Artists Archive
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Called a “hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” by Theatre Jones and “outrageous and profane" by The New York Times, Alex Tatarsky makes performances in the uncomfortable in-between zone of comedy, dance-theater, performance art, and deluded rant—sometimes with songs. Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt. Playing with perceptions of language and narrative structure, their live performances are highly responsive to venue and audience, often breaking the fourth wall and embracing humor to reveal vulnerability and humanity. Venues include La Mama Experimental Theater Club, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, Playwrights Horizons, The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many bars and basements. As curatorial fellow at The Poetry Project, they organized a series on the poetics of rot. Research interests include bootlegs, hellscapes, and compost.
Learn moreBack to Back Theatre comprises an ensemble of six actors considered to have developmental or intellectual disabilities. The company explores how respect is withheld from outsiders—the disabled or unemployed—who society deems “unproductive.” Since 1987, the ensemble, based in the small regional center at Geelong, Australia, has transformed the theater experience by exploring prejudices associated with the notion of “other.” The group’s past performances include Mental (1999); Dog Farm (2000); and Soft (2002). small metal objects received a 2008 Bessie Award after its performance at Under the Radar Festival, and a 2007 Zurich Theatre Festival Appreciation Prize for extraordinary achievement in theater. In 2005, the ensemble received the Sydney Meyer Performing Arts Award for their long-standing contribution to the development of Australian theater.
Learn moreAtlanta, Georgia, is a hotbed of contemporary art with an abundance of choreographers and performance artists seeking affordable and accessible venues. Recognizing this scarcity of performance space as an opportunity, curator and lighting designer Malina Rodriguez founded Dance Truck: a mobile project that uses the back of a rental truck as a stage. With its inventive technical direction, diverse artistic lineup, and stunning visual platform, Dance Truck has been an enormous success in “bringing dance to the people” at festivals, museums, parks, and streets throughout the Dirty South.
Selected Press
Dance Truck Pulls into the Contemporary, Andrew Alexander, Creative Loafing Atlanta, February 9, 2011.
Learn moreDavid Thomson is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice borders on choreographic situations and installations centered around questions of identity, unconscious narratives, and the expression of presence and absence as performative states.
He has been supported or presented by The Kitchen, Movement Research at Judson Church, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC Arts, Performance Space NY, The Invisible Dog, Mt Tremper Arts, The Yard and Danspace Project, among other institutions.
His work has been recognized with awards and fellowships including a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artist Award (2022), Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2018), Yaddo (2016), MacDowell (2014), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography (2013), and the US Artists Ford Fellowship (2012).
Thomson has worked across the fields of music, dance, film, theater, and performance with Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Tracie Morris, Marina Abramović, Meg Stuart, Grisha Coleman|Hot Mouth, Yvonne Rainer, Sekou Sundiata, Maria Hassabi, Yanira Castro, and Okwui Okpokwasili, among others.
He has served on the faculties of Movement Research, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, Barnard, Bennington, Pratt and Middlebury. In 2017, he and Kate Watson-Wallace initiated The Sustainability Project, which serves as a platform for expanding the discourse surrounding financial, artistic, and personal empowerment within the arts community.
Thomson received an interdisciplinary B.A. from State University of New York at Purchase.
Learn 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 moreKayin Talton Davis started off in an artistic direction from a very young age, but later learned her love for math and science and pursued a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering at Portland State University. Her design projects were always influenced by a drive to be accessible to all. She started the soapbox theory in 2001, as a way to express herself creatively. And through these mediums, her interest is always in creating something that is positive, helpful and accessible to all but especially children from culturally underrepresented communities.
Learn moreFounded by Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez in 2003, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a young Mexican theater company reflecting the new dynamics of contemporary Mexican culture. They develop their multimedia stage productions as mechanisms to link work and life and give voice to overlooked moments in social and political historical. Lagartijas has toured widely throughout Mexico and Europe and has received awards from the Impatience Festival and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
Related Content
Learn moreLumi Tan is curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she organizes exhibitions and produces performances with artists across disciplines and generations. Most recently, Tan has worked with Half Straddle, Sara Magenheimer, and Sondra Perry. Previously she co-curated From Minimalism into Algorithm (2016), a year-long performance and exhibition series, as well as projects with artists including Ed Atkins, Gretchen Bender, Glasser, George Lewis, Anicka Yi, and Danh Vo and Xiu Xiu. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was Guest Curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, The Exhibitionist, and numerous exhibition catalogues.
Learn moreGutierrez is a New York-based dance and music artist who makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. His work has toured internationally to festivals and venues including American Realness Festival in New York; Festival d’automne à Paris; Antipodes Festival in Brest, France; Out There Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; UNAM in Mexico City; and ImPulsTanz in Vienna. He is the winner of three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards.
Learn moreMorgan Thorson (Minneapolis, MN) is a dance-maker. Morgan’s recent work addresses how the body shapes time; and how time influences our perception and expression of the body in spaces where labor, coordination, identity, movement and image can flourish and decay as well as redefine our notion of dance, sexuality, belonging and life. Morgan has received support from The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (2009, 2011 and 2015), and The National Dance Project (2008, 2012, and 2015). She is a United States Artist (2012), Guggenheim (2010), and McKnight (2002, 2009) Fellow and has received multiple Sage Awards for Outstanding Choreography. Currently, she is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University.
Learn moreNature Theater of Oklahoma is an OBIE Award-winning New York-based performance group under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Since Poetics: a ballet brut, their first ensemble piece, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has been devoted to making the work they don’t know how to make, putting themselves in impossible situations, and working from out of their own ignorance and unease. Using readymade materials, found space, overheard speech, and observed gesture, and through extreme formal manipulation, and superhuman effort, they shift our perceptions of everyday reality. Selected Press Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, December 21, 2009. 'Romeo And Juliet': Just As You Misremembered It, Robert Smith, NPR, December 29, 2009. Deconstructing Romeo and Juliet, Hilton Als, The New Yorker, January 11, 2010. Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2009. Stage Notes: Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet, Tom Murrin, papermag, December 16, 2009.
Learn moreReuben Tomás Roqueñi
Director of National Artists Fellowships
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
Reuben is a nationally respected arts administrator with over 15 years in progressive program development, management, artist-centric support systems and grantmaking experience. He is currently Director of National Artists Fellowships at Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, serving Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian artists, organizations, and programs across the US. Previously, Reuben was Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area, one the nation’s largest arts and culture funders. Formerly, Reuben served as Grants Program Director at the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. Reuben is a board member at MAP Fund in NYC and a former a board member at PICA. Reuben is of mixed Yaqui/Mayo/Chicanx ancestry and is currently living in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreRobert Trafford is a journalist by training, and an assistant director with Forensic Architecture, a human rights research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, with whom he has worked since 2017. There, he leads investigative research projects, writes and edits for exhibitions and publications, and supports other team members to bring investigations to publication, and to think about how their research can be activated across a range of forums in pursuit of accountability. His work with Forensic Architecture has covered the extrajudicial killing of civilians by Cameroon’s special forces, chemical weapons attacks by the Assad regime, and counter-protest violence by US police. He has jointly led investigations into the 2020 right-wing terror attack in Hanau, Germany, the 2011 killing of Mark Duggan by London’s police, and the agency’s acclaimed TRIPLE-CHASER investigation, which premiered at the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York.
Learn moreSarah T. Hamid (she/her/no preference) is an immigrant, Muslim, and abolitionist working at the intersection of technology and global/domestic warfare. Currently the PDX Lead Organizer for Freedom to Thrive, she co-founded and helps advise the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, an archiving and knowledge-sharing network for organizers building community defense against the design, roll-out, and experimentation of carceral technologies, and serves on the coordinating team for the inside/outside research collaboration, the Prison Tech Research Group. Sarah also sits on the board of the Lucy Parsons Lab in Chicago, and helped create the #8toAbolition campaign: a police and prison abolition resource built during the 2020 uprisings against state violence.
Learn moreTharp was raised in Ontario, Oregon, and presently resides in Portland. He received his BFA from Cornell University. His work was featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has been acquired by The Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright Knox Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Reed College. He is represented by PDX Contemporary Art (Portland), Nicole Klagsbrun (New York) and Galerie Bertrand & Gruner (Geneva). Selected Press Critic's Pick: Storm Tharp, Stephanie Snyder, Artforum.com, August 3, 2010. Perfect in the Middle, Matt Stangel, Portland Mercury, June 24, 2010. Storm Tharp's eighth show at PDX Contemporary Art features latest work, 'Hercules', John Motley, The Oregonian, July 30, 2010. Storm Tharp, Richard Speer, art ltd., May 2010. Interview with Storm Tharp, Bean Gilsdorf, Daily Serving, January 4, 2010. Virtuoso Vindicated: Storm Tharp at PDX Contemporary, Jeff Jahn, PORT, January 10, 2007. Storm Tharp: Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black, Stephanie Snyder, PLAZM, September, 2008. Selected Video Storm Tharp Artist Talk at the Portland Art Museum. Storm Tharp on OPB Art Beat
Learn moreTai Carpenter (she/her) is a writer, gallerist and community archivist with a passion for social impact in the realms of art and civil rights. She is also the founder of Compose Yourself Magazine, an independent online publication spotlighting music, culture and social justice. She has curated political art installations, facilitated panel discussions and organized artmaking workshops centered on civic action with Portland Art Museum, University of Oregon’s Special Collections and University Archives, Society of American Archivists, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Shift Collective and Documenting the Now, among others.
Her work allows her to intersect two passions, art and civil rights, to create a more equitable and creative world by utilizing critical research to facilitate dialogues around art in relation to current social movements.
Tai is currently the Board President of Don’t Shoot Portland, a community-based advocacy nonprofit and Director of The Black Gallery. Most recently she was Gallery Coordinator for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, Gallery Manager at HOLDING Contemporary and an Archives & Records Management Coordinator at the City of Portland Archives.
Learn moreTakahiro Yamamoto is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer based in Cowlitz, Clackamas, and Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (Portland, Oregon). His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He has received support from New England Foundation for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, MacDowell, National Performance Network, Japan Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium, and others. His performance and visual art works have been presented at Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Diverseworks, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, The Henry Art Gallery, and GoDown Arts Centre Nairobi, among other venues. Yamamoto holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. He is part of the Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.
Learn moreCalling Tanya Tagaq an Inuit throat singer is like calling Yo-Yo Ma a cello player. Sure, it’s accurate, but it’s not the whole of what he does. Like Ma, Tagaq is the best of what she does – innovative, inspired. —The National Post, Canada
Born in Canada’s high arctic, Tanya Tagaq is a contemporary performance artist who utilizes the ancient traditional Inuit art of throat singing to mesmerize audiences around the world. She is considered a Canadian national treasure whose music defies description. Alternately called primal, orchestral, and free form, her performances are improvised and dialed to a one-of-a-kind frequency. The end result is a staggering array of performances that portray, in full-colour sound, the scope of her life experiences. Tagaq’s commitment to stretching her musical boundaries has led to visionary projects across all mediums and with groundbreaking artists such as the Kronos Quartet. As a solo artist, Tagaq has released two critically acclaimed albums with her band, Sinaa and Auk/Blood, both of which were nominated for Juno Awards (Best Aboriginal Recording) and (Best Instrumental Recording). The albums additionally took first place in several categories at the 2005 and 2008 Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, including Best Female Artist (2005).
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Tanya Tagaq and her work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreA playwright, actor, and singer-songwriter hailed by Time Out New York as “one of the most exciting theater artists of our time,” Mac has performed his work around the world. Mac’s plays include The Walk Across America For Mother Earth, The Young Ladies Of, Red Tide Blooming, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, and The Lily’s Revenge, a five-hour, 36-cast-member show that was named the best play in 2009 by Time Out New York and Paper Magazine and made the top ten lists of The New Yorker and The New York Post. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, such as a Sundance Theater Lab Residency, a Rockefeller MAP Fund Grant, a Creative Capital Grant, The James Hammerstein Award for playwriting, The Edinburgh Festival’s Herald Angel Award, and three GLAAD Media Award Nominations. Mac’s upcoming projects include touring The Lily’s Revenge across the US and UK, the creation of a two-man theatrical concert with Mandy Patinkin, and a festival of full-length plays inspired by Greek classics.
Selected PressTaylor Mac at the Soho Theatre London W1, Donald Hutera, June 3, 2010.
Comparison is Violence, Arched, Glasgow, Mary Brennan, Herald Scotland, June 14, 2010.
Gig Review: Taylor Mac, Jay Richardson, The Scotsman, June 13, 2010.Glamming it Up with Taylor Mac, Caridad Svich, American Theater Magazine, November 2008.
Red Tide Blooming: The Discomforting Spring of Taylor Mac,, Brian Boyles, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2006.
Reminding us of Our Humanity: An Inclusive Interview with Taylor Mac, JT Ross, Minor Progression, March 11, 2011.
Learn moreFrom capturing environments, architectural structures, sound, light and human behavior, the source of Umeda’s work ranges widely. Working actively both in and outside of Japan, the artist remodels installations out of daily products, engages viewers with his interactive performance pieces, and collaborates with musicians using his own originally-produced implements. He has held a number of significant solo exhibitions including “Criterium 73: Tetsuya Umeda”, Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito (2008), “Hotel New Osorezan”, Ota Fine Arts Singapore, Singapore (2013), “Age0”, Breaker Project, Osaka (2014), and “Science of Superstition”, SonicProtest Festival, Montreuil (2015). Umeda has also participated in the “1st Aichi Triennale 2010: Arts and Cities”, Nagoya (2010); “Double Vision: Contemporary Art From Japan”, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow / Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa (2012); “Simple Interactions. Sound Art from Japan”, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Roskilde (2011); and is recently featured at “RhythmScape”, Gyoenggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyoenggi (2015) and “Sounds of Us”, Trafó Gallery, Budapest (2015-2016).
Learn moreMELISSA DYNE is a conceptual, installation and performance artist, with a focus on the physics of sound and light. Her large scale installations have shown at The Museum of The City, in Mexico City, and Para/Site, in Hong Kong. Her installation, Glass, in which a window from a skyscraper balanced for three months on a gallery wall, was exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Craft in 2008. She studied optics at UNAM in Mexico City, art at College of Santa Fe, NM and completed a degree in accoustics at SAE Institute in New York. Dyne has been peforming and collaborating with The Blow since 2009, and recently officially joined the band, expanding her investigations of sound waves into the field of popular music. melissadyne.com
KHAELA MARICICH is a performance artist, writer and pop musician. Under the name, The Blow, she has made albums and narrative performance works, interweaving the elements of one within the framework of the other. At TBA 2004 she performed the pop opera Blue Sky vs. Night Sky, as well as a fictional corporate presentation about a mental health maintenance system called Remosch. She has presented her work nationally and internationally in a broad range of venues, from art centers to house parties to concert halls, including such venues as The Kitchen, On The Boards, Henry Fonda Theater, and Great American Music Hall. She lives and works in New York City. khaelamaricich.com
Since coming together in collaboration on The Blow in 2009, Dyne and Maricich have performed at The Wexner Center, Joe's Pub, and The Warhol Museum. They have lectured on their collaboration at PICA, The Henry Gallery, Seattle, and Residency Unlimited, in Brooklyn, NY. Their new album, The Blow, is being released on Kanine Records in October 2013.They first met at the TBA festival in 2004. theblow.org
The Delicate Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Khaela Maricich, The Stranger, June 26, 2013.
Learn 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 moreSTEW: Guitars/Vocals, Text/Music
THEATER: Book, Co-Composer and Lyricist for Passing Strange (2008 Tony—Best Book, 2-time 2007 Obie (Best New Theater Piece and Best Ensemble ), Family Album (2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Notes of a Native Song (Spring 2015 Harlem Stage), Wagner, Max! Wagner! (Fall 2015 Kennedy Center) The Total Bent (Public Theater 2016), Making It (Spring 2010 St. Anne’s Warehouse), Brooklyn Omnibus (Fall 2010 Brooklyn Academy of Music) Resurrection City (2016 Studio Theatre), Chicago Omnibus (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 2012) FILM: Spike Lee’s Passing Strange. ROCK AND ROLL: Stew and The Negro Problem. Albums: Post Minstrel Syndrome, Joys and Concerns, Guest Host and The Naked Dutch Painter (both called Album of the Year by Entertainment Weekly), Welcome Black, Something Deeper than These Changes, Making It and the cast album of Passing Strange. Numerous Lincoln Center appearances, United Nations, Symphony Space.: Guest Host and Album of the Year by Entertainment Weekly TV: Stew is co-composer (w/ Heidi Rodewald) of “Gary Come Home,” for SpongeBob SquarePants. ARTS EDUCATION: Doctor of Humane Letters, Oshkosh University, Wisconsin; California Inst. of the Arts; New School; Stanford; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of the Arts, Philly. Stew is a Sundance Institute Alum and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence.
Heidi Rodewald is the Tony Award nominated, Obie Award winning co-composer of the musical Passing Strange, which transferred from The Public Theater to Broadway in 2008. Rodewald composed music for Karen Kandel's Portraits: Night and Day (2004); Brides of the Moon by The Five Lesbian Brothers (2010); and co-composed music for Shakespeare's Othello and Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet (2010-12). Rodewald joined the band The Negro Problem in 1997, where she began a longtime collaboration with singer songwriter, Stew. She has collaborated with him in a range of capacities -- as a co-composer, producer/arranger and performerSheis. the co-composer with Stew of the musical Family Album which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival during the 2014 season, Notes of a Native Song, at Harlem Stage in 2015, Wagner, Max! Wagner!! at the Kennedy Center in 2015, and The Total Bent at The Public Theater,May 2016.Heidi is the composer of The Good Swimmer, with librettist Donna DiNovelli, presented by Prototype Festival January 2016 at the space HERE in NYC,and scored her first film I Dream Too Much, which had it's world premiere at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival.
Learn moreWith legendary bits like their signature audience participation costume changes and Guns n Roses trapeze act, The Wau Wau Sisters are widely recognized by their peers for revolutionizing circus aesthetics and carving out a new niche for circus events – where high physical skill, comedy chops, burlesque and outright nudity mix with just the right splashes of chaos and irreverence are so close and palpable you can see the tear in their fishnets, the sinew of their muscles and the sweat on their skin! Don’t miss them as they fly through their trapeze routines with all the adrenaline and abandon of a rock concert, deconstruct the humor and paradigms of country and heavy metal music, while playing matching guitars and barely sitting on one another’s shoulders! They do it all in a festive, freewheeling hour that keeps the audience guessing every second, who’s in control and for how long?!
They have made appearances at these fantastic festivals and venues: The World Famous Spiegeltent,(VAC, Edinburgh, Auckland, Sydney, NYC), Lincoln Center (NYC), The Mayan Theater (Los Angeles), The Roundhouse (London), Olivia Cruise Lines, Feast Festival (Adelaide), Soho Bar (London), El Cid (Los Angeles), The Grammys (Los Angeles Staples Center), Irving Plaza (NYC), The Palms (Las Vegas), CBGB’s (NYC), The Hammerstein Ballroom (NYC), Joe’s Pub (NYC), The Bowery Ballroom (NYC), The Henry Fonda Theater (Los Angeles), The Pica Festival (Portland, OR), Edinburgh Fringe Festival/The Pleasance (Scotland), The Jermyn St. Theater (West End, London) , The Art House, Crown & Anchor (Provincetown, MA), Philadelphia Fringe Festival (Philadelphia, PA), Sydney Festival, Auckland Festival among countless other cities and venues!!
They’ve been profiled or featured in the pages of: The Village Voice, The New York Post, Time Out New York, Time Out London, The New York Times, Jane, BUST and New York Magazine, The Guardian, Metro, VENUS, The Sun, LA Weekly, GONYC, French Vogue, Spectacle, The Australian, The Times (London, Scotland), Sydnay Morning Herald and countless others!
Television & Film exploits include the feature film “Shortbus” by John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), the film “Who’s the Top?” by Jenny Livingston (Paris Is Burning), ABC Australia’s “Sideshow”, Nipon TV’s “Good Morning Japan”, “The Isaac Mizrahi Show” w/ Rosie Perez, NPR’s “The Next Big Thing”, “Live From Downtown”, “The Sharon Osbourne Show”, and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Learn moreThe Wooster Group is an ensemble of artists who make new work for the theatre, dance and media. The Group has created over 40 pieces since its first in 1976.
Elizabeth LeCompte, a founding member of The Wooster Group, has directed all of the company's works. Her honors and awards include a NEA Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in American Theater, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a US Artists Fellowship and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Selected Press
Two Experimentalists Under One Roof, Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, March 26, 2010.
Learn moreTim DuRoche is a jazz and sound artist living in Portland whose work ranges from live performance to installation, including projects with Tere Mathern Dance, Linda K Johnson, and Cydney Wilkes.
Learn moreTimothy White Eagle is a mixed race artist. He graduated from the University of Utah with a BFA in theater. His art practice rises from a decades-long exploration of traditional ritual and embodiment practice. His preferred mediums include objects, photography, durational performance, storytelling, and installed space.
He has served as an artist-in-residence at Town Hall and On The Boards in Seattle, as well as La Mama ETC in NYC. Timothy was the recipient of the WAA/AIP Launch Pad award in 2019 as well as a Seattle City Artist award in 2020.
Timothy toured internationally as one of the artistic directors and a performer with MacArthur Fellow Taylor Mac’s Pulitzer Prize finalist “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.”
Timothy’s new ritual performance work, “What To Do When The Air Returns,” will premiere at LaMama in November 2021.
Learn moreTim Smith-Stewart is a queer interdisciplinary artist based in Seattle who uses text as his primary medium for creating installations, performances and zines. For the past seven years, Tim has primarily been creating work in collaboration with artist/electrical engineer Jeffrey Azevedo. They are currently developing Salvage Rituals: a dance set on six piezoelectric tiles to premiere in the fall of 2019. Visual and durational iterations will be presented at various locations including Seattle University in the fall of 2018.
Most recently they premiered Awaiting Oblivion—Temporary Solutions for surviving the dystopian future we find ourselves within at present at On the Boards in February 2017 and The Perpetual Insurrection of Claude Cahun at the Henry Art Gallery in October 2017.
Selections of Awaiting Oblivion... have been presented at: On The Boards NW New Works festival (SEA), Risk/Reward Festival (PDX), Velocity Dance Center (SEA) and Fresh Oysters Performance Research (MSP). Tim and Jeffrey have presented multiple installations including their video/paper tapestry installation Queer City Lost at New Tomorrow, Erasure (curated by the Lion’s Main Art Collective), and the Velocity Dance Center Big Bang. They also presented Stained glass in my replacement church at the 2014 Lofi Arts Festival.
From 2010-2013 Tim & Jeffrey co-created The Eternal Glow Project—a four part performance/installation which premiered work at The Seattle Center Next50 (The Eternal Glow of Electric Hearts), On the Boards NW New Works Festival 2013 (Ω<1),and Lofi Arts Festival 2013 (Less than red, more than violet).
Learn moreHalf Straddle is an Obie-winning, Brooklyn-based ensemble of performers and designers that makes plays, performances, videos, and music led by Artistic Director Tina Satter. This critically acclaimed company began in 2008, and has toured its shows to cities throughout U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Tina Satter is an American writer, director, and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn-based, Obie-winning theater company Half Straddle. She is a recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award; a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Award, and was named an Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York. She has written and directed 9 full-length shows and a number of smaller performance and video pieces with Half Straddle that have premiered in New York City. Tina’s work has been presented at theaters and festivals in Europe, Asia, Australia, and other U.S. cities. Tina has had residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, LMCC, The Performing Garage, Kitchen L.A.B., MASS MoCA, and New Museum for Contemporary Art. She’s been a visiting artist at Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Reed College, and Fordham University—and a visiting playwriting professor at the University of Michigan. Drawing on her recent teaching work, Tina has been developing and leading generative writing and directing workshops to participants from a range of backgrounds and experience. Tina attended Mac Wellman’s graduate playwriting program at Brooklyn College and received an M.A. from Reed College and a B.A. from Bowdoin College. Her first collection of plays, Seagull (Thinking of you), was published by 53rd State Press in 2014.
Learn moreNative of Shreveport La, but Baton Rouge La did all the "raising". Monroe has resided in Dallas since finishing legislative work for the State of Louisiana in 08 (Tony graduated from The Southern University A&M College in Fall of 08 with a B.S. in marketing). After working with AT&T & the Marketing Arm of Dallas, he quickly learned that the networking and rapport building skills learned on the Yard would play to his advantage in the Obama recession right out of SU. Pivoting from the ad agency sector to the nonprofit realm was no easy feat. Now working as a custom Suiting Stylist entrepreneurially, and Scholarship Program Director currently, the trajectory has been filled with lessons and educational hurdles!
Learn moreTrajal Harrell’s work has been presented in New York and across the US at venues including New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, American Realness Festival, ICA Boston, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122, and Walker Arts Center, among others. Internationally, his work has toured in France, Switzerland, Portugal, Japan, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Poland, Croatia, Brazil, and Mexico, and has shown his performances in visual art contexts such as Performa, Fondation Cartier (Paris), The New Museum, The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Art Basel-Miami Beach, as well as galleries in Tokyo, Berlin, and New York. His latest works have been seen in 2013 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and MoMA PS1.
Learn moreTravis Stewart is a contemporary Northwest artist of Chinook, Rogue River, and Kalapuya descent. He lives in Grand Ronde, Oregon, and works in a variety of mediums to depict stories defined by the cultural landscape and design of the Willamette Valley and Columbia River people. He also works as a curator at Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center (Grand Ronde, OR) and has devoted his life to the preservation of the art and culture of the tribes of Western Oregon. Travis is a founding member of the Shawash Ili?i Kanim Tilixam, which is a nonprofit cultural preservation group and canoe family that works to impart traditional teachings to at-risk tribal youth through song, dance, language, and art.
Learn moreTristen Edwards is an attorney at Metropolitan Public Defender, where she represents individuals charged with major felony crimes and works on policy issues related to promoting the use of restorative justice as an alternative to prosecution. Tristen is a Coordinating Committee Member of the Restorative Justice Coalition of Oregon and leads the coalition’s legislative advocacy efforts. She also serves on Governor Kotek’s Racial Justice Council’s Criminal Justice Reform Committee and chairs the Council’s Subcommittee on the Department of Corrections, which focuses on supporting restorative justice efforts led by incarcerated men. Tristen holds a strong commitment to diversity and is the founder and chair of the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. Tristen has been recognized for her work amplifying the voices of marginalized people and promoting effective and compassionate responses to harm by the Oregon New Lawyers Division, the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association, and Oregon Women Lawyers.
Learn moreTyler Wallace is a Portland-based artist working in video, installation, and performance to investigate concepts of identity and personal history. Nicole Dill is a Portland-based artist whose work interrogates the function of celebrity culture in contemporary society through photography, performance, audio, sculpture, and installation. Both Wallace and Dill recently defended their theses at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and received their BFAs in May 2009.
"Between Us," Leah Bobal, PNCA UNTITLED.
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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