Artists Archive
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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 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 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 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 moreAnna Huff is a multi-media artist, composer and performer. She has extensively toured Europe and the United States under the name Anna Oxygen, performing dance pop recitals and interactive performance pieces. Best known for her aerobics live performances, she has released several albums of electronic and acoustic music, most recently "This is an Exercise” on indie label Kill Rock Stars. Her performance and video work has been presented at PS1 MOMA Contemporary, The Seattle Art Museum, NYU, The Hammer Museum, PICA, and the Rohsska Museet in Gothenburg, Sweden.
At Calarts she co-founded media group Cloud Eye Control with director Chi-wang Yang, and animator/performer Miwa Matreyek. The group has performed at numerous festivals including the Images Festival in Toronto, FUSEBOX Festival in Austin, REDCAT in LA, Exit Festival in Paris , and TBA in Portland.
She is also a member of the LA ladies Choir.
Learn moreAriel Osterweis (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) recently joined the faculty of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she will teach dance history, aesthetics, and pedagogy. She has also taught at Skidmore College, Wayne State University, and UC Berkeley. Osterweis earned her PhD in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley and her BA in Anthropology at Columbia University. Her book manuscript, Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity (working title), is under contract with Oxford University Press and examines issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary dance. Osterweis also researches Sub-Saharan African dance and mixed-race, feminist, and transgender performance that disavows dance-based virtuosity. Publications appear in Dance Research Journal, TDR/The Drama Review, Women and Performance, e-misférica, Theatre Survey, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Choreographies of 21st Century Wars (Oxford University Press, 2016). Osterweis danced with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Mia Michaels R.A.W., and Heidi Latsky, choreographs, and has served as dramaturg for John Jasperse and Narcissister. She is on the Board of Directors of the Society of Dance History Scholars and is Book Reviews Editor for Dance Research Journal.
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 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 moreDarren O'Donnell is an artist, writer, actor, and city planner. He is the director and founder of Mammalian Diving Reflex, and the author of Social Acupuncture (Coach House Books, 2006), a manifesto calling for a more socially and politically profound art and theater. His art is often described through the lens of relational aesthetics. O'Donnell is the Artistic and Research Director of Mammalian Diving Reflex (which presented projects for TBA during 2007 and 2014), a "research-art atelier" that produces performances, community-based events, and theoretical texts. The organization fosters dialogue and audience participation, and creates activist performance described by the group as "ideal entertainment for the end of the world." Its programs work to dissolve boundaries between art and life in an attempt to create an aesthetic of civic engagement.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. After working for more than forty years as Eiko & Koma, she began performing her own solo project A Body in Places in 2014. In 2017 she launched a multi-year Duet Project that she directs and performs with a diverse range of artists.
After studying with Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata in Japan and Manja Chmiel in Germany, Eiko and Koma relocated to America and went on to create 46 interdisciplinary performance works, two career exhibitions, and numerous media works. Their durational performance living installations were commissioned by the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and MoMA. Their Retrospective Project (2009 to 2012) culminated in a comprehensive monograph, Time is Not Even, Space is Not Empty, published by the Walker Art Center. Eiko & Koma were honored with the first United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and Doris Duke Artist Awards (2012). Among many other awards and honors, they were the first collaborative pair to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996) and the first Asian choreographers to receive the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award (2006).
Eiko’s solo project began with a twelve-hour performance at the Philadelphia Amtrak station. Since then, Eiko has performed variations of the project at over forty sites. In 2016, Eiko was the subject of the 10th annual Danspace Platform, a month-long curated program that brought her a special Bessie citation, an Art Matters grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In November, co-presented by Performa 2017 and Met Live Arts, Eiko occupied on each of three Sundays the three Metropolitan Museum of Art sites: For each of these daylong durational installations, Eiko created and performed in conjunction with hours-long video distillations of William Johnston’s photographs, “staining” the walls of each instillation with haunting images of herself dancing in ruined Fukushima.
Eiko teaches Delicious Movement in communities, colleges, and art schools. Using movement study as a means of inquiry along with readings and media studies, she also teaches interdisciplinary college courses about the atomic bombings and other environmental disasters. In 2016 Eiko was named Artist-in-Residence for its Dignity Project at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Eiko was a think tank fellow in Wesleyan’s College of the Environment.
Learn more"Fever One" is a B-Boy and DJ originally from Seattle, WA who relocated to New York in 1997 and eventually joined the world famous Rock Steady Crew. He is most well known for his 'gunzblazin' style which he developed while studying with his mentors Icey Ice and Lil' Lep of the New York City Breakers. Inspired by a Poppin' Battle in Seattle's Central District and the aggression he saw in breakin’, Fever One became influenced by the spirituality and competitiveness of dancing by the age of ten. Since then, Fever One became a member of the world famous Rock Steady Crew which took his career to new heights. He has performed in many prestigious venues from Lincoln Center to Madison Square Garden and Fashion Week to Dancing with the Stars. He has also lectured about the history of hip-hop at Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Washington.
Learn moreFriends of Noise is a 501-c3 org that is dedicated to boosting youth musicians via professional development workshops, curating and producing all ages concerts, and creating opportunities for youth to shine via the arts. Our ultimate goal is to remake our regional music ecosystem to include and value youth but to also be equitable and sustainable
Learn morejaamil olawale kosoko (they/he/she/jlov) is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s work in performance is rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body as a means to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.
jaamil is the recipient of awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund award, 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency, 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and consecutive 2016-2020 USArtists International awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.
Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, their book, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, was published in spring 2022.
Premiering in 2022, Black Body Amnesia (the performance reading) examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people negotiating the psychic lifeworlds of living inside the American context. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of performers including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, and DJ Maij, with sound accompaniment by Everett Saunders. In this new work, Kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a performance device. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests, and how they then archive these personal freedom narratives to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.
Their 2020 work Chameleon is a multimedia living digital art work, film, and audio transmission project that explores the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the intersection of Blackness, gender fluidity, and queerness in a pirated virtual space. Chameleon is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; the New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency program; and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, in partnership with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and Tanz im August/HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Additional development support for Chameleon was made possible, in part, with commissioning support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, through the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program.
Their 2017 work, Séancers, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in December 2017 and has toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim. Recent highlights include Mousonturm (Frankfurt, DE), FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA), Sophiensaele (Berlin, DE), the Wexner Center (Columbus, OH), Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), and Montréal Arts Interculturels (Montréal, CA), among others.
jaamil’s previous work #negrophobia (premiered September 2015, Gibney Dance Center) was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award and toured throughout Europe appearing in major festivals including Moving in November (Finland), Take Me Somewhere (UK), SICK! (UK), Tanz im August (Berlin), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (Norway), zurich moves! (Switzerland), Beursschouwburg (Belgium) and Spielart Festival (Munich).
They are a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University where they earned their MA in Curatorial Studies.
As a performer, jaamil has created original roles in the performance works of Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. In addition, creative consultant and/or performer credits include: Terry Creach, Lisa Kraus, Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, Leah Stein Dance Company, Emergent Improvisation Ensemble, and Faustin Linyekula and Les Studios Kabako (The Democratic Republic of Congo).
In 2009, they published the chapbook Animal in Cyberspace. In 2011, jaamil published the collection Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). Other publications include the American Poetry Review, the Dunes Review, the Interlochen Review, the Broad Street Review, Silo Literary and Visual Arts Magazine.
jaamil has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Baker Artists Awards, among others. From 2014 to 2020, jaamil served as a trustee on the Board of Directors for Dance/USA, the national service organization for dance professionals. jaamil is also a founding advisory board member for the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving, and currently serves as an artistic advisory member of The Field Center in Vermont.
jaamil has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center among others, and has taught and lectured at various educational institutions across the world. In Fall of 2020, jaamil was appointed the 3rd annual Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA World Arts & Cultures/Dance Department. Additionally, they lecture regularly at Princeton University, The University of the Arts Stockholm, and Exerce Master at ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France.
Learn moreJasmine Orpilla is a multipliced Ilokana/x-American vocal performance artist and operatic composer of experimental theatrical sound installations, in which she activates her lifelong practices of folk ritual dance, combat systems, and music of the Philippine diaspora, against the contemporary American framing of the first generation, imperialist military culture of her own childhood. Unlimited by “soprano” nor so-called classical beauty, her unfiltered voice-in-motion exorcizes eurocentric performance structures from her muscle memory, while remaining accountable to the oral legacies and languages of the Indigenous Pilipino musical systems she, her family, and community remains indebted to. With decades embodying center with her energetically intensive solo practice as a multi-instrumental and multilingual writer/performer, Orpilla’s work serves to humanize and honor the intersectionality of the Filipina/x-American body in agency, despite ongoing minimization of colonial history’s revisionist narratives.
Orpilla’s performance installations are intentionally embedded with materials from her own family archives, such as portraiture, heirloom jewelry, clay pottery, rare handwoven cloth, uniforms, medallions, defunct weaponry, soil, bone, gold, copper, hand-forged musical instruments and handwritten letters. As fragile materials that have survived wartime, she creates with them a kinetic, movement- and sound- sensitive space in which to re-visit, elevate, or question the inter-generationally impacted stories preserved in each object, while marking their decay over time in correlation to her voice and body.
Following intensive experience with world-renowned theater and opera directors such as Ariane Mnouchkine at Théâtre du Soleil, Paris, and Peter Sellars, over the past ten years Orpilla has taken space, internationally performing in genre-defying voices at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; CAP UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA; Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany; Théâtre Paris-Villette, Paris, France; HAU Hebbel Berlin, Germany; and more. Jasmine Orpilla’s solo and collaborative work has been supported by Creative Capital, United Artists, California Arts Council, Alliance for California Traditional Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Durfee Foundation, Mairie de Paris, and more.
Learn moreKnowledge of Wounds is the collaborative curatorial practice of S.J Norman (Wiradjuri) and Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation). Since its first iteration in Lenapehoking/NYC in 2020, and currently operational as a hybrid live/digital program, KoW is continually evolving in its mission to foreground the work of Indigenous creators and knowledge workers across hemispheres and disciplines. www.knowledgeofwounds.com / IG: @knowledgeofwounds
Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree sound artist approaching sound as a mode of connection. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
DB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an artist addressing audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience, often focusing on the role error plays as a generative opportunity. His media-centered installations are the result of DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations, and persistent, inquisitive experimentation of available materials.
Learn moreLars Jan is a director, writer, visual artist, and the founding artistic director of Early Morning Opera (EMO), a genre-bending performance + art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience. He is the son of émigrés from Afghanistan and Poland.
Jan has received multiple commissions from the Whitney Museum and developed his recent projects with major commissioning and residency support from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). His works have been also presented by The BAM Next Wave Festival, Sundance Film Festival, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Symphony Space, Kirk Douglas Theatre, Ringling Museum of Art, Pasadena Museum of California Art, and Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival.
His work has been supported by multiple awards from the NEA and Center for Cultural Innovation; Rauschenberg Foundation; MAP Fund; Adam Mickiewicz Institute; Surdna Foundation; NEFA’s National Theatre Project; NPN’s Creation Fund; New York State Council on the Arts; and the Sherwood Award. He has spoken at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Performa, and the 92Y, and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Princeton Atelier; CalArts; and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, where he was an inaugural artist-in-residence.
In August 2015, EMO’s lecture performance ABACUS will be presented by Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe, and in October 2015, the public performance spectacle HOLOSCENES will be presented by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco, prior to an exhibition of related video works at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in January 2016. Jan is a TED Senior Fellow.
Learn morePhoto: Sarah Marguier
Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a Brooklyn, NY composer, musician and artist. She produces solo albums, live performances and film/art soundtracks and frequently collaborates with artists in film, music, art, dance, multi-media, activitism and poetry, such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Caroline Monnet, Michelle Latimer and Martha Colburn. She plays violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, pedal steel guitar, sings through a megaphone, and makes field recordings. Ortman’s notable performances includes venues at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, MoMA P.S. 1, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, SF MoMA, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The Knitting Factory, CBGB’s, St. Marks Church, Dia Art Foundation, the Wave Farm, amongst countless other established and DIY venues in the US, Canada and Western Europe.
Learn moreLawrence Oliver III, who also goes by Lawren, was born in Los Angeles in 1981. They spent most of their youth and started making art in Hope, AR, where summer thunderstorms feel like a giant air conditioner with a powerful fan. Lawren has always been fascinated by fans, trains, highway bridges, and tall weeds that look like miniature trees. They make art using many different materials, but have a knack for coming up with unique ways of repurposing household materials in transformative sculptural processes--making home-made clay recipes, saturating paper and chipboard with wood glue in thick layers to form durable wood-like surfaces, and reminding people that things are never quite they way they seem.
https://lawrenceoliverartist.weebly.com
Lawrence is a 2023 Golden Spot Residency awardee.
Learn moreFounded in 2012 by Libby Werbel, Portland Museum of Modern Art (PMOMA) is an investigative project focused on the lack of major contemporary and modern art institutions within a growing metropolis. PMOMA has produced more than 50 exhibitions and events within the context of a self-actualized and community-grown modern art museum.
Learn moreLuis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio was a Mexican playwright.
Learn moreMalkia Okech is an activist, Afrofuturist, and community archaeologist. She is currently a Digital Producer for the local creative agency Mighty Engine. She is also the Associate Producer for Black Spatial Relics, an artist residency and annual convening exploring slavery, justice and freedom and has been working as a Humanities Consultant for Scribe Video Center’s Precious Places Project. She is a curator in the Philadelphia Black arts collective, Bad Apple Commune. Her interests include the cross-sections of multi-modal archaeology, art, cultural heritage, and decolonization. Malkia conducts social justice work as an anti-capitalist and abolitionist with the goal of fostering radical imagination.
Learn moreMusic Population Project is an effort to bring chamber music back to the people, invoking times when performances were public spectacles, when operas were performed in front of enthusiastic audiences, when uprisings followed premieres and classical music was pop music. The MPP germinated in Portland, Oregon under the direction of Brede Rørstad, working closely with the Music Population Orchestra, a chamber music ensemble created to fulfill the mission of The MPP. Operating more like a band than a traditional orchestra, the ensemble performs with and without electronics in configurations varying between four and twenty musicians in bars, clubs, galleries, and more traditional concert venues. Looking back to his native Norway for inspiration, Rørstad combines classical and electronic influences in what he deems klatronic compositions for chamber ensembles, commercials and short films. Rørstad is currently working on bringing the MPP to Europe and establishing an Oslo-based Music Population Orchestra.
Learn moreNature Theater of Oklahoma is an OBIE Award-winning New York-based performance group under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Since Poetics: a ballet brut, their first ensemble piece, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has been devoted to making the work they don’t know how to make, putting themselves in impossible situations, and working from out of their own ignorance and unease. Using readymade materials, found space, overheard speech, and observed gesture, and through extreme formal manipulation, and superhuman effort, they shift our perceptions of everyday reality. Selected Press Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, December 21, 2009. 'Romeo And Juliet': Just As You Misremembered It, Robert Smith, NPR, December 29, 2009. Deconstructing Romeo and Juliet, Hilton Als, The New Yorker, January 11, 2010. Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2009. Stage Notes: Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet, Tom Murrin, papermag, December 16, 2009.
Learn moreThe United States has over 700 military bases on foreign soil in sovereign countries where we have no declaration of war. This project unites musicians, researchers, and music lovers to gather covers by American musicians of songs that originate from each of these places. By creating a new rendition of songs from occupied regions, these musicians enact a second (symbolic) occupation and encourage reflection on the implications of our nation’s exceptionally expansive reach and presence.
Throughout the world, music serves as a mobilizing force, from the musicians of Bolivian President Evo Morales’ grassroots campaign to actions by CRASS and other punks. In contrast to the frequent co-optation of music as entertainment or commodity, this project will focus on music’s power to transform awareness and create change. Songs in Wartime functions as a reciprocal window: we project a limited version of American culture into foreign territory with the presence of our bases, and these distant places reflect back into our territory when we cover and share their songs.
Learn moreOffsite Dance Project was started in 2008 to pioneer alternative approaches to arts presentation through site-specific performance in locations such as trains, parks, and museums. Offsite also produces an annual community forum, We dance, to stimulate Japan’s contemporary dance scene by bringing artists from various genres together in unusual circumstances that generate new ways of approaching their art.
Learn moreBorn in Israel, Meromi currently lives and works in New York City, where he is represented by Harris Lieberman Gallery. Meromi graduated from Bezalel Academy in 1992 and went on to receive his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003. He has exhibited at venues including The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; the Lyon Biennial, France; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Magasin 3, Stockholm; De Appel Museum, Amsterdam; Sculpture Center, New York; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and Art in General, New York. He has received numerous scholarships and awards, including a Percent for Art commission (2009), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2008) Grants to Artists Award, the Fund for Video and experimental film (2004), I.C. Excellence Foundation (2003), and the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli ArtPrize (1998).
Selected Press
Ohad Meromi - 500 Words, Dawn Chan, Artforum.com, December 18, 2010.
Studio Visit - Ohad Meromi, Andrea Bellini, Flash Art Online.
Re: Diaspora - Yael Bartana, Elad Lassry, Ohad Meromi and Daniel Silver in Correspondance - Israel, Nicola Trezzi, Flash Art, October 2009.
Peripheries
Kurt Schwitters: Reconstructions of the Merzbau, Karin Orchard, Tate Papers, Autumn, 2007.
Learn moreProducing since 1997 and MCing since 1993 the Ohmega Watts resume includes two solo records on Ubiquity Records, The Find (2005) and Watts Happening (2007). MC/producer of the group Lightheaded (Tres Records) and a 7" under the name M64, which was comprised of Ohmega on production and Ragen Fykes on the vocals, released on Record Breakin (2009.) Ohmega is also an avid DJ who has toured extensively in the U.S. and abroad including Australia, the E.U. and Japan all the while expanding his record collection, and musical influences. He's performed, DJ'd alongside and supported artists/bands including: Galactic, Lifesavas, The Breakestra, De La Soul, Quantic, Mark de Clive-Lowe, Waajeed, Ge-Ology, Kon & Amir, DJ Spinna, Bobbito Garcia, Rich Medina, Cosmo Baker, and the list goes on. He's also a freelance Graphic Designer/Photographer making him a full-time creative.
Learn moreOkwui Okpokwasili is a New York-based writer, performer, and choreographer. Deemed “a magnetic performer” by The New York Times, Okpokwasili has worked with Ralph Lemon, Julie Taymor, Nora Chipaumire, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Dean Moss, and others. Bronx Gothic is her second solo performance project, after pent-up: a revenge dance. Both projects are collaborations with visual designer, filmmaker, and director Peter Born. Together they create award-winning multidisciplinary experiences of raw intimacy—a collision of body, image and sound. Okpokwasili ‘s accomplishments include MANCC Choreographic Fellow; Artist in Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Park Avenue Armory, and LMCC’s Extended Life Program; Foundation for Contemporary Arts grantee. Her current work Bronx Gothic enjoyed a sold-out run in PS122’s 2014 COIL Festival and continues to tour nationally and internationally.
Learn moreOlaf Breuning was born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland in 1970 and currently lives and works in New York. He studied professional photography in Zurich, Switzerland, and went on to complete postgraduate studies in photography at the HSFG Zurich. Breuning has had solo exhibitions at Metro Pictures, New York; Migros Museum, Zurich; Chisenhale, London; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; and Magasin, Grenoble. He has also been included in several international group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial 2008 at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Looking At Music at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); All About Laughter at Mori Art Museum, Japan (2007); Let’s Entertain at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centre Georges Pompidou.
Selected Press
WHO WANTS MORE? An interview with Olaf Breuning, David Coggins, Artnet.com, November 17, 2009.
Olaf Breuning, Burkhard Meltzer, Frieze, January 2008.
Learn moreOlivia Camfield is a multimedia movement artist of the Muscogee Nation, born and raised in Texas Hill Country. Their work finds connection to dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism. They have performed and choreographed dance for much of their career, and their film work includes themes of the Alien as kin, time traveling relatives, and Mvskoke lifeways in experimental forms. They are a tattoo artist whose hand poke practice is based in Southeastern and Mississippian Indigenous tattoo traditions, creating designs for Southeastern people that imagine the possibilities of those tattoos in the future and the new shapes they may take. Olivia's films have screened internationally at Camden International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and have appeared in print and online publications such as Artforum and Variety. Olivia is a 2018-19 Alembic Artist In Residence, a CYCLE I featured artist of COUSIN Collective, a 2022 Sundance Institute Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive participant, and a 2022 recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s LIFT–Early Career Support for Native Artists award.
Learn moreOmari Weekes is an assistant professor of English and American Ethnic Studies at Willamette University where he teaches courses primarily on gender and sexuality in African American literature. He is currently working on a book project that thinks through the affective dimensions of sex and spirituality in contemporary black literature. Other research interests include black popular culture, black religious studies, and representations of African Americans in Latin America. His writing (both scholarly and otherwise) has appeared in Public Books and Post 45.
Learn moreBorn in Seattle when the last person leaving was supposed to turn out the lights, Omar Willey has been an experimental filmmaker and photographer since 1989. He has made six feature films and a dozen shorts that have been shown locally as well as broadcast internationally. He is currently finishing up a five year project in hyperphotography dealing with the human use of public land.
In 1988 he began writing about performing arts for KCMU radio (now KEXP). Shortly thereafter he started his first magazine, Free Forum, dedicated to literary arts and cultural analysis. After this he began another zine, Lines of Sight, dedicated to photography and film and featuring interviews and articles about contemporary artists as well as photography. After this he moved on to freelance writing for Earshot Jazz, 5/4 Music, Tablet Magazine, and other local magazines. In 2010, he joined the staff of the online blog, Seattlest, where he remained till it shuttered.
For the past three years, he has been known as the publisher of the online journal of arts and culture, The Seattle Star, in which he has continued his interest in writing about performing arts, science, experimental film, and open culture.
Mr. Willey is an alumnus of both Western Washington University and the University of Washington. He volunteers time to open source software movement, Project Gutenberg, and Creative Commons projects across the country. He teaches free workshops in critical writing and photography around town. He is interested in everything.
Learn moreAs an alumni Prancing J-Sette of THEE Jackson State University. I always stay ready, so I don’t have to “Get Ready” Hi! I’m O’Necia Ford hailing originally from Eldorado, Arkansas. In high school, I cheered all of my life and danced for the Southern Belles Dance Company where I was captain from 2014-2016. I then went to finish my matriculation at JSU where I graduated in May 2020 with a bachelor's in Criminal Justice and Correctional Services. In college I of course danced with the Prancing J-Settes along with the JSU Dance Ensemble and other organizations. I’ve participated in dance throughout my life with different genres such as tap, ballet, hip hop, jazz, and majorette. Some of my best accomplishments throughout my journey of cheering and dance have been performing on ESPN, NBA halftime games, opening for Big Freedia, and being a part of music videos that featured big stars such as Trina and Big Krit.
Learn moreOne of My Kind (OOMK) is a collaborative publishing practice led by Rose Nordin, Sofia Niazi and Heiba Lamara. Working together since 2013, they design, publish and distribute books and printed works which arise from self-initiated projects. OOMK functions as an annual publication centreing women, creative practice and activism. OOMK also commission new works by artists and co-curate DIY Cultures, one of the UK’s largest annual independent publishing fairs. Together OOMK founded and run community Risograph printing studio, Rabbits Road Press.
Learn moreThe Brooklyn-based artist has always deftly balanced the experimental with the accessible: He has released several albums under his Oneohtrix Point Never moniker on various independent labels – including the 2013 3-CD/5 LP Rifts, a compilation of his early work – as well as amassing a large catalogue of mini-album tape releases. His most recent disc, 2011’s Replica, was built around samples of television commercials; Sasha Frere Jones of the New Yorker called it “music that gently triggers a series of images and feelings, none of which you can name and all of which seem entirely common.” He has built live soundscapes at the Museum of Modern Art; collaborated with Montreal-based ambient electronic music composer Tim Hecker on the largely improvised 2012 Instrumental Tourist; and recast the title track from his 2010 disc Returnal as an elegant and emotive piece for piano, featuring the otherworldly voice of Antony Hegarty. Advertising powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi tapped Lopatin for an installation event at the 2012 Cannes film fest and Sofia Coppola’s longtime cohort Brian Reitzell invited him to create original music for Coppola’s The Bling Ring. Said the Saatchi execs, “There’s this grandeur to his music, but it’s always counterbalanced by moments of irony and lightness.”
Selected Press:
"The Top 50 Albums of 2013," Pitchfork, December 2013
Learn moreOregon Mushroom Stories, a project of Ecotrust and Edible Portland, brings the surreal, fantastical beauty of mushrooms, and the knowledge of growers, foragers and fanatics, out of the dark to a broad audience. Join PICA and Oregon Mushroom Stories for a weekend of mycological happenings at the crossroads of nature and culture, science and art, food and fungi.
Related Thinking and Artists
"Sounds and Mushrooms," Edward Rothstein, The New York Times, November 22, 1981.
"John Cage and Mushrooms," Audrey Ference, The L Magazine, September 5, 2012.
"Beard Beer: Rogue Ales Creates Brew Out Of Yeast From Brewmaster John Maier's Facial Hair," Hillary Hanson, Huffington Post, September 26, 2012.
Learn moreThe Oregon Painting Society is an art collective from Portland, Oregon, formed in 2007. They have exhibited and performed at Fontanelle Gallery (PDX) and Reed College (PDX).
Learn moreSince the Oregon Symphony was established 117 years ago, it has been recognized for its internationally acclaimed music directors, skilled performers, diverse programs, and outstanding community services in education and regional touring. The Oregon Symphony now ranks among the largest orchestras in the nation, and the oldest west of the Mississippi.
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 morePablo de Ocampo lives in Vancouver where he is Exhibitions Curator at Western Front. He has curated screenings, exhibitions, and performances at galleries, cinemas, and festivals internationally. From 2006 to 2014, de Ocampo was Artistic Director of the Images Festival in Toronto, and in 2013, served as the programmer of the 59th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, History is What's Happening. He was a founding member of the collective screening series Cinema Project in Portland, OR.
Learn moreLarrakia language. Born 1938. Died 2OO2.
Known as Midpul to his Larrakia kin, there is some debate as to how Prince of Wales acquired his royal epithet. Some suggest it was because he danced for Queen Elizabeth II when she visited Darwin in 1963. More likely is that it was because he was the son of King George (Imabul) and grandson of King Miranda, the recognized leader of the Larrakia at the time of the British arrival in Darwin. Midpul never ascended to King because by the time he became leader of the Larrakia, the patronizing colonial practice of “crowning” Indigenous leaders had been eliminated. Irrespective, Midpul was a proud and important leader of his people. In 1971, he and his brothers mounted a public protest to have parts of Darwin declared a Larrakia reserve, and later he was actively involved in the successful Kenbi Land Claim. Despite suffering a stroke that paralyzed most of his left side, Midpul began painting in 1995, drawing his inspiration from the body markings used in ceremonial rituals. Although the Larrakia had a long artistic tradition, Midpul was the first artist to seek a sustained engagement with the contemporary art world. Without any template to work from, he produced works of singular poetry and grace; restrained yet visceral; tremulous yet compellingly assured. Compared to the tight-knit dot- paintings of the Central desert, Midpul’s paintings were a revelation. Across stark, unmodulated grounds, his marks hover like ghostly fingerprints. Haptically direct, these marks offer a stark evocation of the body in movement, creating a haunting metaphor for the memory ancient rituals burnished into the ether of time. In 2OO1, Midpul was awarded the general painting prize at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. His works are held in most state collections in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Learn moreQueaz Otti is South Sacramento raised, a loving father, aspiring rapper, and street philosopher of the people.
Known to many as a loyal brotha and voice of understanding.
Learn moreRachid Ouramdane is a French choreographer of Algerian descent at the forefront of Europe’s conceptual dance thinkers. His projects reassess the definitions of “performer” and “choreographer” and question modes of producing and circulating artwork. Prior to founding L’A. in 2007, Ouramdane collaborated with artists such as Emmanuelle Huynh, Meg Stuart, Christian Rizzo, Alain Buffard, and choreographer Julie Nioche, with whom he co-founded Fin Novembre in 1996. Ouramdane has worked with institutions also focused on visual art, including FRAC Champagne/Ardennes, Manège de Reims, and the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris. Besides choreography, Ouramdane regularly leads artistic workshops and moderates international encounters with artists.
Peripheries
The Purple Shall Govern, Daniel Fernández Pascual, deconcrete, June 8, 2011. Learn moreRoyal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE) has performed rituals at the Guggenheim Museum, Under the Radar Festival, FringeArts, Under the Radar’s Incoming! Series, Gibney Dance Center, Kate Werble Gallery, Special Effects Festival at Participant Inc., Prelude Festival, AUNTS Arts@Renaissance, and JACK. ROKE received a 2016 Creative Capital award for The Art of Luv series, and has been awarded a Franklin Furnace Fund grant (2013) and a BAX Space Grant (2014). They were part of the Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group and PS122’s RAMP residency program. They spent the summer of 2014 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and were 2015 CUNY Hunter Artists-in-Residence in ceramics. The Art of Luv (Part 1): Elliot is created with support from The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group, Gibney Dance Center, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and a residency at CUNY City Tech. Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble is supported by Immediate Medium’s AGENCY program, which provides financial, administrative, and equipment support to emerging artists. The Art of Luv is a project of Creative Capital.
Learn moresidony o’neal is an artist and writer working from interdisciplinary research and pre- to post- machine computing. o’neal’s practice treats conceptual art and mathematics as related forms of industrial culture that have shaped human relationships to objects, labor, and technology over time.
Recent solo exhibitions include Et al. (SOFTMAX HARD HASP), San Francisco, CA; Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, (The Pudding Butcher), Princeton, NJ; Dracula’s Revenge (NOT TALKING UNTIL BAD COMPANY JOINS), New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Enchiridion: Aisle, Spline, Resort), Portland, OR; and Veronica (AuguRing), Seattle, WA. Duo and group exhibitions include Third Born (Continuous Dimensional Thorax), Mexico City, Mexico; ICA at Maine College of Art and Design (ENTER:), Portland, ME; and SculptureCenter (In Practice: Total Disbelief), Long Island City, NY. o’neal has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Banff Centre, Banff, AB, among others. o’neal is the co-founder of INFANT design firm. Performances as a part of DT have been presented with Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, and Performance Space New York. o'neal is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Oregon Arts Commission's Joan Shipley Award and a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. In 2023, o’neal was awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship. Learn moreSylvan Oswald is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Philadelphia who creates text-based projects exploring trans identity, history, and nonviolent dramaturgy. He seeks alternative structures designed to respect all people. He seeks spaces that interrupt consumption and open up new styles of satisfaction.
Current work includes High Winds (Fusebox Festival, X Artists' Books); text for choreographer Meg Foley's Blood Baby; and an essay titled "Towards a Trans Theater." Projects include "Cut Piece," a personal history of play publishing; Play A Journal of Plays (2003-2011); and Outtakes, a lo-fi semi-improvised web series starring Becca Blackwell and Zuzanna Szadkowski, hosted at weareopentv.com. Plays include Trainers: A Theatrical Essay (Gate Theatre, London, Oberon Books); A Kind of Weather (Diversionary Theater, San Diego); Profanity (Undermain Theater, Dallas); Vendetta Chrome (Clubbed Thumb, New York); and Pony (About Face Theater, Chicago). Pony is a seminal work about queer and trans belonging revived summer '22 in a production directed by Jess Barbagallo.
Honors include a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rosati Fellowship from Duke University Libraries, the Thom Thomas award from The Dramatists Guild, a Jerome Fellowship, and residencies at Sundance/Ucross, Macdowell Colony, and Yaddo. Sylvan is an alum of CTG's Writers' Workshop, an affiliated artist at Clubbed Thumb, and an alum of New Dramatists.
Learn moreTara Jane O’Neil is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and visual artist. She composes and performs under her own name and in collaboration with other musicians, artists, dancers, and filmmakers. As a solo artist, she has released ten full-length albums. O’Neil was a founding member of Rodan, the Sonora Pine, and several other bands. She has collaborated on recordings and stages with Papa M, Steve Gunn, Hand Habits, Lower Dens, Michael Hurley, Little Wings, Marisa Anderson, Catherine Irwin, Mirah, Mount Eerie, and many others. Since 1992, has performed at clubs, galleries, and DIY spaces around the world and venues such as the Centre de Pompdou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer, and the Broad. She starred in the cult classic film Half-Cocked and scored feature films, including His Lost Name, Great Speeches From a Dying World, and others. Her visual art work has been shown in cities including London, Tokyo, LA, New York, and Portland, and has been published in three monographs.
Learn moreWith over twenty years of dance-making behind him, Tere O’Connor continues to challenge the accepted tenets of dance as performance. His distinctive compositional style is bewitching, richly textured, and disturbingly beautiful. Bringing both theatrical and physical elements to the stage, O’Connor’s choreography casts an eye on contemporary society and human behavior and challenges his audiences to consider alternative choices and imagined worlds.
As well as touring extensively with his company throughout the US and Europe, South America, and Canada, O’ Connor has created commissioned works for several other dance companies, including Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. He is a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow, and has received two Bessie Awards, one for Heaven up North (1988), and a second in 1999 for Sustained Achievement. Most recently, O’Connor was invited to participate in the DNA Project, a new program of Arts International.
Learn moreSelected Press
Interview: How Artist Tom Russotti Creates Art from Drinking, Dancing, and Sports, Peter Simek, FrontRow, July 21, 2011.
Drinking and Dancing, Mike Kepka, San Francisco Chronicle, November 22, 2009.
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 moreOberzan is an original member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, based in New York City. With Nature Theater, he has collaborated and performed in productions including Poetics: a ballet brut, the Obie-winning No Dice, and the one-man show, Rambo Solo. His latest theater/film work, Your brother. Remember? premiered at Brussel's Kunstenfestivaldesart. Oberzan has also released two albums of original music, most recently Athletes of Romance. He has performed with the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and is currently collaborating with the Dutch group Kassys.
Selected Press
Rambo Solo: Zachary Oberzan's Flooding With Love For the Kid, Matt Zoller Seitz, The L Magazine, January 6, 2010.
Rambo redux, as a homemade, one-man, no-budget movie, Ben Walters, Guardian.co.uk, June 17, 2009.
Learn more