Artists Archive

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Autumn Knight

Autumn Knight is a New York-based, Texas-born interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, sound, and text. Drawing from her training in theater, group dynamics, and psychology, Knight makes performances that reshape power structures and upend audience expectations of live experiences. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions, including Human Resources, Los Angeles; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Shedhalle, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, New York; Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Performance Space New York, NY; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired to the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors, and fellowships, including an Art Matters Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly

Gerard & Kelly (Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly) have collaborated since 2003 to create project-based installations and performances interrogating the formation of the couple and the critical potential of intimacy. Driven by an inquiry of their own partnership, the duo uses choreography, video, and sculpture to address questions of sexuality, memory and the formation of queer consciousness. Their work has been exhibited internationally at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; and The Kitchen, New York, among other institutions. Their ongoing performance series Modern Living, in collaboration with L.A. Dance Project, was recently presented by The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, in association with Art Production Fund. Gerard & Kelly have received numerous recognitions for their work, including the New England Foundation for the Arts (2015), Art Matters grant (2014), and the 2014 Juried Award from the New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessies. Gerard & Kelly completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2010, and received their MFAs in 2013 from the Interdisciplinary Studio in the UCLA Department of Art.

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Hannah Krafcik

Hannah Krafcik is a Portland-based interdisciplinary neuroqueer artist and writer whose work emerges from ongoing reflections on social patterning and censorship, (over)stimulation, perseveration, and intuition. Their practices span dance and new media. They often create performances and teach dance in collaboration with artistic partner, Emily Jones. 

www.hannahkrafcik.com

 

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jaamil olawale kosoko

jaamil 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 ReviewSilo 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. 


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Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (East Palo Alto, CA) is an artist, writer, and former public school social studies teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. In her interdisciplinary and research intensive practice, she considers ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing. She has exhibited at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Project Row Houses, among others. She has been the recipient of awards including the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Print Studio, Triple Canopy Commission at New York Public Library Labs, Artadia Grant, Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship, Art Matters Grant, among others. She is a curriculum writer for NYC public schools, the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine, a contributing editor at The New Inquiry, and on faculty at School of Visual Arts. Currently, she is an artist in residence at Smack Mellon.

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Kaneza Schaal

Kaneza Schaal is a New York City based theater artist. Her recent work GO FORTH premiered at PS122 and then showed at the Genocide Memorial Amphitheater in Kigali, Rwanda; LMCC’s River-to-River Festival; Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; Cairo International Contemporary Theater Festival in Egypt; and at her alma mater Wesleyan University, CT. Schaal received a 2017 MAP Fund award, 2016 Creative Capital Award, and is the current Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage. This spring her new piece CARTOGRAPHY will be workshopped through New Victory Theater Lab, NYU Abu Dhabi, and will show at The Kennedy Center’s New Vision New Voices. Her work with The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, Claude Wampler, Jim Findlay, and Dean Moss has brought her to venues including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, The Whitney Museum, and MoMA.

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Keioui Keijuan

Keioui Keijuan creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Keijuan examines, deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of the black body in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials addressing blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Keijuan earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Keijuan has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; and the United Kingdom. Keijuan was an artist-in-residence at PICA as part of the Creative Exchange Lab program in Fall 2015.

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keyon gaskin
keyon gaskin. this is not a thing (genius, genius, genius, at Central Public Library, Portland, OR) Photo Courtesy of Robert Duncan Gray

keyon gaskin (Portland, OR) prefers not to contextualize their art with their credentials.

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Kite

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an award winning Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, composer and academic raised in Southern California, known for her sound and video performance with her Machine Learning hair-braid interface. Kite holds a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). 

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Kole Galbraith

Kole Galbraith is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on sound, audio-visual, and found-object installation. Based in Seattle, WA, Kole Galbraith has been active in the underground experimental music community for the past decade performing throughout the US and Europe. Sonically, the sonic studio compositions are informed by early 20th century French musique-concrète, harsh-noise, black metal, free jazz, and contemporary composition. Thematically, the compositions are influenced by interior Salish folklore and contemporary indigenous experience. Galbraith mixes materials found in nature with electronic techniques to uncover both latent sonic capabilities and latent histories. Galbraith has released albums on his own label, Obscure & Terrible, and other labels such as SIGE, Titania Tapes, and Krim Kram. Galbraith has worked with musicians including Lori Goldston, Greg Kelley, Jessika Kenney, Jason Lazer, Steve Moore, Catherine Guesde, Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow), Nathan Young (Delaware), Patrick Wurzwallner, Maja Osojnik, morher, and Noel Kennon.

Kole Galbraith is an enrolled member of the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma and the COUSIN indigenous film collective.

kolegalbraith.bandcamp.com

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Kristan Kennedy

Kristan Kennedy is an artist, curator, and educator, who has been involved with PICA since its founding in 1995. Kennedy began working with PICA as a volunteer, then was supported by the organization as an exhibiting artist, consequently served the organization as a board member, and joined the staff in 2003. She is currently Artistic Director, Curator of Visual Art at PICA. Kennedy works collaboratively alongside co-artistic directors Roya Amirsoleymani and Erin Boberg Doughton to set the artistic vision for the organization, curate the Time-Based Art Festival, manage the Precipice Fund and create public programs. Kennedy currently directs PICA's year-round Exhibition Program, where she focuses on commissioning and developing large-scale projects, publications, and happenings with artists that exist at the borders of genres. She is a working artist who is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary Art, here in Portland Oregon. Kennedy writes and lectures about art praxis, curatorial practice, and artist‐centric ethics within and outside of institutional frameworks. She has taught in various MFA programs across the country for the last decade as an Associate and Visiting Professor teaching Contemporary Art seminars, mentoring, and developing visiting artist programs. Kennedy sits on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and is a founding member of Common Field.

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Marco Kane Braunschweiler

Marco Kane Braunschweiler (Los Angeles, CA) is a Swiss-American artist and publisher. He has presented programs at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago; and White Flag Projects, St. Louis. He has exhibited at the Swiss Institute, New York; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; among others.

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Raja Feather Kelly

Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, a director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory. He is a three-time Princess Grace Award winner (2017, 2018, 2019), two-time Lucille Lortel Award nominee (2019, 2020), and 2019 Chita Rivera Award nominee. In 2020 he was the Obie Award winner and Outer Critics Circle Award honoree for choreography for the Pulitzer-winning musical A Strange Loop. In 2019 he was an SDCF Joe A. Callaway Award finalist for both A Strange Loop and the Pulitzer-winning play Fairview. Raja is also the 2019–2020 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2019 Creative Capital award recipient. He is a current fellow of HERE Arts, the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School. Over the past decade, Kelly has created fifteen evening-length premieres with his company the feath3r theory as well as directing and choreographing extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City. His choreography has also garnered a 2018 Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) and the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and he was Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College.

www.thefeath3rtheory.com

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Satpreet Kahlon

Satpreet Kahlon (b. 1989) is a Panjabi-born artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a full fellowship to pursue her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2019. In addition to her studio practice, which has been featured in Hyperallergic and Artforum, she co-founded and -ran an Indigenous arts organization that supported 400 artists with over $2 million of opportunities and rematriated 1.5 acres of greenspace that was slated for development during her tenure from 2017-2023. For this work, she was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine in 2019, and was a 2022 Roddenberry Fellow for “new and innovative strategies to safeguard human rights and ensure an equal and just society for all.” 

Kahlon's practice has been supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; National Endowment for the Arts; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Critical Minded; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; 4Culture, Seattle, WA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Magnum Foundation, New York, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; and Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA, among others. She is the 2024 recipient of the Foundwork Artist Prize, an annual international juried award “to support outstanding artistic practices,” and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in PICA's 10,000-square-foot warehouse space. 

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