Artists Archive
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Sacha Yanow is a New York City-based artist and actor. Her solo performance works include: Dad Band, New Museum, NYC (2015); Silent Film (in development), The Lab, San Francisco, Pieter, Los Angeles, and MAPP/Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY (2015), Dixon Place, NYC (2014), and Movement Research Festival, NYC (2013); and The Prince, Dixon Place, NYC (2013). Her residencies and awards include: LMCC Process Space (2016); SOMA, Mexico City (2015); Dixon Place, NYC (2014); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2012); and The Field, NYC (2011). She was creative consultant for Elisabeth Subrin’s feature film A Woman A Part (2016), and co-director and dramaturge for Dynasty Handbag’s performance piece Soggy Glasses (The Broad/REDCAT 2016, Brooklyn Academy of Music 2014). Yanow received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a graduate of the William Esper Studio Actor Training program.
Learn moreDolphin Midwives is the solo project of Portland-based harpist/composer/producer Sage Elaine Fisher. Her ecstatic ritual experiments are made audible through electronic feedback, whispered and watery soprano, iridescent harp, ASMR beats, glitch and phasing loops.
Learn moreSahar al-Sawaf (she/her) is an Iraqi-American filmmaker, visual artist, and photographer based in Oregon. Born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Lebanon and Iraq, she fled to California just before the Gulf War. Her work explores war, displacement, and fragmented family memory shaped by her experiences in Iraq and the United States. Her short films “Uncle Ma’an,” “Um Abdullah,” and “Shadow of Paradise” have screened internationally, including at DOC NYC, Chicago International Film Festival, and Animafest Zagreb. She was a Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center in New York, NY, and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Video/Film. Most recently, she completed a photogravure intensive at Mullowney Printing, supported by a Regional Arts Cultural Council grant. Her photo-performance work is featured in the 2026 Artists’ Biennial, The Price of the Ticket, at Oregon Contemporary.
Learn moreSaint Abdullah is the moniker of Mohammad and Mehdi, New York based Iranian-Canadian brothers working across sound, and music. Inspired by Iran’s religious, political and cultural history, the project was formed out of a deep frustration with the way the West perceives – and treats – Muslims and the Islamic faith. We aim to challenge stereotypes and act as a conduit between unnecessary enemies.
Learn moreSalimatu Amabebe (they/he), is a Bay Area-based chef, multimedia artist and the founder/ director of Black Feast. Amabebe's work focuses on the intersection of food and art, drawing from family memories, Nigerian recipes, and Black culinary history.
@salimatuamabebe Learn moreSam Gould is the co-founder and editor of Red76, an experimental publication platform. Established in Portland, Oregon in January of 2000, Red76 often works towards forming publics through print and other methods like meals and public projects that open space to discuss social, educational, and political life in America today.
Gould has taught within the graduate department for Social Practice at the California College of the Arts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has written, as well as lectured extensively within the United States and abroad.
Learn moreGreen is a documentary filmmaker based in New York and San Francisco. His film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, and the NEA.
Selected Press
Sam Green's Love Song at SFIFF, Mike Plante, Filmmaker Magazine, May 7, 2012.
'The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller' with Yo La Tengo at SFIFF, John Angelico, SFGate Culture Blog, May 3, 2012.
A hundred visions and revisions, Sam Stander, San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 17, 2012.
Someone else's glasses: Sam Green Talks Buckminster Fuller, Moriah Ulinskas, Bay Area Video Coalition, April 25, 2012.
Learn moreSam Hamilton (Sam Tam Ham) is an independent, working class, interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent based in Portland, OR. After 20 years of working independently and professionally across experimental music and sound art, moving and still image, painting, writing, performance, stage, cinema, and curatorial projects, Hamilton's practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but verdant garden full of old and new growth, hidden places, edible arrangements, toxic weeds, garden parties, frolicking, and most importantly, the life-affirming ferment of deep existential entanglement. What physically emerges in any given season through the confluence of this garden depends most simply on what vessel(s) best serve the idea at hand.
The long song
a meandering garden path
Both an entrance and an exit
Hamilton's work has existed in a wide range of contexts, including Converge 45, Portland; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Portland Art Museum, OR; Transmediale, Berlin; Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival; Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland; as well as a research station in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, an active volcanic island crater, a billboard, a functioning Shinto shrine in Japan, an anarchist squat in Athens, Greece, the Australian outback desert, a dank underground parking lot, some dude’s apartment in Lima, Peru, and on the radio.
In addition to their solo work, they have collaborated extensively with artists across Aotearoa New Zealand, Sāmoa, Australia, Kiribati, the US, Finland, Japan, and Peru, including ten years spent working with the internationally acclaimed Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, touring major works to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAB; Ruhrtriennale, Ruhr; KVS; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; and more.
Their work has been recognized with a Creative Capital Award, Oregon Community Foundation's Creative Heights Award, and an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award, among others.
Learn moreArtist and composer Samita Sinha creates multidisciplinary performance works that investigate origins of voice. She synthesizes Indian vocal traditions and embodied practices to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation. Sinha's works have been commissioned and presented by Asia Society, Performance Space 122, Danspace, Rubin Museum, Queens Museum, Western Front, and Gibney Dance, among others. Sinha teaches voice extensively.
Learn moreSamiya Bashir’s books of poetry: Field Theories, Gospel, and Where the Apple Falls, and anthologies, including Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, exist. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. She lives in Portland, Ore, with a magic cat who shares her obsession with trees and blackbirds and occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
Samiya Bashir is the author of Field Theories (2017), as well as Gospel (2009), and Where the Apple Falls (2005), which were both Lambda Literary Award finalists. She is also the author of the chapbooks Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring (1999), American Visa (2001), and Teasing Crow (2006). She is also the editor of Black Women’s Erotica 2 (2003) and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art (2002), with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana. Her work has been most recently featured in Poetry, Drunken Boat, World Literature Today, Portland Monthly, Tuesday, An Art Project, The Offing, Ecotone, HOAX, Poet Lore, Callaloo, and The Encyclopedia Project. Samiya also collaborates with a variety of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Field Theories in Light, Sound, & Movement, with Roland Dahwen Wu and Keyon Gaskin, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, currently on exhibition at L.A. Louver. Bashir is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent. Bashir lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches creative writing at Reed College. “Breath,” Bashir says, “is everything.” Bashir’s work helps to remind us not only to breathe, but how, and why, and together.
Learn moreTBA:16 Guest Scholar Sampada Aranke (PhD, Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in Art Journal, Equid Novi: African Journalism Studies, and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. She’s currently working on her book manuscript entitled Death’s Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics.
Learn moreSan Cha is a Mexican-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice blends rancheras, electronics, cumbia, and pop to explore themes of identity, power, and liberation. Born Lizette Gutierrez to Mexican immigrant parents, San Cha's artistic journey began with singing in the Catholic Church choir and evolved within the vibrant Bay Area queer drag nightlife scene. This formative period fostered a unique fusion of musical influences, including Catholic hymns, Mexican corridos, rancheras, cumbias, and punk queer electroclash, shaping her distinct artistic voice.
Rooted in the DIY, punk, and queer nightlife cultures, San Cha's work is driven by a commitment to personal, social, and political liberation. Her creative process is fueled by community narratives, lucid dreams, and cultural exploration. A transformative experience living on her aunt's farm in Jalostotitlán, Mexico inspired her to reimagine traditional ranchera music through a queer lens, subverting established forms and cultural signifiers.
San Cha's early work, such as the Capricho del Diablo EP (2018), received critical acclaim, with Bandcamp Daily naming it Album Of The Day. Her 2019 album, La Luz De La Esperanza, earned an 8.0 rating on Pitchfork and recognition as one of The Advocate's "Women Of The Year" in 2020. Her music has been featured in the Starz TV series Vida and Kacey Musgraves' film Star-Crossed: The Film, with the Los Angeles Times declaring, "San Cha sings from a divine place." Her ongoing Processions (2024) mixtape, released through Ballroom Marfa, further demonstrates her artistic versatility and commitment to exploring complex narratives.
San Cha's practice extends to collaborative projects in classical music and opera. She has engaged in projects, performances, and residencies with Performance Space New York, New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; lumber room, Portland, OR; The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Red Bull; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; Denniston Hill, Glen Wild, NY; Oak Head; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; Movimiento de Arte y Cultural Latino Americana, San Jose, CA; KQED; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Portland, OR, and more. Her work has also been supported by the California Arts Council.
Recent awards and accolades include the National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund Grant (2023), National Performance Network Documentation & Storytelling Grant (2024), Los Angeles Performance Practice Research & Development Award (2024), a 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. San Cha's work consistently pushes artistic boundaries, utilizing music and performance as powerful vehicles for sociopolitical change and liberation.
Learn moreSanchel Brown is a mother/performer/choreographer/medicine woman originally from Baltimore, MD. She has worked professionally in commercial, concert, and theatre primarily in New York and Philadelphia. She obtained her B.F.A from Virginia Commonwealth University, and since then has continued her studies at L’Ecole De Sable in Senegal West Africa, with Rhapsody James in Los Angeles, and Rhythm One Acting with Ozzie Jones. She began her career as an apprentice with Urban Bush Women. Her performance career continued on with highlights such as World of Dance Philadelphia, The Kimmel Center's 2018 Jazz residency, Davido’s Coming to America Tour, Theatre Horizon's Black Nativity (Barrymore Win!), and Let 'Im Move You: This is a Formation (National Tour). Her choreography highlights include Theatre Horizon's "The Color Purple" Regional PREMIERE ( nominated for Outstanding Movement/Choreography) and Yale University Dramat's "Dreamgirls". Recently, she has shifted her focus into her self-produced healing works including her hit dance play "Home To Homeland” and musical titled “Wheelz of Life”. Sanchel currently teaches her original “AfroClub “ dance class fusing Baltimore House and West African Dance Forms.
Learn moreSandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is a Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher. Her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Her works are in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; Amon Carter Museum, TX; The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, CA; Denver Art Museum, CO. She was awarded the 2023 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency, Creative Capital Award, and Migrations Initiative from Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell. Rodriguez and her work have been featured in BBC News: In The Studio, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Spectrum News 1, and others.
Check out a behind-the-scenes video of Sandy Rodriguez's work in Policing Justice.
Learn moreSara Greenberger Rafferty is an artist and art writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her photos, paintings, and sculptures reveal a fascination with comedy, performance, and intentional accidents (foot + banana peel, photo + spilled water, pie + face). She received her BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and her MFA in Sculpture and New Genres from Columbia in New York. Greenberger has had solo exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; The Kitchen, New York; P.S.1, New York; and The Suburban, Chicago. She has also produced a project for the 2007 Time-Based Art Festival. From 2005–07, Rafferty was co-editor of the annual publication North Drive Press; her own writing about art and comedy has been published in several notable art and culture publications. Rafferty is represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery New York.
Learn moreSarah AbuAbdallah lives and works in Qatif, Saudi Arabia and studied art in both Rhode Island School of Design for a Masters in Digital Media, and in the College of Art and Design in University of Sharjah. She is currently an artist and puzzlemaker. Working with video, installation, poetry and images. Shown work in Sharjah Biennial 11, Serpentine Galleries Marathons, Fluidity in Kunstverein in Hamburg, Co-Workers in Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Do it Arabic, Prospectif Cinéma/Filter Bubble in Centre Pompidou and Luma Foundation, Private Settings in Warsaw Museum of Modern Art; Arab Contemporary in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Rhizoma in the 55th Venice Biennale, amongst others
She is the recipient of Sharjah Art Foundation’s production programme grant (2016) in collaboration with Josh Bitelli for their project To Gaze at Ten Suns Shining and is a shortlisted artist for Abraaj Group Art Prize 2017.
Learn moreSarah Brahim is a performance and visual artist from Saudi Arabia. Her work includes video installation, live performance, textiles and dance collaborations for galleries, museums, performance and film festivals. Her work is rooted in experiences of the body such as identity, loss, borders, and immigration.
TBA:20 | Mobile Projection Unit: Fernanda D'Agostino and Sarah Turner
AGAINST THE CURRENT
September 14, 2020
Learn moreSarah Dougher is a musician, composer, and university professor. She has performed for over twenty years, including at PICA’s TBA festival and has received commissions from the Classical Greek Theater of Oregon, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Multnomah County Library, and the Cooley Gallery at Reed College.
Learn moreSarah Farahat is a transdisciplinary Egyptian American* artist, cultural worker, teacher, and abolitionist dreaming of a more collective future for all beings. She holds a BA in Psychology from Occidental College, a BFA in Intermedia Studies from PNCA, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has trained in auricular acupuncture at the historic Lincoln Recovery Center in The Bronx, and participated in Beirut's Homeworkspace program on the coattails of the Arab "Spring." She teaches art at local colleges and for kids in her community, and is a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. For the past 16 years, Farahat has monitored the body within the sociopolitical landscape in the US and abroad, intervening with works that explore grief, connection, assimilation, storytelling, and engagement. Grassroots movement building informs her work. She finds joy in reading speculative fiction, talking with plants, cooking, and DJing. Her work lives in protests, archives, public and digital spaces, and is in the permanent collections of JustSeeds Collective, Pittsburgh; Arab American National Museum, Dearborn; Charles Voorhies Fine Art Library, Portland; Palestine Poster Project, Silver Spring; and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Culver City. She has been featured in publications including Artforum, The Oregonian, L'Orient-Le Jour, and The Daily Star. As a nomadic child of diaspora, Farahat plants portals through taste, smell, and sound while continually attempting to live in reciprocity with the land wherever she creates home. She is a co-founder of the SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center in Portland.
* Farahat grapples with an appropriate way to name her location amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects.
Learn moreSarah Gilbert (she/they) is an artist and educator based in what is currently called Los Angeles, CA (Gabrileño/Tongva/Kizh Lands), where she is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Affiliate Faculty in Gender and Feminist Studies at Pitzer College. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Brown University, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Idaho.
Gilbert’s work explores craft and collectivity—how the sticky relationality of material transformation can open spaces for thinking and feeling together in more-than-human worlds. Joining a wide range of materials and processes, her promiscuously interdisciplinary practice moves between art and science, synthesizing traditional craft techniques with emerging technologies. Often unsettling clear boundaries between past and present, her work draws on material memory and tensions between figuration and abstraction as springboards for contemplating our experience of time. Moving us away from narratives of material mastery or maker-movement individualism, Gilbert's practice highlights the ethical particularities of encounters with difference, and the radical potential of embodied attunement to reorient us towards collective care.
Gilbert has exhibited widely throughout the US and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include BREAKING AND BENDING, curated by Stephanie Snyder at the Edith Feldenheimer Gallery at Reed College, Portland; GOOSEBUMPS, an interactive sound installation as part of the 7th Tallinn Applied Arts Triennial, Estonia; and TURNINGS at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including WOMEN ON THE FENCE in Desert Hot Springs; GENERIS01: COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION at Bushwick Expo, Brooklyn; BORN/MADE at Tartu Art House, Estonia; GLASSAC 17 in Lisbon; WHITHER THE AMERICAN DREAM at Punch Gallery, Seattle; and IMAGINED COMMUNITIES at Gallery Project, Ann Arbor.
In 2014, Gilbert was awarded the inaugural 4Front: Innovation From All Angles Residency at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has been a Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America, Millville; and a Resident Artist at Faro Tláhuac, Mexico City; Olustvere Mõis, Estonia; Glazenhuis, Lommel; and the LC36-Kunstverein, Cologne.
Her published writing includes:
“A Widening Chromaticism: Learning Perception in the Collective Craftwork of the Encounter” in Material Perceptions, Documents of Contemporary Craft no. 5, edited by Knut Astrup Bull and André Gali, Arnoldsche Art Publications, Stuttgart, Germany, 2018.
“Understories: A Common Ground for Art and Science,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in the Museum Catalog for Alma Heikkilä’s Exhibition: ‘ , ‘ /mediums,.’_ ” bodies,.’_ ” ° ∞ logs,∞ ‘ , ‘ /~` ‘ holes, .’ `-. ` .’ — °habitats / /`‘ * ‘-‘ . ‘ , ‘ /~`want to feel (,) you inside | * . . * * | ..* . . *./..-. ~ .’ ‘ , ‘ /~` ❅ ☼ ~, curated by Satu Oksanen, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, 2019.
“Process Epistemologies for the Careful Interplay of Art and Biology: An Afterward,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in Drawing Processes of Life: Cells, Molecules, Organisms, edited by Gemma Anderson and John Dupre, Intellect Press, Bristol, United Kingdom (forthcoming, 2023).
Learn moreSarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY. Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice in a subversive examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and performance art. She has presented her work in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes (NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan), and Second Edition (Stockholm). Hennies is currently a member of improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music.
Learn moreWorks and Commissions
Value Talk: Sarah Michelson: On Devotion Study #3 and Devotion Study #4, the experience of sharing an artist and work between institutions, presented by MoMA at New York City Center, New York, NY, May 14, 2014
4, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, January 24-26, 29-February 2, 2014
Devotion Study #3 (work in progress) MoMA Some sweet day series curated by Ralph Lemon, New York, NY, November 2-4, 2012
Not a Lecture/Performance Crossing the Line Festival, FIAF, Tinker Auditorium, New York, NY, October 12, 2012
Devotion Study #1, The American Dancer The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, March 1-11, 2012
Devotion On The Boards, Seattle, WA, March 10-13, 2011
Devotion ODC Theater, San Francisco, CA, February 28 - March 6, 2011
Devotion Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, February 17-19, 2011
Devotion The Kitchen, New York, NY, January 14-16, 19-22, 2011
CanDoCo Dance Company Commission, London, March 3 - April 29, 2010
Dover Beach The Kitchen, New York, NY, June 2009
Dover Beach, Chapter Arts, Cardiff, Wales, UK, September 2008
DOGS, Tanz im August, The Hebbel Theater, Berlin, Germany, August, 2007
DOGS, Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival, New York, NY, October 2006
Swan Lake, Transitions Dance Company, London, May 2006
Daylight (Seattle), On the Boards, Seattle, WA, October 2005
Daylight (Minneapolis), Walker Art Center, (Commissioner) Minneapolis, MN, September 2005
Daylight, Performance Space 122 (Co-commissioner), New York, NY, June 2005
Love is Everything, Lyon Opera Ballet (Commissioner), Lyon, France May 2005
Shadowmann, Tanz im August, Berlin, August 2004
Shadowmann, Zurich Theatre Spektakel Festival, August 2004
Shadowmann, Venice Biennale, July 2004
Shadowmann, SommerSzene, Salzburg, Austria July 2004
Shadowmann, The Cutting Edge Festival, Frankfurt, Germany, June 2004
219, Casa Hoffman, Curitiba, Brazil, July 2003
Shadowmann, The Kitchen and P.S. 122, New York, NY, March/April 2003
The Apartment, 857 5th Avenue, New York, NY, February 2003
NGE, Movement Research at Judson Church, New York, NY, January 2003
Dancing, Danspace Project at St. Marks Church, New York, NY, October 2002
Group Experience, Zurcher Theater Spektakel, Zurich, Switzerland, August 2002
ONE NIGHT ONLY THE WHEATLY BALLET, Lexington Arts Center, Lexington, NY, June 2002
Grivdon at the Grivdon Lawn, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, Mass., June 2002
The Experts, White Oak Dance Project, May 2002
Grivdon at the Grivdon Concrete, The Kitchen, New York, NY, April/May 2002
Group Experience, P.S. 122, New York, NY, October 2001
I'm in Fawn, The Kitchen, New York, NY, February 2001
Prelude to Fawn, BAX, Brooklyn, NY, January 2001
Plether, Die Pratze, Tokyo, Japan, July 2000
Hot Heap, Die Pratze, Tokyo, Japan, July 2000
AUT NORM, The Congress Theater, Chicago, Illinois, June 2000
Aut Norm, P.S. 122, NYC, April 2000
Blister Me, Dixon Place, New York, NY, April 2000
Miami 3XLA, The Kitchen, New York, NY, December 1999
Spit and the Believers, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, New York, NY, March 1999
Glory Glory Glory, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, New York, NY, November 1993
Where God is Now, Cunningham Studio, NYC, April 1992
Cindy Camille Sheila and Shirley, New Performance Gallery, San Francisco, 1990
Upcoming Works and Commissions
4 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN September/October 2015
Awards and Grants
Doris Duke Artist Award, 2012
The Bucksbaum Award, 2012
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2009
Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, 2008
Alpert Award in Dance, 2006
Creative Capital, 2006
American Music Center Live Music for Dance Program, 2006, 2007, 2009
The DSJJ Fund, 2010
The Jerome Foundation, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, 2005
The Rockefeller MAP Fund Award, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2010Meet the Composer, Commissioning USA, 2008
New York Foundation for the Arts BUILD Award, 2004, 2010
New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, 2010
New England Foundation for the Arts, National Dance Project Grant, 2004, 2010
National Performance Network Creation Fund, 2004, 2010
The Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions, Arts International, 2002, 2004
The Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund, 2004, 2009, 2011
Yellow House Fund, 2011
Altria Group, Inc. 2002, 2003, 2004
NY Dance and Performance Award, "Bessie," 2002, 2003, 2007
DNA Project Grant, Arts International, September 2002
Der Foerder Prize Zurich, September 2002
Learn moreSarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, journalist, and AIDS historian. Her most recent books are the novel THE COSMOPOLITANS, selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best American novels of 2016, and CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE, winner of the Publishing Triangle Nonfiction Award. Sarah is currently collaborating with icon Marianne Faithful on a work of musical theater, THE SNOW QUEEN, incorporating 24 of Marianne's great songs from her long career. Sarah is co-founder, with Jim Hubbard, of MIX: NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, (now in its 30th season), the ACT UP Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory,org) and are co-producers of Jim's featuring documentary film UNITED IN ANGER: A history of ACT UP. Sarah is on the advisory board of Claudia Rankine's The Racial Imaginary, and Jewish Voice for Peace. She is faculty advisor to Students for Justice in Palestine at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, where she is a Distinguished Professor.
Learn moreSarah T. Hamid (she/her/no preference) is an immigrant, Muslim, and abolitionist working at the intersection of technology and global/domestic warfare. Currently the PDX Lead Organizer for Freedom to Thrive, she co-founded and helps advise the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, an archiving and knowledge-sharing network for organizers building community defense against the design, roll-out, and experimentation of carceral technologies, and serves on the coordinating team for the inside/outside research collaboration, the Prison Tech Research Group. Sarah also sits on the board of the Lucy Parsons Lab in Chicago, and helped create the #8toAbolition campaign: a police and prison abolition resource built during the 2020 uprisings against state violence.
Learn moreSarah Turner is a new media artist, curator, and community builder based in Portland, OR. She is the artistic director of Pink noise and the Co-Founder of Mobile Projection Unit. Her work utilizes large scale video mapping projection and immersive installations. Her work has been shown at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Portland International Film Festival, Portland Art Museum, Northwest Film Center, Spaceness Festival, Marfa Open Festival, and more.
Learn moreSara Jaffe is a writer living in Portland, OR. Hurricane Envy, a short story collection, was published in Fall 2025 by Rescue Press. Dryland, a novel, was published by Tin House Books and Cipher Press (UK ). Her short fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in publications including Joyland, Fence, BOMB, NOON, and Maggot Brain. She co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians, drawing on her experience as a guitarist for post-punk band Erase Errata.
Sara has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, RADAR Productions, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council. She is also co-founding editor of New Herring Press, a publisher of prose chapbooks. She teaches creative writing as part of the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low-Residency Creative Writing MFA.
Learn moreSara Krajewski is the newly appointed Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum. Krajewski was previously the Director of INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she curated an array of interdisciplinary exhibitions and performances with artists such as Xavier Cha, Mateo Tannatt, and Morgan Thorson. In 2012, Krajewski was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for research into emerging transdisciplinary artistic practices in visual art and performance. Krajewski was curator at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle from 2004 - 2012 where she focused on solo artist projects and group exhibitions exploring photography's impact on visual culture.
Learn moreSara Ludy is an American artist whose work explores confluence of the physical and virtual. Her practice incorporates photography, Second Life, animation, video and sound. Past exhibition of her work have included Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Berkeley Art Museum, California; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles; bitforms gallery, New York; Postmasters Gallery, New York; Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Western Front, Vancouver; Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Barbican Centre, London; Carroll Fletcher, London; and Xpo Gallery, Paris.
Learn moreSara Magenheimer (b. Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York: Art in General + Kim?, Riga, Latvia; COR&P, Columbus, Ohio; JOAN, Los Angeles; Recess, New York, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, and DOCUMENT, Chicago. Her videos have been screened at venues such as Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Images Festival, Toronto; and The New York Film Festival. Her work has been in group shows at White Columns, New York; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston; and Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague.
Learn moreSara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, 1976-) is a master artist from the South Coast of Oregon. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators; her training began in the home. Her lifelong mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakima). Her weaving teachers are Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation). Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. She has been represented by Augen Gallery since 2010.
Her studio work is multi-disciplinary and branches into education and institutional reform. These concepts directly influence and are reflected in her artwork and public presence. Siestreem created and runs a weaving program for the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people. She teaches collegiate studio arts and theory at PNCA. Her work in institutional reform relates to curatorial and educational practices regarding Indigenous fine art and critical race theory. She is director of the Present Future Action Lab at the OJMCHE.
Siestreem's work has been widely supported through grants, residencies, and fellowships. It has been shown in museums and institutions regionally, nationally, and internationally. Locally, her work has been on near constant public display for over a decade. Her work figures in public and private collections around the world.
She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon
Learn moreSasha Wortzel is a visual artist and filmmaker working between South Florida (Miccosukee and Seminole lands) and New York City (Lenape lands). Blending the archival and the imaginary, Wortzel uses film, video, installation, sculpture, sound, and performance to explore how the past haunts and inextricably shapes contemporary American life. Projects examine queer place-making, geographies of resistance, and the systems that marginalize, extract, and erase communities, peoples, and histories.
Wortzel’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art’s DocFortnight, True/False Film Festival, DOC NYC, BAMcinemaFest, Blackstar, New Orleans Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Berlinale, among others. Their work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and The Kitchen, New York; and SALTS, Birsfelden. Wortzel has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Doc Society, Art Matters, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. Wortzel has participated in residencies including Smack Mellon’s Artist Studio Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Abrons Arts Center, Watermill Center, New York; AIRIE (Artists in Residence in the Everglades) and Oolite Arts, Miami Beach. Wortzel’s film This is an Address (2020) is distributed by Field of Vision. Happy Birthday Marsha! (2018; co-director Tourmaline) won special mention at Outfest and is distributed by Frameline. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Miami Dade County Art in Public Places. She has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and New York Magazine. Wortzel received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College.
Learn moreSathya is a Bay Area-based artist with a particular focus on the somatic ripple effects of trauma & social alienation. He is an Indian gay trans man with a history of FSSW.
@transfxgsneverdie
Learn moreSatpreet Kahlon (b. 1989) is a Panjabi-born artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a full fellowship to pursue her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2019. In addition to her studio practice, which has been featured in Hyperallergic and Artforum, she co-founded and -ran an Indigenous arts organization that supported 400 artists with over $2 million of opportunities and rematriated 1.5 acres of greenspace that was slated for development during her tenure from 2017-2023. For this work, she was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine in 2019, and was a 2022 Roddenberry Fellow for “new and innovative strategies to safeguard human rights and ensure an equal and just society for all.”
Kahlon's practice has been supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; National Endowment for the Arts; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Critical Minded; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; 4Culture, Seattle, WA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Magnum Foundation, New York, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; and Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA, among others. She is the 2024 recipient of the Foundwork Artist Prize, an annual international juried award “to support outstanding artistic practices,” and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in PICA's 10,000-square-foot warehouse space.
Learn moreSatya Byock is a psychotherapist in Portland. Her clinical and academic work is rooted in the scholarship of Carl Jung, which emphasizes the reality of the unconscious and its impact on human experience, identity, and relationships. Through studying the language of dreams, mythology, and history, Satya seeks to better understand what propels us towards acts of creation and destruction. Prior to working as a clinician, Satya studied and worked in a variety of settings internationally including with prisoners in Colombia, with students and Buddhist monks in central Sri Lanka, and with farmers in post-tsunami South Asia. She has also worked with tech start-ups, non-profits, and foundations in Portland and California. She holds a B.A. in History from Lewis & Clark College and a Masters in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She has a private practice in downtown Portland.
Learn moreScout Niblett is an English singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Niblett debuted in 2001 with her first full-length studio album Sweet Heart Fever, and has gone on to release five more studio albums.
Learn moresean chamberlain is a queer artist currently living in Portland, OR.
Their practice largely focuses on identity production, the ethics of the second self, and the construction of our IRL/URL worlds. This work predominantly manifests through video, installation, publication, and performance, as well as being engaged through curatorial work, event production, and writing. chamberlain has exhibited at b10, Composition, GAK Space, First Brick, One Grand Gallery, and has performed in various nightclubs, both above and below ground.
@seanchamberlain
Learn moreSeba Calfuqueo are from Mapuche origin. Their work appeals to their inheritance to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural, and political status of the Mapuche subject in contemporary Chilean society and in Latin America. It includes installations, ceramics, performances, and video art that explore cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes produced from the cross between Indigenous and Western ways of thinking. Their research also has the purpose of making visible feminist and sexual dissidence issues. Seba Calfuqueo is part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, which edits YeneRevista, an online magazine of art, thought, and writing in Wallmapu and AbyaYala language.
Learn moreSilent Ending Caught in Rapture Emblems Truth and Secrets (S.E.C.R.E.T.S.) is a performance based surrealist musical project from Portland, OR, and is comprised of musician Aaron Chapman (of Nurses), and visual artist/dancers Andrea Glaser and Rose Dickson.
Learn moreTrained as a composer, Sergei Tcherepnin (b. 1981) works at the intersections of sound, sculpture, and theatre. Tcherepnin was included in the 55th Venice Biennale and in the recent exhibition of sound works at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He presented a major site-specific sound and sculptural installation as part of “The Imminence of Poetics, the 30th Bienal de São Paulo.” Other recent exhibitions include “Pied Piper, Part 1,” Audio Visual Arts, New York (2012); “Looking at Listening with Ei Arakawa,” Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2011); “Be a speaker. So be it…” with Ei Arakawa and Gela Patashuri, CAC Brétigny (2011) and the Showroom, London (2011). Recent performances include The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012); The Art Institute of Chicago with Das Institut and United Brothers (2012); Issue Project Room, Brooklyn with Woody Sullender (2012); the 30th Bienal de São Paulo with Jutta Koether and Yuki Kimura (2012); Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York with Das Institut and United Brothers (2012).
Learn moreThe organized sound of Shaky Hands veers off the path right from the start. Their pounding rhythm lives somewhere between folk and crunk with a high energy sensitivity that has become a given at their frenetic live performances. Nick Delffs, Colin Anderson, Mayhaw Hoons and Jeff Lehman live in Portland, Oregon and are currently recording their first full length album.
Learn moreShameka Marshall is a retired track and field athlete, coach, and educator specializing in the long jump and hurdles. A three-time U.S. Olympic Trials qualifier (2004, 2008, 2012), she won a silver medal in the long jump at the 2011 Pan American Games and earned a silver medal runner-up at the 2008 USA Indoor Championships. A Rutgers University graduate and Hall of Fame inductee (2017), she still holds six school records, including the indoor and outdoor long jump. Marshall coached at the collegiate level from 2008–2016, winning Penn Relays titles in 2014 and 2016, and has served as an adjunct professor at Temple University from 2008–2023.
Learn moreBorn in California, Moulton is a Brooklyn-based video, installation, and performance artist. She attended school at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, De Ateliers, LMCC, and Harvestworks. She was also a New Commissions artist at Art in General in 2009. Moulton has presented at venues such as The Wexner Center, MoMA P.S.1, The Kitchen, Performa 09, Electronic Arts Intermix, the Andy Warhol Museum, and Socrates Sculpture Park.
Selected Press
Whispering Pines 10 at the Kitchen, Kareem Estefan, BOMBlog, April 28, 2010.
The Object Whisperer: Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines, Brian Droitcour, Rhizome, April 14, 2010.
Learn moreShanekia McIntosh (*1989) is a writer, creative arts programmer and dj born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. In 2010, McIntosh moved to Hudson, New York, and has been actively engaged in multimedia work (radio, performance, curation). Most recently founded and published art + writing zine ZeroCool.
Learn moreShannon Funchess is an activist and self-taught, interdisciplinary queer performance artist. The founder, vocalist, producer of internationally revered, electronic music project LIGHT ASYLUM founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2007, she has engaged audiences in performance at DIY art spaces, museums, galleries, music festivals and nightclubs in the U.K., North America, Europe, South America, Scandinavia, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Australia and Canada. Her musical journey began in a gospel choir of a southern baptist church in Spokane, Washington at the age of nine. With an ethos rooted in community and a passion for collaboration, she has joined forces with artistic peers and allies globally. From recording studio vocal features, creating sound design and remix productions for performance artists The Knife, LEECH, Yves Tumor, TR/ST, Chris Garneau and Justin Kennedy among others to lending vocals and appearing as an actor in video installation works of Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Michelle Handelman, Gloria Maximo, Wu Tsang, Tony Ousler, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner. She has regularly been invited on stages as a guest performer / musician with artists the likes of The Knife, LCD Sound System, TV on the Radio, electronic music pioneer Laurie Anderson, Coco Rosie and Christeene. Funchess has established herself as a force across her community and is lauded for her cathartic performances as well as a DJ at established art institutions, clubs and underground events. She’s at home in all stages of her creative exploration and continues to produce music and art within her community in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreBorn in Madras, India, and brought up in Paris, Shivalingappa is the child of East and West. She is a world-renowned practitioner of the classical Indian Kuchipudi technique, and she received an intense and rigorous training from the master teacher Vempati Chinna Satyam. Driven by a deep desire to bring Kuchipudi to Western audiences, she has performed in important festivals and theaters around the world, earning praise and admiration from all.
Acclaimed for her rare talent by artists and connoisseurs in India and Europe, Shantala combines a perfect technique with flowing grace and a very fine sensitivity. Since the age of 13, she has worked with some of the greatest artists of our time: Maurice Bejart, Peter Brook, Bartabas, and Pina Bausch. She began dancing with Pina Bausch in 1999 and was a featured performer in Bausch’s Nefes and Bamboo Blues.
Selected Press
A Dancer rises in the East, and now the West, Julie Bloom, New York Times, December 10, 2008.
Learn moreAs an artist, Sharita Towne’s interests lie in unpacking the inherited struggles of past burdens and in affording collective catharsis. Through collaboration, stereo-photography, printmaking, video, and community art projects, she’s worked at memorials in Germany; in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria; Brazil; in gentrifying cities like Portland and New Orleans; in schools, museums, and neighborhoods, and within her own family. She received a BFA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Portland State University. She currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art, works in the DIY printmaking and audiovisual collective URe:AD Press (United Re:Public of the African Diaspora), the post-colonial conceptual karaoke band Weird Allan Kaprow, and is a 2016 Art Matters grant recipient.
Learn moreDr. Sharon Groves works at the intersection of faith, LGBTQ equality, and social justice. Throughout her career, she has been guided by the belief that no one should have to choose between who they are, who they love, and what they believe. Sharon is currently working with Faith and Public Life to forge new dialogues between evangelicals and the LGBTQ community and with the Religious Institute for Reproductive Choice to create a theological frame for reproductive justice. Sharon is the former Director of the Religion and Faith Program at the Human Rights Campaign, a post she held from 2005-2014. Through her leadership Groves oversaw breakthrough conversations with conservative and moderate religious leaders nationwide to advance dialogues around faith and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. She guided the mobilization of faith organizers in statewide advocacy work, including marriage efforts in Oregon, Illinois, Rhode Island, Maine, Maryland and Washington State. Groves has also overseen the development of many training tools and resources for advocacy efforts as well as efforts to increase understanding of LGBT family and friends from a faith perspective. Among such resources that she spearheaded are A La Familia, a bilingual guide for Latino/a families struggling with the Bible and LGBT family, and its accompanying film, Before God: We Are All Family and Triumphs Through Faith, a tool for faith leaders organizing for justice. She has also created a Summer Institute for Religious and Theological Study, which invests in the next-generation of LGBT and allied faith scholars.
Sharon served as editor and managing editor for Feminist Studies, an interdisciplinary scholarly journal at the University of Maryland. She received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Maryland in 2000 and has furthered her theological education through extensive coursework at Chicago Theological Seminary, Wesley Theological Seminary, and the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation. She is an active lay member at her local congregation, All Souls Church in Washington, D.C.
Learn moreShawna Lipton is Chair of the MA in Critical Studies Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). She received her Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a literary scholar whose work is fundamentally informed by interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies.
Learn moreSHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. SHAWNÉ was a 20-21 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Queer Theatre & Performance Resident and is currently teaching across the New Arts Journalism and the Film Video New Media and Animation departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Learn moreShayla Lawson is (and / or, at times, has been) an amateur acrobat, an architect, a Dutch housewife, & dog mother to one irascible hound. Her work has appeared in print & online at Tin House, GRAMMA, ESPN, SALON, The Offing, Guernica, Colorado Review, Barrelhouse, & MiPOesias. She is the author of: A Speed Education in Human Being, PANTONE, & the forthcoming I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean (Saturnalia Books, 2018). She is a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellow and resident of Portland, OR.
Learn moreIranian-born visual artist Neshat is known for her hauntingly beautiful explorations of Islam and gender relations. Neshat left Iran before the revolution in 1979 and, since 1996, has been unable to return to her country due to the controversial nature of her art. Over the past 15 years, she has created work that draws from her personal experiences in exile and the widening political and ideological rift between the West and the Middle East. Neshat has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery (London), and was the recipient in 1999 of the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial. In 2009, Neshat won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice Film Festival.
Selected Press
Women Without Men: A Conversation with Shirin Neshat, Leila Darabi, PBS Frontline: Tehran Bureau, May 5, 2010.
Women Without Men - In 1953 Iran, Sisterhood Sought During a Coup, Stephen Holden, The New York Times, May 14, 2010.
Shirin Neshat: An Interview, Eleanor Heartney, Art in America, June 16, 2009.
Shirin Neshat: Women Without Men, Tehran Review.
Shirin Neshat, Arthur C. Danto, BOMB, Fall 2000.
Shirin Neshat: A long way from home, Homa Khaleeli, Guardian.co.uk, June 13, 2010.
Iran's Hidden Turmoil: Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men, Sarah Kerr, nybooks.com, May 14, 2010.
Learn moreShirotama Hitsujia discovered her passion for cabaret singing and performance art after studying literature at Meiji University in Tokyo. In 1994, she founded Yubiwa Hotel, a key force in Japan’s alternative theatre scene. Yubiwa Hotel has created more than forty works, all written, directed, and performed by women. They are known for a burlesque–like aesthetic that ranges from the delicate to the outrageous, and often use non-traditional spaces like warehouses, galleries, underground dance clubs, rooftop tennis courts and strip clubs. Their work has toured internationally and includes Long Distance Love (2001), Yubiwan Beauty (2001), and It’s Up to You (2003).
Learn moreSholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose immersive works, performances, and audience participatory scores implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary’s practice is a conglomeration of visual, sound, and collective processes, all of which she is deeply dedicated to.
Featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue,” Asgary has been supported by numerous residencies, most recently including Headlands Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, UCLA Art Sci, ARoS Kunstmuseum, and Berkeley Art Center. Her work has been presented through performances, exhibitions and screenings by such institutions as Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Minnesota Street Project, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, 500 Capp St., and Ann Arbor Film Festival. Asgary holds an MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University. 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 moreSigne Becker is a freelance scenographer and artist. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA) in Fredrikstad (2006) and a Master’s Degree in visual culture from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2008). Her artistic projects include theatre and dance productions, as well as personal art projects as installations, pictures and video work. In recent years, she has worked on a number of productions in Norway, and for six years she has been a permanent scenographer at Verk Produksjoner. Their The Eternal Smile won the prize of The performance of the year (2011), and Becker was nominated for best scenography for the performance Stalker, 2013. She also curates and organizes «++», a monthly art event held in the foyer at Black Box Theatre, Oslo.
Learn moreSilvia Bottiroli is a curator, researcher and organizer in the contemporary performing arts field. After completing a Ph.D. in Visual and Performing Arts at Pisa University, she attended the EU training program SPACE / Performing Arts Managers on the Move (2009-2011), and several international seminars and gatherings, such as the conference “Beyond Curating” at Pact in Essen (2011), the marathon “Truth is Concrete” at Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz (2012), the Spring Meeting at PAF / Performing Arts Forum in St Erme (2013), the program Watch and Talk at Basel Festival (2014) and the workshop Empty Stages, Crowdes Flates on Curating the Performing Arts in Cracow (2014).
Silvia is the co-author of two books and numerous papers and essays about the XX Century and contemporary performing arts scene, focusing especially on the dimension of collective creation and collaborative practices. Additionally, she has supervised diverse critical, curatorial and educational projects in collaboration with art organizations and public institutions in Italy and abroad, including with a.o. SNDO School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, Homo Novus Festival in Riga, and Ghent University, Vooruit and Campo in Ghent.
Since 2011, Silvia has served as Adjunct Professor at Bocconi University in Milan, where she teaches Methodology, Critique and Research in the Arts and Theatre, Festivals and Live Performances. From 2008 to 2011 she worked for theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio and has been part of the Critical-organizational Committee of Santarcangelo Festival, directed by Chiara Guidi/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Enrico Casagrande/Motus and Ermanna Montanari/Teatro delle Albe. From 2012 to 2016, she has served as the artistic director of Santarcangelo Festival, one of the most relevant contemporary performing arts festivals in Italy.
Learn moreSimon Liu (b. 1987, Hong Kong) is an artist filmmaker working between alternate documentary forms, abstract diary films, 16mm projection performance, and video installation. He has exhibited at film festivals and institutions globally including the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, British Film Institute, The Shed, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Cinéma du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, “Dreamlands: Expanded,” and a solo-presentation at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Mondays series. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s quadruple 16mm projection “Highview” with other recent works for their Permanent Collections. Liu is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art, and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. Liu is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.
Learn moreRichard Bishop, guitarist and founding member of the band Sun City Girls (1981-2007), released his first solo record (Salvador Kali) in 1998 on John Fahey’s esteemed Revenant label under the moniker Sir Richard Bishop. Since then he has released albums on a variety of labels: Improvika, Elektronika Demonika, and While My Guitar Violently Bleeds (Locust Music); Fingering the Devil (Southern Records, UK); Hypostasis: A Work in Three Parts (VDSQ); Intermezzo (Editions Mego); The Unrock Tapes and Road to Siam (Unrock); and Polytheistic Fragments, The Freak of Araby, Tangier Sessions, and Oneiric Formulary (Drag City).
“Sir Richard Bishop forces one to alter that hoary cliche ‘jack of all trades’, to master of…damn near all. Renowned for his mercurial guitar-playing for 26 years with Seattle ethno-delic legends Sun City Girls, Bishop has wrought a distinguished solo canon as well. He combines soulfulness and advanced technique with a panache that’s nearly unrivaled among today’s guitarists. Bishop strums spiritual with incantatory ragas, free-folk excursions, crystalline flamenco flourishes, ruddy Appalachian folk, Middle Eastern-tinged fantasias and gypsy arabesques. This is eclecticism done with respect and third-eye-dilating filigree; his compositions attain a sepia-toned wistfulness and a psychedelic complexity.” - Dave Segal (OC Weekly)
Learn moreS.J Norman (b. 1984) is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. His career has so far spanned 18 years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between Australia, Germany, the UK, and the United States.
His practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. Working extensively with durational and spatial practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks, Norman's primary medium is the body. Drawing on embodied ancestral lineages of ceremonial praxis, Norman frequently utilises relational and process-based choreographies as a mode of structural critique: reflected in his work is an abiding interest in the space of co- and inter-corporeality, the forces that suffuse it, and how the live act might be utilised as a mean to examine, disrupt and re-inscribe prevailing systems of social power.
Norman has received major commissions from the Biennale of Sydney (AU), Performance Space New York (US), Dark Mofo (AU), The National Gallery of Australia (AU), Venice International Performance Week (IT), Spill Festival of Live Art (UK), Fierce Festival (UK), In Between Time (UK), Arnolfini (UK), Liveworks (AU), Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AU), Unsound Festival (PL), Fusebox Festival (US), Melbourne Festival (AU), Tarnanthi Festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art (AU) and Tate Modern (UK), the Science Gallery London (UK), Die Fabrikanten (AT), and the Festival of Live Art (AU), to name a few. He has received numerous awards for his work including a Sidney Myer Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship, two of Australia's most prestigious honors for art.
Aside from his artistic and curatorial practice, he is also a writer of fiction, essays, and poetry. He has won or placed in numerous literary awards, including: The Peter Blazey Prize, The Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award, The ABR/Elizabeth Jolley Award for Short Story, and the Overland/Judith Wright Prize for Poetry. His award-winning debut short story collection, Permafrost, will be published by the University of Queensland press in 2021.
Learn moreFresh out of the backwoods of sunny Tampa, Florida, S. Loper was educated in "The Greatest City in America," Baltimore, Maryland at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2010, degree in hand, Sloper stepped into the professional arena, pioneering as a toy expert and acting as a videographer, and sole animator for one of Tampa's finest cinematic enterprises. In result of a high-stakes bet, Sloper made the move to Portland, Oregon where all sorts of charm and adventure seem to follow in tow.
Learn moreFormerly known as Adelaide, Small Sails is a music and film collective based in Portland. Their music is a gorgeous mix of electronic post-rock anthems, with visuals performed live using original 16-mm film loops on dual projectors. A field of dandelions plowed over, silhouettes of overlapping faces, a flowing river of color, sing-song vocals, and warm spacey melodies, that’s what Small Sails looks and sounds like. Chanting, humming vocals hint at tangibility, while remaining half-submerged; rhythms are a baby-bouncing jumble of eclectic percussion and twittering electronics; and soaring over the top, achingly gorgeous melodies stripped down to the still-gleaming bone.
Learn moreSNAP! is a monthly party that happens every last Friday of the month at Holocene in Portland, Oregon. This DANCE PARTY is held down by Portland resident DJs: Doc Adam, Colin Jones, Freaky Outty and hosted by Ms Coco B. The vision behind the party is to offer a slice of nostalgia that will deliver booty-shaking, head-nodding, and memories of all those awesome middle school dances. SNAP! is proud to have hosted some of the most talented DJs/Producers touring the world currently.
Learn moreSojourn Theatre is an eight-year-old ensemble making original performance in Portland and around the country, committed to a consistent investigation of the relationship artists and audiences have to place and architecture during the event of theatre. BUILT continues their pursuit of actions and practice that make use of complex research and cultural context to move beyond documentary and civic dialogue to create compelling, engaging theatre that demands presence and actual exchange.
Learn moreVocalist & songwriter Soot Uros delivers a new sound with a strikingly ancient spirit. The music of Soot Uros introduces a refreshing experience to the magic of chanting & singing, while exploring the darker musical spirits of Hip Hop & Jazz, with a rich & soulful under-world tone.
Learn moreSophia Tweed Ahmad is a freelance movement artist, vocalist and costume maker. Over the years she has been exploring the intersections of dance, the voice, and costume design. Her movement training stems from Contemporary Dance, Contact Improvisation and Capoeira currently training in Portland with Capoeira São Salvador with Mestre Pedro Cruz. Her choreography has been presented by Ten Tiny Dances, Performance Works NW, Stripart Festival, Choreoscope Dance & Film Festival, and is currently in Residence at Shaking the Tree Theatre. Find her at Capoeira Rodas, teaching Soft Acrobatics and working with multicultural youth.
Learn moreSorour Darabi is a self-taught Iranian artist living and working in Paris.
Working actively in Iran, they were a part of the underground organization ICCD, whose festival Untimely (Teheran) hosted their work before their departure for France.
During studies at the CCN de Montpellier they created the solo Subject to Change, a performance that questions transformation with regards to time and one’s cohabitation with an environment.
In 2016, they created Farci.e a solo dealing with notions of language, gender identity, and sexuality, as part of the Montpellier danse festival.
In 2018, they created Savušun, an ode to affection, vulnerability, and affected beings, which draws inspiration from Muharram's mourning ceremonies and addresses the issue of emotions: grief, fear, and suffering.
In 2021, they create Mowgli - inspired by the jungle as an infinite territory at the crossroads of contemporary myths - and Natural Drama - a post-dystopic myth that questions the notion of “Nature”.
Learn moreSounds et al is an independent record label exploring sound, product design, collaboration and curation.
Learn moreRecognized worldwide as one of today's most accomplished monologue artists, Spalding Gray is also a celebrated writer, actor, and performer. He has created over 14 monologues which have been performed throughout the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia, including Swimming to Cambodia, which also earned him an OBIE Award. Mr. Gray has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. His work is noted for its eccentric detail, razor wit, and encyclopedic obsessiveness. Regarded as the "high priest of anxiety," his monologues and stories are autobiographical in nature, built through improvisation, and reflect the mastery of years of experience.
Learn moreSpencer Byrne-Seres is an artist, preparator and culture-worker based in Portland, ORE. His activities range from woodworking and custom fabrication to administrative and curatorial project management for museums, non-profits, commercial galleries, colleges, small alternative spaces and for himself.
Spencer has been making research based and socially engaged projects that look at the intersection of broad systems with the daily and the personal. Spencer is interested city infrastructure, international time standards, and submarine cables. These often opaque or invisible structures allow us to connect, and inform how we think about and move around to built environment.
He currently co-runs a conceptual art club called Sunday Painters Group in collaboration with Roz Crews, and maintains 2xfourtune, a library of recycled dimensional lumber for recycle and reuse by artists around Portland.
He has recently been experimenting with kite mapping on the Oregon coast, planting signs on college campuses, and cultivating an obscure vlog personality.
Learn moreFounded in New York in 1980 with Deb Margolin, Split Britches continues with the duo and solo work of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw which spans satirical, gender-bending performance, methods for public engagement, videography, digital and print media, explorations of aging and well-being, and iconic lesbian-feminist theatre.
Learn moreStacey Levine is a poet and free-lance writer in Seattle. Her books include My Horse and Other Stories, which garnered her the 1994 PEN/West Fiction Award, and Dra---, both published by Sun & Moon Press in Los Angeles. Other collaborations with the Black Cat Orchestra include The Post Office, a radio play that she wrote and directed in 1995, about a narcissistic postal employee, a whining customer, and matters of the human heart.
Learn moreStacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR currently based in Providence, RI. She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, family, identity. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and diaCRITICS. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018).
Learn moreStanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video, with a practice that includes performance, writing, sound design, drawing and digital media. Kahn’s kinetic relationship to humor informs a hybrid media practice infused with pop vernacular, documentary tropes, improvisation, comedy and experimental film/video praxis. The work inhabits spaces between fiction and document and stems from an extensive background in live performance. Integrating the performative with the candid, Kahn addresses issues like agency, power, trauma and the uses and failings of language.
In addition to her solo work, she has been in collaborative teams with artist Harry Dodge and with the performance company CORE. Her solo and collaborative works have shown in numerous venues nationally and internationally including The Whitney Biennial (08); The California Biennial (10); MoMA/NY; MOCA/LA; The Getty Center/LA, the Hammer Museum/LA; the Sundance Film Festival; Migrating Forms Film Festival; the Center for Art and Media/Karlsrühe; PS1 Museum of Contemporary Art/NY; Contemporary Center for Art/Vilnius, Lithuania; MIT, Cambridge; ICA, Philadelphia; Kunstalle, Bonn, GDR; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Hayward Gallery, London; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles and Elizabeth Dee Gallery/NY, among many others. Recently solo shows include the New Museum in New York and currently on view at Cornerhouse in Manchester is a survey of her solo works from 2008 to the present with an accompanying book. Kahn is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video.
Learn moreStephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual, and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay, and dialectic. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human and non-human existence (its morbidity, profundity, and banality) with play and humor.
Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums, and festivals.
Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema. Publishing Genius Press published her books Night Moves and these here separated... in 2013 and 2010 respectively. CTRL+P published a collection of her haiku, Status Update Vol. 1 in 2019 and her full-length play Trial in the Woods was published by Plays Inverse in 2021 with a second pressing in 2022.
James Glisson at Artforum wrote, "...the films of Stephanie Barber engage universal themes—time, death, memory, forgetting, frustration." and Ed Halter at Afterall Online wrote, "Barber...approaches cinema as a philosophical toy, intimately small, in which the play itself generates both pleasure and insight."
Barber is currently Department Head of Film and Digital Cinema at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, PA. She is also a resident artist at The Mt. Royal MFA for Interdisciplinary Art at MICA in Baltimore, MD, and a teaching artist for The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and Image Text Ithaca.
Learn moreStephanie DeGooyer (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is Assistant Professor of English at Willamette University. Her work focuses on the intersections of law, politics and aesthetics. She is co-author of The Right to Have Rights (forthcoming from Verso Books) and is completing a manuscript titled The Aesthetics of Democracy. Beyond the academy, DeGooyer writes for the art magazine frieze. She is also co-organizer of Moonlighter Presents, a lecture series that invites scholars to speak on topics outside their field of expertise.
Learn moreStephanie Snyder is the Anne and John Hauberg Director and Curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, a position she has held since 2003. Snyder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College and completed her graduate studies in Art History and Art Education at Columbia University. In 2008, Snyder received a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation, and in 2014 she was a Fellow in the Getty’s Museum Leadership Institute. In 2013 she received an award for her critical writing from the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the CUE Foundation, New York. The author of numerous catalog essays and other writing projects, she is a regular contributor to Artforum.com.
Learn moreStephen Slappe is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the South Carolina State Museum; The Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; The Sarai Media Lab in Delhi; Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco; and The Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR. Slappe was the recipient of a Couture award from the New American Art Union in Portland for his 2009 exhibition entitled Shelter in Place.
Learn moreStephen Thompson, originally from Calgary, Alberta is an inter-disciplinary artist working between Canada, USA and Europe. Stephen’s introduction to movement and performing was through competitive figure skating. He received a Bachelor of Kinesiology (art and science of movement) and Dance from the University of Calgary. In 2015 at the World “Figure” Championships in Lake Placid, Stephen received the bronze medal. In 2016 he received a Victor Martin-Lynch award from the Canada Council for the Arts. Past choreographic work and collaborations: 2012 Bessie award winning Antigone Sr. (Large), The Ghost of Montpellier and the Samurai (2014) with Trajal Harell, Culture Administration & Trembling (2014), Les Etudes (2017), Chaud (2020); Jennifer Lacey, Antonija Livingstone, Dominique Pétrin, whatwearesaying (2014); Public Recordings (2 Dora Mavor awards Toronto), numerous projects with Benoit Lachambre, Relative Collider (2015); Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard, Service #5: Try to keep kids off naturalism and Kein Paradiso with Adam Linder recipient of the Mohn Prize at the L.A. Bienniale, Stitchomythia with Nadia Lauro and Zeena Parkins, Dramaturge for Such Sweet Thunder (2019) recipient of 8tensions Impulstanz, Compulsory Figures (2019) co-signed with French visual artist Xavier Veilhan.
Learn moreSterling Cunio, is an award winning author, playwright and poet. An Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Pen America Arts for Social justice Fellow, and a World Yes Jammer whose work has been published in The Marshall Project, L.A. Book review and performed by various artist including Grammy award winning musician Antino Sanchez. Sterling sits on the board of Directors of Oregon's Transformative Justice Community and acts as lead facilitator for Regroup, a support and empowerment network of Returning Citizens that played an instrumental role in abolishing the authorization of slavery from Oregon's constitution. Along with currently working for Church at The Park in Salem serving its houseless community, Sterling also works as a lead consultant on the Ubuntu Climate Initiative, a global climate resilience movement focusing on Reuniting people and planet through joy, art and sustainability.
Learn moreTharp was raised in Ontario, Oregon, and presently resides in Portland. He received his BFA from Cornell University. His work was featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has been acquired by The Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright Knox Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Reed College. He is represented by PDX Contemporary Art (Portland), Nicole Klagsbrun (New York) and Galerie Bertrand & Gruner (Geneva). Selected Press Critic's Pick: Storm Tharp, Stephanie Snyder, Artforum.com, August 3, 2010. Perfect in the Middle, Matt Stangel, Portland Mercury, June 24, 2010. Storm Tharp's eighth show at PDX Contemporary Art features latest work, 'Hercules', John Motley, The Oregonian, July 30, 2010. Storm Tharp, Richard Speer, art ltd., May 2010. Interview with Storm Tharp, Bean Gilsdorf, Daily Serving, January 4, 2010. Virtuoso Vindicated: Storm Tharp at PDX Contemporary, Jeff Jahn, PORT, January 10, 2007. Storm Tharp: Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black, Stephanie Snyder, PLAZM, September, 2008. Selected Video Storm Tharp Artist Talk at the Portland Art Museum. Storm Tharp on OPB Art Beat
Learn moreIt’s not enough to call Strategy a producer of electronic music; Portland-based Paul Dickow stretches his skills among ambient and dub, high-spirited techno, house and sound art, all couched in musicianship and a community-minded DIY weird-punk approach. As complex and nuanced as his music can be, it’s not distractingly ornate: Dickow embraces certain low-fi aesthetics, layering dubby tones, crunchy noise and exacting rhythms using high-tech hardware and instruments of varying vintages, mixers, machines of his own making and effects strung strategically together. Recording as Strategy since 1999, Dickow released albums Futurerock and Drumsolo’s Delight on Kranky in the mid-2000s, 12-inches on Toshiya Kawasaki's Endless Flight, and most recently, albums on Peak Oil and Field Hymns, followed by 2014’s Boxology on 100% Silk. He co-runs independent label Community Library and plays electronic noise, keyboards and drums in underground-sound bands Fontanelle, Nudge and several others, an ongoing influence that bleeds into his stage and studio time as Strategy.
Learn moreSTROLL is the amoeba baby of a loose and shifting collaboration of sex workers committed to organising for justice and equity. Founded in 2015 as a street outreach project with a side publication, over the years STROLL has provided hot meals, clothing, legal referrals, workshops, references and resume help, home HIV test kits, and a bad date list to sex workers and houseless workers in the PNW.
Learn more at strollpdx.org
Learn moreNatya Leela's Founder & Artistic Director Subashini Ganesan choreographs to express the universal emotional depths present in her form, Bharathanatyam (South Indian Classical Dance). Two time recipient of the Regional Arts & Culture Council Individual Projects Grant, her works have been showcased at local & regional festivals including Ten Tiny Dances, NW Folk Life Festival, & the Salem Library's "World of Music." As the Director of Studio 2@Zoomtopia, in SE Portland, she founded N.E.W. (New Expressive Works), an Artist in Residency Program. Ganesan also serves on RACC's Right Brain Initiative Board (Operating Committee).
Learn moreSue Tompkins (b. 1971, Leighton Buzzard) lives and works in Glasgow.
Working with fragments of language gathered from everyday encounters and experiences, Tompkins’ practice incorporates text, sound, installation and performance.
Tompkins graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1994, and has been involved in exhibitions and performances worldwide including solo exhibitions at The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Inverleith House, Edinburgh; Spike Island, Bristol; and Contemporary Art Musuem, St. Louis. She has presented performances and been included in numerous group exhibitions including those at: Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; the 29th São Paolo Biennale, São Paolo; the British Art Show 7 at the Hayward Gallery, London and touring; MACBA, Barcelona; ICA and the Tate Modern, London; and Artists Space, New York.
Tompkins recently produced web-based project, My Kind Book with Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2012, and has a collaborative publication with her twin sister Hayley Tompkins, through and through, published by LemonMelon in 2013.
Tompkins was shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures Prize in 2006, and received the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2011. She was formerly a member of the Glasgow based art collective Elizabeth Go, and the band Life Without Buildings.
Learn moreFounded in 1999, Superamas is an artist collective splitting time between Paris and Vienna. Their first works, Building (1999) and Body Builders (2001), gained the group widespread international acclaim. In 2001, with the support of many European cultural agencies, Superamas launched the first installment of the BIG trilogy, and have developed a highly original visual style in such diverse works as Sauve qui peut (Romania) and High Art.
Learn moreMy art is born from the everyday dance of life—landscapes, encounters, history, politics—and from the soul stories we tell each other—crystalline moments in time that hold a myriad of meanings, summoned through the nature of re-membering and witnessing. Movement & images & sounds & words are all at play in the experiments that form the choreography of a story. The eye of life comes alive through body imagination, in memory places where life and art intersect.
Collaborations with fellow poets of memory and history define the varying SO&SO&SO&SO projects, on-going since 1976. SO&SO dance and theatre works have been performed on stages, in studios, schools, and found spaces in the US and abroad. In collaboration with four other artists, I opened the doors to Dreams Well Studio, 1990-2002, a modest, lively petri dish for performance experiments and body-mind practices. Memorable offerings of dance, theatre, multi-media storytelling, kids’ performances, poetry, music, and community ceremonies came forth from this activated dream space/laboratory.
The creative lab is the bedrock of my teaching methods in universities, classrooms, and studios over the years and of continuing practice as a writer, choreographer, and community activist.
No Strangers Here Today (premier 2008) and The Hillsboro Story (premier 2010) are multi-voiced investigations that illuminate the role my hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio, played in American civil rights history and the journey to encounter that history directly. Both theatre works, with soundtracks and live music scores by David Ornette Cherry, toured nationally and are expanded into a non-fiction book, The Hillsboro Story/A Kaleidoscope History (Spuyten-Duyvil Press, NYC).
Nu History, an educational model designed to empower students to investigate history directly, and Great Serpent, a multimedia performance score, are in development in concert with Mr. Music/theme & thought, featuring the collaborations and vision of jazz/world music composer, the late David Ornette Cherry.
I am deeply grateful to walk this path and give thanks to the great teachers who have led the way and the collaborators with whom I have shared and continue to share this journey. I believe that creative practice is essential to nourishing and understanding oneself in relationship to the natural and social worlds. The intention is to awaken the senses, embody the voice, ignite the action, and enjoy the process.
“We are not condemned to accept the future. We may invent it.”
--Eduardo Galeano
Learn moreA cult classic, with a national following, Love’s Fowl is silliness on a grand scale. Writer and performer Susan J. Vitucci handles the tiny Italian puppet troupe, Il Teatro Repertorio delle Mollette (The Clothespin Repertory Theatre) on a table-top stage while she and accompanying baritone/pianist sing the score (in Italian) composed by two-time Tony Award nominee and Grammy Award-winner Henry Krieger. Like opera, Love's Fowl is sung in Italian while the text is projected as supertitles on a screen above the actors' heads. And, like rock and roll, live video of the styrofoam-and-clothespin puppet actors is projected onto large screens on either side of the stage.
Learn moreSutapa Biswas was born in Santinekethan, India, in 1962. Her poignant films and poetic artworks have been shown in museums and art galleries worldwide. Biswas studied at the University of Leeds from 1981-85, at the Slade School of Art from 1988-1990, and at the Royal College of Art between 1996-1998. She works in a wide range of media including installation, film and video, drawing and painting. Her works are conceptual and since the mid 1990s Biswas has been interested in exploring themes of time and space particularly in relationship to gender, identity and desire.
She has exhibited extensively internationally, and her recent solo shows include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2000), Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (2004), and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon (2006). She has shown at numerous group exhibitions including: From Tarzan To Rambo, Tate Modern, London (2002-2003), Art Through the Eye of A Needle, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2001), The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (1998), and the 6th Havana Biennale, Cuba (1997), Melbourne International Arts Festival (2006). Biswas was a Fellow at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1990 and 1992. She is currently a Reader at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London and lives and works in London. Biswas is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, USA.
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 moreSymara Sarai, a Portland, OR native currently residing in Brooklyn, NY, has immersed herself globally in interdisciplinary and choreographic studies with deep recognition. Named Dance Magazines’ 2025 “Top 25 to Watch,” a 2023 Bessie Winner for Breakout Choreographer, and a recipient of the Dai Ailian Foundation Scholarship based in Trinidad and Tobago, she is known to be a courageously committed performer and maker. The New York Times stated, “Sarai is a daring solo improviser, and her uninhibited spirit infuses.” Sarai is a 2019 graduate of the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, State University of New York. She was most recently a MoMA PS1 Greater New York Artist and was commissioned in 2025 by Danspace Project and BOFFO. Between 2024 and 2026, they were a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and an Abrons Arts Center Performance AIRspace Resident. She participated in Live Artery Festival 2025, Triple Canopy Symposium 2025, and more. Their work as a performer and maker has been reviewed and featured in prominent publications such as The New York Times and Brooklyn Rail. She has most notably danced with Urban Bush Women, Joanna Kotze, and Ogemdi Ude, among others.
Learn moreSynth Library Portland is a collectively run arts organization that supports a diverse community of artists, centering access for marginalized folks to experiment, learn, and participate. We are an audiovisual art laboratory that provides Portlanders with access to a myriad of production tools and equipment, as well as practical workshops hosted by local and visiting artists. After having to close our physical space and suspend in-person programming due to Covid-19, we adapted to host remote workshops, launched our take-home gear lending program in 2021 and resumed in-person workshops a year later. We are committed to generating equity, opportunity, and freedom to explore and create in our artistic communities.
http://synthlibraryportland.com
Aaron Guice - artist in residence of Synth Library Portland (2023)
Yaw Evans - artist in residence of Synth Library Portland (2023)
Learn moreJacob Ciocci is an artist; a current Eyebeam Fellow; one third of the American art collective Paper Rad; and a prolific producer of music, installations, websites, and animations. David Wightman is completing a PhD in Music Composition at UC San Diego where he is a Lecturer of Pop Music Studies. Some of his many musical projects include Fortress of Amplitude, Powdered Wigs, and Chariots of Fire. Together, Jacob and David connect like Voltron in the high-NRG electronic music band Extreme Animals. They have toured the country every summer for the past 8 years presenting their music, videos, and art.
Selected Press
Eleven Evocations (For Paper Rad), Ed Halter, Rhizome, September 2, 2009.
Learn moreThe Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) produces videos, photographs, installations, and published texts. From 1999 to 2003, Archive projects centered on state secrecy and the production of the past. Current works address the use of documents—images, texts, objects, bodies, and physical structures—to project and claim visions of the future. The Archive is a collaboration of Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. Recent projects have been exhibited in the 2006 California Biennial (Orange County Museum of Art), Gallery Akbank Sanat (Istanbul), Kunstmuseum Goteborg (Sweden), Palazzo de la Papesse, (Siena, Italy), Apex Art (New York), Momenta (New York), the Hayward Gallery’s (London) travelling exhibition program, Whitechapel Gallery (London), the Oberhausen Short Film Festival (Germany), the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others.
Julia Meltzer believes in the power of art to build and transform communities and has worked to create opportunities for the marriage of art and advocacy for nearly three decades as a filmmaker and the founding director of Clockshop in Los Angeles.
She directed two feature films and multiple short films. Her films about a women’s Qur’an school in Damascus and a mother-daughter who arrive in LA escaping the war in Aleppo, Syria, are quiet feminist stories that upend expectations about who Muslim women are and what they can be.
Her film and video work has been broadcast on POV as part of the 25th anniversary season and as the opening film of the 30th anniversary season. Meltzer is a recipient of multiple grants including the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria in 2005-6 where she taught independent filmmaking at the University of Damascus. Her current project focuses on documenting and preserving histories of the neighborhoods along the LA river in Northeast LA where she lives with her family.
David Thorne is an Australian humourist, satirist, Internet personality and New York Times best-selling author. His work has been featured on the BBC, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Thorne gained public recognition in late 2008 for an email exchange in which he attempts to pay an overdue bill with a drawing of a seven-legged spider. The exchange spread virally via email and social networking sites, leading to a surge of visitors to his website 27b/6 (27bslash6). 27b/6 features a collection of humorous emails and articles from Thorne's life. These and additional essays appear in Thorne's book, The Internet is a Playground. Published by Penguin Group and released on 28 April 2011, the book debuted at number four on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Learn moreOver the past year, The Stripper Project crew has travelled around the country listening, filming, recording and capturing people who work the sex industry. Even though we believe our journey isn’t done, we have collected a wide variety of voices.
Our intention for this project is: 1. People outside of the industry be able to see and experience content that is genuine and true to us And; 2. Have people in the industry begin to grasp how different this job can be depending on race, social status, education and, mental health status. We hope to create greater support to our community from the inside out.
Learn moreThe Suicide Kings are a spoken word power-house comprised of Geoff Trenchard, Jamie DeWolf, and Rupert Estanislao. Collectively, they are known for their explosive live performances combining gritty punk rock theatrics, a cappella hip-hop and vaudeville comedy. The Kings also facilitate workshops and host slams for the inmates in San Quentin Penitentiary and create feature length performances with at-risk youth. Their work has been featured on two seasons of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, UPN, 60 Minutes and radio stations from the Midwest to the Phillipines.
Learn moreWith legendary bits like their signature audience participation costume changes and Guns n Roses trapeze act, The Wau Wau Sisters are widely recognized by their peers for revolutionizing circus aesthetics and carving out a new niche for circus events – where high physical skill, comedy chops, burlesque and outright nudity mix with just the right splashes of chaos and irreverence are so close and palpable you can see the tear in their fishnets, the sinew of their muscles and the sweat on their skin! Don’t miss them as they fly through their trapeze routines with all the adrenaline and abandon of a rock concert, deconstruct the humor and paradigms of country and heavy metal music, while playing matching guitars and barely sitting on one another’s shoulders! They do it all in a festive, freewheeling hour that keeps the audience guessing every second, who’s in control and for how long?!
They have made appearances at these fantastic festivals and venues: The World Famous Spiegeltent,(VAC, Edinburgh, Auckland, Sydney, NYC), Lincoln Center (NYC), The Mayan Theater (Los Angeles), The Roundhouse (London), Olivia Cruise Lines, Feast Festival (Adelaide), Soho Bar (London), El Cid (Los Angeles), The Grammys (Los Angeles Staples Center), Irving Plaza (NYC), The Palms (Las Vegas), CBGB’s (NYC), The Hammerstein Ballroom (NYC), Joe’s Pub (NYC), The Bowery Ballroom (NYC), The Henry Fonda Theater (Los Angeles), The Pica Festival (Portland, OR), Edinburgh Fringe Festival/The Pleasance (Scotland), The Jermyn St. Theater (West End, London) , The Art House, Crown & Anchor (Provincetown, MA), Philadelphia Fringe Festival (Philadelphia, PA), Sydney Festival, Auckland Festival among countless other cities and venues!!
They’ve been profiled or featured in the pages of: The Village Voice, The New York Post, Time Out New York, Time Out London, The New York Times, Jane, BUST and New York Magazine, The Guardian, Metro, VENUS, The Sun, LA Weekly, GONYC, French Vogue, Spectacle, The Australian, The Times (London, Scotland), Sydnay Morning Herald and countless others!
Television & Film exploits include the feature film “Shortbus” by John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), the film “Who’s the Top?” by Jenny Livingston (Paris Is Burning), ABC Australia’s “Sideshow”, Nipon TV’s “Good Morning Japan”, “The Isaac Mizrahi Show” w/ Rosie Perez, NPR’s “The Next Big Thing”, “Live From Downtown”, “The Sharon Osbourne Show”, and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Learn moreTim Smith-Stewart is a queer interdisciplinary artist based in Seattle who uses text as his primary medium for creating installations, performances and zines. For the past seven years, Tim has primarily been creating work in collaboration with artist/electrical engineer Jeffrey Azevedo. They are currently developing Salvage Rituals: a dance set on six piezoelectric tiles to premiere in the fall of 2019. Visual and durational iterations will be presented at various locations including Seattle University in the fall of 2018.
Most recently they premiered Awaiting Oblivion—Temporary Solutions for surviving the dystopian future we find ourselves within at present at On the Boards in February 2017 and The Perpetual Insurrection of Claude Cahun at the Henry Art Gallery in October 2017.
Selections of Awaiting Oblivion... have been presented at: On The Boards NW New Works festival (SEA), Risk/Reward Festival (PDX), Velocity Dance Center (SEA) and Fresh Oysters Performance Research (MSP). Tim and Jeffrey have presented multiple installations including their video/paper tapestry installation Queer City Lost at New Tomorrow, Erasure (curated by the Lion’s Main Art Collective), and the Velocity Dance Center Big Bang. They also presented Stained glass in my replacement church at the 2014 Lofi Arts Festival.
From 2010-2013 Tim & Jeffrey co-created The Eternal Glow Project—a four part performance/installation which premiered work at The Seattle Center Next50 (The Eternal Glow of Electric Hearts), On the Boards NW New Works Festival 2013 (Ω<1),and Lofi Arts Festival 2013 (Less than red, more than violet).
Learn moreTim Smith-Stewart | Jeffrey Azevedo is a Seattle based artist duo creating contemporary art at the intersection of performance and installation. They are currently artists in residence at On the Boards, where they are developing their latest project Salvage Rituals. Tim was recently a resident artist in the spring 2018 PICA Creative Exchange Lab cohort.Tim and Jeffrey premiered Awaiting Oblivion—Temporary Solutions for surviving the dystopian future we find ourselves within at present at On the Boards in February 2017 and The Perpetual Insurrection of Claude Cahun at the Henry Art Gallery in October 2017.
Twenty-minute selections of Awaiting Oblivion have been presented at: On The Boards NW New Works Festival (SEA), Risk/Reward Festival (PDX), and Fresh Oysters Performance Research (MSP). Tim and Jeffrey have presented multiple installations including their video/paper tapestry installation, Queer City Lost, at New Tomorrow, Erasure curated by the Lion’s Main Art Collective, and the Velocity Dance Center Big Bang. They also presented Stained glass in my replacement church at the 2014 Lofi Arts Festival.
From 2011-2013 Tim & Jeffrey co-created The Eternal Glow Project—a four part performance/installation which premiered work at The Seattle Center Next50 (The Eternal Glow of Electric Hearts), On the Boards NorthWest New Works Festival 2013 (Ω<1), and Lofi Arts Festival at Smoke Farm 2013 (Less than red, more than violet).
Learn moreHalf Straddle is an Obie-winning, Brooklyn-based ensemble of performers and designers that makes plays, performances, videos, and music led by Artistic Director Tina Satter. This critically acclaimed company began in 2008, and has toured its shows to cities throughout U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Tina Satter is an American writer, director, and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn-based, Obie-winning theater company Half Straddle. She is a recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award; a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Award, and was named an Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York. She has written and directed 9 full-length shows and a number of smaller performance and video pieces with Half Straddle that have premiered in New York City. Tina’s work has been presented at theaters and festivals in Europe, Asia, Australia, and other U.S. cities. Tina has had residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, LMCC, The Performing Garage, Kitchen L.A.B., MASS MoCA, and New Museum for Contemporary Art. She’s been a visiting artist at Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Reed College, and Fordham University—and a visiting playwriting professor at the University of Michigan. Drawing on her recent teaching work, Tina has been developing and leading generative writing and directing workshops to participants from a range of backgrounds and experience. Tina attended Mac Wellman’s graduate playwriting program at Brooklyn College and received an M.A. from Reed College and a B.A. from Bowdoin College. Her first collection of plays, Seagull (Thinking of you), was published by 53rd State Press in 2014.
Learn more