Artists Archive
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Alex Cecchetti is an artist based in Paris, France, who works primarily in writing and performance. Cecchetti has published several books of his writing, and performed internationally at places including: La Vatrine, Paris, France (2010); Art Pavillion, Zagreb, Croatia (2010); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France (2009); and Artists Space, New York, NY (2009). Cecchetti was an artist in residence at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2006) and SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2003).
Learn moreAli Chahrour (Beirut, Lebanon) is a choreographer, dancer, and graduate of the theatre department at The Lebanese University. Influenced by techniques from several European countries, he studies contemporary dance in the Arab world and movement that is related to society’s memory and its local circumstances that contribute to creating an identity for contemporary dance, whose techniques and problematics are inspired by its surroundings and history. His work examines the relationship between dancing and the body, and the religion and the sacred, relying on the Islamic and Shiite religious rituals and practices in the Arab world.
Learn moreAnthony Hudson is a Grand Ronde/Siletz artist and writer also known as Carla Rossi, Portland's premier drag clown. Hudson’s performance work—from his award-winning solo show Looking for Tiger Lily to Queer Horror at the Hollywood Theatre—have earned him national fellowships, international engagements including the US Pavilion’s drag clown in residence at the 2024 Venice Biennale, features in Hyperallergic and Art in America, and sainthood from the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. A 2023 FSG Writer’s Fellowship finalist and 2024 Tin House resident, Hudson’s writing has appeared in American Theatre, BOMB Magazine, and Arts and International Affairs. Hudson is currently adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.
Learn moreCatala's practice, aside from making video, includes performance-based works and curating as a medium. A New York-based French artist, Catala holds a BA in mathematics and was schooled in sonic and fine arts at Middlesex and London Guildhall Universities in London. His work has been exhibited internationally at le Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Galerie Christine Mayer (Munich); GAM (Mexico); The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh); and numerous venues in Bordeaux, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Mexico, New York, Munich, Paris, Toulouse, and Saint-Etienne.
Learn moreBoyzie Cekwana (Durban, South Africa) is a performing artist and choreographer. Along with some of his continental peers, he is part of an artistic noise for developing a voice for contemporary dance practice and scholarship in Southern Africa. Together with Desiré Davids, he founded The Floating Outfit Project in 1996, where he remains Artistic Director, Choreographer and performer. He works across disciplines and his work has been shown across various platforms around the world. He is part of the on-going African guerrilla thought-factory, developing and shaping ideas for artistic self-expression in the Southern African region.
Learn moreDr. Brook Colley (Wasco, Warm Springs, Eastern Cherokee; Enrolled: Eastern Band of Cherokee) is an associate professor and chair of the Native American Studies program at Southern Oregon University. Colley’s research is focused on federal Indian law and policy, Oregon Tribes, intertribal relations and conflict, and community health and healing. Her book Power in the Telling: Grand Ronde, Warm Springs, and Intertribal Relations in the Casino Era was published in 2019 by the University of Washington Press and it was a finalist for the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction. In 2014, she received her PhD in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis, and is currently working on an intertribal Indigenous-led collaboration to enhance first food access and first food production in Southern Oregon. She lives in Jackson County with her daughter and two pups named Honey and Leonard Cohen.
Learn moreCandace Avalos is a first-generation American “Blacktina”, daughter of Black Americans from the south and Guatemalan immigrants. Mi nombre en español es Candis Ávalos. Originally from Virginia, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Foreign Languages, with a focus on Spanish and Italian, and Master of Education degree in College Student Personnel Administration from James Madison University. Prior to her current career as a nonprofit executive leader, she started her career as an educator and worked at Portland State University for 8 years providing civic engagement education and advising support for student leaders. She lives in East Portland and is an active member of her community, previously serving as chair of the Citizen Review Committee and Charter Review Commission for the City of Portland, as well as currently on the boards of the Coalition of Communities of Color and Street Roots. Her hobbies include perfecting her Guatemalan recipes, reading social justice literature, playing kickball in her fast pitch league, and exploring Portland's parks.
Learn moreCarissa Dez: Dedicated advocate for social justice and policing reform. With a background in investigative journalism and involvement in community organizing, Carissa would like to promote accountability, equity, and transparency in law enforcement practices. As a panelist, Carissa brings a wealth of experience and insights to the discussion, aiming to drive positive change and foster safer, more equitable communities for all.
Website: https://carissadez.com/
Learn moreCarlos Motta | Photo by Cory Rice
Carlos Motta’s (b. 1978, Colombia) multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.
Motta's work was the subject of the survey exhibitions Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia (2017) that traveled to Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2018); and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015). His solo exhibitions at international museums include, The Crossing (2017), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Histories for the Future (2016), Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; Réquiem (2016), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano the Buenos Aires (MALBA) (2016); Patriots, Citizens, Lovers (2015), PinchukArtCentre, Kiev; Gender Talents (2013), Tate Modern, London; La forma de la libertad (2013), Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; We Who Feel Differently (2012), New Museum, New York; Brief History (2009), MoMA/PS1, New York; and The Good Life (2008), Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia; among others.
In 2020, Motta will participate in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and the Yerevan Biennial, and he will have solo exhibitions at Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery—University of California Santa Cruz, and at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA).
Carlos Motta’s first 20-year career monograph, Carlos Motta: History’s Back Rooms was published by SKIRA in June 2020. He won the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise (2017); the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008).
Motta received grants from Art Matters (2008), NYSCA (2010), Creative Capital, and the Kindle Project (2012).He was appointed tenure-track Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department in 2019.
Learn moreConsidered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Determined as ever to enter the picture—both literally and metaphorically—Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for over thirty years. During this time, Carrie Mae Weems has developed a complex body of art employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.
In a New York Times review of her retrospective, Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible."
Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.
Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, The Alpert, The Anonymous was a Woman, and The Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.
In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur “Genius” grant as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also received the BET Honors Visual Artist award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art photography, was one of four artists honored at the Guggenheim’s 2014 International Gala, a recipient of the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography, The WEB Dubois Award from Harvard University, as well as Honorary Degrees from: California College of the Arts, Colgate University, Bowdoin College, the School of Visual Arts and Syracuse University.
She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London.
Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008, and is currently Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone who is Executive Director of Light Work.
Learn moreChase Biado (b. 1985) is an artist based in his native Portland, Oregon. His varied output including sculpture, video, painting and writing has been exhibited at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Ulsan; Rocksbox, Portland, OR; sophiajacob, Baltimore, MD; Appendix Project Space, Portland OR; Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; Gaite Lyrique, Paris, FR; The Front, New Orleans, LA; among others. He received a BFA from Portland State University.
Learn moreChisao’s grandmother, Chisao Tajima, came to Oregon as a “picture bride” in 1890. In1942 her mother, Kasae (Kay) Tamiyasu married Tadashi (Ted) Hata in the Poston concentration camp in Poston, Arizona. Arts training and artists teachers in Iowa shaped Chisao’s early life. Moving to Oregon from Iowa, her years at the University of Oregon fueled her Asian American activism, community organizing and pursuits as an artist. Chisao connected to the Portland dance community where she eventually established a school and company. A life changing study in Japan solidified her artistic vision and commitment to exploring how artful practices could address social issues and create change. In the Japanese American community her early leadership led to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and inspired her personal research and artmaking. Her studies in the Portland State Dance program, abruptly ended with the decimation of the program. However, new opportunities thrust her into arts in public education where her teaching philosophy as a dance educator influenced curriculum design and integrated arts programming schoolwide and impacted hundreds of students.
Her personal work incorporate community engagement, social action and includes omitted histories on themes of identity, culture, social action and legacies. DrumSouls and We Are You were intercultural and intergenerational works visioning an inclusive America. Harmos, The Human Flag project created for Hiroshima Day performed throughout Portland and Remember Us were community based performances on a citywide scale. Gambatte-An American Legacy, The Assembly Center Project and We are Still Here incorporate Japanese American history, oral histories through the fusion of text, poetry, music, dance and visual storytelling. Additionally Ms. Hata has designed and directed numerous art driven programs like Move Backs and Move On classes.
Her training in modern dance, expressive arts, physical theater, healing through the arts, community facilitation, poetry, taiko drumming and classical Japanese dance integrate with her peace and justice work in diverse communities. Her original choreo poems and artistic collaborations root her artist voice. “There's not one group she hasn’t touched with her activism through art. Her themes are exigent for our times and urge participants to ponder their worldview and take action for change.” Chisao’s vision has consistently created innovative programs, artistic works and shaped community partnerships. Chisao is also an Artist Organizing for Change with the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, Maryland where the scope of her work develops intergenerational institutes, mentors socially engaged artists, creates cross-cultural programming rooted in the philosophies held at the Dance Exchange. This work continues to inspire her work as an Oregon Humanities Conversation Leader, community activist artist serving multiple organizations throughout the city of Portland and beyond.
Learn moreChris Riser is a human, husband, father, and educator living and working on the stolen lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Kalapuya, Kathlamet, Molalla, Multnomah, Tualatin, and other peoples who have been here since time immemorial. He works in the field of education as a means of planting the seeds for a world that does not yet exist. He currently serves as the Administrator of HOLLA School in East Portland, with a mission to change the academic narratives for Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth.
Learn moreClare Croft is a historian, theorist, and dramaturg, working at the intersection of dance studies and performance studies. She specializes in 20th and 21st century American dance, cultural policy, feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory. In all of these areas, Croft considers how dance is a way of thinking and a mode for asking questions. What does it mean to acknowledge that people have bodies and that they use their bodies to make meaning, create community, and critique social structures?
Croft's current book project, Funding Footprints: Dance and American Diplomacy (Oxford University Press), examines the history of U.S. State Department funding of international dance tours. Croft's approach to writing dance history emphasizes the role of dancers in performance, asking how history might look differently if dancers, audiences, and choreographers were seen as equal partners in the creation of meaning in dance. Croft is also editing the anthology Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance, which brings together artists and print scholars in a written volume of essays and manifestos, as well as a website of performances, documented in Michigan's Duderstadt Video Studio.
Croft's writing about dance has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics, and is forthcoming in Dance Chronicle. From 2002-2005, Croft was a regular contributor to The Washington Post, and from 2005-2010, she covered dance, as well as theatre and musical theatre, for the Austin American-Statesman. Her performance criticism has appeared in other popular press venues, including The Baltimore Sun, Dance Magazine, and The Houston Chronicle.
At the University of Michigan, Croft teaches courses in the BFA and MFA dance programs, as well as in the BFA interarts program. Her courses include Approaches to Dance Dramaturgy, Dancing Women/Dancing Queer, Fantasies and Anxieties of Racial Integration in 20th Century American Performance, Problematizing Theory and Practice, and Reading and Writing Dance Criticism. She also has a keen interest in helping students develop as choreographers and dramaturgs.
Croft holds a PhD in theatre history and criticism with an emphasis in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas-Austin and an MA in performance studies from New York University. From 2010-2013, Croft was a postdoctoral scholar in the University of Michigan's Society of Fellows.
Learn moreMeza is a Portland-based artist and composer who studied music composition and digital music production at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She has recorded and toured with Japanther and Explode Into Colors, and has performed her own work in clubs, basements, dance halls, ballrooms, art galleries, and music festivals internationally. Meza started the young series New Musics to support new classical music and working avant-garde composers within the Portland music scene.
Learn moreClayton Lee is a Canadian curator, producer, and performance artist. He currently serves as the Artistic Director of Fierce Festival in Birmingham, UK. From 2019–2023, Clayton was the Director of Rhubarb Festival!, Canada’s longest-running festival of new and experimental performance, and previously served as the Curatorial Associate at the Luminato Festival. His performance projects have been presented in venues across Canada, the US, the UK, and New Zealand. He was one of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Artists-in-Residence in 2023. As part of the Living Room Collective, he represented Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Learn moreCleo Davis started his education in architecture at the University of Oregon further changing to industrial design at San Jose State. He is an artist whose work takes a critical view of the social, political and cultural issues and through his work, he continues to reconstruct the cultural view modernizing while also highlighting traditions. Although he engages with multiple subjects and mediums his methodology remains consistent. He also has started the Screw Loose Studio, the Mayo House Project, and most recently, the archives project in collaboration with Kayin.
Learn moreCornell Alston is a long time member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a not-for-profit that uses the arts as a springboard to teach life skills to individuals both inside and outside of state correctional facilities. He initiated the Youth Empowerment Through the Arts initiative that launched in Queens NY, and he continues to work as an arts-in-education advocate. He is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award. Alston performed and collaborated with Kaneza Schaal on PLEASE, BURY ME at Baryshnikov Arts Center and GO FORTH during a Performance Space 122 RAMP residency. Other performance highlights include: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 12 Angry Men, and the title role in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
Learn moreC. Riley Snorton is a scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender, sexuality, and race. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (U Minn Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (U Minn Press, 2017). Snorton is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago.
Learn moreCrispin Spaeth offers private coaching, workplace trainings, and group classes that champion the beauty of our human design and its intrinsic relationship to confidence, connection, and freedom.
Her work is deeply informed by Integrative Alexander Technique (IAT), an experiential learning process that allows you to access your natural coordination so that you can move, think, and communicate more effectively and in line with your true wishes.
Learn moreCrystal Quartez (Cortez) is a Portland based musician & creative technologist. Through field recording, synthesis and self-built instruments they create “Restorative Noise”; sculpting drones and rhythms of mechanical life, natural voices, and digital timbres to form a texture rich electronic dance music. The resulting sonic landscapes offer windows into shared networks of reality, often separated by borders of space, time, and perception. Recently, their work has involved the collection of live biodata from plants and static data from climate change, to translate these numbers and electrical impulses into sound.
Learn mored.a. carter is a writer, teacher, and cognac sipper. He is co-editor of The Iconic Obama, 2007-2009: Essays on Media Representations of the Candidate and New President (2012). He is currently completing Obscene Material, a book examining black girlhood and scandal in 1919 Washington, D.C. and is also a member of the Queering Slavery Working Group, an interdisciplinary scholarly collective that uses Tumblr to place black queer studies in conversation with the history of enslavement: http://qswg.tumblr.com and http://qswgremix.tumblr.com. He is an assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, with research interests in 20th Century African American History, gender and sexuality studies, and black cultural studies.
Learn moreEmily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Originally from Alaska, she is currently based in Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, history, and role in community. Her work is currently supported by Creative Capital, Map Fund, a Joyce Award and The Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts. Emily is a 2013 Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at the University of Minnesota, a 2012 Headlands Center for the Arts and MacDowell Artist in Residence, a Native Arts and Cultures Fellow (2011), a MANCC Choreographer Fellow (2009/2010/2012), a MAP Fund Grant recipient (2009/2010/2012/2013), and McKnight Fellow (2009). She received a 2012 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performance for her work, The Thank-you Bar, at New York Live Arts. Her current work, Niicugni, is touring to Florida State University/MANCC/Seven Days of Opening Nights, Coil Festival/PS122/Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC), Redfern Arts Center at Keene State (NH), Arizona State University, Tigertail (Miami), Northrop Auditorium (MN), PICA (Portland, OR) and Bunnell Street Gallery (AK).
Selected Press
"Shedding Light on the Last Frontier," Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, January 4, 2013.
"Emily Johnson in Conversation with Ain Gordon," Movement Research Critical Correspondance, January 9, 2013.
Call & Response: Spandex and Basketballs, Emily Johnson, Mental Contagion, July/August 2008.
Learn moreKara-Lis Coverdale works in both acoustic and electronic media to create works that transcend reality. Driven by a patient devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Coverdale’s world-building work occupies new planes built upon a borderless understanding of electronic music rooted in the interlocking pathways of musical systems and languages. Named a unique navigator of the digital frontier with an ease and emotive sensitivity “we cannot yet comprehend” (FADER) and heralded as “one of the most exciting composers in North America” (The Guardian), Coverdale’s work has been met with consistent critical acclaim. Her most recent recorded release, Grafts (Boomkat, 2017), whilst rooted in a modal sensibility, explores the impermanence of identity signature to exhibit a highly idiosyncratic approach to ratio-based microtonality and overtone, grief, love, and the passing of time. Grafts has been described as an “arresting,” “masterful work” of “uncompromisingly distinct,” “indescribable beauty.” Coverdale’s recordings are architecturally considered and often understated, but her dynamic live shows can be unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, confrontational—symptoms that the artist is emotionally present— for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite as a highly dynamic and explorative artist; unpredictable and resistant to categorization and stasis.
Previous releases include Aftertouches (2015, Sacred Phrases), a distinct exploration of holographic sonics, container technologies, and digital ether, that explores music’s sacred histories while forging its mediated and culturally saturated frontiers. Extended harmonic resolutions of seventeenth century chromatic keyboard music are redolent of her approach to this part writing, voiced with hybrid keyboards, fractured samples, algorithmically rendered vocals, and VST miragery. Aftertouches was named a top album of the year by The Wire, NPR, and others. A 480 (2014, Constellation Tatsu), is a set of studies accompanied by .nfo scores sourced from the data-sourced voice to explore the sonic impermanence of identity signatures. Coverdale has collaborated with Philadelphia noise artist David Sutton (LXV) on their collaborative album Sirens (2015, Umor Rex), to explore disembodiment and fantasy in the digital age, Tim Hecker (Love Streams, Virgins), and her production credits include Marilyn Manson, How To Dress Well, Lee Bannon, and others. She has also presented an A/V collaboration with MFO (Marcel Weber). Coverdale has written scores with artist and writer Kara Crabb on several projects, including the writing of the score for Royal Jelly (a modern reworking of the Greek Tragedy Medea), and The Reproductive Life Cycle of a Flower. In 2016 and 2017, Coverdale performed over eighty shows in Europe, North America, and Australia, including performances that were “festival favourites” for Unsound, Semibreve, and Mutek. More recently, she presented new large scale works Marjamaa Laulud, a unique commission for Dance with the Estonian Vanemuine Theatre and choreographer Ruslan Stepanov, and VoxU, a pipe organ commission for Mutek Montreal (CALQ) that is centred around the collection and arrangement of the unique sonics of the Vox Humana stop in particular, the first record and instrument of vocal synthesis dating back to the fifthteenth century. The work weaves a narrative characteristic of this period, intersecting motives of emulation, the body, and transcendence.
Kara-Lis was born in Burlington, Canada, and began studying with the Royal Conservatory of Music from age 5. Her grandparents were immigrants from Estonia. She later went on to complete with degrees in musicology and composition, for which she wrote a Masters thesis “Sound Rhetoric, and the Fallacy of Fidelity,” a seed to Coverdale’s infatuation with the mutability of the real. Coverdale has worked as organist and music director at several churches across Canada since age 13, where she has also served as choir conductor. She is recipient of a “remising young artist” award by Canadian new music composer Ann Southam, has held residencies with GRM Paris, EMS Stockholm, FUGA Zaragoza and others, and presents original performances, commissions, collaborations, and installations all over the world including The Barbican, Theatre du Chatelet, AGO, MAC Montreal, Filharmonia Krakowska, Teatro Circo, Kraftwerk, and Elbphilharmonie.
Learn moreWith the publication of her debut book, The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio became the first undocumented finalist for a National Book Award. Her book was also named by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020 and was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Time, NPR, The New York Public Library, Book Riot, Vulture, and the Library Journal. Karla has written about immigration, music, beauty, and mental illness for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, n+1, and The New Inquiry, among others. She lives in New Haven with her partner and their dog. She is a graduate of Harvard University and a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at Yale.
Learn moreLili Chopra, Executive Vice President and Artistic Director of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in New York City, is founder and curator of its trans-disciplinary fall festival Crossing the Line. She has extensive experience in programming, producing, and marketing international events and performance works in both France and New York. In addition to working with various festivals and independent artists as an administrator and producer, she spent four years at New York Live Arts (formerly known as Dance Theater Workshop) working closely with David White as Associate Producer and as Curator of its Gallery. She received her Masters in Theater and Performing Arts History at Paris X University, and her M.A. in Arts Administration from Columbia University in New York.
Learn moreLucy Cotter is an independent writer, curator and trained artist, holding a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. A regular contributor to journals such as Mousse, Flash Art, Frieze and Third Text, her edited book Reclaiming Artistic Research was published in 2019. She was curator of the Dutch pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale 2017, presenting artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Cotter was formerly director of the Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She is currently based in Portland, Oregon and working on new projects that experiment with the boundaries of the artistic, the curatorial and the theoretical.
Learn moreMarcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of the collection Cenzontle (2018), which won the 2017 A. Poulin Jr. prize, and the chapbook Dulce (2018). His memoir, Children of the Land (2020), is his most recent publication. His work has appeared or been featured in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, People Magazine en Español, The Paris Review, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. He currently teaches in the Low-Res MFA program at Ashland University
Learn moreMyles de Bastion develops technology and art installations that enable sound to be experienced as light and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum, and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. He has built large format installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding.
Myles is the founder of CymaSpace, a non-profit that facilitates cultural events inclusive of the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing; and Audiolux Devices, which produces products featuring light and sound synergy. 2018 Director of the first Northwest Deaf Arts Festival. Myles mentors Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing youth, has developed curriculum, and taught workshops in music and sound for Deaf schools, camps, and communities.
A current project, The Ikigai Machine, is a multimedia visual narrative with interactive installations and live performances that he is developing into a feature-length, touring production for disability hubs and art institutions. Myles has received support from Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Cultural Trust, Oregon Cultural Foundation and Randall Charitable Trust.
Learn moreFor the past ten years, Zimbabwe-born and New York-based Chipaumire has investigated Africa and her own personal iconography. Her performances complicate, implicate, and destroy the concept of the African female body as a subjugated, colonial, and tribal unknowable. Chipaumire is a recipient of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and two New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards.
Selected Press
Nora Chipaumire: Body and Soul Podcast, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Infinite Body Podcast, April 25, 2008.
Platform 2012: Parallels, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, April, 2012.
Learn morePaul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance.
Learn moreRachel Carrico is a scholar and practitioner of dance and performance. She holds a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California–Riverside and an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU. She has published her research on second lining, an improvisational dance form rooted in New Orleans's African diaspora parading traditions, in TDR: The Drama Review, TBS: The Black Scholar, and several anthologies. Fellowships and awards include the Society of Dance History Scholars' Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for excellence in dance scholarship, the UC Center for New Racial Studies Research Grant, and the Center for Gulf South Research Global South Fellowship at Tulane University. Also a practitioner, Carrico completed the Limón Institute's dance teacher training. In 2008, she co-founded Goat in the Road Productions in New Orleans, with whom she has directed two international artist residencies and launched Play/Write, a youth playwriting festival, in New Orleans schools.
Learn moreRaven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of a United States Artists fellowship in music, a Creative Capital award in visual arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
Learn moreRobert Alexander Clarke is a designer, educator, and theorist practicing at the intersection of culture, identity, and architecture. His work aims to develop and canonize black aesthetics, thus authenticating it as a lens through which to practice architecture. His design office, BAS ( Black Aesthetic Studio ) was founded by Clarke, Cleo Davis and Kimberly Morland; their studio explores how to unearth new aesthetics that are immensely specific to African American culture, experience, and identity.
Before joining as Activist in Residence at UCLA’s City Lab, Clarke held posts as a Wilson Smith III Design in Spatial Justice Fellow at the University of Oregon’s College of Design. As well as Research Fellow at Newlab under the supervision of architect and New York University Associate Professor of Practice Mitchell Joachim. Before opening his practice, Clarke worked for many years at architectural firms across the globe, including HOK, Terreform ONE, Gensler, and Archi-Union.
Learn moreRobert Quillen Camp is a theater artist and scholar whose current research focuses primarily on the ways in which expanded dramatic practices intersect with contemporary post-conceptual visual art. His other research areas include European modern drama and the phenomenology of performance.
He has written extensively for the stage, including writing the text for Pig Iron Theater Company’s OBIE-award winning CHEKHOV LIZARDBRAIN, which has toured internationally and been published by 53rd State Press. His most recent play, ALL HANDS, a collaboration with the Hoi Polloi Theater Company, premiered at NYC’s Incubator Arts Project in 2012, directed by Alec Duffy, with music by Dave Malloy and choreography by Dan Safer. Another collaboration with Pig Iron, the Barrymore Award nominated PAY UP, returned to the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in the fall of 2013. His plays and performance works have been produced at many venues in the US and abroad, including the Public Theater Under the Radar Festival, the Ohio Theater, the Ontological-Hysteric, Peak Performances at Montclair University, The Empty Space, Prelude Festival, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and HERE. His plays have been published in the literary journals Conjunctions, Chain, Conundrum, Factorial, and Play A Journal of Plays.
He currently teaches in the theatre department at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR.
BA Reed College, MFA Brown University, PhD University of California, Santa Barbara.
Learn moreSan Cha is a Mexican-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice blends rancheras, electronics, cumbia, and pop to explore themes of identity, power, and liberation. Born Lizette Gutierrez to Mexican immigrant parents, San Cha's artistic journey began with singing in the Catholic Church choir and evolved within the vibrant Bay Area queer drag nightlife scene. This formative period fostered a unique fusion of musical influences, including Catholic hymns, Mexican corridos, rancheras, cumbias, and punk queer electroclash, shaping her distinct artistic voice.
Rooted in the DIY, punk, and queer nightlife cultures, San Cha's work is driven by a commitment to personal, social, and political liberation. Her creative process is fueled by community narratives, lucid dreams, and cultural exploration. A transformative experience living on her aunt's farm in Jalostotitlán, Mexico inspired her to reimagine traditional ranchera music through a queer lens, subverting established forms and cultural signifiers.
San Cha's early work, such as the Capricho del Diablo EP (2018), received critical acclaim, with Bandcamp Daily naming it Album Of The Day. Her 2019 album, La Luz De La Esperanza, earned an 8.0 rating on Pitchfork and recognition as one of The Advocate's "Women Of The Year" in 2020. Her music has been featured in the Starz TV series Vida and Kacey Musgraves' film Star-Crossed: The Film, with the Los Angeles Times declaring, "San Cha sings from a divine place." Her ongoing Processions (2024) mixtape, released through Ballroom Marfa, further demonstrates her artistic versatility and commitment to exploring complex narratives.
San Cha's practice extends to collaborative projects in classical music and opera. She has engaged in projects, performances, and residencies with Performance Space New York, New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; lumber room, Portland, OR; The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Red Bull; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; Denniston Hill, Glen Wild, NY; Oak Head; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; Movimiento de Arte y Cultural Latino Americana, San Jose, CA; KQED; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Portland, OR, and more. Her work has also been supported by the California Arts Council.
Recent awards and accolades include the National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund Grant (2023), National Performance Network Documentation & Storytelling Grant (2024), Los Angeles Performance Practice Research & Development Award (2024), a 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. San Cha's work consistently pushes artistic boundaries, utilizing music and performance as powerful vehicles for sociopolitical change and liberation.
Learn moreSeba Calfuqueo are from Mapuche origin. Their work appeals to their inheritance to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural, and political status of the Mapuche subject in contemporary Chilean society and in Latin America. It includes installations, ceramics, performances, and video art that explore cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes produced from the cross between Indigenous and Western ways of thinking. Their research also has the purpose of making visible feminist and sexual dissidence issues. Seba Calfuqueo is part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, which edits YeneRevista, an online magazine of art, thought, and writing in Wallmapu and AbyaYala language.
Learn moreSterling Cunio, is an award winning author, playwright and poet. An Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Pen America Arts for Social justice Fellow, and a World Yes Jammer whose work has been published in The Marshall Project, L.A. Book review and performed by various artist including Grammy award winning musician Antino Sanchez. Sterling sits on the board of Directors of Oregon's Transformative Justice Community and acts as lead facilitator for Regroup, a support and empowerment network of Returning Citizens that played an instrumental role in abolishing the authorization of slavery from Oregon's constitution. Along with currently working for Church at The Park in Salem serving its houseless community, Sterling also works as a lead consultant on the Ubuntu Climate Initiative, a global climate resilience movement focusing on Reuniting people and planet through joy, art and sustainability.
Learn 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 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.
Learn moreYOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is yhchang.com. It is also Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge. They have made work in 17 languages and presented much of it in major art institutions, including Tate London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the New Museum, New York. Selected Press "DISTANCE, HOMELESSNESS, ANONYMITY, AND INSIGNIFICANCE": AN INTERVIEW WITH YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES", Thom Swiss, The Iowa Review, December 15, 2002. Interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Hyun-Joo Yoo, dichtung-digital, February, 2005. Selected Video
Learn moreYOUNG JEAN LEE (Artistic Director) is an OBIE award-winning playwright and director who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays, The Shipment and Lear) and by Samuel French (Three Plays by Young Jean Lee). She is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, NYFA, NEA, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Rockefeller MAP Foundation. She is also the recipient of two OBIE awards, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award.
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