Artists Archive
A Black Art Ecology of Portland (BAEP) is a multi-faceted, multi-discipline, multi-sited new initiative that brings together community organizations in coalition to devote resources to creating, reclaiming, and redefining spaces for Black art, youth, and audiences in Portland. Responding to this rupture in Portland’s Black community, the City of Portland’s Arts Affordability resolution, and most importantly, the Arts & Culture section of the Portland African American Leadership Forum’s (PAALF) “People’s Plan,” BAEP brings together community organizations prioritizing residents who have experienced, or are at risk of, forced displacement from places that have long been hubs of Black life. BAEP is supported by an Oregon Community Foundation Creative Heights grant, Miller Foundation, The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, The Ford Family Foundation, Community Development Partners, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. PICA is the fiscal sponsor and a core partner of A Black Art Ecology of Portland through the SPACE Program. SPACE Program SPACE (Supporting Partners, Artists, and Community Events) offers PICA’s space, equipment, staff and other resources in support of local artists and community organizations to curate and produce residencies, programs, and events. SPACE is supported in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Maybelle Clark Macdonald Fund, James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation, Pacific Power Foundation, and Rose E. Tucker Charitable Trust.
Learn morea canary torsi is a Bessie-award-winning, interdisciplinary group of artists formed by Puerto Rican artist and choreographer Yanira Castro. a canary torsi’s work examines the encounter between spectator and event, developing scenarios where the audience’s presence dramatically impacts the work. We investigate what brings us together, the nature of the space we inhabit, and how every aspect of our convergence is loaded with cultural, social, historical, and personal dynamics that influence how we form meaning and how power is structured. We develop indeterminate performative systems that catalyze—in performance—spontaneous structures, patterns, and instructions. We do this to complicate authorship, ensure multiplicity, and to form the work together in real-time. This way of working is for us a conscious de-centered politic. a canary torsi persists in the idea that live performance is uneasy communal action.
Learn moreAdam Linder (b. 1983, Sydney) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. He makes stage works and provides Choreographic Services. FULL SERVICE (Services No. 1 - 5) was presented by CCA Wattis Institute (San Francisco, 2018) and Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (2019), alongside a new work for the 2019 Venice Biennale. Linder will premiere a new work at MoMA New York in 2020. Recent solo or two person shows include South London Gallery, Kunsthalle Basel, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. His works have been commissioned, presented or hired by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Kampnagel, Hamburg; Sadler’s Wells, London; American Realness, NYC; MoCA, Los Angeles; 356 Mission, LA; Frieze LIVE, London; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Linder participated in the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Liverpool Biennial and Made in LA at the Hammer Museum. He has performed with the Michael Clark Company, Meg Stuart’s Damaged Goods, and The Royal Ballet London.
Learn moreAdee Roberson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is a meditation on symbolism and texture. Synthesizing performance and installation, her work melds vibration and technicolor visions through paintings, video, and melodic compositions. These works offer a refracted timeline of black diasporic movement, weaving sonic and familial archives, with landscape, rhythm, and spirit.
They have exhibited and performed at numerous venues including, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Antenna Gallery, Project Row Houses, Palm Springs Art Museum, Human Resources , UTA Artist Space, NADA Miami, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, MOCA Los Angeles, and Art Gallery of Ontario. Adee has been an Artist-In-Residence at Echo Park Film Center, Treehouse Lagos, and ACRE. She is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Cutting Edge Grant and the 2021 Los Angeles Artadia Award. She is based in Los Angeles, California.
Learn moreAdela Demetja is a curator and author born in 1984 in Tirana, Albania. She holds a Master's Degree in Curatorial and Critical Studies from Goethe University and Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Demetja was first trained as a painter and studied from 2002 to 2006 at Academy of Art in Tirana, Albania. She is the director of Tirana Art Lab – Center for Contemporary Art, Albania's leading independent art institution, which she established in 2010. As an independent curator, she has organized, managed, and curated numerous international exhibitions and events in a number of European countries. In 2016, she was appointed curator of Focus: Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania at viennacontemporary international art fair in Vienna, Austria. In 2015, she co-curated the Third Edition of the International Contemporary Project Biennale D-0 Ark Underground, which took place in the anti-atom shelter build by Tito in Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Other thematic exhibitions she has curated include: The aesthetic of the small act at Action, Action Field Kodra Festival in Thessaloniki, Greece and Voices of Truth in Villa Roman, Florence, Italy. As an author, she writes exhibition reviews, catalogue texts, and articles for online platforms and publications in Albania and throughout Europe.
Learn moreAdrienne Truscott received a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Artist Award and is a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grantee for Theater/Performance Art. Her solo comedic work and group choreographic works have been presented at Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Just For Laughs, Darwin Festival, PS122, Joe's Pub, The Kitchen, Dublin Fringe Festival, Danspace Project, Boom Arts, New York Live Arts, the Malthouse Theatre (Melbourne), and Dance Theater Workshop. Her form-busting show Adrienne Truscott’s Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else! won the 2013 Edinburgh Foster's Panel Prize, was a finalist for the Total Theatre Award for Playing With Form, and is considered a critical impetus to the evolving conversation about rape culture. It has been presented by or included in curriculum at CalArts, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Lewis and Clark College, among others. THIS was nominated for a 2017 New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for Outstanding Production. The Wau Wau Sisters, her boundary-defying neo-vaudevillian collaboration with Tanya Gagne, have been presented by the Sydney Opera House, Joe's Pub, CBGB, Victoria Arts Centre, and The Roundhouse, and won the prestigious 2009 Herald Angel Award. Her piece Wild Bore, a “meta rebuke to critical writing,” was nominated for a Green Room Award for New Writing for the Australian Stage and won for Best Ensemble. Current touring pieces MASTERCLASS, a collaboration with Dublin-based Brokentalkers was recently presented at Dublin Fringe, in Harstad, Norway and at The Pleasance at Edinburgh Fringe and Grey Arias, a desecration of the problematic Madame Butterfly through the lenses of race and drag with UK-based opera performer Le Gateau Chocolat is premiering in Melbourne in April 2023. Truscott's essays have been published in Between Us: Women of Letters and Doing It: Women Tell the Truth about Great Sex, as well as in the Guardian. She's appeared as a storyteller at the Sydney Opera House's Festival of Dangerous Ideas and on The Moth. Truscott has guest taught for the Wesleyan University Dance Department, Sarah Lawrence College, Princeton University, Bard College, and is currently the MA Coordinator at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College/Open Society University Network.
Learn moreAhamefule J. Oluo (they/them) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer, comedian, and creator of live performance. They were a founding member of the award-winning experimental jazz quartet Industrial Revelation and is a Mellon Foundation Creative Research Fellow, a Creative Capital awardee, an Artist Trust Arts Innovator awardee, and a semifinalist in NBC’s Stand Up for Diversity comedy competition. Oluo co-produced comedian Hari Kondabolu’s albums Waiting for 2042 and Mainstream American Comic for Kill Rock Stars, and the album Who the Hell is Dwayne Kennedy? by the eponymous standup legend. They have premiered two autobiographical, music-based performances at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival: Now I’m Fine, 2016, which was described by The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley as “a New Orleans funeral march orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg,” and by Time Out New York as "A day later, it's as though I grabbed a live wire; I can still feel the electricity in my skin;" and Susan, 2020, which Brantley called “virtuosic” and “crackerjack.” Oluo has written for television, including the stop motion animated comedy Santa Inc. on HBO Max, starring Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen. Now I’m Fine was adapted into the feature film Thin Skin, which Oluo wrote, scored, and starred in. Thin Skin won Best Director at the 2020 Harlem Film Festival and is now available on streaming services. They have appeared on This American Life. Oluo has been commissioned, presented, invited, or supported by Under the Radar, On the Boards, PICA, Meany Center, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Seattle Theatre Group, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre, REDCAT, MacDowell, Yaddo, Wa Na Wari, Langston, and more.
Learn moreAki Onda is an artist and composer. His musical and visual works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as his widely-known project "Cassette Memories", drawn from three decades of field recordings (or, as Onda refers to them, ‘sound diaries’). Crossing genres, he has been active internationally in the fields of art, film, music, and performance. His artistic collaborators include Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Raha Raissnia, Loren Connors, Alan Licht, David Toop, and Akio Suzuki. Onda has presented his works at documenta 14, the Louvre Museum, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Argos, Bozar, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA, The Kitchen, and Walker Art Center, Nam June Paik Art Center among other institutions. After residing in New York for many years, he currently lives and works in Mito, Japan.
Learn moreAKIO SUZUKI is known as a pioneer of sound art, but the breadth of his activities and the form of his works far exceeds the normal boundaries of sound art. It is perhaps more as a “quester after sound and space” that he has received the most attention from artists in many fields. Suzuki’s journey as an artist began in 1963 with a performance at Nagoya station, in which he threw a bucket full of junk down a staircase. The inspiration behind this performance is the idea that if one were to hurl an object down a well-balanced stairway, a pleasant rhythm might be the result— took the desire to “listen” as its subject. That desire to hear, to listen has remained the one constant in Suzuki’s stance as an artist. During the sixties, Suzuki’s sense of playfulness led him to undertake a series of Self-Study Events, where he explored the processes of “throwing” and “following”, taking the natural world as his collaborator. The experiences he gained in these events led him in the seventies to invent an echo instrument he named Analapos. The instrument’s structure resembles that of two mirrors facing each other, reflecting into infinity. As an extension of the principles underlying Analapos, Suzuki constructed the Hinatabokko no kukan (Space in the Sun) in 1988. This space consists of two huge parallel walls, in between which the artist can sit all day and purify his hearing by listening to the reflected sounds of nature. This space leads the artist to discover a new method of listening. Suzuki himself comments: “Sound, which had been conceptually imprisoned in various spaces, is freed to circle the world.”
His performances and installations have been presented at major venues internationally including: Yokohama City Art Gallery, Japan, 2010; The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, 2010; The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, 2007; Gelbe Musik, Berlin, Germany, 2007; The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan, 2005; British Museum, UK, 2003 and DAAD Galerie, Berlin, Germany, 2000.
He has also participated in major international events and Festivals including: Tuned City, Brussels, 2013; LISTE Art Fair Basel, Switzerland, 2013; MaerzMusik, Berlin, Germany, 2012; Nuit Blanche Festival, Paris, France, 2004; Adelaide Festival, Australia, 1999; Sonambiente Festival, Berlin, Germany, 1996; Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany, 1987; and Festival d’Automne, Paris, France, 1978.
Learn moreAlessandro Sciarroni is an Italian performing artist with an extensive background in visual art and theater. His works are featured in contemporary dance and theater festivals, museums, and art galleries, as well as in unconventional spaces and involve professionals from different disciplines.
His work goes beyond the traditional definitions of gender. He starts from a conceptual Duchamp-like matrix, makes use of a theatrical framework, and he can use some techniques and experiences from dance, as well as circus or sports. In addition to the rigor, coherence and clarity of each creation, his work tries to uncover obsessions, fears and fragilities of the act of performing, through the repetition of a practice to the limits of the physical endurance of the interpreters, looking at a different dimension of time, and to an empathic relationship between the audience and the performers.
His works have been performed in 21 European countries, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, and the United Arab Emirates. Among the main events he took part: the Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Impulstanz Festival in Wien, the Venice Biennale, the Festival d'Automne and the Festival Séquence Danse at 104 in Paris, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Juli Dans Festival in Amsterdam, and he exhibited his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the MAXXI Museum in Rome.
Alessandro Sciarroni is supported by APAP - Advancing Performing Arts Projects - and his shows are produced by Marche Teatro in collaboration with international co-producers such as the Comune di Bassano del Grappa / Centro per la Scena Contemporanea, the Biennale de la Danse / Maison de la Danse de Lyon, the Mercat de les Flors-Graner / Barcelona, Centrale Fies and the Association Corpoceleste-C.C.00# of which he is artistic director. It is also one of the artists of the Project Matilde, regional platform for the new scene in Marche. In 2015, Alessandro Sciarroni was appointed Associate Choreographer of the company of the Ballet of Rome and he is supported for his latest creation Aurora from the Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès.
Learn moreAlex Ian Smith is an artist, musician, and curator based in Portland, OR.
Learn moreMacKenzie is an experimental film artist working primarily with relic analog film equipment and hand-processed imagery. He creates works of expanded cinema, light projection installation, and projector performance. His work has screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the EXiS Experimental Film Festival in Seoul, Lightcone in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, and others. MacKenzie was the founder and curator of the Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images, the Blinding Light!! Cinema, and the Vancouver Underground Film Festival. He was an artist in residence at Atelier MTK in Grenobles, France, and Struts Gallery/ Faucet Media in New Brunswick. MacKenzie is currently Artist in Residence at Cineworks’ Analog Film Annex in Vancouver.
Learn moreCalled a “hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” by Theatre Jones and “outrageous and profane" by The New York Times, Alex Tatarsky makes performances in the uncomfortable in-between zone of comedy, dance-theater, performance art, and deluded rant—sometimes with songs. Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt. Playing with perceptions of language and narrative structure, their live performances are highly responsive to venue and audience, often breaking the fourth wall and embracing humor to reveal vulnerability and humanity. Venues include La Mama Experimental Theater Club, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, Playwrights Horizons, The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many bars and basements. As curatorial fellow at The Poetry Project, they organized a series on the poetics of rot. Research interests include bootlegs, hellscapes, and compost.
Learn moreAli Chahrour (Beirut, Lebanon) is a choreographer, dancer, and graduate of the theatre department at The Lebanese University. Influenced by techniques from several European countries, he studies contemporary dance in the Arab world and movement that is related to society’s memory and its local circumstances that contribute to creating an identity for contemporary dance, whose techniques and problematics are inspired by its surroundings and history. His work examines the relationship between dancing and the body, and the religion and the sacred, relying on the Islamic and Shiite religious rituals and practices in the Arab world.
Learn moreAlison O’Daniel is a visual artist and filmmaker who works with moving image, performance, sculpture, and large-scale installation. Informed by her experiences of being d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing and collaborations with others across the d/Deaf spectrum, including composers, athletes, musicians and actors, O’Daniel builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the auditory. She has screened and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. O’Daniel is a United States Artist 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and has received grants from Ford Foundation; Sundance; Creative Capital; Field of Vision; ITVS; Chicken & Egg; SFFILM. She was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s 2019 25 New Faces of Independent Film issue. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. Her film “The Tuba Thieves' premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Learn moreAlissa DeRubeis lives in Portland, where she works for 4MS and S1. A co-founder of the S1 Synth Library, Alissa enjoys teaching intro workshops, facilitating library hours, and patching pre-amps and resonant filters. Her interests include playing music, curating, collaborating, education, improvisation, sharing, and experiments.
Learn moreAllie Hankins is a dancer, choreographer, and sound artist who has been producing and performing experimental works in Portland since 2013. Her interdisciplinary practice has led to her professional engagements with choreographers Heather Kravas (Seattle), Milka Djordjevich (LA), Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis); and Portland artists Linda Austin, Takahiro Yamamoto, keyon gaskin, Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, claire barrera, and Emma Lutz-Higgins. Allie co-initiated the ongoing Queer performance cooperative Physical Education (PE) with keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim in 2013. PE produces festivals, hosts reading groups, and teaches workshops nationally. She’s been awarded residencies at Centrum, Ucross, Headlands Center for the Arts, Caldera, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency.
Learn moreAllison Akootchook Warden is an Iñupiaq futurism artist that resides in Fairbanks, Alaska, and is a tribal member of the Native Village of Kaktovik. She translates her traditional values through the mediums of installation, music, performance, visual art, poetry, and dance. Her most recent contribution took form as poems as a part of a hyphen-labs project for Google Arts and Cultures. She is the recipient of a 2019 United States Artists Fellowship in the field of traditional arts. She is most excited to work with Aqqalu Berthelsen, an Inuit producer and beat maker from Greenland.
Learn moreA.L. Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of the project Ridykeulous, founding member of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her works have been featured internationally at such venues as P.S.1/MoMA, Tate Modern, The New Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Centre Pompidou, The Kitchen, REDCAT, and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, among others. Her work is included in such public collections as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Steiner is currently based in Los Angeles and is faculty at the University of Southern California.
Selected Press
The Lowdown: A.L. Steiner, Io Tillet Wright, New York Times T Magazine, May 11, 2011.
Eve Fowler & A.L. Steiner, North Drive Press #4, 2007.
Would it be okay if I kept my sweater on?, Naomi Fry, Paper Monument.
Learn moreBorn in Portland, OR, Amber Kay Ball (citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians) is a theatre maker, visual artist, and community-based advocate. As a contemporary Native multi-practice artist, Ball uses theatre, multimedia, and beadwork as mediums for sharing stories, truths, laughter and joy. These mediums allow them to critically explore, honor, and weave Native pasts, presents, and futures in a just and liberated format. Ball studied theater arts and Native American Studies at the University of Oregon where they were able to study theatrical arts abroad in London, UK.
Most recently, Ball co-directed The Nut, The Hermit, The Crow and The Monk in New Native Theatre’s 15th season at Gremlin Theatre, Minneapolis, MN. Their play Finding BigFoot was selected for the Fertile Ground PDX New Play festival and premiered as a staged reading at Barbies Village. Ball has previously directed with Creative Nations First Storyteller’s Festival and Red Eagle Soaring Native Youth Theatre, as well as a workshop production of Tipi Tales From the Stoop at New York Theatre Workshop. They are a Miller Foundation Spark Awardee, a PICA Precipice Fund Awardee, and a recipient of the Indigenous Place Keeping Artist Fellowship through the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Ball additionally received the Community Mentor Award from Southern Oregon University’s Native American Studies Department. Learn moreSongwriter, music producer, and actor Amenta Abioto is on the cutting edge of all that is performances musical, theatrical, and literary. Her music is boldly mystical and soul-fired, and her raw invoke elements of both theatrical surprise and magic through ancient African diasporic sounds and stories. Weaved into syncopated rhythms and dichotomies of comedic proportions, Amenta surprises and tantalizes audiences with mind bending ideas. She brings to the music scene funky academia while skipping vocally from soul shaking gospel to smooth jazz and then onto hip hop rhythms wrapped in West African beats. Amenta was born and raised in Memphis, TN. She became a part of the Portland community in 2010 after graduating from Idyllwild Arts Academy where she trained in musical theatre. Since graduating she has courted the music scene and produced one self-titled EP, Amenta Abioto, and one album, Opening Flower Hymns. Mythological characterization and cultural stories are reflected in her original works. Boldly striking, Amenta brings beauty, charm, and creativity to any stage as an ode to funk.
Learn moreAmy O’Neal is a dancer, performer, choreographer, and dance educator based in Seattle, WA. For the last 15 years, she has taught and performed throughout the US, Japan and Mexico and choreographed for stage, commercials, rock shows, galleries, dance films and music videos. Her work is an amalgam of her diverse movement and life experiences presenting social commentary with dark humor and heavy beats. She is the recipient of numerous grants including awards from Creative Capital, the National Performance Network, the National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts and the James W. Ray Project Venture Award through Artist Trust and Frye Art Museum. Amy has been an artist-in-residence at Bates Dance Festival, Headlands Center for the Arts, the US/Japan Choreographer’s Exchange, and Velocity Dance Center. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, a DanceWEB Scholar, and two-time Stranger Genius Awards nominee. She has worked extensively with musician/comedian Reggie Watts since 2002 both on stage and screen. She choreographed his Comedy Central produced “Fuck, Shit, Stack” video and toured nationally in his show Disinformation. She has created commissioned pieces for Degenerate Art Ensemble and Spectrum Dance Theater and collaborated with Savion Glover and Daniel Bernard Roumain through Seattle Theater Group. She has performed in the work of Pat Graney, Scott/Powell Performance, and Mark Haim. From 2000 to 2010, she was co-director of locust (music/dance/video) with musician/composer Zeke Keeble, creating 6 evening length works and several shorter works. She teaches Contemporary Dance and Urban Styles at Velocity Dance Center and House at The Beacon: Massive Monkees studio in Seattle. She also teaches dance composition and improvisation for Seattle Theater Group’s Dance This program. She holds a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, and her dance writing has been published in Dance Magazine, City Arts Magazine, and ArtDish Forum.
Learn moreAmy O’Neal and Ellie Sandstrom have danced together in other people’s productions and in O’Neal’s own choreographic work for 10 years. O’Neal is a performer, choreographer, dance educator, the creator of Amyo/tinyrage, and the co-director of locust (music/dance/video) with musician/composer Zeke Keeble.
Learn moreRotaru is a poet and journalist, and the author of two collections of poetry, including In a bed under a white sheet and Southern Lands. She has received numerous awards, including the Mihai Eminescu National Poetry Prize and The Bucharest Writer's Association Prize. Rotaru’s poetry frequently intersects with other artists and practices: she has participated in live poetry performances with jazz musicians and in train stations her first collection of poems dealt with the legacy of Frida Kahlo, and her current explorations involve collaborations with local dancers.
Learn moreAndrew Dickson has been part of the PICA community for over two decades, first as an artist premiering shows like AC Dickson: eBay PowerSeller, Sell Out, and Life Coach at the Time-Based Art Festival, and for the past six years as a board member. He’s also a storyteller and host of The Moth, co-host of the podcast BACKFENCE Unhinged, and is developing his Life Coach performance into a web series.
Learn moreAndrew Dinwiddie and Jeff Larson are performers and creators in Brooklyn. Together, they curate a dance, theater, performance, and video series called Catch. They premiered Get Mad at Sin !, their first full-length collaboration, at the Chocolate Factory Theater, with sound design by Jon Moniaci, set design by Sara C. Walsh, and lighting design by Chlöe Z. Brown. They have recently presented the show at Minneapolis’ Bryant-Lake Bowl and in Austin’s Fusebox Festival. Dinwiddie is a frequent performer with David Neumann / Advanced Beginner Group, and Larson is currently designing video for Big Dance Theater.
Selected Press
Not Exactly Preaching to the Choir, Jason Zinoman, The New York Times, June 2, 2010.
Andrew Dinwiddie at the Chocolate Factory, Andy Horowitz, Culturebot, May 28, 2010.
Learn moreAndrew Gilbert is a Los Angeles-based performer, musician, and teacher. In 2007 he co-founded Poor Dog Group, an experimental performance collective with whom he has developed six works as a sound designer and performer, performing in venues including REDCAT, the Experimental Media and Performance Art Center (EMPAC), The Getty Villa, Grotowski Institute in Poland, Bitef Theater in Serbia, and the Pula International Theater Festival in Croatia. House Music, an ongoing co-creation with choreographer Jennie Liu, is a performance for 16 guests rooted in an ongoing study of Japanese tea ceremony, and has been performed since 2014 at venues including Prelude Festival, Live Arts Exchange, HomeLA, The Mistake Room and the Printed Matter Art Book Fair. He most recently designed sound for choreographer Faye Driscoll's Thank You for Coming: Space. Andrew is one half of the band Royal Auditorium. @royalauditorium @andrewgilbertindependentartist
Learn moreAndrew Schneider is an OBIE award-winning, Drama Desk nominated performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist who creates original works for theater, video, and installation since 2003. Schneider creates and performs original performance works, builds interactive electronic art works and installations, and was a Wooster Group company member (video/performer) from 2007-2014. Rooted at the intersection of performance and technology, Schneider’s work critically investigates our over-dependence on being perpetually connected in an always-on world. Andrew’s original performance work in NYC includes AFTER (2018 Under the Radar Festival), YOUARENOWHERE (2015 OBIE award –The Invisible Dog, 2016 Drama Desk nom – 3LD); DANCE/FIELD (2014 – Dance Roulette), TIDAL (2013 – River to River festival); and WOW+FLUTTER (2010 –The Chocolate Factory Theater) among others.
Learn moreAndrew Tay is a hybrid performer, choreographer, curator and DJ. He is the cofounder of Wants&Needs Danse with Sasha Kleinplatz. Together, they produce the popular dance events Short&Sweet and Piss in the Pool which take place in non-traditional venues in Montreal. Tay received the Buddies in Bad Times Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation at the SummerWorks Performance Festival for his work Fame Prayer / EATING (2016). He was named the first artistic curator at Le Centre de Création O Vertigo (CCOV) in Montreal and recently became the Artistic Director of Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) one of Canada’s oldest contemporary dance companies. Tay actively thinks about community, irreverence and resistance in both his performance and curatorial practices.
Learn moreAngélica Maria Millán Lozano is a Portland based artist from Bogotá, Colombia. She creates abstract and figurative compositions on distressed fabrics that question the social injustices that affect Latinas in the home. She received her MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently the Curatorial Fellow for Community Engagement at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). Millán is also a co-founder at cvllejerx, a poc focused fashion, poetry, and performance collaboration. Millán has presented work at Disjecta, Williamson | Knight, Nationale in Portland, OR; Gallery Protocol in Gainesville, Florida; and Bridge Productions in Seattle, Washington.
Learn moreAngelo Scott is an interdisciplinary artist from the South currently living in Portland, OR and completing their BFA in Intermedia at PNCA. Their sonic compositions build shifting layers of melodic sentiments from splintering phrases, emphasizing irregularities in live sampling, synthesis, and insisting upon fleeting swells of emotive expression as a passage through intricate patterns in overwhelming soundscapes. Scott received their Associate of the Arts from Linn-Benton Community College in 2019, where they worked as the photo editor for The Commuter. While living in Corvallis, Oregon, they began operating in DIY sonic arts communities, co-organizing and curating installation and video works for Corvallis Experiments In Noise's What is Noise? festivals. In 2016, they co-initiated and co-created Sponsored Trash, an ongoing performance arts collective. They currently perform solo sound compositions as Tyronza and participate in improvisational ensembles, create video projections, and make collaborative CRT installations for interactive music events.
Learn moreAngel Robinson is a woman who wears many hats and is deeply passionate about impacting others through sport and life. A former WNBA and international professional basketball player, she carries the lessons of discipline, resilience, and teamwork into everything she does today.
Outside of her professional role, Angel co-owns a basketball training program where she develops young athletes—teaching not just skills, but confidence, work ethic, and character. She is also involved in her community through coaching, officiating, and mentoring, with a special focus on empowering young girls to find their voice and thrive in sports.
Grounded in faith, family, and purpose, Angel is committed to inspiring the next generation and creating meaningful impact both on and off the court.
Learn moreAnissa Mack received her BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art. She also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and participated in the PS1 National Studio Program. Her work has been featured solo exhibitions in New York, Atlanta, and Portland, Oregon. She has also created commissioned public projects and performances for the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (California), WaveHill Gardens (Bronx, New York), The Public Art Fund (New York), and the Queens Museum (New York). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Mack is represented by Laurel Gitlen in New York.
Selected Press
Anissa Mack at Small A Projects, Micah J. Malone, Big, RED & Shiny, March 17, 2008.
Anissa Mack: The Last Full Weekend Each September, John Motley, Portland Mercury, March 27, 2008.
Pies for a Passerby (with audio), Melissa Block, NPR, June 14, 2002.
Learn moreGray and Paulsen are artists who live and work collaboratively. Their idea-based practice fuses history, fiction, autobiography, and artistic commentary into a wide variety of material works. Their work has been shown and published internationally. They live and work in Portland, where they are represented by PDX Contemporary Art.
Selected Press
Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Nat Andreini, Shift.jp, June, 2011.
Review: Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen at PDX Gallery, DK Row, The Oregonian, July 15, 2010.
Learn moreAnna Martine Whitehead does performance from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires; the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi Nations; as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Meskwaki; the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, and the Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) Nations. Their solo and collaborative work has been presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Chicago Symphony Orchestra, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San José Museum of Art, CA; Links Hall, Chicago; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She has developed her craft working closely with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, among others. She has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, MAP Fund, Dance/USA, PICA’S Creative Exchange Lab, Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago, 3AP (3Arts Projects), Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Whitehead has written about Blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, Frieze, and Art Practical. They have also contributed chapters to a range of publications, including Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford University Press, 2017), Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Sobsercove, 2016), and Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (Gallery 400, 2016). Whitehead is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).
Learn moreAnna Vo is a radical educator for 8 years in over 20 countries in Inclusion, Refugee Support, Trauma-Informed Care, and Racial Justice. Editor of an internationally renowned publication for People of Color that has been going for 6 years, and a speaker, artist and musician who has exhibited and toured in Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, Croatia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the States. Anarchist and local festival organizer.
Learn moreAnt made his first works under the name Rotozaza—a performance-based project starting in 1998, which ended up spanning theatre, installation, intervention, and writing-based works. His work, though varied in tone and content, has consistently played with a tension between liveness and automation. Most often, Ant’s practice has involved guiding people through unrehearsed performance situations, and since 2007, it has included the audience itself within structures loosely defined as Autoteatro. Rotozaza became a partnership with Silvia Mercuriali and ended in 2009 after their last production, Etiquette, which was also the first Autoteatro work. Since then, Ant has worked with Tim Etchells, Christophe Meierhans, Britt Hatzius, Gert-Jan Stam, Glen Neath, Joji Koyama, and Sam Britton to create the works listed here, which continue to tour internationally; over 80 different language versions exist of the various Autoteatro productions created so far.
At times, Ant’s performances do not require travel; a paradoxical outcome (especially for an artist committed to liveness and presence), which in turn informed his recent advocacy and research project, ShowingWithoutGoing.live.
In September 2023, he founded Time Based Editions with David Bergé, an ongoing series of “live books” binding print to time, merging sound with paper. The first edition was his own Borderline Visible, which won the 2024 IDFA DocLab Special Jury Award for Creative Technology. For the second edition, ADE DEA, he collaborated with musicians Ulla and Perila.
Other solo projects include experimentation around “live portraiture” as The Other People: structured encounters with people from non-theatrical milieu. He was head dramaturg for Projected Scenarios at Manifesta 7, the European Biennial for Contemporary Art and has contributed to projects by other artists, including Ivana Müller, David Weber-Krebs, Anna Rispoli, Jerome Bel, and Forced Entertainment.Ant has created and led workshops worldwide, including FANTASY INTERVENTIONS: Writing for Site-Specific Performance and has also worked as a coach/mentor for artist programs such as MAKE (Ireland); a.pass and Sound Image Culture (Belgium); Onassis AiR (Greece); and DasArts (Netherlands) where, together with Edit Kaldor in 2013, he designed and mentored a 10-week block, Every Nerve. The work with Kaldor spawned his own wider investigation of radical trust, risk-taking, and leaps of faith, most obviously via the The Thing: An Automatic Workshop in Everyday Disruption, created with Christophe Meierhans.
http://www.rotozaza.co.uk/
http://www.rotozaza.co.uk/autoteatro.html
https://www.anthampton.com/menu.html Learn moreAnthony Hudson is a Grand Ronde/Siletz artist and writer also known as Carla Rossi, Portland's premier drag clown. Hudson’s performance work—from his award-winning solo show Looking for Tiger Lily to Queer Horror at the Hollywood Theatre—have earned him national fellowships, international engagements including the US Pavilion’s drag clown in residence at the 2024 Venice Biennale, features in Hyperallergic and Art in America, and sainthood from the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. A 2023 FSG Writer’s Fellowship finalist and 2024 Tin House resident, Hudson’s writing has appeared in American Theatre, BOMB Magazine, and Arts and International Affairs. Hudson is currently adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.
Learn moreCombining spontaneous off the cuff wit and well-written punches to the gut, Anthony's comedy can best be described as Chuck D and Flavor Flav in one person. Beginning stand up in Kansas City, MO at 21, he left the Midwest to further pursue comedy and hasn't looked back since.
Worked with comedians like Ty Barnett, Aparna Nancherla, Rory Scovel, Amy Miller, Aamer Rahman, Baron Vaughn, Curtis Cook, Neel Nanda, JohnRoy, just to name a few.
Credits include Bumpershoot, NW Comedy Festival, Seattle International Competition, NBC Stand Up for Diversity
Learn moreAntoine Defoort tries to maintain a good atmosphere and a high level of porosity between his seasonal whims, life, as in real life, and contemporary art. He therefore often finds himself struggling with blatant contradictions that are either proudly assumed or shamefully hidden through the use of mind numbing non-sequiturs and wild digressions. Failures and accidents are welcomed with open arms and create a crispy granularity particularly appreciated by connoisseurs. Together, Julien Fournet, Antoine Defoort and Halory Goerger co-founded l’amicale de production, a small production house in Lille / Brussels (France / Belgium) For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Antonie Defoort and his collaborative work with Halory Goerger, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreAntony and the Johnsons, former artists in residence at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater (NY), have performed at the Bloomsbury Theater in London, the Warhol Museum, the Wexner Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Antony has also worked extensively with Lou Reed and Björk and was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial with a Charles Atlas collaboration entitled TURNING. In 2005 Antony and the Johnsons won the UK's Mercury Prize for the album I am a Bird Now. In January 2012, the Museum of Modern Art presented Antony and the Johnsons' Swanlights to a sold out crowd at Radio City Music Hall in NYC.
Antony is also a visual artist and has exhibited his drawings at Palais Des Beaux Arts in Belgium, Isis Gallery in London, Accademia Albertina in Turin and the Triennale in Milan. In 2009 he curated a group show entitled Six Eyes at Agnès B. Galerie Du Jour in Paris, which included work by Peter Hujar, Kiki Smith, and William Basinski. In October of 2010, Antony released a book of collages and drawings, also called Swanlights, published by Abrams Image. Antony's drawings were exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in Spring 2012, curated by James Elaine. Learn moreArab.AMP is a platform for experimental live art, music, and ideas by artists of the Southwest Asian North African diaspora, region, and allied communities. Founded in 2016 by Leyya Mona Tawil, Arab.AMP is a primary program of ELIXIR 501c3, based in California. With a focus on presenting work from the Arab and SWANA diaspora, region, and allied communities, Arab.AMP supports national and international discourse and cultural empowerment. They present the work of other BIPOC communities in conversation with those of SWANA diasporic artists and prioritize LGBTQI+ narratives. The 2022 season features AMP FOLKTALES, an 8-episode series of broadcasts featuring our 2022 commissioned artists and a community spotlight segment hosted by artist/organizer Nadya Tannous. Arab.AMP Live is our nomadic live event series operating in partnership with venues inter/nationally including FUSEBOX Festival (Austin), Pieter Performance Space (LA), The Invisible Dog (Brooklyn), ISSUE Project Room (NYC), and the Arab American National Museum (Dearborn/Detroit). Arab.AMP, via ELIXIR 501c3. is supported with lead funding from the California Arts Council and City of Oakland Cultural Funding Program, as well the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, Investing in Tomorrow Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation NEW Program, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.
Learn morewww.arca1000000.com Selected Media:
Learn moreAsher Hartman is an interdisciplinary artist, director, writer, and creator of live performances. His works operate in the charged space between performance art, experimental theater, and immersive installation. In this sphere of intensely amplified perception, Hartman generates works that grapple with the myriad of social and political issues that dominate this current era of chronic crisis. Often situating personal and emotional history in relation with the ideologies that structure Western culture, his works are dense, visual, poetic, embodied texts, where clown and cringe humor are layered upon moments of desperate rage and arousal. In every work, Hartman implants evidence of his own trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit indelible feelings.
Hartman received his BA in Theater from University of California, Los Angeles and his MFA in Studio Arts from CalArts, where he has since become a faculty member in the CalArts School of Theater. He has also taught at Otis College of Art and Design, and University of California, Riverside. He is the founder and chief of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of artist-actors for whom he has written and directed since 2010. Hartman was also one half of the performative duo Krystal Krunch (with Haruko Tanaka), and over the course of their collaboration the two artists taught intuition-building work to artists, activists, and interested members of the public. From 1999-2005, Hartman co-directed Crazy Space, a performance art venue that featured artists such as Dark Bob, Mariel Caranza, Mario Gardener, Jamie McMurry, Johana Went, Kristina Wong, Liz Young, and Paul Zaloom.
Hartman's recent projects include The Mommy Leaks the Floor at New Hollywood Theater, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Blessed with Switch with Jasmine Orpilla at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024) and University of California, Irvine, The Art of Performance (2024); It’s Better to Start Out Ugly at JOAN, Los Angeles, CA (2023) and The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2023). Past Gawdafful National Theater performances include The Dope Elf, Yale Union, Portland, OR (2019) revised as Organized Around the Erotics of Doing You In at The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2021); Sorry, Atlantis, Or Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA (2017); The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2016); and Annie Okay!, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2010). Hartman's recent publications include Mad Clot on a Holy Bone (X Artists’ Books, 2020); Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Learn moreASUNA is a Japanese sound artist. He has been creating experimental music and installation work from a very young age since the late '90s. ASUNA has become a pioneer in Japan's experimental ambient / drone / improvisation scene and has collaborated with many Japanese and international electronic musicians, including Jan Jelinek, minoru sato-m/s (ex.WrK), Pękala Kordylasińska Pękala, and numerous others. He has been prolific and produced a large number of albums for European, American, and Japanese labels.
Alongside his first major work, "Each Organ" (2002) — a sound installation reconsidering the concept of etymology — ASUNA also produces experimental composition works, recording with acoustic instruments and electronics under the title "100 Toys." This performance uses tiny toys to create a multi-layered and fascinating plastic universe of drones, loops, sonic moire, and occasional pop implosions.
ASUNA's current touring work, "100 KEYBOARDS," is a live music performance featuring over 100 keyboards. Multiple sound waves on the same frequency are disseminated in multiple directions, creating a complex distribution of acoustic pressure. This causes what is known as a moiré pattern of sound interference. In this site-specific listening experience, the audience will hear subtle variations of sound interference and resonance that vary based on one's own position in the performance space.
Learn moreAutumn Chacon (Diné / Chicana) is an artist and activist whose organizing work in media justice has led to the inception of three FCC-licensed community radio stations; while her work as an activist has led to meetings with the largest banks of the world in a successful effort to divest $3.8 billion from the Dakota Access Pipeline. Her work as a conceptual, installation, and performance artist has been shown among First Nations communities throughout North America and abroad. Many of Chacon’s pieces reveal Indigenous futurisms where technology has a sacred relevance, and exemplify her skills as a self-taught electronic engineer.
Learn moreAutumn Knight is a New York-based, Texas-born interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, sound, and text. Drawing from her training in theater, group dynamics, and psychology, Knight makes performances that reshape power structures and upend audience expectations of live experiences. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions, including Human Resources, Los Angeles; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Shedhalle, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, New York; Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Performance Space New York, NY; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired to the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors, and fellowships, including an Art Matters Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Learn moreBack to Back Theatre comprises an ensemble of six actors considered to have developmental or intellectual disabilities. The company explores how respect is withheld from outsiders—the disabled or unemployed—who society deems “unproductive.” Since 1987, the ensemble, based in the small regional center at Geelong, Australia, has transformed the theater experience by exploring prejudices associated with the notion of “other.” The group’s past performances include Mental (1999); Dog Farm (2000); and Soft (2002). small metal objects received a 2008 Bessie Award after its performance at Under the Radar Festival, and a 2007 Zurich Theatre Festival Appreciation Prize for extraordinary achievement in theater. In 2005, the ensemble received the Sydney Meyer Performing Arts Award for their long-standing contribution to the development of Australian theater.
Learn morebart fitzgerald (b. 1991) is a pastor, scholar, and cultural critic.
Learn moreBean Gilsdorf's work examines the visual traces of political histories and sociocultural narratives. Her projects have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the American Textile History Museum, as well as exhibition spaces in England, Italy, China, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and South Africa. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship (2024), a Ford Family Foundation Fellowship Residency at Ucross (2023), an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2020), two creative Fulbright Fellowships to Poland (2015–2016 and 2016–2017), and a Graduate Fellowship Residency at Headlands Center for the Arts (2011–2012). Gilsdorf’s work is in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, and the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreBebe Miller’s vision of dance and performance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty. Her aesthetic relies on the interplay of a work’s idea, its physicality, and the contributions of company members to fashion its singular voice. She has collaborated with artists, composers, writers and designers along with the dancers who share her studio practice and from whom she has learned what dancing can reveal. Seeking to expand the language of dance, Bebe Miller Company’s work encompasses choreography, writing, film, video and digital media.
A native New Yorker, Bebe first performed her choreography at NYC’s Dance Theater Workshop in 1978. She formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985 to pursue her interest in finding a physical language for the human condition. Since then, Bebe has created more than 50 dance works for the company that have been performed in nearly 400 engagements worldwide. BMC has been commissioned and presented by leading venues including 651 ARTS, BAM Next Wave, DTW, Jacob’s Pillow, Joyce Theater, PICA, REDCAT, Walker Art Center and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her choreography has been performed by Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M. (Abraham In Motion), Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, Salt Lake City’s Repertory Dance Theater, the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company, PACT Dance Company of Johannesburg, South Africa, and a host of colleges and universities.
Over the last decade the Company has produced a variety of digital archive projects that share the company’s creative practice with artists and audiences. Committed to keeping dance available to a wide spectrum of people and to further the conversation about the role of arts and creativity in our culture, BMC is dedicated to providing access to the creative process and expression to diverse communities.
Named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center in 2005, Bebe has been a Movement Research honoree, has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards, the David R. White Award from New York Live Arts, United States Artists and Guggenheim Fellowships, honorary doctorates from Ursinus College and Franklin & Marshall College, and is one of the inaugural class of Doris Duke Artist Award recipients. Bebe is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance and lives in Columbus, OH.
Learn moreBecca Blackwell is a NYC based trans actor, performer and writer. Existing between genders, and preferring the pronoun "they," Blackwell works collaboratively with playwrights and directors to expand our sense of personhood and the body through performance. Some of their collaborations have been with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok, Richard Maxwell, Sharon Hayes, Theater of the Two Headed Calf and Lisa D'Amour. Recently seen in Erin Markey's tour of A Ride on the Irish Cream and Richard Maxwell's Samara. Becca is a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award 2015.
Learn moreBen Darwish is a pianist and composer who has been playing music since the age of six. He attended University of Oregon and received a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies. Upon graduation, he was awarded "Outstanding Undergraduate Performer in Jazz Studies." Darwish has played with many artists, including Kevin Mohagany, Rich Perry, Ron Miles, Devin Phillips, Esperanza Spalding, Alan Jones, Reggie Watts, Bill Summers (of The Headhunters), Stephanie Schneiderman, Ohmega Watts, and Ryan Dolliver. In 2009, he was nominated for “Outstanding Achievement In Jazz” by the 2009 Portland Music Awards and recently released his second album Ode To Consumerism with his band, the Ben Darwish Trio.
Learn morePulling from her Southern roots, Beyondadoubt has brought originality to nightlife for over a decade, whether in the Northwest or the deep South. DJing since ‘98, Beyondadoubt creates rhythms from her sprawling collection of vintage soul records to complement her raw, Dirty South, New Orleans Bounce, and 90s rave sounds.
I’ve Got a Hole in My Soul, her groundbreaking monthly party of rare 60s soul records, has achieved legendary status with soul heavyweights and “beautifully ecstatic dancers” around the country. Beyondadoubt also hosts MRS., a monthly queer dance party with friends and guest DJs, where she packs the house with true queer culture. Her sets get the already flamboyant and beautiful queer community out on the dance floor and shaking ass to real underground queer music.
Learn moreBig Art Group is a New York-based experimental performance ensemble founded by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson in 1999. The company pushes the formal boundaries of theater, film, and visual art through the use of technology and experimental methods of communication. In its history, the company has grown from an underground performance group to an internationally recognized ensemble with invitations from leading festivals and presenters including Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Festival d’automne à Paris, La Vie de Festival Rome, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and The Kitchen in New York.
Selected Press
10 years of Big Art Group, Justin Bond, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2010
Big Art Group: 'The People' Shaped by Local Views, Nirmala Nataraj, San Francisco Chronicle, September 15, 2011.
Learn moreBig Terrific is a weekly comedy show in Brooklyn hosted by Gabe Liedman, Jenny Slate, and Max Silvestri. It started as a project between three friends: a free, low-key event where they could try out new material and perform regularly in front of an audience who’d be up for the experimentation. Before long, the show’s reputation grew, and it became the go-to stage for innovative comedians and comedy fans who’d rather see something new than the regular two-drink-minimum acts.
The big concept behind the show is: let’s just be friends. The idea that you might get made fun of if you sit too close to the stage is the antithesis of what Gabe, Jenny, and Max set out to do. On any given Wednesday in Brooklyn, you can show up at Big Terrific to hear personal stories from people who love to tell them, see short films by up-and-coming directors, and laugh along to stand-up curated carefully by Gabe, Jenny, and Max.
Big Terrific has been proud to host Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Silverman, Nick Offerman, Janeane Garofalo, Aziz Ansari, Reggie Watts, and many other comedy superstars over the years. The show was also awarded the prestigious “Best Of New York” by New York Magazine.
Because Jenny Slate Proved There's Life After SNL, Andrew Marantz, GQ, August, 2011.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Jenny Slate, Ellen Killoran, The L Magazine, May 25, 2011.
Learn moreBILJANA KOSMOGINA is an avant-garde writer, performer and multimedia artist from Belgrade. Her stories are included in three anthologies of Serbian prose, translated into Italian, German and Albanian. Kosmogina is a writer and performer who forcefully deals with women’s questions, sexual and gender discourse and roles, as well as social disorders. She is subversive and politically incorrect towards all existing values!
Learn moreMulti-instrumentalist/composer James Everest is based in Minneapolis and has worked on a variety of musical projects, including Lateduster, Neotropic, Sans Le Systeme, Roma Di Luna, Vicious Vicious, and with Walter Kitundu and Eduard Nesterenko. Since 2002 Everest has been a close collaborator with choreographer Emily Johnson, writing and performing original scores for several performances. Since 2005, he has hosted and curated the Making Music conversations series at the University of Minnesota's Whole Music Club and the Walker Art Center.
Joel Pickard is based in Portland, OR and works as an improviser and composer creating music for dance, theatre, video, commercial advertising, and performance. In 2003 he collected all of these various projects under the Hatfarm label. Pickard has an MA in Composition from Mills College in Oakland, CA, where he studied with Fred Frith, Alvin Curran, and Pauline Oliveros. Pickard plays guitar in Jigsaw and pedal steel guitar in Mire.
Learn moreChoreographer Suniti Dernovsek and visual artist David Stein began making work together in 2004 under the name Hot Little Hands, which, in 2011, evolved into the Portland-based contemporary dance company bobbevy. In addition to 18 shorter works, Dernovsek and Stein have produced six evening-length shows: This is how we disappear (2013); Palace of Crystal (2011); ill-starred (2009); Lawn of the Limp (2008); Avian Fable (2007); and Marionette (2004). They have been presented by Conduit Dance, Reed College Arts Week, Danspace in NYC, Velocity Dance Center, Northwest New Works at On the Boards, Ten Tiny Dances’ South Waterfront Project, and PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival. They have received several grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, as well as the Dance New Work Award from UWM.
Learn moreAs co-directors of the BodyCartography Project, Olive Bieringa (NZ) and Otto Ramstad (USA) investigate empathy and the physicality of space in urban, domestic, wild and social landscapes through dance, performance, video, installation work and movement education. Their works range from intimate solos for the street, stage, or gallery, to large site-based community dance works, short experimental films, to complex works for the stage. They have created performance works, short films and installations across the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Europe, Russia and South America and were recently named “Dance Company of the Year” by the Twin Cities City Pages. They are featured artists in the first book about site dance in the USA published by University of Florida Press entitled Site Dance, the Lure of Alternative Spaces.
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of BodyCartography Project and their work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreBody/Head are an electric guitar duo comprised of Kim Gordon (CKM, Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, etc.) and Bill Nace (X.O.4, Vampire Belt, Ceylon Mange, etc.). They began working together in various loose formats a few years ago, but the Body/Head concept evolved more specifically in early 2012.
Body/Head have also worked with guest artists since their inception. An early session with Michael Morley of The Dead C resulted in the Body/Gate/Head LP Glare Luring Yo, and live collaborations with Ikue Mori. Ikue has been focusing on electronics as her primary instrument in the decades since the end of her groundbreaking trio DNA, but Kim was able to talk her into trying drums again, and the results have been astounding. Ikue’s percussion grounds the spirals of guitar and vocals with its strong central pulse, allowing everybody to achieve greater heights of musical/visual disorientation.
Body/Head have thus far recorded a single for Dennis Tyfuss’ Ultra Eczema Editions, a tour EP for Nace’s own Open Mouth Productions, and released their collaboration with Morley through Feeding Tube Records. Their next release, Coming Apart, will be issued as a double LP /CD/digital album by Matador Records on September 10 (September 16 in the United Kingdom and Europe)
Selected Press
"Q&A: Kim Gordon on Body/Head's Coming Apart and Life After Sonic Youth," T. Cole Rachel, Stereogum, June 26, 2013.
Learn morebone lattice is the quiet side project of performance artist SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY and composer Antbohony A. Dunn. After a decade of collaboration on paintings, illustrations, and theatrical soundtracks, they are dedicated to working together through sound and image to confront contradictions, intensities, violence, and darkness as they also navigate these themes in their own, very different, practices of the digital arts. Both artists are concerned with poetry and sound as material. Chicago’s Wish Fulfillment describes b o n e l a t t i c e as “Thrumming engine-room ambience suffused with foreboding, while refusing to even acknowledge the Halloween-store cliches of so much "dark ambient." Instead, [b o n e l a t t i c e ] inhabits that same greyed-out zone where Jeff Greinke and others have played, juggling texture, harmony, suspense, and wonder with equal aplomb…”
Learn moreBorn in Ouarzazate, Morocco, and educated in France, Bouchra Ouizguen has been performing in Marrakech and France since 1995. In 2002, with Taoufiq Izeddiou and Saïd Ait El Moumen, Ouizguen founded ANANIA, a contemporary dance company in Marrakech, and created the On Marche dance festival. She also collaborated that year in forming the Al Mokhtabar contemporary dance company. Her choreographic works include AnaOunta (2002); Fina ken’ti (2002); Mort et moi (2005); Déserts, desires with Taoufiq Izeddiou (2006); Aïta with Naïma Sahmoud (2007); and Madame Plaza (2008-2009). Ouizguen has performed throughout Morocco and France, including at the prestigious Montpellier Dance Festival, and in New York at the 2010 FIAF Crossing the Line Festival in NYC. Since 2007, Ouizguen has been a co-organizer of the annual festival Recontres Chorégraphiques in Marrakech.
Selected Press
"A Moroccan Tradition in Full Cry," Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, September 23, 2010.
Learn moreBrad Adkins was born in Kalispell, Montana. Adkins' individual, collaborative, and curatorial work has been presented at The Art Gym, Consolidated Works, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery, The Portland Art Museum, and PICA; and has been noted and featured in ArtNews, Artweek, Modern Painters, Punk Planet, and The Independent. His work is represented by PDX Contemporary Art (OR). BIG RED, an audio cd that documents an afternoon conversation between Adkins and Curtis Knapp on the subjects of performance, imitation, and close-up magic, was produced by Marriage Records in 2004.
Learn moreBrian Rogers is a theater and film director, video and sound artist, and performing arts curator. Since 1997, Rogers has created films, performances, albums, and other time-based projects including Small Songs (2023-2024); Screamers (2018); Hot Box (2012, co-presented with FIAF’s Crossing The Line Festival, PS122’s COIL Festival, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center and supported by a MAP Fund grant); and the Bessie-nominated Selective Memory (2010). Rogers composed the soundtrack for Shaun Iron & Lauren Petty’s film Standing By: Gatz Backstage and has collaborated as a sound and video artist with numerous experimental dance and theater artists in New York and elsewhere. Rogers is a MacDowell Fellow and has had residencies at Yaddo and Mount Tremper Arts.
Rogers is the Co-Founder and Artistic Executive Director of The Chocolate Factory Theater, an internationally recognized venue for experimental dance, theater, and interdisciplinary performance based in Queens, NY. Now in its twenty-second year, Rogers serves as chief curator of The Chocolate Factory Theater’s artistic programming and leads its artistic and administrative operations.
Rogers has taught at Kenyon College, University of Michigan, University of Colorado, The School at The Art Institute of Chicago, St. Johns University, Carnegie Mellon University, Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, New York University, Princeton University, and others. He has served as a panelist/recommender for New York State Council on the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, Fresh Tracks, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, Pew Charitable Trust, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Yaddo, Macdowell, MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim, and others. Rogers is a graduate of Bennington College.
Learn moreBritt Hatzius works in film, video, sound, and performance, exploring ideas around language, interpretation, and the potential for discrepancies, ruptures, and (mis/)communication. Her work has been shown internationally at galleries, institutions, and performance and media arts festivals. Recent collaborations include the cinematic installation Micro Events (2012) with Tom Kok, the interactive performance This Is Not My Voice Speaking (2013) with Ant Hampton, and a sitespecific installation As Never Before, As Never Again (2014) with Ant Hampton.
Learn moreBruce Conkle is an American installation artist based in Portland, Oregon. He is noted for his ecological and dystopian fantasy themes. His work is in the collection of the Portland Art Museum and has shown at Nylistasafnio The Living Art Museum in Iceland and A Gentil Carioca in Brazil.
Learn moreburke jam is an artist, composer, curator and educator. His recent work in performance, installation and recorded media explores sound as intervention–questioning and subverting perceptual coherence and relationships with physical place. His research engages the intersection of field recording, composition, acoustic ecology and the Anthropocene. Following the completion of his MFA in 2013 at the University of Montana, Jam received a Fulbright Grant to Iceland researching environmental sound and methods of listening. Jam performs and exhibits internationally, and works as the Director of Digital Facilities and Instructor of Music and Art in the College of the Arts at Portland State University.
Learn moreCameron Clayborn (b. 1992, Pine Bluff, AR) is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, drawing and performance. Clayborn’s practice is deeply informed by their personal experiences, with much of their work addressing themes of heritage, fragility of memory, grief, and healing.
Clayborn earned their BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and their MFA from the Yale School of Art. Clayborn’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); Woonhuis (Amsterdam, NL); Gallery 400, University of Illinois Chicago (Chicago, IL); Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, DE); Simone Subal Gallery (New York, NY); Morán Morán (Los Angeles, CA); Chapter NY (New York, NY); Emalin (London, UK); and TONE (Memphis, TN), among others.
Their work is in the permanent collections of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (Los Angeles, CA); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, DE); and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, MI).
Learn moreCandace Kita is an enthusiastic arts and cultural worker committed to connecting people of color with creative opportunities. Born in Chicago to Japanese American and Swedish American parents, she has been an artist and arts enthusiast for as long as she can remember. Her multifaceted artistic practice has spanned illustration, sculpture, graphic design, typography, book arts, writing, and performance.
Weaving her creative background with her experiences in social justice organizing and nonprofit administration, Candace currently manages cultural work and strategy at the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO). Previously, she co-founded grassroots collective Arts Workers for Equity, worked in development, marketing, and programs for the Portland Art Museum and Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre, and served as Visual Art Curator for Asian American art and community space Tuesday Night Project. She has participated in multiple initiatives to empower arts professionals of color including the Western States Arts Federation’s Emerging Leaders of Color Fellowship and the Getty Multicultural Internship Program. Candace received her BA in Studio Art from Scripps College and was recently featured as one of Scripps College Magazine’s “30 Alumnæ Under 30.”
In her spare time, Candace co-manages a blog called Asians Doing Everything and reads voraciously. She is a lover of words, cities, and onigiri.
Learn moreCannupa Hanska Luger is a New Mexico-based, multi-disciplinary artist. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent. Using social collaboration, and in response to timely and site-specific issues, Luger produces multi-pronged projects that take many forms. Through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, and cut-paper, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about twenty-first century Indigeneity. This work provokes diverse publics to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring, and oftentimes presents a call to action to protect land from capitalist exploits.
cannupahanska.com
@cannupahanska
Learn moreCeleste Camfield is a mixed Muscogee artist living on the settled land of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ Sookobitʉ (Comanche), Ndé Kónitsąąíí Gokíyaa (Lipan Apache), Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos peoples, currently known as Austin, TX. She works in the mediums of movement, film, and food. She grew up dancing in Texas Hill Country and studied dance at Marymount Manhattan College. Celeste has studied modern dance in Vicenza, Barcelona, Prague, and at ImPulsTanz in Vienna, and was a participant in P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels, under the direction of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. She is a member of ARCOS and has performed with the company since 2019. Celeste has also performed original works with BLiPSWiTCH and Alexa Capareda. She has been creating and performing in experimental dance films since 2019, with screenings in Austin, Camden, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, and Portland. In 2022, Celeste co-founded Preheat Fest, a film festival that celebrates the experimental on camera.
Learn moreChanticleer Trü is a musician, performance artist who currently resides in Portland, Oregon. His body of work encompasses music, theater, fringe, dance, visual installation, drag, film, cabaret, and good time instigation. When he's not turning heads the world over as front-man of "Post Phunk" dance outfit Magic Mouth, you can catch him pursuing one of his many other creative efforts. His unique brands of aesthetic storytelling, and expression have made him a mainstay on stages both large and small. His creative direction and performances are in demand across major city hotbeds of the underground and mainstream.
Learn moreAtlas has created work for film, theatre, television, and museums including the Whitney (New York) and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville (Paris). A pioneer of integrating live video with stage performance, Atlas is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with choreographers, dancers, and performers such as Leigh Bowery, Diamanda Galas, Merce Cunningham, and with Antony and the Johnsons on the audiovisual performance, Turning. Atlas is the recipient of three Bessie Awards and was recently presented with the prestigious John Cage award, by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2006).
Atlas has been active as an interdisciplinary filmmaker and video artist since the 1970s. Over the years he has made pioneering media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television, and live electronic performances. In November 2006, London's Tate Modern presented a retrospective of his work, titled Hail the New Puritan.
Learn moreCharlotte Vanden Eynde is a contemporary dancer and choreographer, based in Ghent. In 1999, she graduated at P.A.R.T.S., the renowned school for contemporary dance headed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Since, she has been creating highly personal choreographies and performances, focusing on the body with a strong sculptural and imaginative sensibility. Her early works revolved around vulnerability, intimacy and femininity. In ‘Lijfstof’ she explored the body as object/matter and in ‘MAP ME’ video images were projected on the body as on a canvas. She pursued her movement research in the solo’s ‘I’m Sorry It’s (Not) A Story’ and ‘Shapeless’, and in various site-specific performances and improvisation solos. Her last work ‘Deceptive Bodies’ displayed an iconography of the theatrical body and was also shown in exhibition spaces. She often collaborates with other choreographers, theatre makers, film makers and musicians. Additionally, she gives advice to other artists and conducts workshops based on her own artistic practice.
Learn morechelfitsch Theater Company was founded in 1997 by writer and director Toshiki Okada. Named after a deliberate mispronunciation of the English word “selfish,” chelfitsch Theater Company began to refine its textual aesthetic as that of colloquial language representing contemporary youth culture. With Five Days in March (awarded the Kunio Kishida Award for Best Script) the company began to juxtapose a noisy choreography derived from everyday mannerisms to the text. The works of chelfitsch have been presented at premier international theater festivals and venues throughout Europe, North America, and Asia. In 2011, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech received the critics’ award from the Association québécoise des critiques de théâtre for the 2010-2011 season. The troupe continues to develop its distinct methodology, which revolves around the relationship between speech and body.
Selected Press
"Writing for Foreigners (Americans)," Jason Zinoman, The New York Times, May 21, 2014
"Under the Radar 2012: An interview with chelfitsch's Toshiki Okada," Jeremy M. Barker, Culturebot, December 27, 2011.
"Temp Workers Too Twitchy to Engage in Office Politics," Ben Brantley, The New York Times, January 6, 2012.
"Hot Pepper," Tom Philips, Dance Review Times, January 7, 2012.
Learn moreChloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree, Canadian interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
Learn moreCreated by performance artist Paul Soileau, CHRISTEENE has emerged as a pop music artist and anti-icon in its own right. CHRISTEENE is a shameless and sexually infused sewer of live rap and RnB, whose message challenges gender, capitalism, corporate mendacity, complacency, and false celebrity while shattering the American obsession with charm and grace. Providing a much-needed voice for a new society and posing a threat to those who support the current structures, CHRISTEENE is a new, dangerous, and unstable breed of entertainer and “Drag Terrorist.”
Attempts at gathering personal information on CHRISTEENE concerning age, origin, race, religion, and even gender have proven fruitless, leaving the public to rely on a highly stylized collection of music videos released through the singer’s collaborative efforts with award-winning filmmaker and cinematographer PJ Raval. Sightings of CHRISTEENE have been documented in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, New Orleans, Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin.
Selected Press
Don't call him queen: Paul Soileau talks about more-punk-than-drag persona Christeene Vale, Bree Davies, Denver Westword, July 19, 2012.
Learn moreBorn in Cannes, Christian Rizzo took his first steps as an artist in Toulouse, where he started a rock band and created a line of clothing before studying visual arts at the Villa Arson in Nice. In the ’90s, he performed with and created costumes and soundtracks for choreographers including Mathilde Monnier, Hervé Robbe, Mark Tompkins, Georges Appaix, Vera Mantero, Catherine Contour, Emmanuelle Huynh, and Rachid Ouramdane. Since founding “l’association fragile” in 1996, he has created over 30 performances and dance pieces, alternating with other projects or commissions for fashion and visual arts. He was an artist-in-residence at l’Opéra de Lille, and has performed his works around the world at the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, the Nouveau Festival du Centre Pompidou, deSingel, the Festival d’Avignon, and On the Boards.
On January 1, 2015, Christian Rizzo took over as the Director of the Centre Choréographique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillion-Midi-Pyrénées, which has been renamed ICI (International Choreographic Institute).
Learn moreChristi Denton is a Portland based composer and sound installation artist who works with found sounds, electronics, and homemade and modified instruments.
Learn moreMiner was born in 1973 and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. His videos address the impact of his upbringing with regard to religion, race, family, and sexuality. He received his MFA at Yale University School of Art and his BA at the University of Tennessee. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), the New Museum (New York), and at Tate Britain (London), among other institutions. Miner is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Selected Press
Christopher Miner, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, January 28, 2009.
Art in Review - Christopher Miner, Ken Johnson, New York Times, February 13, 2009.
Learn moreChristopher Sutton is a longtime artist, musician, writer, and DJ who currently lives in Portland, Oregon. As a musician he has toured, performed, and recorded with bands such as Hornet Leg, Gossip, Dub Narcotic Sound System, Spider & The Webs, C.O.C.O., Hooded Hags, The Dirtbombs, and Chain & The Gang to name a few. His life as a writer has seen contributions mainly to self published fanzines like Shotgun Seamstress, Bumpidee, and his own zine Nigerian Triple Daisy. He currently writes a blog called Record Lections and some of his opines can be read in the online magazine called Network Awesome. Sutton also exhibits his work as a painter and designs album art for his bands Hornet Leg and C.O.C.O. Finally, Sutton is a DJ participating in regular soulful Portland dance parties like Soul In The Hole and Sugar Town and in various venue around the Northwest.
Selected Press:
"DJ Hornet Leg talks records," Nikki McCoy, Northwest Military, May 14, 2014
"Hornet Leg: Ribbon of Fear," Joe Hemmerling, Tiny Mix Tapes, 2009
Learn moreCinema Project is a collectively run, non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon, and founded in 2003, Cinema Project works to promote public awareness of avant-garde cinema past and present. Featuring artists, curators, and scholars from around the world, Cinema Project’s semi-annual series of screenings, lectures, and discussions function to broaden engagement with, and deepen critical understanding of, innovative experimental film and video art.
Learn moreClaire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box—as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes—there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.”
Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
Recent shows include El Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico D.F.; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Air de Paris, Paris; Regina Gallery, London and Moscow; MUSAC Contemporary Art Museu, Castilla y León, Spain; Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, Baltimore; Bunker Stuzki Contemporary Art Museum, Krakow; Mastermind, Casablanca; and Kunstlerhaus Wien, Vienna. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Metro Pictures, New York; T293, Napoli and Rome; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and Galerie Chantal Crousel/Air de Paris, Paris. She is now preparing a catalogue with Buchhandlung Walther König.
Learn moreClaire L. Evans is a writer and artist working in Los Angeles. She blogs at Universe, which addresses the synchronicities between art, science, technology, and the cultural world. Her “day job” is as the singer and co-author of the conceptual, multimedia, disco-pop band YACHT. Evans has performed her earnestly cosmic PowerPoint presentations at The Kitchen and MoMA PS1, and has co-authored NA/SA: New Art Science Affinities, a collaboratively written compendium on inter-disciplinarity in the arts.
Learn moreClaude Wampler works at the intersection of art installation and performance; engages and experiments with liveness and the art object, concealment and revelation, the performance of the spectator, and the productivity of failure.
Using video, painting, photography, lighting, sound, sculpture, costume, and texts, to explore the possibilities and the value of grafting performance technique onto visual expression and vice versa, Wampler creates an experience of immediacy/excess in which the viewer leaves with a sense of mystery or magic.
Claude has had solo exhibitions and performances at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, New Museum for Contemporary Art, and P.S. 122 (New York); The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and in many international institutions including the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Witte de With & Schouwburg Theater (Rotterdam), the Yokohama Triennale, Kaaistudios (Brussels), and many others.
Learn moreMeza is a Portland-based artist and composer who studied music composition and digital music production at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She has recorded and toured with Japanther and Explode Into Colors, and has performed her own work in clubs, basements, dance halls, ballrooms, art galleries, and music festivals internationally. Meza started the young series New Musics to support new classical music and working avant-garde composers within the Portland music scene.
Learn moreClayton Lee is a Canadian curator, producer, and performance artist. He currently serves as the Artistic Director of Fierce Festival in Birmingham, UK. From 2019–2023, Clayton was the Director of Rhubarb Festival!, Canada’s longest-running festival of new and experimental performance, and previously served as the Curatorial Associate at the Luminato Festival. His performance projects have been presented in venues across Canada, the US, the UK, and New Zealand. He was one of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Artists-in-Residence in 2023. As part of the Living Room Collective, he represented Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Learn moreColin Self (b. 1987 Oregon, USA) is an artist, composer, and puppeteer based between Brooklyn, NY and Berlin, DE. They create music, performances, and new systems for interfacing with the human spirit across a spectrum between the living and deceased. Their practices revolve around the temporary assembly of communities and envelop collaborative and dialogical experiments into play.
Learn more.Compost Cooperative takes the tossed-out leftovers from digital culture and breaks them down to grow a more lush virtual landscape. In the ease of mass consumption and the gold rush for the supposedly infinite space provided by the Internet, much of our digital infrastructure and the tools used to make it go disconcertingly unexamined. We believe that through cultivating a biome of thoughtful appropriation, re-design, humor, and the surreal we can begin to glimpse a microcosm of new possibility and the recipe to get there. Together we make websites, video games, educational materials, and a range of other media that playfully percolates on our ever-decaying/blossoming digital world.
.Compost Cooperative is: Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zan Kerrigan, and Carly Barton. Our work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in the Maine College of Art and Design in Maine, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon, and the Utkal University of Culture in Odisha, India. Learn moreCornell Alston is a long time member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a not-for-profit that uses the arts as a springboard to teach life skills to individuals both inside and outside of state correctional facilities. He initiated the Youth Empowerment Through the Arts initiative that launched in Queens NY, and he continues to work as an arts-in-education advocate. He is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award. Alston performed and collaborated with Kaneza Schaal on PLEASE, BURY ME at Baryshnikov Arts Center and GO FORTH during a Performance Space 122 RAMP residency. Other performance highlights include: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 12 Angry Men, and the title role in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
Learn moreCourtenay Collins is the owner and Executive Producer of Dirty Angel Entertainment. The company currently produces The Real Comedy Spot Open Mic at Eastside Bar and Grill on Tuesday’s. DAE also produced an open mic at Harvey’s Comedy Club in Portland, OR. The company has produced showcases at Triple Nickel in Portland, Oregon and Pub 26 in Welches, OR. It also produces the NW Black Comedy Festival which is in its fifth year. The company manages comic The Real Hyjinx, who has appeared around the country and hosts all Dirty Angel Entertainment productions. He’s been on AMC and also co-produces the Festival. She also performs as DJ Wildchild and is the resident DJ for all Dirty Angel Entertainment Productions including The Real Comedy Spot Open Mics and the NWBCF. She also co-hosted the Portland Radio Project show Soulfull Saturdays.
Learn moreIncorporating irony and humor into her work, Cristina Lucas focuses on the irrationality of human actions and ethics within contemporary aesthetics. She was born in Jaén, Spain, and earned her BFA from Complutense University, Madrid, followed by an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Lucas has recently participated in Dominó Canibal II Bienale PAC Murcia and the Liverpool Biennial. Her work has also been seen in solo exhibitions such as Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Móstoles an Carrillo Gil, Mexico DF; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, The Netherlands; and Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid; as well as in group exhibitions at NMAC Foundation, Cádiz; Aldrich Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; 28 Bienal de Sao Paulo; and X Istanbul Bienale. Lucas lives and works in Spain, where she is represented by Juana de Aizpuru Gallery, Madrid.
Selected Press
Cristina Lucas, Touch and Go, 2010, Arthur Roberts and Barbara Jones, all my colours, November 7, 2010.
Learn moreCrystal Quartez (Cortez) is a Portland based musician & creative technologist. Through field recording, synthesis and self-built instruments they create “Restorative Noise”; sculpting drones and rhythms of mechanical life, natural voices, and digital timbres to form a texture rich electronic dance music. The resulting sonic landscapes offer windows into shared networks of reality, often separated by borders of space, time, and perception. Recently, their work has involved the collection of live biodata from plants and static data from climate change, to translate these numbers and electrical impulses into sound.
Learn moreCVLLEJERX is the product of our multicultural inbetweenness as second generation immigrants and the violent colonization and subsequent diaspora of colombia, mexico, and africa, which informs our mestizx and black experiences in america. CVLLEJERX was born in the whitest city in america, portland, that has deep-seated white supremacist roots. with this and other historical and contemporary circumstances in mind, it is urgent for us to reclaim space in this city. we merge fashion, performance, and poetry as a form of resistance. through the engagement of voice, clothing, and physical movement, we are reclaiming authorship. Choosing what we wear, what we say, and how we move, we are amplifying ourselves with tools accessible to us.
Learn morePart country, part Lou Reed, part Patti Smith, part performance artist. —The Washington Post Cynthia Hopkins is an internationally acclaimed musical performance artist. Hopkins writes and sings songs, records albums, and creates groundbreaking multi-media performance works that intertwine truth and fiction—blurring the lines between edification and entertainment. Through the process of making performances, she attempts to alchemize disturbance into works of intrigue and hope that simultaneously stimulate the senses, provoke emotion, and enliven the mind. Hopkins has produced six performance works and eight albums of original music. Her work has been honored with many awards, including the 2007 Alpert Award in Theater and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. Hopkins most recently premiered A Living Documentary and is currently at work on a screenplay, Alcoholic Movie Musical (a tale of self-destruction and redemption). Selected Press "In Debt to Art? So Actor’s Piggy Bank Attests: ‘A Living Documentary,’ a Solo Show at New York Live Arts," The New York Times, March 7, 2014 "Cynthia Hopkins on How to Earn a Living as a New York City Artist," The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2014
Learn mored.a. carter is a writer, teacher, and cognac sipper. He is co-editor of The Iconic Obama, 2007-2009: Essays on Media Representations of the Candidate and New President (2012). He is currently completing Obscene Material, a book examining black girlhood and scandal in 1919 Washington, D.C. and is also a member of the Queering Slavery Working Group, an interdisciplinary scholarly collective that uses Tumblr to place black queer studies in conversation with the history of enslavement: http://qswg.tumblr.com and http://qswgremix.tumblr.com. He is an assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, with research interests in 20th Century African American History, gender and sexuality studies, and black cultural studies.
Learn moreDakhaBrakha is music quartet from Kyiv, Ukraine. Reflecting fundamental elements of sound and soul, Ukrainian “ethno chaos” band DakhaBrakha creates a world of unexpected new music. DakhaBrakha was created in 2004 at the Kyiv Center of Contemporary Art “DAKH” by the avant-garde theatre director Vladyslav Troitskyi, and given the name that means “give/take” in old Ukrainian. Theatre work has left its mark on the band performances—their shows have never been staged without a strong visual element.
After experimenting with Ukrainian folk music, the band has added rhythms of the surrounding world into their music, thus creating the bright, unique and unforgettable sound of DakhaBrakha. They strive to help open up the potential of Ukrainian melodies and to bring it to the hearts and consciousness of the younger generation in Ukraine and the rest of the world. Accompanied by Indian, Arabic, African, Russian and Australian traditional instrumentation, the quartet’s powerful and uncompromising vocal range creates a trans-national sound rooted in Ukrainian culture. At the crossroads of Ukrainian folklore and theatre, their musical spectrum is at first intimate then riotous, plumbing the depths of contemporary roots and rhythms, inspiring cultural and artistic liberation.
In March 2010, DakhaBrakha won the prestigious Grand Prix prize named after S.Kuriokhin, in the sphere of contemporary art, and confirmed its place in the culture once again. They have played hundreds of concerts, performances, and have taken part in major international festivals throughout Eastern and Western Europe, Russia, Asia, Australia, and North America. DakhaBrakha has also collaborated with such international musicians as: Port Mone (By), Kimmo Pohjonen Cluster (Fi), Karl Frierson (DePhazz) (Ge), Steve Cooney (IRL), Inna Zhelannaya (Ru), Kievbass (UA), Djam (UA-Iran), and David Ingibaryan (Hu).
Learn moreDakota Camacho is a Matao•CHamoru multi-disciplinary artist / researcher working in spaces of Indigenous lifeways, performance, musical composition, community engagement, and education.
Learn moreDana Michel is a choreographer and performer based in Montreal, Canada. Her practice is rooted in exploring the disorderly multiplicity of identity using intuitive improvisation and image creation. Before entering the BFA in Contemporary Dance program at Concordia University in her late twenties, she was a marketing executive, competitive runner, and football player. In 2011, She received a danceWEB scholarship, allowing her to deepen her research process at ImPulsTanz (Vienna, Austria). She has been making and internationally touring work for the past nine years.
Michel’s newest solo, Yellow Towel, premiered at the 2013 Festival TransAmériques (Montreal) to critical acclaim. The work featured on the “Top Ten” 2013 dance moments in Dance Current Magazine (Canada) and was recently singled out as one of the most remarkable productions at the 2014 American Realness Festival (New York City) by The New York Times. In August 2014, she received the ImpulsTanz Award for artistic excellence in life.
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