Dance and attended the Naropa Institute. Gutgsell trained on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham Studio, and apprenticed with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and Shen Wei Dance Arts. He has danced with David Dorfman Dance, Tiffany Mills Company, Risa Jaroslow, and many others throughout the United States, Australia, France, Ireland, and Poland. His choreography has been presented through Danspace Project, LaMamma Theater, Dixon Place, Teatro Merida, Ten Tiny Dances, Performance Works NorthWest, Zoomtopia / Studio 2, and Velocity Dance Center. He has been a guest artist at NYU, Connecticut College, and Reed College, as well as facilitated workshops for underserved populations throughout the five Boroughs with Risa Jaroslow and Dancers. Gutgsell is perpetually fascinated with the nuances and complexities found within improvisational forms.
Luke Wyland: 2 Events; AU is the work of multi-instrumentalist Luke Wyland. Begun back in 2005 while finishing up his degree from the Massachussetts College of Art, Wyland moved the band across the country to find its roots in the thriving community of Portland, Oregon. It’s now a working live band with an ever changing roster of players that currently includes Dana Valatka (Jackie-O-Motherfucker) on drums, Jonathan Sielaff (Parenthetical Girls, Nick Jaina) on guitar, clarinets and saw, and has been blessed by the help of Mark Kaylor (Hamor of Hathor, CexFucx), Becky Dawson (Saw Whet, Ah Holly Fam'ly) and Sarah Winchester (A Weather) on its recordings.
Au’s sound is vast and “deftly treads a narrow bridge between the loose-associations of the backwoods freak-folk crowd and the more formalized concoctions of art-poppers like Brian Eno.” Both on record and on stage Au “manages to erase the high art/low art boundary between American contemporary classical music and American pop music, blending them into a simple, compelling, verse-chorus celebration…[and] is the rare band that can reinvent its songs live and still manage to match their recorded quality.”
Lumi Tan: 1 Event; Lumi Tan is curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she organizes exhibitions and produces performances with artists across disciplines and generations. Most recently, Tan has worked with Half Straddle, Sara Magenheimer, and Sondra Perry. Previously she co-curated From Minimalism into Algorithm (2016), a year-long performance and exhibition series, as well as projects with artists including Ed Atkins, Gretchen Bender, Glasser, George Lewis, Anicka Yi, and Danh Vo and Xiu Xiu. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was Guest Curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, The Exhibitionist, and numerous exhibition catalogues.
Lu Yim: 2 Events; Lu Yim is based between NYC and Portland, OR. They are a choreographer, movement facilitator and poet. Yim’s work is influenced by their peers and by community care practices. They create in dialogue with embodiment practices, interested in articulations of imperceptible states. Their choreography has been shown at SculptureCenter (NY), ICA London, Center for Performance Research (NY), TBA Festival (Portland, OR), and recently at No Gallery (IL) in collaboration with sculptor Catalina Ouyang. Yim co-organizes two artist-run, queer and BIPOC centered collectives: PE and pidzn club. They were a 2019 Fellow at UCross Foundation (WY) and 2020-2021 AIR at Center for Performance Research (NYC). They have been published in interdisciplinary online publications: FormIV:Issue 12, curated by Isabel Mallet, and Ear Wave:Issue Six, curated by Jules Gimbrone.
Lydia Brawner: 2 Events; Lydia Brawner is the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at New York’s Performa. She holds a Ph.D in Performance Studies from New York University, where she also received her M.A. She is the current assistant editor of Performa Magazine, and previously was the managing print editor of the San Francisco Arts Quarterly (SFAQ), and the reviews editor of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, New York University and the College of Staten Island, serves on the advisory committee for the Center for the Arts and Religion at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, and much of her research focuses on the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary performance.
madison moore: 3 Events; madison moore is an artist, cultural critic, dj and performance-maker based in London and Berlin. His work touches pop culture, queer studies, nightlife, sound, media, visual culture and contemporary art. madison holds a ph.d. in american studies from yale university and is currently an ERC funded researcher in 'Modern Moves' in the Department of English at King's College London, where he is also the Director of the Queer@King's research centre.
madison's scholarly and popular writing has been published by The Creators Project, Splice Today, Thought Catalog, Out, Aperture, Interview, Art in America, Theater, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Dancecult: the Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture and The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-songwriter. He has given invited lectures, held residencies and performed at universities, art galleries and nightclubs around the world, including King's College London, the University of Oxford, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of St. Andrews, University College London, Reed College, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, CUNY Graduate Center, the Barbican, East Bloc (london), Elektrowerkz (London) and Performance Space Sydney. His first book, The Theory of the Fabulous Class: Creativity at the Margins, will be published by Yale University Press in 2018. He is currently working on a new project on club culture and creativity as well as an EP.
Magic Luscious Spirit Sounds: 1 Event; Magic Luscious Spirit Sounds (MLSS) is a non-hierarchical cross-abilities collective that aims to create an inclusive, welcoming space where people with and without disabilities can share their love for music.
We believe in the transformative power of courageously embracing imperfection. Through collaboration, we break down barriers to music, making it accesswible and available for all.
Our collective encourages creative freedom and the courage to make music in new ways. As Octavia Butler said, "The only lasting truth is change" and we actively welcome impermanence to guide our group.
We believe that everyone is a musician, every voice should be heard and valued, and there is no right or wrong way to make music.
Malik Nashad Sharpe (Marikiscrycrycry): 1 Event; Malik Nashad Sharpe, also known as Marikiscrycrycry, is a choreographer and movement director known for his provocative and formally engaging performance works that address themes of violence, alienation, horror, melancholia, and the horizon. He holds a BA in Experimental Dance with highest honors from Williams College and a certificate in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he won the Simone Michele Prize for Outstanding Choreography. He has received commissions and shown his work at venues and festivals across the UK, Europe, and Canada, and is currently an Associate Artist at The Place, London and a studio resident of Somerset House Studios, London. He has held artistic residencies at Sadler’s Wells, Barbican, Performance Situation Room, Dance4, Duckie, and Tate Modern. In 2019, he was named a Rising Star in Dance by Attitude Magazine and is a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2022, recognized for his unique and pervasive choreographic achievements. He currently lives in London and is a guest professor in dance and performance at the Stockholm University of the Arts in Sweden.
maliknashadsharpe.com
Malkia Okech: 1 Event; Malkia Okech is an activist, Afrofuturist, and community archaeologist. She is currently a Digital Producer for the local creative agency Mighty Engine. She is also the Associate Producer for Black Spatial Relics, an artist residency and annual convening exploring slavery, justice and freedom and has been working as a Humanities Consultant for Scribe Video Center’s Precious Places Project. She is a curator in the Philadelphia Black arts collective, Bad Apple Commune. Her interests include the cross-sections of multi-modal archaeology, art, cultural heritage, and decolonization. Malkia conducts social justice work as an anti-capitalist and abolitionist with the goal of fostering radical imagination.
Mamela Nyamza: 2 Events; South African dancer, choreographer, teacher and activist Mamela Nyamza acquired a National Diploma in Ballet at Pretoria Technikon and has trained in contemporary, African and pantsula dance—as well as at the Alvin Alley American Dance Center. Born in Gugulethu and educated under an oppressive Apartheid Bantu Education system, much of Nyamza’s performance work addresses the politics of the body and important political and social issues existing in modern day South Africa, notably issues of sexuality, race and gender. Awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award in Dance in 2011, her works include Hatched (2008), Amafongkong (2011), and I Stand Corrected (2013). Nyamza’s performances and collaborations have been presented in various international contexts including the USA, South Africa, Mali, Egypt, Lebanon, France and Slovenia.
Mammalian Diving Reflex: 4 Events; Founded in 1993, Mammalian Diving Reflex is a research-art atelier dedicated to investigating the social sphere, always on the lookout for contradictions to whip into aesthetically scintillating experiences. Mammalian creates site and social-specific performance events, theatre-based productions, gallery-based participatory installations, video products, art objects and theoretical texts. They create work that recognizes the social responsibility of art, fostering a dialogue between audience members, between the audience and the material, and between the performers and the audience. It is their mission to bring people from across the planet together in new and unusual ways to create ideal entertainment for the end of the world. For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Mammalian Diving Reflex's projects and philosophy, 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!
Manuel Solano: 2 Events; Manuel Solano (Mexico City, 1987): Through painting, performance and video, Manuel Solano’s work references pop culture and personal memories to inform on Manuel’s own queer identity and bittersweet experiences. After becoming blind for life in 2014 as a result of an HIV-related infection, Manuel’s rebellious nature drove him to keep making art rather than giving up his past life. He has since shown at Museo Carrillo Gil, Zona MACO and Galería Karen Huber.
Ma Qiusha: 2 Events; Ma Qiusha was born in 1982 and currently lives and works in Beijing, China. Her work was recently featured in Personal Space, 24HR Contemporary Art Center, Australia; Landscape Topology, Magee Gallery, Beijing, China; Madrid, Spain; Anything is Possible, CCRN Luxembourg; and REFRESH: Emerging Chinese Artists at the Zendai Moma, Shanghai, China. Group exhibitions include the 35th International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2006); Rumor Décor, ddmwarehouse, Shanghai, China (2005); Beijing Documenta—Producing HIGH, Beijing, China (2005); 920 Kilograms, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China (2005); Archaeology of the Future: the Second Triennial of Chinese Art, Nanjing Museum, Nanjing, China (2005); 2004 Automat Contemporary Art Exhibition, Suzhou Art & Design Technology Institute, Suzhou, China (2004); and SCARIFY—China Present Independent Video Exhibition, Beijing, China (2004). Ma Qiusha is represented by Beijing Commune in Beijing, China.
Marbles Jumbo Radio: 2 Events; Marbles Jumbo Radio is a dancer and movement thinker who works within performance, video, and discussion based platforms that engage experiences of social marginality with politics of place, belonging, land, and identity.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph: 3 Events; Marc Bamuthi Joseph is an inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, the winner of the 2011 Alpert Award in Theater, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. He is the founding Program Director of the exemplary non-profit Youth Speaks, and is a co-founder of Life is Living, a national series of one day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks through hip hop arts and focused environmental action. Mr. Joseph recently premiered the Creative Time commission “Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos” in New York’s Central Park, and is currently completing new works for the Chautauqua Symphony, the Philadelphia Opera and South Coast Repertory Theater while serving as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. His evening length piece “/peh-LO-tah/” has been commissioned by the Kennedy Center and will premiere at YBCA in the Fall of 2016.
Marc Matchak: 1 Event; Marc Matchak is a writer and project person currently based out of San Francisco, California. Recently work has been presented through lecture at S1 and appeared in print at the Litman Gallery, The New School Library, and Split/Fountain. They will be showing work this fall at HQ here in Portland.
Marcus Fischer: 2 Events; Marcus Fischer is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Portland, Oregon. A first-generation American artist who creates, collects, and transforms sound into immersive, layered compositions that accompany performances and exhibitions. Site-specific assemblages of exposed speakers, tape loops, and objects are characteristic of his installations, paired with melodies of restraint and tension. He has released numerous recordings—both solo and collaborative —on 12k, a label that has decisively defined and developed its own concept of minimalism in the realms of experimental and ambient music. Fischer contributed two sound works and two performances to the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has been selected for residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Rauschenberg Residency, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and MacDowell. In 2024 he was awarded The Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts as well as the International Music & Composition Fellowship from the Montalvo Arts Center’s Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program
Fischer has performed and recorded as a solo artist, as a member of Wild Card and in collaborations with artists such as Taylor Deupree, Aki Onda, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Laura Ortman + Raven Chacon, Stephen Vitiello, Calexico and Simon Scott.
Maria Hassabi: 3 Events; Born in Cyprus, Hassabi moved to the US in 1990 and received a BFA in Performance and Choreography from the California Institute of the Arts. Since moving to New York City in 1994, she has created seven evening-length works and seven short-form pieces. Hassabi has been presented in the US at venues such as PS122 (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Dance Theater Workshop (New York), and Ballroom Marfa (Texas). Internationally, she has been featured at festivals in Austria, Spain, Russia, France, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, and Portugal. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ 2009 Grants to Artists Award.
Selected Press
Playing Connect the Dots, From Aphrodite to Lil’ Kim, Gia Kourlas, New York Times, November 13, 2009.
Mariana Valencia: 1 Event; Mariana Valencia | Photo credit Ian Douglas
Mariana Valencia, (creator/performer) has held residencies at Chez Bushwick (2013), New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013-14), ISSUE Project Room (2015) and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2016-18). Nationally, she has held residencies at Show Box LA and Pieter Pasd (2014) in Los Angeles; and was part of PICA’s 2018 Creative Exchange Lab. Valencia is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award to Artists grant recipient (2018), a Jerome Travel and Study Grant fellow (2014-15), a Yellow House Fund of the Tides Foundation grant recipient (2010-13) and a Movement Research GPS/Global Practice Sharing artist (2016/17). Her ethnographic research has taken her to Belize, Mexico and the Balkans and she has performed in works by Jules Gimbrone, Elizabeth Orr, Kate Brandt, AK Burns, Em Rooney, robbinschilds, Kim Brandt, Fia Backstrom and MPA. Valencia is a founding member of the No Total reading group and she has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence (2016-17). She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA (2006).
Mariano Pensotti: 3 Events; Mariano Pensotti (Buenos Aires 1973) is an Argentine author and theater director. He studied cinema, visual arts and theater in Buenos Aires, Spain and Italy. He is a graduated from Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Rogelio Yrurtya (Buenos Aires) and was a fellow studient at Casa de América (Madrid) and La Loggia CISD (Italy). In theater, as an author and director, he created more than fifteen performances in the past ten years.
Among his latest creations are Cineastas (Filmmakers) (2013) premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) and presented in Wiener Festwochen, HAU Berlin, Holland Festival and Theaterformen, El Pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal) (2010/2012) premiered at Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires and presentd at Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Festival de Otoño (Madrid), Theaterformen (Hannover), Hebbel am ufer (Berlin), Auabirlewen (Bern), Norwich & Norfolk Festival (England), Kampnagel Festival (Hamburg), Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zürich), Tempo Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Fiac (Bahia), Rotterdamse Schowburg (Rotterdam), Frascati Theater (Amsterdam). Sometimes I think I can see you (2010/2011) premiered in Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer as part of Ciudades Paralelas Festival and presented in Buenos Aires, Cologne, Brussels, Zürich, Warsaw, Salamanca, Copenhage, Helsinki, Girona and Paris. Encyclopaedia of unlived lives (2010) premiered at Schauspielhaus Graz (Austria) and presented during Steirischer Herbst Festival and La Marea (2005/2011) premiered at the V Buenos Aires International Festival and later on invited to the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Hebbel am Ufer Theater (Berlin), Homo Novus Festival (Riga), Dublin Festival (Ireland), Festival Automne en Normandie (Rouen), Carrefour International de Théâtre (Québec), Festival Transamériques (Montréal), Yokohama (Japan), Festival Temporada Alta (Girona), Norfolk & Norwich Festival (England), Metropolis Copenhague (Denmark) and Push Festival (Vancouver).
Pensotti has become one of the most noted experimental directors throughout the world. He has been heralded as one of Latin America’s brightest theater talents and he and his company tour extensively throughout the year.
He formed the Grupo Marea together with set designer Mariana Tirantte.
For his work he received several awards worldwide. His texts has been published and translated to more than twenty languages. In his work he developed two different lines, one composed by stage performances where he write his own very literary texts and the play is strongly based in the work with the actors, and in paralell he produced several site specific performances where the main intention is to create a particular contrast in between fiction and reality with fiction placed in public places.
Selected Press
"Macklin Kowal interviews Mariano Pensotti," Macklin Kowal, THE OFFCENTER, February 16, 2012.
mario lemafa: 1 Event; mario lemafa (b. 1990 / Hawai'i) is an artist and independent organizer based in Seattle, WA. their recent work includes presentations at the '19 Honolulu Biennial, SOIL Gallery, cogean?, and yəhaw̓ at King Street Station.
“when i was a child my mother used to like a certain Suave shampoo, "Tropical Breeze" (i believe it was called). it reminded her of home. nothing in the shampoo bottle reflected her material relation to the islands. while she wore a scent to remember a place, others might wear the same one with the desire to some day go there. i still think about that.”
https://cargocollective.com/mariolemafa
Mark Russell: 2 Events; Mark Russell is a writer and cartoonist living in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of God Is Disappointed in You and has written several acclaimed comic book series, including the DC reboot of The Flintstones, Second Coming, and Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, which won the 2019 GLAAD Award for Outstanding Comic.
Marty Schnapf: 1 Event; Dancepod was an architectural installation that housed live-streamed dance parties in four cities simultaneously, Portland OR, Mexico City, Berlin, and New York. It was the first exploration of concepts laid out in the Swells performance/lecture.
Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr.: 2 Events; Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. is Black, Italian, Queer, Non-Binary, Neurodyvergent, and practices primarily in america. Their collaborative approach results in artwork by and for the people.
Stevenson’s practice has been dedicated to supporting young people ages 4 to 18 in developing the necessary skills to encourage advanced imaginative thinking and self-confident expression. In 2019 they developed the Afro Contemporary Art Class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School which has had many forms since, including Afro Futurist February, and three years of Fred Hampton Summer Camp. Supporting community efforts as well, taking the shape of support for the effort to Save Dr. Martin Luther King School from being displaced by the expansion of Interstate 5 which has triggered the need to move Harriet Tubman Middle School. Stevenson is currently working in the Albina community to develop a Living Archive at Jefferson High School with students, community, and the architectural design team. Stevenson also has a robust portfolio of artist projects centering food and gathering around it, projects involving sculpture, drawing, and photography, and new work in collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated folks. These include Tin Can Phone, a podcast all about life in and outside of prison, and Gallery Blue, a curation and exhibition project both of which are owned and operated by formerly incarcerated individuals. Stevenson pursues these professional and creative goals passionately because they believe that empowered and open-minded young people and communities are the best and most direct way toward ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future for all.
michaelstevensonjr.com
Math Bass: 1 Event; Math Bass (Los Angeles, CA) received her MFA from UCLA. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY (2015); and Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2014). Exhibitions of Bass’s work have been presented by Cooper Union, New York, NY (2015); Tanya Leighton, Berlin, Germany (2015); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2014); White Flag Projects, Saint Louis, MO (2014); Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY (2014); Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (2014); and Silberkuppe, Berlin, Germany (2014).
Matthew Day Jackson: 1 Event; Matthew Day Jackson (born 1974) is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video,performance and installation. Since graduating with an MFA from Rutgers University in 2001, following his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, he has had numerous solo exhibitions. His work has been shown at MAMbo Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA; the Portland Museum of Art Biennial in Portland, Maine; and the Whitney Biennial Day for Night in New York.
maximiliano: 3 Events; maximiliano is ⅓ of rise x fall
mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist working in BLKwvv, a generative multimedia mythos: a Black reclamation rococo aesthetic and agenda based in exploring and expanding the multiplicity and fluidity of the Black self through pleasure, desirability, innocence, and imagination as performance, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, and publications.
Maxx Katz: 1 Event; Maxx Katz is a composer, musician, and performance maker based in Portland, OR, whose work draws on vocabulary from free improvisation, performance art, jazz, contemporary classical, and heavy metal. A classically trained flutist with an MA in Music from the University of Virginia, Katz uses flute, electric guitar, voice, and movement as instruments of radical transformation.
They have toured extensively across the US, Europe, and Canada as part of various collaborative and solo projects. Katz was a resident at the 2019 Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music with Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey, and Atlantic Center for the Arts with flutist Nicole Mitchell. They compose work for ongoing ensembles including Yelling Choir and Floom.
Katz has been commissioned by the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble and the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial, and has created work in collaboration with musicians and dancers including Tyshawn Sorey, Linda Austin, Tahni Holt and Muffie Delgado-Connelly, John Niekrasz, Julian Otis, lauren jean crow, and Eddie Bond.
Their Yelling Choir project has debuted compositions at the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial, the American Choral Directors Association Northwest Conference, Congress Yard Projects, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and ACRE Residency. They have led Yelling Choir workshops at Banff and ACRE as well as Portland State University, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Inward Bound Mindfulness Education teen and young adult meditation retreats, and Portland Public Schools.
Maya Beiser: 1 Event; "Maya Beiser treats her concert programs as expansive, evening-length compositions... deep and rich, with a lush vibrato, Ms. Beiser's rich-hued tone singing out from within a bed of sound loops ranged from the insistently rhythmic to the meltingly lyrical..." – The New York Times
"Beiser combines the best of two worlds. She is a classically trained cellist with the technical and interpretive resources to draw whatever kind of music she wishes from her instrument." – The Chicago Sun-Times
“With virtuoso chops, rock-star charisma, and an appetite for pushing her instrument to the edge of avant-garde adventurousness, Maya Beiser is the post-modern diva of the cello.” – The Boston Globe
The New Yorker magazine once referred to Maya Beiser as "the cello goddess.” The Israeli-born cellist is equal parts glamour, passion, and musical artistry of the highest level, and she brings it all to everything she does – from her collaborations with Steve Reich, to her work with Brian Eno and Shirin Neshat, to her stage shows at BAM and other prestigious venues around the world. Maya captivates audiences with her virtuosity, eclectic repertoire, and relentless quest to redefine her instrument’s boundaries. Beiser is a graduate of Yale University, a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and a featured performer on the world’s most prestigious stages from Lincoln Center to London’s South Bank Centre. Her next recording, Uncovered, will be released in August 2014.
Maya Mikdashi: 3 Events; Maya Mikdashi (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her current research/manuscript focuses on law, citizenship, secularity, religious conversion, sexual difference, and the war on terror. She has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014-2016 at Rutgers University, and a Faculty Fellow/Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University (2012-2014). She has published widely in journals including International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Study of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya.com, co-director of the feature length documentary About Baghdad (2004) and co- founding member of filmmaking cooperative Quilting Point Productions. A film she co-conceptualized and co-wrote with Carlos Motta, Deseos, is screening at the 2016 TBA Festival.
Maya Vivas: 2 Events; Maya Vivas is a multidisciplinary artist working in a variety of mediums, such as ceramic, performance, painting, and installation. Maya has exhibited work, spoken on panels, and hosted workshops throughout the United States, including venues and institutions such as The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, Louisiana State University, and Yale. Vivas is also co-founder of Ori Gallery. Whose mission is to redefine "the white cube" through amplifying the voices of Queer and Trans Artists of color, community organizing and mobilization through the arts
www.mayavivas.com
Maya is a 2022/3 Golden Spot Residency awardee.
Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods: 2 Events; Stuart received her BFA in dance from NYU and was a member of the Randy Warhaw Dance Company for five years. On invitation from the Klapstuk Festival in Leuven in 1991, she created her first full-length piece, Disfigure Study. In 1994 Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods began a series of collaborations with visual artists, including Lawrence Malstaf, Gary Hill, and Ann Hamilton. Together with choreographer/dancer Benoît Lachambre and composer Hahn Rowe—both honored with Bessie Awards—Stuart created Forgeries, Love, and Other Matters.
Meg Whiteford: 1 Event; Meg Whiteford writes books and makes theater. Her writing on visual art and performance has appeared in Artforum, Aperture, and X-TRA. She is the author of The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies (Plays Inverse, 2015), the Curator's Choice for the 2017 BAM Next Wave Festival Reading Room, and Callbacks (&Now and Northwestern U. Press, 2018), recipient of the 2016 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Prize. She has performed at Pieter, PAM, REDCAT, Machine Project, Coaxial, and Project Utopia. She is currently the managing editor of the Art Book Review and teaches dance and performance theory and history. Her ballet, Overture, a response to the drawings of artist Beau Rhee, will be published with Gravel Projects this fall. She is interested in creating wild rides.
Meg Wolfe: 1 Event; Wolfe’s work has been presented at venues including REDCAT, Live Arts Exchange Festival, FRESH Festival, the New Original Works Festival, Off Center Festival/Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s, Dia Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, The Living Theater, and Movement Research at Judson Church. She has performed in the works of Vicky Shick, Jérôme Bel, Molissa Fenley, Clarinda Mac Low, and Susan Rethorst. Wolfe has had residencies at REDCAT, Performance Works NorthWest, the Djerassi Resident Artist’s Program, and the Hothouse Residency program at UCLA, among others. She is the founder and director of Show Box L.A., and was a founding co-editor of itch dance journal.
Melanie Flood: 1 Event; Melanie Flood (b.1979, NY) is an artist living and working in Portland, OR. Her practice employs photography as a tool for examining how femininity is constructed, commodified, and performed.
Flood has exhibited at Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Friend of a Friend, Denver, CO; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; ILY2, Portland, OR; Ruschwoman, Chicago, IL; and Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR. She has received support from the Oregon Arts Commission, The Ford Family Foundation, and Regional Arts and Culture Council. From 2008 to 2023, she directed Melanie Flood Projects, an artist-run exhibition space established in Brooklyn, NY. Flood holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY and an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University, Portland, OR. Flood teaches photography in the Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design.
https://www.melanieflood.com/
Melia Donovan: 1 Event; Melia Donovan lives and works in Beaverton, Oregon.
Melissa Levin: 1 Event; Melissa Levin joined the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) in 2005 and is currently the Director of Cultural Programs. She is responsible for planning and programming LMCC’s Artist Residency Programs, the River To River Festival, Open Studios, and the Gallery in the Arts Center at Governors Island. Throughout more than a decade working in the arts, Melissa has been committed to innovative and holistic approaches to supporting artists and the creative process. Previous to LMCC, Melissa held positions at Andrea Rosen Gallery, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Artforum International Magazine. She has participated in panel discussions and served on juries at the National Endowment for the Arts, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, the Alliance of Artist Communities, Rhode Island School of Design, Baruch College, Lower East Side Print Shop, and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts; and lectured at the Drew University, University of Oregon in Eugene, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, New York University, Parsons: The New School for Design, and The Cleveland Institute of Art. As an indepedent curator and writer, Melissa has also worked with venues including MoMA PS1, Real Art Ways in Hartford, Culturehall.com, NurtureArt, Cuchifritos Gallery, ISE Cultural Foundation, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Los Angeles. Melissa received her B.A. with honors in Visual Art and Art History from Barnard College.
Meow Meow: 1 Event; Post-post-modern diva Meow Meow’s unique brand of ‘kamikaze cabaret’ and performance art exotica has hypnotised, inspired and terrified audiences globally. The spectacular crowd-surfing queen of song ‘drags cabaret kicking and screaming into the 21st century’ (Time Out NY), with trail-blazing sell-out seasons from New York's Lincoln Center and Berlin's Bar Jeder Vernunft to London’s Apollo Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Sydney Opera House.
Named a ‘cabaret diva of the highest order’ (New York Post), ‘SENSATIONAL’ (The Times UK), One of the Top Performers of the Year by The New Yorker, ‘The Queen of Chanson’ by the Berliner Zeitung and ‘a Phenomenon’ by the Australian press, multi-award winning Meow's works have been curated by David Bowie, Pina Bausch and Mikhail Baryshnikov amongst others, and she has created original works for numerous international arts festivals and venues as well as performing everything from Schubert and Schumann with orchestra to touring with punk outfit Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls.
Meow starred recently on London's West End in Kneehigh Theatre and Michel Legrand's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and in her own solo concerts at the legendary Apollo Theatre. She had a sensational 21 show season of the Malthouse Theatre/Sydney Festival commissioned Meow Meow's Little Match Girl at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre in December and performed Cocteau's piece for Piaf, Le Bel Indifferent, for the Greenwich Music Festival U.S. She has won numerous Green Room Awards, Helpmann Theatre Awards, Sydney Theatre Critics, the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Prize, and the New York Franklin Furnace Performance Art Award amongst others.
Meow has just had her debut with The London Philharmonic under Maestro Jurowski as Jenny in Brecht/Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper in Paris Theatre des Champs-Elysees and London Royal Festival Hall. She joins the London Philharmonic again in July for further UK performances. She most recently sold out her Lincoln Center American Song Book Series concert and toured the concert halls of Australia with Barry Humphries and the Australian Chamber Orchestra in a programme of lost and re-found works from Weimar Germany in the 1920's. With long-time adored collaborator Pink Martini's Thomas M Lauderdale she has written and recorded the album Here Kitty Kitty ...The lost sessions, due for release in 2013. Meow's albums Vamp and Songs from a Little Match Girl, are available on iTunes.
Selected Press
"A Freewheeling Trot Around the Globe," Stephen Holden, The New York Times, April 1, 2013.
"Meet the Queen of Kamikaze Cabaret," David Hajdu, The New Republic, April 11, 2013.
Mere Tokorahi Boynton: 1 Event; Mere Tokorahi Boynton is a multitalented performance artist, singer, actor, and MC. She has had formal training in voice and developed her own unique style of performing that draws upon classical training and her Māori heritage.
Some of her most memorable singing engagements to date have been performing in Gareth Farr’s Te Papa, which was composed for the opening of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; singing and touring nationwide in the dance opera Jerusalem by Michael Parmenter; singing in the film Te Tangata Whairawa o Weneti (The Māori Merchant of Venice); and singing the lead role Taranga in ‘Maui One Man Against the Gods’ (2006). Boynton also performed with the avant-garde theater company MAU at the Vienna Mozart Festival in Requiem (2006) which was commissioned by Artistic Director Peter Sellars for the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart. Requiem was also presented in Brussels, Auckland, London and New York. In 2008 she performed in the NZIAF opera production ‘The Trial of the Cannibal Dogs’ by composer Matthew Suttor, and also performed in Ex Stasis by Gareth Farr and The Three Cornered Hat by Manuella de Falla with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.
In 2013 Boynton sang in Jack Body’s Songs and Dances of Desire with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra for the Auckland Arts Festival and Tokyo, Japan. Also that year, she performed again with MAU in the acclaimed all Māori women production Stones in Her Mouth and I Am a commemoration of the First World War Centenary WW100 in Europe, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In 2021 she collaborated with composer Gareth Farr and taonga puoro (Māori musical instruments) artist Ariana Tikao to compose and perform Ngā Hihi o Matariki with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

In 2005 Boynton released her album Waikohu, which is a collaboration with composer/percussionist Gareth Farr; this recording features an eclectic range of compositions which have been given different vocal and musical treatments, from kapahaka (cultural performance) to classical string quartet with karanga (call of welcome). Her next album release was Aroha/Ahava at the Auckland Arts Festival 2015, a collaboration with composer Jonathan Besser which explores the expression of aroha (love).
As an actor she is well known for her portrayal of the character Mavis in Once Were Warriors and has also performed in several other films for cinema and television including The Piano and more recently the full feature Deadlands, Hinekura, a short film in te reo Māori, (Māori language), Colonial Combat a television series in te reo Māori and The Untold Tales of Tūteremoana also in te reo Māori. Most recently, she acted in the acclaimed Witi’s Wāhine, a theater work written and directed by Nancy Brunning for the Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival.
Meryem Jazouli: 2 Events; Moroccan choreographer and dancer Meryem Jazouli has lived and worked in Casablanca since 1997. After pursuing dance studies and performing for several companies in Paris, Jazouli returned to her home country where her artistic work has been strongly influenced by the Moroccan context. She has worked extensively with collaborators in various disciplines, such as Mouna Sekkat, Bernardo Montet, Ambrose Bye and the visual-arts collective La Source du Lion. Works include: Temps de chien (2006), Keima…un cir à la mère (2009), Entre deux (2012), and Contessa (2013). Among other community-oriented initiatives, Jazouli established L’Espace Darja, a space in Casablanca dedicated to creation, artist residencies, training and experimentation in contemporary dance as well as a space to develop and expand exchanges and dialogues between artists of various disciplines and generations.
Mia Habib: 1 Event; Mia Habib (b. 1980, Houston, Texas) is an Oslo-based dancer, performer, and choreographer working at the intersection of performance, exhibitions, publications, lectures, teaching, mentoring, and curating. Her work is described as holding a critical cultural perspective on body, identity, society, and dance. She engages in labs and research with a variety of specialists including artists, scientists, and political activists.
Habib has collaborated internationally with Jassem Hindi, Guilherme Garrido, Steinunn Ketilsdottir, Julie Nioche, Rani Nair, Brynjar Bandlien, Monica Gillette, keyon gaskin, Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson, and Tommy Noonan. She danced with Carte Blanche, The Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance, from 2017-2018, for whom she also made the commissioned work, Gjallarhorn (2016).
Habib has been an associated artist of Dance House Oslo, co-initiated the artist network Sweet & Tender Collaborations, and is a former member of the board of The Norwegian Opera and Ballet. She holds an M.A in Conflict Resolution and Mediation from Tel Aviv University, and a B.A. in Choreography and Dance Pedagogy from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Habib’s work has been presented: LaMaMaMoves!, Tanz im August, Dance House Oslo, Aerowaves 2015, Black Box Theatre Oslo, BIT Teatergarasjen, Theatre Freiburg, Tanzhaus nrw Dusseldorf, Spielart Festival, Gotheborg Dance and Theatre festival, On Marche Festival Marrakech, I'TRÔTRA Festival Antananarivo, and Keðja Reykjavík.
Mia Imani: 1 Event; Mia Imani is an international interdisciplinary artivist (art + activist) and arts writer based in Berlin, Germany. She creates and curates liminal spaces that invite Black and Brown communities to heal individual and communal trauma through conscious (daydreaming, visualization) and subconscious (lucid, REM sleep) dreaming. These works aim to center the agency of marginalized communities and use dreams as a portal to manifest alternative past(s), present(s), and future(s). She received her BA in media communications studies from the University of Washington and is completing her master’s degree in North American Culture and Literature studies at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.
https://www.miaiharrison.com/
Mic Capes: 1 Event; Mic Capes is a hip hop artist from Portland, OR that represents the North Portland neighborhood, St.Johns. Capes is known for having vivid story telling ability, raw lyricism, and thought provoking social commentary as key components of his music. He released his debut solo album "Rise & Grind" and made a huge impact on the local hip hop scene and now gearing up for his highly anticipated sophomore offering "Concrete Dreams", slated to drop in 2015. He is a member of the Portland hip hop supergroup The Resistance of FRSH TRB.

Artists Archive

Keith Hennessy

Keith Hennessy / Circo Zero

Kelly Pratt

Kemi Adeyemi

Kendra Jayne Patrick

Kenny Mellman

Kevin Holden

keyon gaskin

Kim Laughton

Kinski

Kite

Knowledge of Wounds

Kole Galbraith

Kota Yamazaki/Fluid Hug-Hug

Selected Press

Kristan Kennedy

Krystal South

Selected Writing

Selected Press

Kumari Suraj

Kunu Bearchum

Kurt Vandendriessche

Kye Alive

Kyle Abraham / Abraham.In.Motion

Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol

Related Content

Lalo Perez

Lapalux

Larry Bamburg

Larry Krone

Larry/Laura Arrington

Lars Jan / Early Morning Opera

Laura Gibson

Laura Heit

Laura Ortman

Lauren Davis Fisher

Laurie Anderson

Led Er Est

Leila Haile

Leilah Weinraub

Libby Werbel/Portland Museum of Modern Art

Ligia Lewis

Like a Villain

Selected Press

Selected Video

Lime Rickey International

Linda Austin

Linda K. Johnson

Lisa Jarrett

Lisa Radon

Little People

Liz Harris/Grouper

locust

Lola Arias

Selected Press

Lori Goldston

Lo Steele

Lovers

Selected Press

luciana achugar

Lucky Dragons

Lucy Cotter

Lucy Raven

Selected Press

Luis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio

Luke George

Selected Press

Luke Gutgsell

Luke Wyland

Lumi Tan

Lu Yim

Lydia Brawner

madison moore

Magic Luscious Spirit Sounds

Malik Nashad Sharpe (Marikiscrycrycry)

Malkia Okech

Mamela Nyamza

Mammalian Diving Reflex

Manuel Solano