Artists Archive
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a canary torsi is a Bessie-award-winning, interdisciplinary group of artists formed by Puerto Rican artist and choreographer Yanira Castro. a canary torsi’s work examines the encounter between spectator and event, developing scenarios where the audience’s presence dramatically impacts the work. We investigate what brings us together, the nature of the space we inhabit, and how every aspect of our convergence is loaded with cultural, social, historical, and personal dynamics that influence how we form meaning and how power is structured. We develop indeterminate performative systems that catalyze—in performance—spontaneous structures, patterns, and instructions. We do this to complicate authorship, ensure multiplicity, and to form the work together in real-time. This way of working is for us a conscious de-centered politic. a canary torsi persists in the idea that live performance is uneasy communal action.
Learn moreAdrienne Truscott received a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Artist Award and is a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grantee for Theater/Performance Art. Her solo comedic work and group choreographic works have been presented at Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Just For Laughs, Darwin Festival, PS122, Joe's Pub, The Kitchen, Dublin Fringe Festival, Danspace Project, Boom Arts, New York Live Arts, the Malthouse Theatre (Melbourne), and Dance Theater Workshop. Her form-busting show Adrienne Truscott’s Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else! won the 2013 Edinburgh Foster's Panel Prize, was a finalist for the Total Theatre Award for Playing With Form, and is considered a critical impetus to the evolving conversation about rape culture. It has been presented by or included in curriculum at CalArts, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Lewis and Clark College, among others. THIS was nominated for a 2017 New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for Outstanding Production. The Wau Wau Sisters, her boundary-defying neo-vaudevillian collaboration with Tanya Gagne, have been presented by the Sydney Opera House, Joe's Pub, CBGB, Victoria Arts Centre, and The Roundhouse, and won the prestigious 2009 Herald Angel Award. Her piece Wild Bore, a “meta rebuke to critical writing,” was nominated for a Green Room Award for New Writing for the Australian Stage and won for Best Ensemble. Current touring pieces MASTERCLASS, a collaboration with Dublin-based Brokentalkers was recently presented at Dublin Fringe, in Harstad, Norway and at The Pleasance at Edinburgh Fringe and Grey Arias, a desecration of the problematic Madame Butterfly through the lenses of race and drag with UK-based opera performer Le Gateau Chocolat is premiering in Melbourne in April 2023. Truscott's essays have been published in Between Us: Women of Letters and Doing It: Women Tell the Truth about Great Sex, as well as in the Guardian. She's appeared as a storyteller at the Sydney Opera House's Festival of Dangerous Ideas and on The Moth. Truscott has guest taught for the Wesleyan University Dance Department, Sarah Lawrence College, Princeton University, Bard College, and is currently the MA Coordinator at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College/Open Society University Network.
Learn moreCalled a “hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” by Theatre Jones and “outrageous and profane" by The New York Times, Alex Tatarsky makes performances in the uncomfortable in-between zone of comedy, dance-theater, performance art, and deluded rant—sometimes with songs. Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt. Playing with perceptions of language and narrative structure, their live performances are highly responsive to venue and audience, often breaking the fourth wall and embracing humor to reveal vulnerability and humanity. Venues include La Mama Experimental Theater Club, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, Playwrights Horizons, The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many bars and basements. As curatorial fellow at The Poetry Project, they organized a series on the poetics of rot. Research interests include bootlegs, hellscapes, and compost.
Learn moreAnchi Lin [Ciwas Tahos] is a performance and new media artist of Taiwanese Indigenous Atayal and Hō-ló descent based in Taipei, Taiwan. Following a Bachelor of Fine Art in Visual Art at Simon Fraser University (Canada), Lin is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art in New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA). Through her practice and interest in language, identity, gender, and the environment, Lin seeks out new forms of understanding beyond the hetero-patriarchal status quo, using video, performance, cyberspace, and installation.
Learn moreAndrew Tay is a hybrid performer, choreographer, curator and DJ. He is the cofounder of Wants&Needs Danse with Sasha Kleinplatz. Together, they produce the popular dance events Short&Sweet and Piss in the Pool which take place in non-traditional venues in Montreal. Tay received the Buddies in Bad Times Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation at the SummerWorks Performance Festival for his work Fame Prayer / EATING (2016). He was named the first artistic curator at Le Centre de Création O Vertigo (CCOV) in Montreal and recently became the Artistic Director of Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) one of Canada’s oldest contemporary dance companies. Tay actively thinks about community, irreverence and resistance in both his performance and curatorial practices.
Learn moreAntony and the Johnsons, former artists in residence at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater (NY), have performed at the Bloomsbury Theater in London, the Warhol Museum, the Wexner Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Antony has also worked extensively with Lou Reed and Björk and was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial with a Charles Atlas collaboration entitled TURNING. In 2005 Antony and the Johnsons won the UK's Mercury Prize for the album I am a Bird Now. In January 2012, the Museum of Modern Art presented Antony and the Johnsons' Swanlights to a sold out crowd at Radio City Music Hall in NYC.
Antony is also a visual artist and has exhibited his drawings at Palais Des Beaux Arts in Belgium, Isis Gallery in London, Accademia Albertina in Turin and the Triennale in Milan. In 2009 he curated a group show entitled Six Eyes at Agnès B. Galerie Du Jour in Paris, which included work by Peter Hujar, Kiki Smith, and William Basinski. In October of 2010, Antony released a book of collages and drawings, also called Swanlights, published by Abrams Image. Antony's drawings were exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in Spring 2012, curated by James Elaine. Learn moreariella tai is a video artist, film scholar, and independent programmer from Queens, New York. They are interested in Black performance and cultural vernaculars in film, television and media studies. They are one half of “the first and the last,” a fellowship, workshop and screening series supporting and celebrating the work of Black women and femmes in film, video and new media art. They have shown work at Anthology Film Archives, the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival, Portland Institute For Contemporary Art, Northwest Film Center, Boathouse Microcinema, Wa Na Wari, the Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival, MOCA and Smack Mellon. Their most recent video work "safehouse" premiered at Trinity Square Video in Toronto as part of group show "Architectures after the Asylum" curated by Sajdeep Soomal.
Learn moreBack to Back Theatre comprises an ensemble of six actors considered to have developmental or intellectual disabilities. The company explores how respect is withheld from outsiders—the disabled or unemployed—who society deems “unproductive.” Since 1987, the ensemble, based in the small regional center at Geelong, Australia, has transformed the theater experience by exploring prejudices associated with the notion of “other.” The group’s past performances include Mental (1999); Dog Farm (2000); and Soft (2002). small metal objects received a 2008 Bessie Award after its performance at Under the Radar Festival, and a 2007 Zurich Theatre Festival Appreciation Prize for extraordinary achievement in theater. In 2005, the ensemble received the Sydney Meyer Performing Arts Award for their long-standing contribution to the development of Australian theater.
Learn moreBig Terrific is a weekly comedy show in Brooklyn hosted by Gabe Liedman, Jenny Slate, and Max Silvestri. It started as a project between three friends: a free, low-key event where they could try out new material and perform regularly in front of an audience who’d be up for the experimentation. Before long, the show’s reputation grew, and it became the go-to stage for innovative comedians and comedy fans who’d rather see something new than the regular two-drink-minimum acts.
The big concept behind the show is: let’s just be friends. The idea that you might get made fun of if you sit too close to the stage is the antithesis of what Gabe, Jenny, and Max set out to do. On any given Wednesday in Brooklyn, you can show up at Big Terrific to hear personal stories from people who love to tell them, see short films by up-and-coming directors, and laugh along to stand-up curated carefully by Gabe, Jenny, and Max.
Big Terrific has been proud to host Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Silverman, Nick Offerman, Janeane Garofalo, Aziz Ansari, Reggie Watts, and many other comedy superstars over the years. The show was also awarded the prestigious “Best Of New York” by New York Magazine.
Because Jenny Slate Proved There's Life After SNL, Andrew Marantz, GQ, August, 2011.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Jenny Slate, Ellen Killoran, The L Magazine, May 25, 2011.
Learn moreJaru language. Born c.1935. Died 2OO9.
Like many of the senior men and women at Wirrimanu (Balgo), Boxer Milner began painting in the late 198Os, following the establishment of the Warlayirti art centre. His early works were tentative experiments in form. But buried within their restrained palette and restricted formal syntax were the early signs of a matchless mastery of geometry and form. It was not until the mid-199Os, when the artist began tempering these rigid structures with high-keyed color contrasts that the singularity of his talent became unmistakable. In his mature works, Milner revealed himself to be that rare breed of artist adroit at perfectly manipulating both color and form. This balance was the evidence of a lifetime’s observation of the natural world. Milner was born around 1935 at Matwanangu, on the banks of Sturt Creek, south west of Bililuna in Western Australia. Working as a stockman, his life was defined by majestic natural cycles of this ancient country. A senior lawman, he drew his artistic and spiritual sustenance from Purkitji, a major floodplain for the Sturt. It is the ebb and flow of these life-giving waters that shape the idiosyncratic iconography of Milner’s work. In his jostling angles, or flowering ringlets, Milner offers the hieroglyphs of nature’s transformational hand. Rendered in a measured architecture of lines and dots, they are the astute record of an intimate knowledge of place. Milner’s work was included in the exhibitions Images of Power: Aboriginal Art of the Kimberly and Color Power: Aboriginal Art Post 1984 at the National Gallery of Victoria. He is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Learn moreCatherine Ming T'ien Duffly is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department at Reed College where she teaches courses on race and identity in American theatre, performance studies, and community-based performance, in addition to courses in acting and directing. Kate’s written work has appeared Theatre Journal and Theatre Annual. She is currently researching the use of food in socially engaged performance practices.
Learn moreChanticleer Trü is a musician, performance artist who currently resides in Portland, Oregon. His body of work encompasses music, theater, fringe, dance, visual installation, drag, film, cabaret, and good time instigation. When he's not turning heads the world over as front-man of "Post Phunk" dance outfit Magic Mouth, you can catch him pursuing one of his many other creative efforts. His unique brands of aesthetic storytelling, and expression have made him a mainstay on stages both large and small. His creative direction and performances are in demand across major city hotbeds of the underground and mainstream.
Learn moreChloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree, Canadian interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
Learn moreAtlanta, Georgia, is a hotbed of contemporary art with an abundance of choreographers and performance artists seeking affordable and accessible venues. Recognizing this scarcity of performance space as an opportunity, curator and lighting designer Malina Rodriguez founded Dance Truck: a mobile project that uses the back of a rental truck as a stage. With its inventive technical direction, diverse artistic lineup, and stunning visual platform, Dance Truck has been an enormous success in “bringing dance to the people” at festivals, museums, parks, and streets throughout the Dirty South.
Selected Press
Dance Truck Pulls into the Contemporary, Andrew Alexander, Creative Loafing Atlanta, February 9, 2011.
Learn moreDavid Thomson is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice borders on choreographic situations and installations centered around questions of identity, unconscious narratives, and the expression of presence and absence as performative states.
He has been supported or presented by The Kitchen, Movement Research at Judson Church, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC Arts, Performance Space NY, The Invisible Dog, Mt Tremper Arts, The Yard and Danspace Project, among other institutions.
His work has been recognized with awards and fellowships including a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artist Award (2022), Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2018), Yaddo (2016), MacDowell (2014), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography (2013), and the US Artists Ford Fellowship (2012).
Thomson has worked across the fields of music, dance, film, theater, and performance with Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Tracie Morris, Marina Abramović, Meg Stuart, Grisha Coleman|Hot Mouth, Yvonne Rainer, Sekou Sundiata, Maria Hassabi, Yanira Castro, and Okwui Okpokwasili, among others.
He has served on the faculties of Movement Research, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, Barnard, Bennington, Pratt and Middlebury. In 2017, he and Kate Watson-Wallace initiated The Sustainability Project, which serves as a platform for expanding the discourse surrounding financial, artistic, and personal empowerment within the arts community.
Thomson received an interdisciplinary B.A. from State University of New York at Purchase.
Learn moreSeattle’s [self professed] hottest postmodern nightlife performance duo, Drama Tops was born of the artistic partnership of Elby Brosch and Shane Donohue. They began making work together seven years ago with the creation of a solo on two bodies. The dynamic between their trans body and cis body has created beautiful moments of frustration, competition, tenderness, and comedy. Drama Tops blends the worlds of nightlife and concert modern dance to create an interesting and unique blend of accessible and funny modern dance. You may have seen Drama Tops perform their smash hit Boys! Boys! Boys!, presented by Velocity Dance Center’s Made in Seattle program, or their self-produced show, Drama Tops, this is for you at Washington Hall in Seattle. Other performances include NW New Works Festival presented by On the Boards, Seattle, WA; Family Meal and Catharsis at Kremwerk, Seattle, WA; Heels! at Cha Cha, Seattle, WA; High F@ggotry, Seattle, WA, and more.
Learn moreEdie Tsong received her MFA in ceramics from Louisiana State University. Telecommunity Portrait was recently presented as part of Bay Area Now 4 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her video Thank-you America was recently on view in April Meetings: A Festival of Expanded Media in Belgrade, Serbia. She has performed collaboratively with Pete Kuzov in the EnterActive Language Festival in Portland, Oregon, for the past three years. Tsong has held residencies at Women’s Studio Workshop in New York, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program in Roswell, New Mexico.
Learn moreA record label and a movement, a series of club nights and a cooperative project in music, visual art, video, and apparel, Fade to Mind is changing the global dance scene. Kingdom, aka Ezra Rubin, is a DJ/Producer living in Los Angeles who is also involved in the London-based Night Slugs collective. Rubin’s work is known around the world for its inventive drums, unusual bass rhythms, and full-on R&B and hip hop samples. Rubin has official releases on Fools Gold, Night Slugs, and Acephale, and his own Fade To Mind label. Total Freedom is Ashland Mines, a DJ/Producer living in Los Angeles. Besides being known internationally for brain-broadening DJ sets, Mines curates and produces nightlife events in LA. Musician and producer Massacooramaan (Dave Quam) recently moved to Portland from Chicago, where he was active DJing in and documenting the local Juke/Footwork scene. Quam also photographs and writes for XLR8R, The Wire, DJ Magazine, and Shook.
Selected Press
Kingdom Launches Fade to Mind Label, Shawn Reynaldo, XLR8R, June 22, 2011.
The Underground Kings of Fade to Mind, Chris Kelly, Postcultural, April 10, 2012.
Selected Audio
Fade to Mind on SoundCloud
Kingdom on SoundCloud
Massacooramaan on SoundCloud
Total Freedom on SoundCloud Learn moreFUTURE DEATH TOLL (F-DT) is an art-oriented collective that releases Creative Commons licensed audio and video primarily online. The elusive group creates work circumventing the normal bounds that geography (namely museums and galleries but also physical media) imposes on an art form. Armed with modular synthesizers, projectors, and uniformed in blaze orange, F-DT is a throbbing mess of noise that mutates sound and video in a sculptural fashion.
Learn moregarima thakur is a friend, interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator who is all over the place. She was raised during the ’80’s and ’90’s in New Delhi, India, a country forever recovering from a colonial hangover—teetering between an aspirational Western identity and a nationalistic one. To help soothe the hangover, she moved to the United States in 2008. Over the last 14 years she has merged installation, video, code, and text to make the bureaucratic structures of immigration visible and critique the alienation they impart. She looks up to Black feminism as a way to crack open the problems of Indian respectability politics and more deeply understand gender, sexuality, and queerness in her practice. She loves to share meals together and wishes you would hit her up for some snax. Her work has received support from organizations like the Ford Family Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, Khoj, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
Learn moreHand2Mouth Theater (H2M) is a theatre ensemble that creates original work that is bold, accessible and inclusive. We support all forms of artistic expression and experimentation and seek to enrich the social fabric of society through our work.
Committed to fostering community through performance, engagement events and educational programs, H2M seeks genuine connections with audiences by speaking authentically from the voices and lives of our creative artists and our community.
H2M pushes for a kinder, more inclusive society where the public experiences the value and uniqueness of every life story, amplifying the voices of those historically silenced.
Learn moreHitoshi Toyoda was born in New York City and grew up in Tokyo. He returned to the United States in 1990 on a grant from Neo Vision Co. For several years, Toyoda traveled throughout the U.S. taking photographs, before settling in New York in 1993. He has presented his work in public spaces, galleries, museums and film festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI), Images Festival (Toronto), Museum Of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo), Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo), Anthology Film Archives (NY), and graf media gm (Osaka).
Learn moreHailing from North Carolina but currently residing in Portland, OR, II TRILL has been active in the Portland club scene since 2011.
Learn moreThis Actor/Dancer/Stripperformance Artist (primarily known for live work) has performed in New York & abroad since 1988. A Pioneer in the 1990s burlesque revival, Tigger! has been "acting like a stripper" since 1992 & remains a leading influence in the world burlesque scene. He won the first ever "King of Boylesque" title at Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas as well as several Golden Pastie Awards, including "Most Likely to Get Shut Down by the Law" & "Most Unpredictable Performer." He was ranked the #4 Burlesque Performer of 2010 (the only solo male) in an international online poll. Called "the Boylesque King...a heart-pounding climax" by LA Weekly, "hysterical and acrobatic" and "wickedly arch" by The New York Times, "disturbing, funny and oddly riveting all at once" by Vancouver Sun, "delightful...simultaneously hilarious and titillating" by TheaterMania, "the taboo-defying dynamo" by NEXT Magazine. He has acted in Shakespeare, Apollinaire, Wedekind, Horváth, Tennessee Williams and numerous original works with Taylor Mac, Julie Atlas Muz and other genius friends. He has recently performed in: Italy, Denmark, Cyprus, England, Hungary, Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, France, Mexico, Canada, and all around the U.S.
Learn moreJason Traeger has released music on Kill Rock Stars and K Records, performed with the art collective Oregon Painting Society at Portland 2010: Biennial of Contemporary Art, TBA:09, Tate Modern and he has shared the stage with some of the biggest names in stand-up comedy. He resides in Portland, OR.
Learn moreJoel B. Tan is an award-winning writer/performer and an internationally recognized trailblazer in connecting arts with social justice, public health, and community development. Tan has published three volumes of poetry, edited three fiction anthologies, and his various poems, plays, essays, and short fiction on race, power and identity have appeared in numerous academic and commercial venues. Since 2004, Tan has served as the Director of Community Engagement at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where his work in the field of arts leadership has been recognized globally. Prior, he worked in Public Health for 16+ years, co-founding LA’s Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team Health Center. Tan is also Sister Baba Ganesh of the San Francisco Mother House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. As Baba, he is the creator of the widely walked “Sistoric” Castro Procession, an historical audio walking tour produced with Queer DJ collective and Honey SoundSystem. He is also the producer of Project Nunway, a fashion fundraiser that pairs Sisters with designers to create a look from recycled materials based on a theme. Nunway is currently in its 6th year in San Francisco and is now replicated in 6 other Sister cities and growing strong.
Learn moreKayin Talton Davis started off in an artistic direction from a very young age, but later learned her love for math and science and pursued a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering at Portland State University. Her design projects were always influenced by a drive to be accessible to all. She started the soapbox theory in 2001, as a way to express herself creatively. And through these mediums, her interest is always in creating something that is positive, helpful and accessible to all but especially children from culturally underrepresented communities.
Learn moreFounded by Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez in 2003, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a young Mexican theater company reflecting the new dynamics of contemporary Mexican culture. They develop their multimedia stage productions as mechanisms to link work and life and give voice to overlooked moments in social and political historical. Lagartijas has toured widely throughout Mexico and Europe and has received awards from the Impatience Festival and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
Related Content
Learn moreEstablished in Israel in 2000 by the actor/writer Lee Sher and dancer/choreographer Saar Harari, LeeSaar The Company uses the different disciplines and training of theater and dance to create original performances. In 2004, after residency in Sydney, Australia, and two seasons in Tel Aviv, the company moved to New York. Lee and Saar received American green cards awarded for excellence in the performing arts in 2005, a Six Points Fellowship for 2007-2008, and were nominated for the 2008 Alpert Award in Dance. The duo is the recent recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and a NYFA Fellowship in choreography.
Learn moreLumi Tan is curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she organizes exhibitions and produces performances with artists across disciplines and generations. Most recently, Tan has worked with Half Straddle, Sara Magenheimer, and Sondra Perry. Previously she co-curated From Minimalism into Algorithm (2016), a year-long performance and exhibition series, as well as projects with artists including Ed Atkins, Gretchen Bender, Glasser, George Lewis, Anicka Yi, and Danh Vo and Xiu Xiu. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was Guest Curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, The Exhibitionist, and numerous exhibition catalogues.
Learn moreLynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her novel American Genius, A Comedy was cited as one of the best books of the millennium (so far) by The Millions. Her other novels are Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast In Doubt, and No Lease On Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent collection of stories, Someday This Will Be Funny, was published in 2011. Her other story collections include This Is Not It, stories and novellas written in response to the work of twenty two contemporary artists; and The Madame Realism Complex. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-67, based on photographs by Stephen Shore (1995); and most recently, her second essay collection What Would Lynne Tillman Do?. Tillman is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, was a Rea Visiting Writer at the University at Virginia and a Kestnbaum Fellow at the University of Chicago. She writes a bimonthly column for Frieze art magazine, and is a Professor/Writer in Residence at The University at Albany. Weird Fucks was her first work longer than ten pages. She lives in Manhattan.
Learn moreBorn in Salt Lake City, Utah, and residing in Chicago, Illinois. Torres mobilizes sound, sweat, and emotional projection to build sensorial performances. These experiences provide a portal into the sensoria of marginalized bodies and are designed to be ingested by viewers as physiological memories. Viewers are invited to share experiences of stress, fear, and celebration to simulate the heterogeneous embodiment of Queer POC, Latinx, and Indigenous people. Torres received a BA in Sculpture Intermedia and a BFA in Art History from the University of Utah, continuing their studies in MFA in Performance from School of the Art Institute Chicago. Torres has performed at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), The Momentary (Bentonville, AK), Fringe Festival (Detroit, MI), Experimental Actions (Houston, TX), and Time-Based Art Festival (Portland, Oregon). Torres has exhibited work at Recess (Brooklyn, NY), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL) UW-Parkside University (Kenosha, WI), Tropical Contemporary (Eugene, OR), Petzel Gallery (NYC, NY).
Learn moreMere Tokorahi Boynton is a multitalented performance artist, singer, actor, and MC. She has had formal training in voice and developed her own unique style of performing that draws upon classical training and her Māori heritage.
Some of her most memorable singing engagements to date have been performing in Gareth Farr’s Te Papa, which was composed for the opening of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; singing and touring nationwide in the dance opera Jerusalem by Michael Parmenter; singing in the film Te Tangata Whairawa o Weneti (The Māori Merchant of Venice); and singing the lead role Taranga in ‘Maui One Man Against the Gods’ (2006). Boynton also performed with the avant-garde theater company MAU at the Vienna Mozart Festival in Requiem (2006) which was commissioned by Artistic Director Peter Sellars for the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart. Requiem was also presented in Brussels, Auckland, London and New York. In 2008 she performed in the NZIAF opera production ‘The Trial of the Cannibal Dogs’ by composer Matthew Suttor, and also performed in Ex Stasis by Gareth Farr and The Three Cornered Hat by Manuella de Falla with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.
In 2013 Boynton sang in Jack Body’s Songs and Dances of Desire with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra for the Auckland Arts Festival and Tokyo, Japan. Also that year, she performed again with MAU in the acclaimed all Māori women production Stones in Her Mouth and I Am a commemoration of the First World War Centenary WW100 in Europe, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In 2021 she collaborated with composer Gareth Farr and taonga puoro (Māori musical instruments) artist Ariana Tikao to compose and perform Ngā Hihi o Matariki with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
In 2005 Boynton released her album Waikohu, which is a collaboration with composer/percussionist Gareth Farr; this recording features an eclectic range of compositions which have been given different vocal and musical treatments, from kapahaka (cultural performance) to classical string quartet with karanga (call of welcome). Her next album release was Aroha/Ahava at the Auckland Arts Festival 2015, a collaboration with composer Jonathan Besser which explores the expression of aroha (love).As an actor she is well known for her portrayal of the character Mavis in Once Were Warriors and has also performed in several other films for cinema and television including The Piano and more recently the full feature Deadlands, Hinekura, a short film in te reo Māori, (Māori language), Colonial Combat a television series in te reo Māori and The Untold Tales of Tūteremoana also in te reo Māori. Most recently, she acted in the acclaimed Witi’s Wāhine, a theater work written and directed by Nancy Brunning for the Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival.
Learn moreGutierrez is a New York-based dance and music artist who makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. His work has toured internationally to festivals and venues including American Realness Festival in New York; Festival d’automne à Paris; Antipodes Festival in Brest, France; Out There Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; UNAM in Mexico City; and ImPulsTanz in Vienna. He is the winner of three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards.
Learn moreMika Tajima is a New York-based artist who employs sculpture, painting, media installation, and performance in her conceptual practice. In 2003, she co-founded New Humans, a collaborative group including then-artists Eric Tsai and her now-husband Howie Chen to make works involving sound, installation, and performance actions. New Humans is a moniker for Mika Tajima's projects with other musicians, artists and designers.
Learn moreMona Vatamanu (Romania) and Florin Tudor (Switzerland) live in Bucharest, Romania, where they have been working together since 2000. Their practice spans film, photography, painting, performance, and installation, and reflects the social upheavals of post-communist Eastern Europe. The duo has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America, and has been featured in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and in the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Vatamanu and Tudor have had residencies at Basis Voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht, AIR Vienna, and Project Room at Ludwig Museum in Budapest, among others. They received first prize in the 2006 Fair:Play Video Festival in Berlin. Vatamanu and Tudor are represented by Lombard Fried Projects, New York.
Peripheries
Moscow's Poplar Curse, New York Magazine, April 17, 2011.
Learn moreMorgan Thorson (Minneapolis, MN) is a dance-maker. Morgan’s recent work addresses how the body shapes time; and how time influences our perception and expression of the body in spaces where labor, coordination, identity, movement and image can flourish and decay as well as redefine our notion of dance, sexuality, belonging and life. Morgan has received support from The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (2009, 2011 and 2015), and The National Dance Project (2008, 2012, and 2015). She is a United States Artist (2012), Guggenheim (2010), and McKnight (2002, 2009) Fellow and has received multiple Sage Awards for Outstanding Choreography. Currently, she is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University.
Learn moreNat Turner Project (NTP) is a fugitive space based in Portland, Oregon. NTP enables artists of color to go beyond the usual expositions inherent in presenting the art of marginalized perspectives; dispersing funds, resources, and platforms to create or express one's own language within and without the parameters of racial commodification or designation. NTP creates an environment of inclusivity –– a communal harbor for artists previously silenced by institutional constraints –– and actively provides them spatial priority.
Learn moreNature Theater of Oklahoma is an OBIE Award-winning New York-based performance group under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Since Poetics: a ballet brut, their first ensemble piece, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has been devoted to making the work they don’t know how to make, putting themselves in impossible situations, and working from out of their own ignorance and unease. Using readymade materials, found space, overheard speech, and observed gesture, and through extreme formal manipulation, and superhuman effort, they shift our perceptions of everyday reality. Selected Press Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, December 21, 2009. 'Romeo And Juliet': Just As You Misremembered It, Robert Smith, NPR, December 29, 2009. Deconstructing Romeo and Juliet, Hilton Als, The New Yorker, January 11, 2010. Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2009. Stage Notes: Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet, Tom Murrin, papermag, December 16, 2009.
Learn moreNic Tammens (Tasmania, 1989) is currently living and working within the United States as a foreign worker. His practice engages in diverse outputs, with a focus on writing and exhibition making. These activities have come to fruition as exhibitions in the United States and Australia, as writings and projects within the pages of Un. Magazine and The Lifted Brow, and as performances within Australian and American free-music communities. Tammens was a recipient of funding from the Australia Council for the Arts in 2012.
Related Thinking
Here you can view fragments from a generative research which may or may not relate to leftist politics, publishing, philosophy, local histories, conceptual art and related ephemera.
Get Rid of Yourself, Bernadette Corporation
An Historical Survey of Anarchism in Melbourne, Takver, Radical Tradition, September 18, 2002.
HONESTY, Volume 1, April 1887–November 1888.
Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language, 1966, pencil drawing.
Wittgenstein's Ladder: The Tractatus and Nonsense, Lynnette Reid, Philosophical Investigations, 21:2, April, 1998. (PDF)
Paul Feyerabend (1975), Against Method, Outline of an anarchist theory of knowledge, marxists.org
Learn moreFounded in 1991 by Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn, Pan Pan Theatre has since produced 22 productions, published a major photographic book, and produced a film, One. The ensemble has worked with a host of Irish and international performers and artists, and both worked and toured extensively throughout Ireland as well as Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Korea, and the United States.
Learn moreRadoslaw Rychcik is a young director living and working in Poland. He began his career as an assistant to renowned director Krystian Lupa on Factory 2 and later worked on Stanislaw Wyspianski's drama Protesilas and Laodamia. In 2008, Rychcik directed Dictator, a performance based on Charlie Chaplin’s film, for the Wybrzeze Sztuki Festival in Gdansk. Most recently, Rychcik has presented A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes at the Drama Theatre in Warsaw and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Versus: In the Jungle of Cities at the New Theatre in Krakow and the Under the Radar Festival in New York.
Selected Press
Rychcik burns actors (Solitude of Cotton Fields), Beata Frysztacka, e-splot.pl, December 20, 2009 (Translated from Polish).
Loneliness is Discovered, Agata Piecuch, e-teatr.pl, January 6, 2010 (Translated from Polish).
Learn moreReuben Tomás Roqueñi
Director of National Artists Fellowships
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
Reuben is a nationally respected arts administrator with over 15 years in progressive program development, management, artist-centric support systems and grantmaking experience. He is currently Director of National Artists Fellowships at Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, serving Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian artists, organizations, and programs across the US. Previously, Reuben was Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area, one the nation’s largest arts and culture funders. Formerly, Reuben served as Grants Program Director at the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. Reuben is a board member at MAP Fund in NYC and a former a board member at PICA. Reuben is of mixed Yaqui/Mayo/Chicanx ancestry and is currently living in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreRichard Taylor is a Professor of Physics, Psychology and Art, and the director of the Materials Science Institute and the Fractals Research Laboratory at the University of Oregon. He has worked in the USA, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and has published more than 250 papers, including 8 papers in Nature and 3 in Science. (Links to selected publications) In addition to his career in science, Taylor is a trained painter and photographer. He adopts an interdisciplinary approach to studying natural patterns called fractals, exploring them across physics, psychology, physiology, geography, architecture and art.
Taylor uses his interests in fractals to encourage collaborations between the arts and sciences and to promote public awareness of science. His work has been featured in TV documentaries, including The Art of Science (ABC, 1998), Hunting the Hidden Dimension (PBS, 2008) and The Code (BBC, 2011) and has been the subject of popular press articles (e.g. in The New York Times and The London Times), magazine articles (e.g. in Scientific American, Time, The New Yorker, New Scientist and Discover) and ten popular science books. He also regularly lectures around the world, commissioned by organizations as diverse as the Nobel Foundation, the Royal Society and national art galleries such as the Pompidou Centre and the Guggenheim Museum.
He has been honored with the following teaching awards: “Outstanding Teacher in Higher Education Award” by the Oregon Academy of Sciences, a Williams Fellowship for Innovative Teaching, the Thomas Herman Distinguished Teaching Award, and a Cottrell Scholarship for Outstanding Teacher-Scholars I have authored (e.g. “Light, Color and Vision”) and edited (e.g. “Physics – Principles and Application”) undergraduate textbooks and received a number of educational grants.
Learn moreRobert Trafford is a journalist by training, and an assistant director with Forensic Architecture, a human rights research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, with whom he has worked since 2017. There, he leads investigative research projects, writes and edits for exhibitions and publications, and supports other team members to bring investigations to publication, and to think about how their research can be activated across a range of forums in pursuit of accountability. His work with Forensic Architecture has covered the extrajudicial killing of civilians by Cameroon’s special forces, chemical weapons attacks by the Assad regime, and counter-protest violence by US police. He has jointly led investigations into the 2020 right-wing terror attack in Hanau, Germany, the 2011 killing of Mark Duggan by London’s police, and the agency’s acclaimed TRIPLE-CHASER investigation, which premiered at the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York.
Learn moreRobert Tyree is a dance artist, writer and educator. He has trained in dance at the University of Washington, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Montréal's after-hours clubs, and Vienna's danceWEB (2011). Tyree has enjoyed working with choreographers Lucy Yim, Kaj-anne Pepper and Meshi Chavez, but maintains a longstanding practice with Tahni Holt since 2008. Tyree's performance writings have been published via several art blogs as well as in FRONT, a Portland-based dance newspaper that he co-publishes.
Learn moreRyan Trecartin works across mediums, investigating installation, video and live performance. He lives and works in Philadelphia. Trecrartin studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and has had solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Dee Gallery (NY), Crane Arts (PA), QED (CA) and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris). Trecartin’s work has been included in numerous group shows including La Trienniale di Milano (Milan, Italy); USA Today, Works from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy of Arts (London, England); and the 2006 Whitney Biennial (NY). His work has been screened at the Walker Art Center (MN), The Getty Center (CA) and The New York Underground Film Festival (NY).
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 moreTabitha Nikolai is a visual artist and educator who uses video games, installation, and writing to study life under the visceral and disorienting onslaught of mass virtuality. Currently based in New Orleans, she grew up in Utah, and is forever influenced by her experiences there. Her work orbits themes of gender, isolation, futurism, and fantasy, often with a dark and humorous twist. With a long history of running DIY spaces, Nikolai believes deeply in the lifesaving power of community-organized scenes. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including the Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; and apexart, New York, NY. Nikolai’s video games have been covered by The New York Times, VICE, and Art in America, and in academic outlets including the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds.
Learn moreTahni Holt is a dance artist and somatic practitioner whose work is rooted in collaboration and community. Born and raised in what is now known as Portland, Oregon, she has spent most of her life in the shadow and glow of Mt. Hood. Shaped by wild landscapes and a punk adolescence, dance making for Tahni is a way to imagine, question and reside in the liminal space, where unraveling is not a marker of failure but one of great power and intrigue. Her work has been presented nationally at On the Boards, Seattle, WA; Velocity Dance, Seattle, WA; Fusebox Festival, Austin, TX; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and White Bird, Portland, OR. She is a recipient of an NDP Touring Award, an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship, and was a 2021 USA Artist Fellowship nominee. Internationally, her work has been performed in Bulgaria and supported through residencies in France, Greece, Romania, and Portugal. Holt is the founder and one of four current stewards of FLOCK Dance Center, a hub for embodied practice and critical engagement in the Pacific Northwest.
Learn moreTai Carpenter (she/her) is a writer, gallerist and community archivist with a passion for social impact in the realms of art and civil rights. She is also the founder of Compose Yourself Magazine, an independent online publication spotlighting music, culture and social justice. She has curated political art installations, facilitated panel discussions and organized artmaking workshops centered on civic action with Portland Art Museum, University of Oregon’s Special Collections and University Archives, Society of American Archivists, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Shift Collective and Documenting the Now, among others.
Her work allows her to intersect two passions, art and civil rights, to create a more equitable and creative world by utilizing critical research to facilitate dialogues around art in relation to current social movements.
Tai is currently the Board President of Don’t Shoot Portland, a community-based advocacy nonprofit and Director of The Black Gallery. Most recently she was Gallery Coordinator for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, Gallery Manager at HOLDING Contemporary and an Archives & Records Management Coordinator at the City of Portland Archives.
Learn moreTakahiro Yamamoto is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer based in Cowlitz, Clackamas, and Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (Portland, Oregon). His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He has received support from New England Foundation for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, MacDowell, National Performance Network, Japan Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium, and others. His performance and visual art works have been presented at Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Diverseworks, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, The Henry Art Gallery, and GoDown Arts Centre Nairobi, among other venues. Yamamoto holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. He is part of the Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.
Learn moreBorn in Tokyo, 1978. Lives and works in Yokohama.
Takashi Makino graduated from Cinematography / Sound Recording course at Department of Cinema at Nihon University College of Art, Japan in 2001 and he studied about film, lighting, and music under Quay Brothers at Atelier Koninck QBFZ in London in 2001. Makino gained his skills relating to film and videos while he was undertaking coloration as a Colorist on various filmography, CF, and music videos from 2001 to 2011. He has been started screening his works since 2004. He captures video of ready-made objects including natural phenomena, human, and cities with various formats. And he layers and configures them while in an editing process, his quite organic yet imaginative films, which seem like bursting unlimitedly are highly regarded internationally. Makino is currently based in Japan and presents movies, music, installation, audiovisual performances around the world. Makino awarded the Tiger Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2011 and he also received various awards at several international film festivals including Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Moscow International Film Festival, and he also awarded the Grand Prize at 25FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival. His cinema works were screened in over 125 cities in the world. Recently screened in documenta 14, Athens, Greece (2017); Austrian Film Festival, Vienna, Austria (2017); New York Film Festival, New York, USA (2014, 2017); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); The Korean Film Archive, Seoul, Korea (2016); BFI IMAX Theatre, London, UK (2016); MoMAPS1, New York, USA (2013); San Francisco MoMA, USA (2009); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA (2008).
Learn moreTala Madani is a Tehran-born painter who lives and works in Los Angeles. She is represented by Pilar Corrias.
Greater New Yorkers | Tala Madani, Kevin McGarry, New York Times T Magazine, June 2, 2010.
Tala Madani, Diana Al-Hadid, BOMB 109, Fall 2009.
Learn moreUtilizing the language and history of sculpture, installation, and conceptual art practices, Tannaz Farsi’s work highlights and re-presents objects and images that contextually start from a collective experience found in the current news or within the milieu of our cultural archive. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Disjecta (Portland, OR), Pitzer Art Galleries (Claremont, CA), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI), Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, and Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH.) She has been granted residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. She received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2014. Born in Iran, Tannaz Farsi lives and works in Eugene, Oregon where she is faculty at the University of Oregon.
Learn moreCalling Tanya Tagaq an Inuit throat singer is like calling Yo-Yo Ma a cello player. Sure, it’s accurate, but it’s not the whole of what he does. Like Ma, Tagaq is the best of what she does – innovative, inspired. —The National Post, Canada
Born in Canada’s high arctic, Tanya Tagaq is a contemporary performance artist who utilizes the ancient traditional Inuit art of throat singing to mesmerize audiences around the world. She is considered a Canadian national treasure whose music defies description. Alternately called primal, orchestral, and free form, her performances are improvised and dialed to a one-of-a-kind frequency. The end result is a staggering array of performances that portray, in full-colour sound, the scope of her life experiences. Tagaq’s commitment to stretching her musical boundaries has led to visionary projects across all mediums and with groundbreaking artists such as the Kronos Quartet. As a solo artist, Tagaq has released two critically acclaimed albums with her band, Sinaa and Auk/Blood, both of which were nominated for Juno Awards (Best Aboriginal Recording) and (Best Instrumental Recording). The albums additionally took first place in several categories at the 2005 and 2008 Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, including Best Female Artist (2005).
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Tanya Tagaq and her work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreTara Jane O’Neil is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and visual artist. She composes and performs under her own name and in collaboration with other musicians, artists, dancers, and filmmakers. As a solo artist, she has released ten full-length albums. O’Neil was a founding member of Rodan, the Sonora Pine, and several other bands. She has collaborated on recordings and stages with Papa M, Steve Gunn, Hand Habits, Lower Dens, Michael Hurley, Little Wings, Marisa Anderson, Catherine Irwin, Mirah, Mount Eerie, and many others. Since 1992, has performed at clubs, galleries, and DIY spaces around the world and venues such as the Centre de Pompdou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer, and the Broad. She starred in the cult classic film Half-Cocked and scored feature films, including His Lost Name, Great Speeches From a Dying World, and others. Her visual art work has been shown in cities including London, Tokyo, LA, New York, and Portland, and has been published in three monographs.
Learn moreHoping to get the unruly Tarek Halaby (performer) out of her hair, his mother signed 12 year old Tarek up for a jazz dance class. He hasn't stopped dancing since. His formal training continued at The University of Iowa, where he received his BFA in Dance Performance. During his three year stint in New York, Tarek worked closely with The Powerful People and the company ChameckiLerner. Other credits include working with Alexandra Beller, Gerald Casel, Doug Elkins, Chris DC Ramos, and behind the scenes with Susan Marshall. In September of 2004, Tarek moved to Brussels, Belgium to live, dance and study at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S.), under the direction of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
Learn moreTashi Wada is a composer and performer based in San Francisco. His recent work focuses on various aspects of sound perception as a basis for direct processes of listening. Wada’s work has been performed throughout the United States and Europe in a variety of venues, and for several years now he has performed alongside his father, Yoshi Wada.
Learn moreA playwright, actor, and singer-songwriter hailed by Time Out New York as “one of the most exciting theater artists of our time,” Mac has performed his work around the world. Mac’s plays include The Walk Across America For Mother Earth, The Young Ladies Of, Red Tide Blooming, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, and The Lily’s Revenge, a five-hour, 36-cast-member show that was named the best play in 2009 by Time Out New York and Paper Magazine and made the top ten lists of The New Yorker and The New York Post. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, such as a Sundance Theater Lab Residency, a Rockefeller MAP Fund Grant, a Creative Capital Grant, The James Hammerstein Award for playwriting, The Edinburgh Festival’s Herald Angel Award, and three GLAAD Media Award Nominations. Mac’s upcoming projects include touring The Lily’s Revenge across the US and UK, the creation of a two-man theatrical concert with Mandy Patinkin, and a festival of full-length plays inspired by Greek classics.
Selected PressTaylor Mac at the Soho Theatre London W1, Donald Hutera, June 3, 2010.
Comparison is Violence, Arched, Glasgow, Mary Brennan, Herald Scotland, June 14, 2010.
Gig Review: Taylor Mac, Jay Richardson, The Scotsman, June 13, 2010.Glamming it Up with Taylor Mac, Caridad Svich, American Theater Magazine, November 2008.
Red Tide Blooming: The Discomforting Spring of Taylor Mac,, Brian Boyles, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2006.
Reminding us of Our Humanity: An Inclusive Interview with Taylor Mac, JT Ross, Minor Progression, March 11, 2011.
Learn moreChoreographer Angelle Hebert and composer Phillip Kraft founded Portland-based dance company tEEth in 2006. Their work is generated through deeply collaborative processes, blending original music and movement through melodic and conceptual mirroring. tEEth approaches the body with a singular eye for life’s beauty and dark absurdity, and combines technical virtuosity with raw impact. tEEth has toured to On the Boards (Seattle), Joyce SoHo (NYC), Fuse Box Festival (Austin), and St. Ferdinand Church and Sidearm (New Orleans), and most recently won the Joyce Theater Foundation’s prestigious A.W.A.R.D. Show! at On the Boards. Their new work, currently in creation and co-commissioned by White Bird (Portland) and On the Boards (Seattle), will premiere in January 2012 at Lincoln Hall at Portland State University, and will tour nationally to pending locations. Selected Press A cracked smile and a silent shout: tEEth's Home Made, Robert Tyree, ultrapdx, November 7, 2010. LIVE REVIEW: tEEth's Home Made, Matthew Korfhage, Willamette Week, November 5, 2010. Dance review: Innovative choreography, intimate performance carry Home Made, Catherine Thomas, The Oregonian, November 6, 2010. Selected Video
Learn moreMelanie Valera (Tender Forever) was born in Southwestern France in 1977. 3 albums (on K Records) and 800 shows later, she’s now pursuing multimedia projects for venues including La Cité Internationale (Paris) and the Whitney Museum (New York). Though she lives today in Portland, OR, her pop project leaps towards a world where we can close the gaps between countries, ideologies and, ultimately, hearts.
Learn moreAn experiment in confined space, Ten Tiny Dances is dedicated to fostering inventive dance and theater on a tiny stage, providing an accessible and exciting performance experience for a diverse audience. Produced by Portland choreographer Mike Barber, the series challenges artists to collapse known vocabulary as well as to make new material that responds to the constraints of the space. It interrupts the usual expectations for dance vocabulary, performance, and viewing, and affects the way people move and are perceived in space. What began with a simple idea has grown into one of the Northwest’s most popular performance series. Since 2002, the platform has inspired an ever-expanding roster of creations and performances: close to 200 emerging and established artists, dozens of engaging venues, and five cities have taken part in Ten Tiny Dances.
Learn moreWith over twenty years of dance-making behind him, Tere O’Connor continues to challenge the accepted tenets of dance as performance. His distinctive compositional style is bewitching, richly textured, and disturbingly beautiful. Bringing both theatrical and physical elements to the stage, O’Connor’s choreography casts an eye on contemporary society and human behavior and challenges his audiences to consider alternative choices and imagined worlds.
As well as touring extensively with his company throughout the US and Europe, South America, and Canada, O’ Connor has created commissioned works for several other dance companies, including Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. He is a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow, and has received two Bessie Awards, one for Heaven up North (1988), and a second in 1999 for Sustained Achievement. Most recently, O’Connor was invited to participate in the DNA Project, a new program of Arts International.
Learn moreTesar Freeman is an artist and amateur historian whose work is concerned with the revision of history and the physical vessels of ideologies. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Peripheries
Learn moreFrom capturing environments, architectural structures, sound, light and human behavior, the source of Umeda’s work ranges widely. Working actively both in and outside of Japan, the artist remodels installations out of daily products, engages viewers with his interactive performance pieces, and collaborates with musicians using his own originally-produced implements. He has held a number of significant solo exhibitions including “Criterium 73: Tetsuya Umeda”, Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito (2008), “Hotel New Osorezan”, Ota Fine Arts Singapore, Singapore (2013), “Age0”, Breaker Project, Osaka (2014), and “Science of Superstition”, SonicProtest Festival, Montreuil (2015). Umeda has also participated in the “1st Aichi Triennale 2010: Arts and Cities”, Nagoya (2010); “Double Vision: Contemporary Art From Japan”, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow / Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa (2012); “Simple Interactions. Sound Art from Japan”, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Roskilde (2011); and is recently featured at “RhythmScape”, Gyoenggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyoenggi (2015) and “Sounds of Us”, Trafó Gallery, Budapest (2015-2016).
Learn moreMELISSA DYNE is a conceptual, installation and performance artist, with a focus on the physics of sound and light. Her large scale installations have shown at The Museum of The City, in Mexico City, and Para/Site, in Hong Kong. Her installation, Glass, in which a window from a skyscraper balanced for three months on a gallery wall, was exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Craft in 2008. She studied optics at UNAM in Mexico City, art at College of Santa Fe, NM and completed a degree in accoustics at SAE Institute in New York. Dyne has been peforming and collaborating with The Blow since 2009, and recently officially joined the band, expanding her investigations of sound waves into the field of popular music. melissadyne.com
KHAELA MARICICH is a performance artist, writer and pop musician. Under the name, The Blow, she has made albums and narrative performance works, interweaving the elements of one within the framework of the other. At TBA 2004 she performed the pop opera Blue Sky vs. Night Sky, as well as a fictional corporate presentation about a mental health maintenance system called Remosch. She has presented her work nationally and internationally in a broad range of venues, from art centers to house parties to concert halls, including such venues as The Kitchen, On The Boards, Henry Fonda Theater, and Great American Music Hall. She lives and works in New York City. khaelamaricich.com
Since coming together in collaboration on The Blow in 2009, Dyne and Maricich have performed at The Wexner Center, Joe's Pub, and The Warhol Museum. They have lectured on their collaboration at PICA, The Henry Gallery, Seattle, and Residency Unlimited, in Brooklyn, NY. Their new album, The Blow, is being released on Kanine Records in October 2013.They first met at the TBA festival in 2004. theblow.org
The Delicate Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Khaela Maricich, The Stranger, June 26, 2013.
Learn moreTHEESatisfaction are Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White. Stas was born and raised in Tacoma, Cat in Seattle and Hawaii. The pair live/laugh/love/dance and create in Seattle, WA. They write, produce and perform their own material, funk-psychedelic feminista sci-fi epics with the warmth and depth of Black Jazz and Sunday morning soul, frosted with icy raps that evoke equal parts Elaine Brown, Ursula Rucker and Q-Tip. THEESatisfaction came upon the scene with lovingly handmade self-released albums, the first of which was 2008’s That’s Weird. All has been in preparation for what they’ve envisioned for years, their debut full-length on Sub Pop Records, awE NaturalE.
Selected Press:
"Startin' Something," Adam Rathe, Out Magazine, March 9, 2012.
"Grind And Shine: Shabazz Palaces And THEESatisfaction," Ann Powers and Andrew Matson, NPR, June 29, 2011.
"THEESatisfaction: Preflight Checklist," Trent Moorman, The Stranger, November 23, 2011.
"Friends with Benefits," Alex Littlefield, PAPER, November 10, 2010.
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 Javaad Alipoor Company (TJAC) is a contemporary theater company that makes work for a changing world and a global audience. Rooted in experimental and multiplatform practice, their work asks the most pressing questions we all face. With a commitment to internationalism, complexity, diversity, and fun, they make work for the twenty-first century, transforming what people think theater can be and what it can do.
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The Julians are four of Portland's finest classically trained female vocalists working together to explore, challenge, embrace, and sing the living daylights out of music that they love. The Julians formed in 2010 with the intention of creating genre-defying programs that seamlessly meld classical, pop, jazz, and indie music. They have performed their original arrangements in a variety of Portland venues including Alberta Rose Theatre, Someday Lounge, Splendorporium, Jade Lounge, as well as on many concert series. They collaborate frequently with local artists and are featured on Bryan Free's 2011 album, Red Queen. The Julians are comprised of: Kristen Buhler, Liz Bacon, Maria Karlin and Vakarė Petroliūnaitė."...the group sounded completely natural in a startling range of repertoire.They're one of the most refreshing breezes to blow through Portland's alt classical scene." - Oregon ArtsWatch
Selected Press
"Weekend MusicWatch: Pirates, Fairies, and more," Brett Campbell, Oregon Arts Watch, November 25, 2011.
"Singing with The Julians," Dmae Roberts, Stage and Studio, November 5, 2011.
"Let's Get to Know: The Julians," Artslandia, June 2013.
Learn moreIn 1997, riot grrrl legend Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) released a solo album under the name Julie Ruin, hoping someday to find a band to play the songs live. She finally assembled her dream team in 2010 as The Julie Ruin, with her ex-Bikini Kill bandmate Kathi Wilcox on bass; Kenny Mellman (half of the legendary punk cabaret act Kiki and Herb) on keys; actor, filmmaker, and musical juggernaut Carmine Covelli on drums; and, Sara Landeau, who Kathleen met while through the Rock Camp for Girls, killing it on guitar. The Julie Ruin brings a strong, tight musical backbone to Hanna’s iconic vocals. Run Fast—their debut album as a band—spans topics from euthanasia to cookies and will be released in September 2013.
Selected Press
"Kathleen Hanna Shares Details of Her Band Julie Ruin's Collaboration With James Murphy", Jenn Pelley, Pitchfork.com, December 10, 2012.
Learn moreBorn and raised in L.A. but based in Portland, Alana Chenevert became left-field rapper/singer The Last Artful, Dodgr when she moved up the Left Coast. Chenevert grew up in the middle of Los Angeles, with one of her earliest memories being a drive-by shooting that left her brother bleeding on the porch. She was only three years old, and her brother survived, but this kind of crime drove the young MC indoors, where she recorded her debut mixtape, 199NVRLND (2013). That same year, she moved to Portland, where her tape caught the ear of the local Fresh Selects. In 2015, Dodgr released the Fractures EP with production from Neill Von Tally. A year later, she partnered with Australian beatmaker DJ WNTD for the single "Squadron" and released the collaborative EP Rare Treat with Myke Bogan. Preceded by the lead single "Oofda," Chenevert and Von Tally released the collaborative LP Bone Music in early 2017 via Eyrst. Her single "Win Is Enough" was released in July 2018 on her own PARTySIZE imprint.
Learn moreSTEW: Guitars/Vocals, Text/Music
THEATER: Book, Co-Composer and Lyricist for Passing Strange (2008 Tony—Best Book, 2-time 2007 Obie (Best New Theater Piece and Best Ensemble ), Family Album (2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Notes of a Native Song (Spring 2015 Harlem Stage), Wagner, Max! Wagner! (Fall 2015 Kennedy Center) The Total Bent (Public Theater 2016), Making It (Spring 2010 St. Anne’s Warehouse), Brooklyn Omnibus (Fall 2010 Brooklyn Academy of Music) Resurrection City (2016 Studio Theatre), Chicago Omnibus (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 2012) FILM: Spike Lee’s Passing Strange. ROCK AND ROLL: Stew and The Negro Problem. Albums: Post Minstrel Syndrome, Joys and Concerns, Guest Host and The Naked Dutch Painter (both called Album of the Year by Entertainment Weekly), Welcome Black, Something Deeper than These Changes, Making It and the cast album of Passing Strange. Numerous Lincoln Center appearances, United Nations, Symphony Space.: Guest Host and Album of the Year by Entertainment Weekly TV: Stew is co-composer (w/ Heidi Rodewald) of “Gary Come Home,” for SpongeBob SquarePants. ARTS EDUCATION: Doctor of Humane Letters, Oshkosh University, Wisconsin; California Inst. of the Arts; New School; Stanford; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of the Arts, Philly. Stew is a Sundance Institute Alum and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence.
Heidi Rodewald is the Tony Award nominated, Obie Award winning co-composer of the musical Passing Strange, which transferred from The Public Theater to Broadway in 2008. Rodewald composed music for Karen Kandel's Portraits: Night and Day (2004); Brides of the Moon by The Five Lesbian Brothers (2010); and co-composed music for Shakespeare's Othello and Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet (2010-12). Rodewald joined the band The Negro Problem in 1997, where she began a longtime collaboration with singer songwriter, Stew. She has collaborated with him in a range of capacities -- as a co-composer, producer/arranger and performerSheis. the co-composer with Stew of the musical Family Album which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival during the 2014 season, Notes of a Native Song, at Harlem Stage in 2015, Wagner, Max! Wagner!! at the Kennedy Center in 2015, and The Total Bent at The Public Theater,May 2016.Heidi is the composer of The Good Swimmer, with librettist Donna DiNovelli, presented by Prototype Festival January 2016 at the space HERE in NYC,and scored her first film I Dream Too Much, which had it's world premiere at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival.
Learn moreAngell was born in Portland, Oregon and lives and works in New York where he has produced and studied video, film and music. His work has been exhibited in Portland, New York, London, Europe and Australia and recently at the Istanbul Biennial. Angell gained notoriety in New York City by projecting his first nature video Jackie-O Forestry Center on the Guggenheim Museum and at Ground Zero. This year at the Caldera residency he inaugurated the first of his “myth building” public art projections on the snow-covered mountains and trees of central Oregon for the edification of unsuspecting drivers.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Asheville, NC; bred and perfected in the cities of Las Vegas, Atlanta and Portland, The Real Hyjinx is an infusion of music and comedy that has made him a fast-rising all around entertainer. He has appeared on AMC's Showville (Summer '13) as a finalist and was voted Fan Favorite. He is a well known performer and has hosted many events throughout the Pacific Northwest. He also co-produces a weekly open mic (The Real Comedy Spot) and a monthly showcase (The House of Hyjinx) and co-founder of the NW Black Comedy Festival. The Real Hyjinx has shared the stage with Rodney Perry (The Monique Show), Honest John (The Wash), the late great Ricky Harris (Everybody Hates Chris), Ralph Porter (BET's CommicView), Tony Roberts & Easu McGraw (Lil Yellow Bus Tour), Nate Jackson (Wild' N Out), Eric Blake (P. Diddy Presents Bad Boys of Comedy) to name a few. He also co-hosted a radio show on 99.1 FM Portland Radio Project titled Soulfull Saturdays. He can currently be seen hosting and performing in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
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 moreThe Wooster Group is an ensemble of artists who make new work for the theatre, dance and media. The Group has created over 40 pieces since its first in 1976.
Elizabeth LeCompte, a founding member of The Wooster Group, has directed all of the company's works. Her honors and awards include a NEA Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in American Theater, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a US Artists Fellowship and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Selected Press
Two Experimentalists Under One Roof, Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, March 26, 2010.
Learn moreThird Angle New Music Ensemble is one of the foremost producers and performers of contemporary chamber music in the United States, and is recognized as a primary creative force in the cultural landscape of Portland and the Pacific Northwest. Since 1985, Third Angle has presented more than 90 programs of contemporary music, commissioned more than 25 new works and released nine recordings to critical acclaim.
Learn moreThomas Fang is a sound and video artist who uses modular synthesizers and esoteric antiques to weave reverberating textural drones with fractured granular alien glitches. After exploring the uses of vintage laboratory test equipment, handmade devices, field recordings, radio transmissions, and circuit-bent electronics, working for synth manufacturers since 2008 has led him to embrace the newest hardware while still allowing chaotic and aleatoric forces to guide creative processes. In 2001 he co-founded the Artificial Music Machine record label and began performing both solo and in ensembles. He has also been a curator for arts nonprofit Church of the Friendly Ghost, staff member of Austin Museum of Digital Art, and has taught synthesis and circuit bending workshops for New Media Art and Sound Summit, Future Music Summit, and Synth Library Portland. Thomas has been a facilitator and administrator for the Synth Library since its inception in 2016.
Learn moreThomas Lauderdale (piano) was raised on a plant nursery in rural Indiana. He began piano lessons at age six with Patricia Garrison. When his family moved to Portland in 1982, he began studying with Sylvia Killman, who continues to this day as his coach and mentor. He has appeared as soloist with numerous orchestras and ensembles, including the Oregon Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Portland Youth Philharmonic, Chamber Music Northwest and Oregon Ballet Theatre (where he collaborated with choreographer James Canfield and visual artists Storm Tharp and Malia Jensen on a ballet based on Felix Salten’s Bambi, written in 1923).
Active in Oregon politics since a student at U.S. Grant High School (where he was student body president), Thomas served under Portland Mayor Bud Clark and Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt. He also worked under Portland City Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury on the drafting and passage of the city’s civil rights ordinance. He graduated with honors from Harvard with a degree in History and Literature in 1992. He spent most of his collegiate years, however, in cocktail dresses, taking on the role of “cruise director” … throwing waltzes with live orchestras and ice sculptures, disco masquerades with gigantic pineapples on wheels, midnight swimming parties, and operating a Tuesday night coffeehouse called Café Mardi.
Instead of running for political office, Lauderdale founded the ‘little orchestra” called Pink Martini in 1994 to play political fundraisers for progressive causes such as civil rights, the environment, affordable housing and public broadcasting. In addition to his work with Pink Martini, Lauderdale collaborates with international superstar and singing sensation Meow Meow, the surf band Satan’s Pilgrims and novelist/writer Tom Spanbauer. In Spring 2008, Lauderdale completed his first film score for Chiara Clemente’s documentary Our City Dreams, a portrait of five New York City-based women artists of different generations. In 2008, he performed as the featured piano soloist in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia with the Choral Arts Ensemble of Portland under the direction of Roger Doyle, and Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F with the Oregon Symphony under the direction of Christoph Campestrini.
Lauderdale currently serves on the boards of the Oregon Symphony and Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreThe drawings, media, and sculptural works of Thomas Zummer have been shown worldwide, with recent exhibitions at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerpen; Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona; Mütter Museum, Philadelphia; and the Frederieke Taylor Gallery and White Box, New York. He has written essays on Eleanor Antin, Vik Muniz, Leslie Thornton, Jim Campbell, Heleen Decuininck, and Harun Farocki, among others, and has curated exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, CinéClub/Anthology Film Archives, Thread Waxing Space, the Katonah Museum of Art, and the Palais des Beaux-arts/Brussels. He is currently working on a book on photography entitled Prosthetic Memory: On Photography’s Histories as well as a study of the early history of reference systems entitled Intercessionary Technologies: Database, Archive, Interface. He lectures on philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of technology at RISDI, the European Graduate School, and the Hogeschool Sint Lukas Brussel.
Learn moreTran is a visual artist living in Brooklyn, New York. For five years, she worked with all her best friends in front of and behind the camera as host and creator of FOOD PARTY, the cutest imaginable, 4:20-friendly TV show about food. FOOD PARTY ran for five episodes on YouTube and 26 episodes on the Independent Film Channel. Tran has been named one of Paper Magazine’s Most Beautiful People and has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and ABC News for her work.
Learn moreTiago Guedes studied music at the Regional Academy of Tomar (Portugal) and then at the Dance Academy of Lisbon. He collaborated with RE.AL as an associate choreographer from 2003 to 2007. As a choreographer since 2001, Guedes has created the following works: A Show with an Announced Opening, October 2002; Trio, April 2005; Matrioska, January 2007; Ópera, July 2007; and Wonderful Things, February 2008. Guedes is resident choreographer at the Théâtre Le Vivat, Armentières, France, and at ZDB Gallery in Lisbon.
Tiago Guedes’ work has been presented in several festivals and theatres in Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Belgium, Switzerland, Brazil, Austria, Netherlands, UK and Hungary. He is the artistic director of Materiais Diversos, a cultural association that aims to produce and spread artistic creations in dance and drama.
Learn moreIn his critically received works, Tim Crouch interrogates the role of the audience in the generation of theatre, theatre as a conceptual form, and the creative act of playwrighting. The BBC Radio 3 production of My Arm won a coveted Prix Italia for Best Adaptation in the Radio Drama category. Crouch won best male actor for his performance in An Oak Tree at the Brighton Festival in 2006, and the piece also received a prestigious Obie Special Citation following its New York run. ENGLAND enjoyed a sold-out run as part of the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and has gone on to receive three major awards: a Fringe First, a Herald Archangel, and a Total Theatre Award.
Learn moreTim DuRoche is a jazz and sound artist living in Portland whose work ranges from live performance to installation, including projects with Tere Mathern Dance, Linda K Johnson, and Cydney Wilkes.
Learn moreTim Etchells is an artist and writer based in the UK, and the artistic director of the performance group Forced Entertainment. His work spans performance, video, photography, text projects, installation, and fiction.
Thoughts on Autoteatro and The Quiet Volume, Ant Hampton, La Otra Parte (Buenos Aires), November 2010.
The Quiet Volume - Review, Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, April 17, 2011. Learn more