Artists Archive
J
Ahamefule J. Oluo (they/them) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer, comedian, and creator of live performance. They were a founding member of the award-winning experimental jazz quartet Industrial Revelation and is a Mellon Foundation Creative Research Fellow, a Creative Capital awardee, an Artist Trust Arts Innovator awardee, and a semifinalist in NBC’s Stand Up for Diversity comedy competition. Oluo co-produced comedian Hari Kondabolu’s albums Waiting for 2042 and Mainstream American Comic for Kill Rock Stars, and the album Who the Hell is Dwayne Kennedy? by the eponymous standup legend. They have premiered two autobiographical, music-based performances at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival: Now I’m Fine, 2016, which was described by The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley as “a New Orleans funeral march orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg,” and by Time Out New York as "A day later, it's as though I grabbed a live wire; I can still feel the electricity in my skin;" and Susan, 2020, which Brantley called “virtuosic” and “crackerjack.” Oluo has written for television, including the stop motion animated comedy Santa Inc. on HBO Max, starring Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen. Now I’m Fine was adapted into the feature film Thin Skin, which Oluo wrote, scored, and starred in. Thin Skin won Best Director at the 2020 Harlem Film Festival and is now available on streaming services. They have appeared on This American Life. Oluo has been commissioned, presented, invited, or supported by Under the Radar, On the Boards, PICA, Meany Center, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Seattle Theatre Group, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre, REDCAT, MacDowell, Yaddo, Wa Na Wari, Langston, and more.
Learn moreAlfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021), as well as, Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).
Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017), Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2020) and SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo (2021).
The artist has realized more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020.
His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide. Learn moreDr. Simonis has a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University and is the Owner & Lead Scientist of DAPPER Stats, a Portland, OR-based quantitative ecology consulting company. They are also the Founder & Director of the Chemical Weapons Research Center, a research, education, and activism organization focused on understanding the impact of chemical weapons on people, communities, and the environment.
When not working, Dr. Simonis plays competitive roller derby, and is a current member of the four-time, currently defending world champion and #1 ranked Rose City Rollers Wheels of Justice. Alongside competing, Juniper has been recognized for their activism and advocacy for inclusion of transgender athletes.
Website: https://www.juniperlsimonis.com/
Learn moreEisa Jocson is a contemporary choreographer and dancer from the Philippines. Trained as a visual artist, with a background in ballet, she won her first pole-dancing competition in Manila in 2010, and also started pole ‘tagging,’ and other public interventions in Manhattan and various cities. Under successive residencies in Belgium, Eisa developed an artistic praxis that probes the stereotype and context of the female pole dancer. Her Death of the Pole Dancer solo toured Berlin, Brussels, Zurich, Vienna and Ljubljana. Eisa then trained in ‘macho dancing,’ a popular night-club entertainment form, and premiered the solo Macho Dancer in spring 2013 which then toured 4 important European summer festivals: Impulstanz, Noorderzon, Tanz im August, and Theater Spektakel in Zurich where she won the Zürcher Kantonalbank Acknowledgement Prize.
Selected Press
"Macho Macho Woman: Interview with Eisa Jocson," ArtAsiaPacific, April 23, 2014
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Eisa Jocson 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 moreElisheba Johnson is a curator, public artist, and administrator. Johnson, who has a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, was the owner of Faire Gallery Café, a multi-use art space that held art exhibitions, music shows, poetry readings, and creative gatherings. For six years, Johnson worked at the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture on capacity-building initiatives and racial equity in public art. Johnson is currently a member of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Network advisory council and has won four Americans for the Arts Public Art Year in Review Awards for her work. She currently co-manages Wa Na Wari, a Black art center in Seattle’s Central District that uses the arts to build community and resist displacement.
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 morejaamil olawale kosoko (they/he/she/jlov) is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s work in performance is rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body as a means to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.
jaamil is the recipient of awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund award, 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency, 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and consecutive 2016-2020 USArtists International awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.
Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, their book, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, was published in spring 2022.
Premiering in 2022, Black Body Amnesia (the performance reading) examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people negotiating the psychic lifeworlds of living inside the American context. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of performers including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, and DJ Maij, with sound accompaniment by Everett Saunders. In this new work, Kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a performance device. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests, and how they then archive these personal freedom narratives to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.
Their 2020 work Chameleon is a multimedia living digital art work, film, and audio transmission project that explores the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the intersection of Blackness, gender fluidity, and queerness in a pirated virtual space. Chameleon is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; the New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency program; and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, in partnership with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and Tanz im August/HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Additional development support for Chameleon was made possible, in part, with commissioning support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, through the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program.
Their 2017 work, Séancers, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in December 2017 and has toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim. Recent highlights include Mousonturm (Frankfurt, DE), FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA), Sophiensaele (Berlin, DE), the Wexner Center (Columbus, OH), Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), and Montréal Arts Interculturels (Montréal, CA), among others.
jaamil’s previous work #negrophobia (premiered September 2015, Gibney Dance Center) was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award and toured throughout Europe appearing in major festivals including Moving in November (Finland), Take Me Somewhere (UK), SICK! (UK), Tanz im August (Berlin), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (Norway), zurich moves! (Switzerland), Beursschouwburg (Belgium) and Spielart Festival (Munich).
They are a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University where they earned their MA in Curatorial Studies.
As a performer, jaamil has created original roles in the performance works of Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. In addition, creative consultant and/or performer credits include: Terry Creach, Lisa Kraus, Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, Leah Stein Dance Company, Emergent Improvisation Ensemble, and Faustin Linyekula and Les Studios Kabako (The Democratic Republic of Congo).
In 2009, they published the chapbook Animal in Cyberspace. In 2011, jaamil published the collection Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). Other publications include the American Poetry Review, the Dunes Review, the Interlochen Review, the Broad Street Review, Silo Literary and Visual Arts Magazine.
jaamil has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Baker Artists Awards, among others. From 2014 to 2020, jaamil served as a trustee on the Board of Directors for Dance/USA, the national service organization for dance professionals. jaamil is also a founding advisory board member for the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving, and currently serves as an artistic advisory member of The Field Center in Vermont.
jaamil has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center among others, and has taught and lectured at various educational institutions across the world. In Fall of 2020, jaamil was appointed the 3rd annual Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA World Arts & Cultures/Dance Department. Additionally, they lecture regularly at Princeton University, The University of the Arts Stockholm, and Exerce Master at ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France.
Learn moreJacob Wren makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed and Polyamorous Love Song, a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2014. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize, Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.
Learn moreJaeda is an extremely gifted Master Makeup Artist, Lash Technician, Entrepreneur, and dancer who has provided her renowned artistry to a wide variety of clientele. Jaeda was born in the Dominican Republic and brings a multi-cultural perspective to the world of beauty and dance, she has the ability to connect with people from all walks of life. After being relocated to Birmingham, Alabama as a child, Jaeda went on to start her dance career with Alabama Ballet company at the age of 7. she trained with the company until she was 15 and that's when she was introduced to the world of majorette style dancing. Jaeda has taught multiple high schools and colleges (Jackson olin High, Caver High Woodlawn High Parker High Alabama State University, Miles College, Stilman college) just to name a few the art of majorette-style dancing. In 2008 she became the coach of Birmingham city school system summer camp and later on the assistant director of Jackson olin auxiliary department. Jaeda has judged many Competitions in the south and still has a love for dance.
Learn moreJaleesa Johnston; ⅓ of rise x fall
Jaleesa Johnston is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and arts administrator currently living and working in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has been the recipient of the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency, and Open Signal’s New Media Fellowship. She has exhibited her work in cities along the West Coast, including San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, and she occasionally facilitates workshops and classes in new media and performance art. Jaleesa also organizes public programs as Programs Lead in the Learning and Community Partnerships Department at the Portland Art Museum.
Learn moreJamarsa Peters, Meet Me On Da Floor President
Jamarsa Peters is a business professional with an astute financial acumen, an empathic heart, and a strong sense of business and personal responsibility. These qualities were shaped largely by his family dynamic. He is the oldest of two siblings. It was after the death of his mom that he assumed paternal responsibility for his younger siblings. With this responsibility, he decided to become this paragon for positivity and for excellence that his siblings could emulate. Because he wanted to be that example for his family, he chose to pursue higher education at Grambling State University where he majored in Business Information Systems; subsequently, earning his Bachelor of Science degree in 2006. In college, he was a member of the collegiate cheerleading team and received technical dance training while being a part of the Orchesis Dance Company under the direction of Dianne Maroney-Grisby, former Alvin Ailey dancer. In addition to his business acumen, he is an extremely powerful choreographer, dancer, and producer having danced with LGBTQ underground Legendary male J-Sette teams like Grambling X-Men, Memphis Elite, and the Texas Teasers where he currently resides in Dallas. Currently, he is recognized as an Icon in the Meet Me On Da Floor dance community where he now serves as President while continuing to change the narrative and making a difference one 8 count at a time!
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by Jamarsa Peters in partnership with Jermone Donte Beacham and jumatatu m. poe.
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 moreJamie Isenstein was born in Portland, Oregon in 1975, and lives and works in New York City.. She has presented her work in exhibitions including It is what it is. Or is it?, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2012); MakeUp, A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy (2012); Liverpool Biennial: Touched, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK (2010); Marina Abramovic Presents, Manchester International Festival, Manchester, UK (2009); One Minute More, The Kitchen, New York (2009); Hammer Projects: Jamie Isenstein: This Way to The Egress, The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2007); Greater New York 2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2005). Her work is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Meyer Riegger in Berlin/Karlsruhe, Germany.
Selected Press
"The Lady Vanishes," Robin Tovey, Reed Magazine, March 2012.
Learn moreJ. Ashlee Albies has been practicing civil rights and employee-side employment law for almost 20 years. She has devoted her legal career to advocating for clients who have been harmed by discrimination, retaliation, or unfair treatment by an employer or by the government. Ashlee has a long history of civil rights advocacy — working to use the legal system and her legal knowledge to advance human rights. She has provided legal support to many mass demonstrations in Portland and nationally, and represents community groups and individuals seeking to hold police accountable. She also helped organize legal seminars for prisoners and the Life Without Parole Storytelling Project at Oregon State Penitentiary in 2019. She regularly offers community education and continuing legal education seminars on the First Amendment, free speech, creative uses of the law, trial advocacy, and civil rights litigation.
Website: http://www.albiesstark.com/
Learn moreJasmine Elizabeth Johnson is a scholar-practitioner and Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores the politics of Black movement including dance, diasporic travel, and gentrification. Johnson’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and elsewhere.
Learn moreJasmine Mahmoud is the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professor and Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies in the School of Drama at the University of Washington, with appointments in Art History and Comparative History of Ideas. Mahmoud’s research engages experimental performance, critical race studies, public policy, and geography, including relationships between theater and gentrification.
Learn moreJason N. Le (they/them) is an arts writer, critic, and cultural worker currently based in Northwest Arkansas, where they work in exhibitions planning at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Momentary. Their academic and artistic research primarily explores queer artistic navigations of human-object relationships at the intersection of performance and sculpture. They have written for BOMB Magazine, Critical Conversations (The Ford Family Foundation & University of Oregon’s Center for Art Research), Portland Monthly Magazine, Oregon ArtsWatch, and more.
Learn moreJennie MaryTai Liu is an artist working across performance, choreography, video, and writing. She has worked in institutions and artist-run spaces including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources, The Mistake Room, The Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and Incubator Arts Center. She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, PICA, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited Riting, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA. She is currently organizing a 2022 performance exhibition funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation engaging LA dance artists to respond to modern dance activity in early twentieth-century LA. Jennie frequently collaborates as a performer in the work of Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group.
Learn moreJennifer Monson is an American dancer and choreographer. She has been actively creating dance work since the 1980s. She works with dance improvisation and creates choreography that is at times improvised or devised through scores, as well as collaborating with other dancers, visual artists, architects and scientists.
Learn moreDancing has been in my blood since I can remember. It started off with hip hop dancing for my high school -- I began to recognize my skill and talent. After 4 years of that, I was introduced to the world of J-Sette by women. J-Sette historically refers to Jackson State University’s female drill team that began in the 1970s. They “created” the dance style, and thus far have made it a distinctive form of dance. I was interested in this type of dance, but not entirely until I saw a group of males performing it. At that point, I claimed the style for myself and perfected it on my body. Currently, I have my own J-Sette line, Mystic Force, and plan to increase our already considerable renown in this style of dance in our community, and eventually internationally. Previously, I served as co-captain of Dallas’ Texas Teasers. I have participated and competed in several events and competitions, including 2 SetteItOff video challenges, Atlanta Pride 2010, Tennessee Classics 2009, and Memphis Pride 2008. In 2015, I was named New Legendary by the Meet Me on the Dance Floor J-Sette council, and have gained many titles since then, such as, Best Dancer and Most Entertaining.
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by Jermone Donte Beacham in partnership with jumatatu m. poe and Jamarsa Peters.
Learn moreJesse Hewit is a dance artist who lives in San Francisco. He has performed and had residencies with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CounterPUSLE, Z Space, KUNST-STOFF Headlands Center for the Arts, Ponderosa Tanzland, Firkin Crane, and others. Hewitt received a 2010 SFBG Goldie Award winner and was a 2011 YBCA Bay Area Now artist. He founded the THIS IS WHAT I WANT Festival with the National Queer Arts Festival, and has curated for THEOFFCENTER and Dancer’s Group/CounterPULSE’s 2nd Sundays series.
Learn moreHutchins received her BA in Art History from Oberlin College and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hutchins has had solo exhibitions in New York and Portland, Oregon, and has been shown across the US, as well as in Iceland, the UK, and Germany. Most recently, Hutchins’ work was included in 2010: The Whitney Biennial. Later this year, Hutchins will be featured in Ephemera at Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park; in Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture at the Saatchi Gallery (London), and at Timothy Taylor Gallery (London). She is represented by Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) in New York.
Selected Press
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Stuart Horodner, BOMB, Summer 2010.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, John Motley, Art in America, June 4, 2010.
Minor Miracles, Ben Davis, Artnet.com, March 26, 2010.
Critics' Picks: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Stephanie Snyder, Artforum, March, 2010.
500 Words: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Patricia Maloney, Artforum, July 22, 2009.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins' Hours and Ours at Small A, Jeff Jahn, PORT, February 1, 2008.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Chas Bowie, Portland Mercury, February 8, 2007.
Learn moreJess Perlitz’s work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. Born in Toronto, CA, she is a graduate of Bard College and received an MFA from Tyler School of Art and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently based in Portland, OR, where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of the year-long Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project and the Experimental Arts Research Forest. Perlitz was named a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, won a Joan Shipley award, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Socrates Sculpture Park, Astoria, NY; Cambridge Art Galleries, Cambridge, CA; De Fabriek in The Netherlands; and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA, as part of the museum’s ongoing artist installation series.
Learn moreJibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of three books of poems, 19 Names For Our Band (Fence, 2008), James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011), and Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2014). His art and writing projects, spanning photography, video, performance and poetry, have been exhibited and performed at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA/P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.
Learn more1. JI YANG is a PUZZLE MAKER and a FICTION BUILDER. 2. JI YANG makes art like saying “2 x 2 = 5 ?” or “ fighting with a puffy pillow.” 3. JI YANG does it underwhelmingly.
Learn moreLifelong neurodivergent artist.
Two main pathways: abstract painting and dance/performance.
As a painter of close to 50 years, my work is equal parts improvisation and design: chance elements sometimes kinesthetically generated, a studied compositional eye, and a deep love of color, movement, architecture, and gesture. I create abstract acrylic paintings with many layers and sometimes collage elements. My studio is in The Drawing Studio in SE Portland, which I co-own with Phil Sylvester, adjoined by the Findlay/Sylvester Gallery, in which my paintings can be viewed.
As a contemporary modern dancer I have created and performed my own, mostly solo performance work. Also worked extensively for many years with these choreographers:
Beginning in 1980 with Jann McCauley Dryer in CIRQUE (formerly Portland Dance Theater), Gregg Bielemeier and Gregg Bielemeier Dance Project, Catherine Egan and Eggshell Productions, and Bonnie Merrill, who, in addition to the many works I danced over the years, choreographed a solo for me that I performed while heavily pregnant.
Helen Buckingham, Kiken Chin, Linda K Johnson, Kimi Okada, Mary Oslund, Sara Padilla, Judy Patton, Ray Terrill.
Collaborated with artists in performance: Alva Bradford, costumer/puppet maker, Cristina DeGennaro, visual/performance artist, Van Findlay, singer/violinist, Daniel Storto, fashion/costume designer, Tyrrell Sweetman cellist, Phil Sylvester, composer/musician, and painter/set designer.
Designed and constructed sets, costumes, props, and hair designs for many choreographers/directors, including Gregg Bielemeier, Jann Dryer, Catherine Egan, and Randee Paufve.
Studied visual art and dance in the 1970’s at Portland State University with instructors who were creative working artists. In addition to modern dance have studied tap, ballet, African, improvisation, jazz, flamenco, as well as piano and drums. Influential teachers include Gregg Bielemeier, modern dance; Ruby Burns, African dance; Jann Dryer, modern dance; Cathy Evleshin, modern and jazz dance; Fred Heidel painting; Jim Hibbard drawing; Michi Kosuge sculpture; and Vincent Martinez-Grieco, modern jazz dance; Bonnie Merrill modern improvisation and tap dance; Judy Patton modern dance and performance collaboration; Barbara Remington ballet; and Claire Roche, tap dance.
Learn moreJo Ann Hardesty is a veteran and civil rights leader whose compassionate vision brings Portland together. As the first Black woman elected to city council, Commissioner Hardesty championed the Portland Street Response, relieving the burden on police to respond to mental health crises. She helped build the coalition that set the national standard for local climate action, and at the height of the George Floyd demonstrations, she crafted a police reform measure that 82% of voters approved. She is a former state representative serving North/Northeast Portland and former President of the Portland NAACP.
Learn moreJose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and Tony-nominated producer. A leading voice for the human rights of immigrants, he founded the non-profit media advocacy organization Define American, named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. His best-selling memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, was published by HarperCollins in 2018. Most recently, he co-produced Heidi Schreck’s acclaimed Broadway play What the Constitution Means to Me, which was nominated for a Tony Award for “Best Play” and is streamable on Amazon Prime Video. In 2020, Fortune named him one of its “40 under 40” most influential people in government and politics.
In 2011, the New York Times Magazine published a groundbreaking essay he wrote in which he revealed and chronicled his life in America as an undocumented immigrant. A year later, he appeared on the cover of TIME worldwide with fellow undocumented immigrants as part of a follow-up cover story he wrote. He then produced and directed Documented, an autobiographical documentary feature film that aired on CNN and received a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary. Also in 2015, MTV aired White People, an Emmy-nominated television special he produced and directed on what it means to be young and white in a demographically-changing America.
Among accolades he has received are the Freedom to Write Award from PEN Center USA and honorary degrees from Emerson College, Colby College, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Passionate about the role of arts in society and promoting equity in education, he serves on the advisory board of TheDream.US, a scholarship fund for undocumented immigrant students.
A product of the San Francisco Bay Area, he is a proud graduate of San Francisco State University (’04), where he was named Alumnus of the Year in 2012, and Mountain View High School (’00). An elementary school named after Vargas opened in his hometown of Mountain View, California in August 2019.
Learn moreJoseph M. Pierce is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th-century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the forthcoming special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, The Art Newspaper, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with SJ Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
Learn moreJuliana Huxtable will treat opening night audiences to a dynamic experience sonically and visually. The night will play between text, sound and video, questioning the parameters between club and gallery. In her work, Huxtable explores the intersections of race, gender, queerness, and identity. She uses a diverse set of means to engage these issues, including self-portraiture, text-based prints, performance, nightlife, music, writing, and social media. Huxtable’s work has been featured in group presentations at MoMA PS1, New York (2014); White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York (2014); “Take Ecstasy with Me,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); Frieze Projects, London (2014); and2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2015); among other venues.
Learn moreJulie Atlas Muz, an internationally performing artist who is based between NYC’s Lower East Side and London, UK has been around the block more than twice. One of the most acclaimed, prolific, and experienced creators around, Julie sucker-punches the boundaries between theater, dance, puppetry, film, and burlesque with outrageously loving performances that have secured her place in the underworld of nightlife, as well as solidifying her as a bastion of the art world.
Learn moreI am a choreographer, performer, and educator based between Philadelphia and New York City who grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with my siblings and cousins. My early exposure to concert dance was through African dance and capoeira performances on California college campuses where my parents studied and worked, but I did not start formal dance training until college with Umfundalai, Kariamu Welsh’s contemporary African dance technique. My work continues to be influenced by various sources, including my foundations in those living rooms and parties, my early technical training in contemporary African dance, my continued study of contemporary dance and performance, and my recent sociological research of and technical training in J-setting with Donte Beacham. I produce dance and performance work with idiosynCrazy productions, a company I founded in 2008 and now co-direct with Shannon Murphy. Previously, I have danced with Marianela Boán, Silvana Cardell, Emmanuelle Hunyh, Tania Isaac, Kun- Yang Lin, C. Kemal Nance, Marissa Perel, Leah Stein, Keith Thompson, Kate Watson-Wallace, Reggie Wilson, and Kariamu Welsh (as a member of Kariamu & Company). As a performer, I also collaborate with Merián Soto.
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by jumatatu m. poe in partnership with Jermone Donte Beacham and Jamarsa Peters.
Learn moreKendra Jayne Patrick directs an itinerant, eponymous art gallery based in New York City. The program is focused on exhibition-making and symbology related to the twenty-first century avant-garde, specializing in post-conceptual and post-internet sculpture, digital, photography, and painting. Since opening in late 2017 the gallery has shown a range of international artists and practices including Ivan Argote, Lap-See Lam, Kenya (Robinson), Jo Shane, and Arden Surdam. Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick has been featured in Artsy, Vulture, ARTnews, Barron’s, the San Francisco Chronicle, and DAZED Magazine.
Learn moreLars Jan is a director, writer, visual artist, and the founding artistic director of Early Morning Opera (EMO), a genre-bending performance + art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience. He is the son of émigrés from Afghanistan and Poland.
Jan has received multiple commissions from the Whitney Museum and developed his recent projects with major commissioning and residency support from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). His works have been also presented by The BAM Next Wave Festival, Sundance Film Festival, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Symphony Space, Kirk Douglas Theatre, Ringling Museum of Art, Pasadena Museum of California Art, and Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival.
His work has been supported by multiple awards from the NEA and Center for Cultural Innovation; Rauschenberg Foundation; MAP Fund; Adam Mickiewicz Institute; Surdna Foundation; NEFA’s National Theatre Project; NPN’s Creation Fund; New York State Council on the Arts; and the Sherwood Award. He has spoken at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Performa, and the 92Y, and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Princeton Atelier; CalArts; and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, where he was an inaugural artist-in-residence.
In August 2015, EMO’s lecture performance ABACUS will be presented by Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe, and in October 2015, the public performance spectacle HOLOSCENES will be presented by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco, prior to an exhibition of related video works at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in January 2016. Jan is a TED Senior Fellow.
Learn moreOregon native and Portland resident Linda K. Johnson has been a professional dance-based, transdisciplinary artist for 40 years. Over these decades of creative practice, Johnson has taught, performed, choreographed, curated, and produced extensively, influencing and forwarding the development of infrastructure (studios and dance programs), funding (support), and conceptual networks (information and training) for professional colleagues and students. Hybrid in her practice, Johnson’s concerns as an artist are social and environmental—curious equally about both the human and nonhuman, addressing our collective relationship to site, place and community. Since creating her first site-based, large-scale interdisciplinary performance in 1992, Finding the Forest, Johnson has gone on to author over 17 major dance/movement installations, most recently Mycelium Dreams, 2022 and Polka Dots/Pioneer Square, 2020, which have utilized forests, intersections, waterways, derelict lots, neighborhoods, green spaces, warehouses, and galleries, as well as formal performance spaces, as staging grounds for presentation. A recipient of the 1999 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, Johnson’s work has been consistently funded and commissioned by public, private, and individual sources, and has received critical review in many venues, including Dance Magazine, Landscape Architecture, NPR’s Living on Earth, Oregon ArtsWatch, and Metropolis Magazine. She has been awarded residencies at the Rauschenberg Artist Residency at Captiva, Yaddo, Caldera Arts, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology to further the development of her work. She is honored to be one of six international custodians of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal postmodern dance work Trio A, and to have been included in Kristin Timken’s 2015 book The New Explorers: Making Meaning in the 21st Century American Landscape, which includes a forward by Lucy R. Lippard. Now considered a “mother tree” (from Suzanne Simard’s work on forest ecosystems) in her community, Johnson’s current practice is devoted to advancing networks of inclusion and collective memory (Mycelium Dreams).
Learn moreLisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is: What will set you free? Her current work connects an interest in tracing lost histories and homelands to the Beauty Supply store and Beauty Salon as critical spaces of Black cultural production with their own sets of aesthetics, desires, and complications.
Lisa is also co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and the art collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. She is a professor at Portland State University where she teaches classes in art and social practice.
Learn moreMarc Bamuthi Joseph is an inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, the winner of the 2011 Alpert Award in Theater, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. He is the founding Program Director of the exemplary non-profit Youth Speaks, and is a co-founder of Life is Living, a national series of one day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks through hip hop arts and focused environmental action. Mr. Joseph recently premiered the Creative Time commission “Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos” in New York’s Central Park, and is currently completing new works for the Chautauqua Symphony, the Philadelphia Opera and South Coast Repertory Theater while serving as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. His evening length piece “/peh-LO-tah/” has been commissioned by the Kennedy Center and will premiere at YBCA in the Fall of 2016.
Learn moreMaster Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. is Black, Italian, Queer, Non-Binary, Neurodyvergent, and practices primarily in america. Their collaborative approach results in artwork by and for the people.
Stevenson’s practice has been dedicated to supporting young people ages 4 to 18 in developing the necessary skills to encourage advanced imaginative thinking and self-confident expression. In 2019 they developed the Afro Contemporary Art Class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School which has had many forms since, including Afro Futurist February, and three years of Fred Hampton Summer Camp. Supporting community efforts as well, taking the shape of support for the effort to Save Dr. Martin Luther King School from being displaced by the expansion of Interstate 5 which has triggered the need to move Harriet Tubman Middle School. Stevenson is currently working in the Albina community to develop a Living Archive at Jefferson High School with students, community, and the architectural design team. Stevenson also has a robust portfolio of artist projects centering food and gathering around it, projects involving sculpture, drawing, and photography, and new work in collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated folks. These include Tin Can Phone, a podcast all about life in and outside of prison, and Gallery Blue, a curation and exhibition project both of which are owned and operated by formerly incarcerated individuals. Stevenson pursues these professional and creative goals passionately because they believe that empowered and open-minded young people and communities are the best and most direct way toward ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future for all.
Learn moreMatthew Day Jackson (born 1974) is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video,performance and installation. Since graduating with an MFA from Rutgers University in 2001, following his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, he has had numerous solo exhibitions. His work has been shown at MAMbo Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA; the Portland Museum of Art Biennial in Portland, Maine; and the Whitney Biennial Day for Night in New York.
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 JEAN LEE (Artistic Director) is an OBIE award-winning playwright and director who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays, The Shipment and Lear) and by Samuel French (Three Plays by Young Jean Lee). She is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, NYFA, NEA, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Rockefeller MAP Foundation. She is also the recipient of two OBIE awards, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award.
Learn more