Artists Archive
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James Yarker studied theatre at Lancaster University, England. In 1991 he co-founded Stan’s Cafe, one of the UK’s foremost independent theatre companies, and has been artistic director of all of its productions. Stan’s Cafe tours regularly, encompassing a broad variety of media including theatre, radio, and site specific performances requiring extensive audience participation. Some of their recent work includes It’s Your Film, Be proud of Me, and The Black Maze.
Learn moreYamazaki was introduced to butoh in 1977 through the teaching of Akira Kasai. From 1996 to 2001, he created a dozen works with his first company, rosy co., and in 2002 he founded Kota Yamazaki/Fluid Hug-Hug. He has performed around the world at the TBA Festival, Bank Art, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, and Danspace Project, among others. Through residencies in Senegal, Yamazaki created FAGAALA with Germaine Acogny, which received the 2007 New York Dance and Performance Award in choreography. He is director of Body Arts Laboratory and organizer of the Whenever Wherever Festival in Tokyo.
Selected Press
Glowing among the shadows, Martha Sherman, Dance Review Times, May 3, 2012.
Face Time: Kota Yamazaki, Betsy Momich, Carnegie Magazine, Spring 2012.
Fluid Hug-Hug: ‘(glowing)’ @ EMPAC, 4/6/12, Tresca Weinstein, Albany Times Union, April 9, 2012.
Learn moreOtomo Yoshihide is one of the most well known Japanese musicians and composers in the experimental music field. Performing with guitar, turntables, and electronics he first came to international prominence in the 1990s as the leader of the noise rock group Ground Zero, and has since worked in a variety of contexts, ranging from free improvisation to noise, jazz and contemporary classical. A pioneering figure in onkyo and electroacoustic improvisation scenes, Otomo has been featured on important records on labels such as Improvised Music from Japan and Erstwhile. He studied at the Meiji University from 1979, where he studied ethnomusicology, concentrating on the Japanese pop music of World War II and the development of musical instruments during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Samples of instruments and music from this period are found in several of his works. He played in rock bands while at college, but turned to improvisation after discovering free jazz and free improvisation musicians like guitarist Derek Bailey, saxophonist Kaoru Abe, and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi.
Learn moreTimothy Yanick Hunter (b. 1990 Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is an artist and curator based in Toronto. Hunter’s practice employs strategies of bricolage, archival exploration, reference, citation, and exploring remix and rearrangement as methods of practice. His approach alternates between exploratory and didactic, with a focus on the political, cultural, and social richness of the Black diaspora. Hunter’s work often delves into speculative narratives and the intersections of physical space, digital space, and the intangible.
Hunter received his BA from the University of Toronto, and has been an artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada, and Black Rock Senegal. He was included in the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art and longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances in New York (2023), Cooper Cole, Toronto (2022), Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography, Bamako (2022), Gallery 44, Toronto (2021); A Space Gallery, Toronto (2020); among others. Hunter lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Learn moreYemenwed is a collaborative project series, which brings together an expansive cast of artists from varied disciplines. Through video, performance, sculpture, and musical instrumentation, Yemenwed explores abstracted concepts of displacement and detachment, fluid identity, domesticity, and the peripheral. Yemenwed has participated in exhibitions and performances at MoMA P.S.1, Performa 09, Fake Estate Gallery, 179 Canal, John Connelly Presents, and Gavin Brown's Passerby. Their publications have been distributed by Ooga Booga (Los Angeles), Printed Matter (New York), Quimby's (Chicago), United Bamboo (Tokyo), and Midway Contemporary Art (Minnesota).
Selected Press
Yemenwed's Fantasy Architecture, Michael Bullock, Interview Magazine, December 1, 2008.
Art Collective Yemenwed Visits Mars, Emma Pearse, New York Magazine, November 25, 2008.
Learn moreYétundé Olagbaju is an artist and maker, currently residing in Oakland, CA. They utilize performance, sculpture, action, gesture, and video as through-lines for inquiries regarding Black labor, legacy and processes of healing. They are rooted in the need to understand history, the people that made it, the myths surrounding them and how their own body is implicated in history’s timeline.
They have shown work at various spaces including Oakland Museum of California, Southern Exposure, and Museum of the African Diaspora. They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of the inaugural Nancy Cook Fellowship, the Murphy Cadogan Awards, the Jay Defeo Award, and the Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellowship.
Learn moreYOKO HIGASHINO is the artistic director and choreographer for Baby-Q. Her productions depict emotional ups and downs, impulses in the human body, and the true nature of mankind. Her body-based performances combine various dance elements and present her strong and vivid viewpoint of the world. She received the prestigious Choreographer of the Next Generation at the Toyota Choreography Awards in 2004 and Yokohama Prize for Brilliant Future in the group dance category in the Solo/Duo Competition in 2005. As a solo artist, Higashino collaborates with many musicians. Sometimes she appears in clubs, bars, or galleries, naming herself as “Kemumaki Yoko,” an unclassifiable avant-garde dancing body.
Yoko Higashino, Mariko Takei, SHIFT, April, 2009. Learn moreYo La Tengo is a critically acclaimed indie rock band from Hoboken, New Jersey. They’ve recorded twelve studio albums, written soundtracks to the films Junebug, Shortbus, and Old Joy, and provided a score for the surrealist aquatic films of Jean Painlevé.
Learn moreYOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is yhchang.com. It is also Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge. They have made work in 17 languages and presented much of it in major art institutions, including Tate London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the New Museum, New York. Selected Press "DISTANCE, HOMELESSNESS, ANONYMITY, AND INSIGNIFICANCE": AN INTERVIEW WITH YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES", Thom Swiss, The Iowa Review, December 15, 2002. Interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Hyun-Joo Yoo, dichtung-digital, February, 2005. Selected Video
Learn moreYOUNG JEAN LEE (Artistic Director) is an OBIE award-winning playwright and director who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays, The Shipment and Lear) and by Samuel French (Three Plays by Young Jean Lee). She is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, NYFA, NEA, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Rockefeller MAP Foundation. She is also the recipient of two OBIE awards, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award.
Learn moreZan Yamashita was born in OSAKA, 1970, started to dance at the age of 19. He studied modern dance and classical ballet at several dance studios, while giving street performances in Osaka.
In 1990, Yamashita joined a performance group, Monochrome Circus in Kyoto as a dancer.In 1993, he choreographed his first piece "Music" for the Monochrome Circus, which was performed at the ALTY Buyoh Festival of Kyoto Prefectural Hall. He choreographed this piece as if composing a piece of music through body movements of 6 performers without using any music.
In 1994, he directed a performance work "The poetry reading" first time as an artistic director, and presented it for the Kyoto Performance Carnival. This piece was presented in a gallery space with its entire walls covered with books where the performers and the audience were placed in a nested structure. Yamashita created scenes from precisely depicting performers' subtle and detailed behaviors, movements, and the incidents that happened simultaneously throughout the space as each performer read his favorite books.
Yamashita began his career as an independent artist in 1995. His first project was "Family" in 1995, a year long project performed in the former Meirin Elementary School, the forerunner of the Kyoto Art Center (Kyoto), Toyoshina Modern Art Museum (Nagano) and Art Space Mumonkan (Kyoto). In this project, he brought the interaction with close people to the stage without altering what were already among them. After the "Family" tour, he continued to present various experimental works at theaters and galleries mostly in Western Japan.
In 2002, Yamashita presented "It is written there" at the Itami Ai Hall (Hyogo), with which the trilogy working on the relationship between language and body began. In this piece, the audience were constantly invited to turn the page of the book given at the entrance, as the stage host called the page number backward, and to enjoy switching their gaze between what was going on the stage and written on the page.In 2004, Yamashita created "Invisible man", which was presented at the Tokyo International Art Festival. And in the same year, he received the Kyoto Art Center Theatre Award for "It is just me coughing", the last piece of the trilogy.
He made an actor debut in the theater piece, "Can you hear.....?", written and directed by Shogo Ohta in 2005.
In thinking of reproducibility of the choreography, Yamashita presented "The sailors", in 2005. The performance took place on a raft-like stage shaking under the weight of 4 performers at the BankART(Yokohama) and the Kyoto Art Center (Kyoto).
In 2007, he presented "Animal Theater", a choreography focused in freedom and restriction, produced by the Kyoto Art Center Theatre Project.
In 2008, Yamashita remade and performed "It is written there" at the Kyoto Art Center Theatre Project (Kyoto), Fukuoka Theatre Arts Series (Fukuoka), KunstenFESTIVALdesArts (Belgium).
In 2009, he presented 'It is just me coughing' at Annex Garelly in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), and 'It is written there' at Istanbul International Contemporary Dance & Performance Festival (Turkey).
In 2010, he performed'It is just me coughing' at Postmainstream Performing Arts Festival (Tokyo). In February 2010, he performed as an actor in 'Ikishima - breath island' directed by Yukichi Matsumoto, produced by Seika theatre (Osaka). In April 2010, he choreographed and presented a new performance‘Daikouzui’ at St Spot Yokohama. In August 2010, he performed a remake of “Yokohama Stay” in the TBA Festival in Portland after a month of creative residency there. Yamashita performed in a perfomance by Pichet Klunchun which was presented in the Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival in Novemever 2010. In 2011, he performed, “It is just me coughing” and “Yokohama stay” as a double-bill performance at the Esplanade theatre studio(Singapore). Experimenting in original forms of communication through words and body, Yamashita presented his new performance, “It is something like a garden,” co-produced by Itami Ai Hall, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) and St Spot Yokohama.
Yamashita received a Senior Fellow Grant from The Saison Foundation in 2011,2012.
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