Artists Archive
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a canary torsi is a Bessie-award-winning, interdisciplinary group of artists formed by Puerto Rican artist and choreographer Yanira Castro. a canary torsi’s work examines the encounter between spectator and event, developing scenarios where the audience’s presence dramatically impacts the work. We investigate what brings us together, the nature of the space we inhabit, and how every aspect of our convergence is loaded with cultural, social, historical, and personal dynamics that influence how we form meaning and how power is structured. We develop indeterminate performative systems that catalyze—in performance—spontaneous structures, patterns, and instructions. We do this to complicate authorship, ensure multiplicity, and to form the work together in real-time. This way of working is for us a conscious de-centered politic. a canary torsi persists in the idea that live performance is uneasy communal action.
Learn moreAlex Cecchetti is an artist based in Paris, France, who works primarily in writing and performance. Cecchetti has published several books of his writing, and performed internationally at places including: La Vatrine, Paris, France (2010); Art Pavillion, Zagreb, Croatia (2010); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France (2009); and Artists Space, New York, NY (2009). Cecchetti was an artist in residence at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2006) and SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2003).
Learn moreAli Chahrour (Beirut, Lebanon) is a choreographer, dancer, and graduate of the theatre department at The Lebanese University. Influenced by techniques from several European countries, he studies contemporary dance in the Arab world and movement that is related to society’s memory and its local circumstances that contribute to creating an identity for contemporary dance, whose techniques and problematics are inspired by its surroundings and history. His work examines the relationship between dancing and the body, and the religion and the sacred, relying on the Islamic and Shiite religious rituals and practices in the Arab world.
Learn moreAnthony Hudson is a Grand Ronde/Siletz artist and writer also known as Carla Rossi, Portland's premier drag clown. Hudson’s performance work—from his award-winning solo show Looking for Tiger Lily to Queer Horror at the Hollywood Theatre—have earned him national fellowships, international engagements including the US Pavilion’s drag clown in residence at the 2024 Venice Biennale, features in Hyperallergic and Art in America, and sainthood from the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. A 2023 FSG Writer’s Fellowship finalist and 2024 Tin House resident, Hudson’s writing has appeared in American Theatre, BOMB Magazine, and Arts and International Affairs. Hudson is currently adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.
Learn moreCatala's practice, aside from making video, includes performance-based works and curating as a medium. A New York-based French artist, Catala holds a BA in mathematics and was schooled in sonic and fine arts at Middlesex and London Guildhall Universities in London. His work has been exhibited internationally at le Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Galerie Christine Mayer (Munich); GAM (Mexico); The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh); and numerous venues in Bordeaux, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Mexico, New York, Munich, Paris, Toulouse, and Saint-Etienne.
Learn moreAutumn Chacon (Diné / Chicana) is an artist and activist whose organizing work in media justice has led to the inception of three FCC-licensed community radio stations; while her work as an activist has led to meetings with the largest banks of the world in a successful effort to divest $3.8 billion from the Dakota Access Pipeline. Her work as a conceptual, installation, and performance artist has been shown among First Nations communities throughout North America and abroad. Many of Chacon’s pieces reveal Indigenous futurisms where technology has a sacred relevance, and exemplify her skills as a self-taught electronic engineer.
Learn moreBlues Control is Lea Cho and Russ Waterhouse, a shape-shifting pair of musicians who channel Debussy via Guaraldi qua Bley qua Hornsby pianisms, alongside the playful juxtapositions of a full spectrum of rock colors: stadium, industrial, psych and prog (to name just a few). Their music spans spacey guitar leads, clarion synth, and the punch of real drums, only to suddenly veer into world music and mellow drug-mospheres, blending exotic and classical, Western and Eastern, and the widest spectrum of sounds available. Their latest album, Valley Tangents, was released in 2012.
Selected Press
"Blues Control: Interview," John Crowell, Tiny Mix Tapes, June 2012.
Learn moreBoyzie Cekwana (Durban, South Africa) is a performing artist and choreographer. Along with some of his continental peers, he is part of an artistic noise for developing a voice for contemporary dance practice and scholarship in Southern Africa. Together with Desiré Davids, he founded The Floating Outfit Project in 1996, where he remains Artistic Director, Choreographer and performer. He works across disciplines and his work has been shown across various platforms around the world. He is part of the on-going African guerrilla thought-factory, developing and shaping ideas for artistic self-expression in the Southern African region.
Learn moreCondon’s work is notable for its influence on the repurposing of existing computer and live games to create sculpture, performance, and software installations. Examples include Youth of the Apocalypse, a series of self-playing game modifications based on Late Medieval Northern European religious paintings, and the recent Twentyfivefold Manifestation, a ritualistic performative event with 80 players from the live action role-playing subculture held at the Sonsbeek 2008 International Public Sculpture Exhibition.
Condon was born in Mexico and received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2002. He attended residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2004 and Skowhegan 2001. Past exhibitions include 2004 Whitney Biennial, Pace Wildenstein Gallery and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Santa Monica Museum of Art and Machine Project in California; the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh; Kunst-werke in Berlin; and the Stedelijk Museum Post CS in the Netherlands.
Learn moreCandace Kita is an enthusiastic arts and cultural worker committed to connecting people of color with creative opportunities. Born in Chicago to Japanese American and Swedish American parents, she has been an artist and arts enthusiast for as long as she can remember. Her multifaceted artistic practice has spanned illustration, sculpture, graphic design, typography, book arts, writing, and performance.
Weaving her creative background with her experiences in social justice organizing and nonprofit administration, Candace currently manages cultural work and strategy at the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO). Previously, she co-founded grassroots collective Arts Workers for Equity, worked in development, marketing, and programs for the Portland Art Museum and Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre, and served as Visual Art Curator for Asian American art and community space Tuesday Night Project. She has participated in multiple initiatives to empower arts professionals of color including the Western States Arts Federation’s Emerging Leaders of Color Fellowship and the Getty Multicultural Internship Program. Candace received her BA in Studio Art from Scripps College and was recently featured as one of Scripps College Magazine’s “30 Alumnæ Under 30.”
In her spare time, Candace co-manages a blog called Asians Doing Everything and reads voraciously. She is a lover of words, cities, and onigiri.
Learn moreCarlos Motta | Photo by Cory Rice
Carlos Motta’s (b. 1978, Colombia) multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.
Motta's work was the subject of the survey exhibitions Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia (2017) that traveled to Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2018); and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015). His solo exhibitions at international museums include, The Crossing (2017), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Histories for the Future (2016), Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; Réquiem (2016), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano the Buenos Aires (MALBA) (2016); Patriots, Citizens, Lovers (2015), PinchukArtCentre, Kiev; Gender Talents (2013), Tate Modern, London; La forma de la libertad (2013), Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; We Who Feel Differently (2012), New Museum, New York; Brief History (2009), MoMA/PS1, New York; and The Good Life (2008), Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia; among others.
In 2020, Motta will participate in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and the Yerevan Biennial, and he will have solo exhibitions at Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery—University of California Santa Cruz, and at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA).
Carlos Motta’s first 20-year career monograph, Carlos Motta: History’s Back Rooms was published by SKIRA in June 2020. He won the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise (2017); the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008).
Motta received grants from Art Matters (2008), NYSCA (2010), Creative Capital, and the Kindle Project (2012).He was appointed tenure-track Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department in 2019.
Learn moreCatherine Ming T'ien Duffly is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department at Reed College where she teaches courses on race and identity in American theatre, performance studies, and community-based performance, in addition to courses in acting and directing. Kate’s written work has appeared Theatre Journal and Theatre Annual. She is currently researching the use of food in socially engaged performance practices.
Learn moreCeleste Camfield is a mixed Muscogee artist living on the settled land of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ Sookobitʉ (Comanche), Ndé Kónitsąąíí Gokíyaa (Lipan Apache), Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos peoples, currently known as Austin, TX. She works in the mediums of movement, film, and food. She grew up dancing in Texas Hill Country and studied dance at Marymount Manhattan College. Celeste has studied modern dance in Vicenza, Barcelona, Prague, and at ImPulsTanz in Vienna, and was a participant in P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels, under the direction of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. She is a member of ARCOS and has performed with the company since 2019. Celeste has also performed original works with BLiPSWiTCH and Alexa Capareda. She has been creating and performing in experimental dance films since 2019, with screenings in Austin, Camden, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, and Portland. In 2022, Celeste co-founded Preheat Fest, a film festival that celebrates the experimental on camera.
Learn moreChanticleer Trü is a musician, performance artist who currently resides in Portland, Oregon. His body of work encompasses music, theater, fringe, dance, visual installation, drag, film, cabaret, and good time instigation. When he's not turning heads the world over as front-man of "Post Phunk" dance outfit Magic Mouth, you can catch him pursuing one of his many other creative efforts. His unique brands of aesthetic storytelling, and expression have made him a mainstay on stages both large and small. His creative direction and performances are in demand across major city hotbeds of the underground and mainstream.
Learn moreAtlas has created work for film, theatre, television, and museums including the Whitney (New York) and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville (Paris). A pioneer of integrating live video with stage performance, Atlas is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with choreographers, dancers, and performers such as Leigh Bowery, Diamanda Galas, Merce Cunningham, and with Antony and the Johnsons on the audiovisual performance, Turning. Atlas is the recipient of three Bessie Awards and was recently presented with the prestigious John Cage award, by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2006).
Atlas has been active as an interdisciplinary filmmaker and video artist since the 1970s. Over the years he has made pioneering media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television, and live electronic performances. In November 2006, London's Tate Modern presented a retrospective of his work, titled Hail the New Puritan.
Learn moreCharlotte Vanden Eynde is a contemporary dancer and choreographer, based in Ghent. In 1999, she graduated at P.A.R.T.S., the renowned school for contemporary dance headed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Since, she has been creating highly personal choreographies and performances, focusing on the body with a strong sculptural and imaginative sensibility. Her early works revolved around vulnerability, intimacy and femininity. In ‘Lijfstof’ she explored the body as object/matter and in ‘MAP ME’ video images were projected on the body as on a canvas. She pursued her movement research in the solo’s ‘I’m Sorry It’s (Not) A Story’ and ‘Shapeless’, and in various site-specific performances and improvisation solos. Her last work ‘Deceptive Bodies’ displayed an iconography of the theatrical body and was also shown in exhibition spaces. She often collaborates with other choreographers, theatre makers, film makers and musicians. Additionally, she gives advice to other artists and conducts workshops based on her own artistic practice.
Learn moreChase Biado (b. 1985) is an artist based in his native Portland, Oregon. His varied output including sculpture, video, painting and writing has been exhibited at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Ulsan; Rocksbox, Portland, OR; sophiajacob, Baltimore, MD; Appendix Project Space, Portland OR; Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; Gaite Lyrique, Paris, FR; The Front, New Orleans, LA; among others. He received a BFA from Portland State University.
Learn morechelfitsch Theater Company was founded in 1997 by writer and director Toshiki Okada. Named after a deliberate mispronunciation of the English word “selfish,” chelfitsch Theater Company began to refine its textual aesthetic as that of colloquial language representing contemporary youth culture. With Five Days in March (awarded the Kunio Kishida Award for Best Script) the company began to juxtapose a noisy choreography derived from everyday mannerisms to the text. The works of chelfitsch have been presented at premier international theater festivals and venues throughout Europe, North America, and Asia. In 2011, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech received the critics’ award from the Association québécoise des critiques de théâtre for the 2010-2011 season. The troupe continues to develop its distinct methodology, which revolves around the relationship between speech and body.
Selected Press
"Writing for Foreigners (Americans)," Jason Zinoman, The New York Times, May 21, 2014
"Under the Radar 2012: An interview with chelfitsch's Toshiki Okada," Jeremy M. Barker, Culturebot, December 27, 2011.
"Temp Workers Too Twitchy to Engage in Office Politics," Ben Brantley, The New York Times, January 6, 2012.
"Hot Pepper," Tom Philips, Dance Review Times, January 7, 2012.
Learn moreChisao’s grandmother, Chisao Tajima, came to Oregon as a “picture bride” in 1890. In1942 her mother, Kasae (Kay) Tamiyasu married Tadashi (Ted) Hata in the Poston concentration camp in Poston, Arizona. Arts training and artists teachers in Iowa shaped Chisao’s early life. Moving to Oregon from Iowa, her years at the University of Oregon fueled her Asian American activism, community organizing and pursuits as an artist. Chisao connected to the Portland dance community where she eventually established a school and company. A life changing study in Japan solidified her artistic vision and commitment to exploring how artful practices could address social issues and create change. In the Japanese American community her early leadership led to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and inspired her personal research and artmaking. Her studies in the Portland State Dance program, abruptly ended with the decimation of the program. However, new opportunities thrust her into arts in public education where her teaching philosophy as a dance educator influenced curriculum design and integrated arts programming schoolwide and impacted hundreds of students.
Her personal work incorporate community engagement, social action and includes omitted histories on themes of identity, culture, social action and legacies. DrumSouls and We Are You were intercultural and intergenerational works visioning an inclusive America. Harmos, The Human Flag project created for Hiroshima Day performed throughout Portland and Remember Us were community based performances on a citywide scale. Gambatte-An American Legacy, The Assembly Center Project and We are Still Here incorporate Japanese American history, oral histories through the fusion of text, poetry, music, dance and visual storytelling. Additionally Ms. Hata has designed and directed numerous art driven programs like Move Backs and Move On classes.
Her training in modern dance, expressive arts, physical theater, healing through the arts, community facilitation, poetry, taiko drumming and classical Japanese dance integrate with her peace and justice work in diverse communities. Her original choreo poems and artistic collaborations root her artist voice. “There's not one group she hasn’t touched with her activism through art. Her themes are exigent for our times and urge participants to ponder their worldview and take action for change.” Chisao’s vision has consistently created innovative programs, artistic works and shaped community partnerships. Chisao is also an Artist Organizing for Change with the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, Maryland where the scope of her work develops intergenerational institutes, mentors socially engaged artists, creates cross-cultural programming rooted in the philosophies held at the Dance Exchange. This work continues to inspire her work as an Oregon Humanities Conversation Leader, community activist artist serving multiple organizations throughout the city of Portland and beyond.
Learn moreChloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree, Canadian interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
Learn moreCreated by performance artist Paul Soileau, CHRISTEENE has emerged as a pop music artist and anti-icon in its own right. CHRISTEENE is a shameless and sexually infused sewer of live rap and RnB, whose message challenges gender, capitalism, corporate mendacity, complacency, and false celebrity while shattering the American obsession with charm and grace. Providing a much-needed voice for a new society and posing a threat to those who support the current structures, CHRISTEENE is a new, dangerous, and unstable breed of entertainer and “Drag Terrorist.”
Attempts at gathering personal information on CHRISTEENE concerning age, origin, race, religion, and even gender have proven fruitless, leaving the public to rely on a highly stylized collection of music videos released through the singer’s collaborative efforts with award-winning filmmaker and cinematographer PJ Raval. Sightings of CHRISTEENE have been documented in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, New Orleans, Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin.
Selected Press
Don't call him queen: Paul Soileau talks about more-punk-than-drag persona Christeene Vale, Bree Davies, Denver Westword, July 19, 2012.
Learn moreBorn in Cannes, Christian Rizzo took his first steps as an artist in Toulouse, where he started a rock band and created a line of clothing before studying visual arts at the Villa Arson in Nice. In the ’90s, he performed with and created costumes and soundtracks for choreographers including Mathilde Monnier, Hervé Robbe, Mark Tompkins, Georges Appaix, Vera Mantero, Catherine Contour, Emmanuelle Huynh, and Rachid Ouramdane. Since founding “l’association fragile” in 1996, he has created over 30 performances and dance pieces, alternating with other projects or commissions for fashion and visual arts. He was an artist-in-residence at l’Opéra de Lille, and has performed his works around the world at the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, the Nouveau Festival du Centre Pompidou, deSingel, the Festival d’Avignon, and On the Boards.
On January 1, 2015, Christian Rizzo took over as the Director of the Centre Choréographique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillion-Midi-Pyrénées, which has been renamed ICI (International Choreographic Institute).
Learn moreChristopher Kirkley is a self-described amateur ethnomusicologist and gentleman explorer of the West African Sahel. His work spans field recording, cultural archiving, experimental ethnography, and the role of new media in West Africa. Under the label Sahel Sounds, he has produced an extensive discography of record releases in conjunction with artists across six countries.
Selected Press
Desert discs: how mobile phones are at the root of Saharan music, Mic Wright, The Guardian, November 1, 2010. Learn moreMiner was born in 1973 and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. His videos address the impact of his upbringing with regard to religion, race, family, and sexuality. He received his MFA at Yale University School of Art and his BA at the University of Tennessee. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), the New Museum (New York), and at Tate Britain (London), among other institutions. Miner is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Selected Press
Christopher Miner, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, January 28, 2009.
Art in Review - Christopher Miner, Ken Johnson, New York Times, February 13, 2009.
Learn moreChristopher Sutton is a longtime artist, musician, writer, and DJ who currently lives in Portland, Oregon. As a musician he has toured, performed, and recorded with bands such as Hornet Leg, Gossip, Dub Narcotic Sound System, Spider & The Webs, C.O.C.O., Hooded Hags, The Dirtbombs, and Chain & The Gang to name a few. His life as a writer has seen contributions mainly to self published fanzines like Shotgun Seamstress, Bumpidee, and his own zine Nigerian Triple Daisy. He currently writes a blog called Record Lections and some of his opines can be read in the online magazine called Network Awesome. Sutton also exhibits his work as a painter and designs album art for his bands Hornet Leg and C.O.C.O. Finally, Sutton is a DJ participating in regular soulful Portland dance parties like Soul In The Hole and Sugar Town and in various venue around the Northwest.
Selected Press:
"DJ Hornet Leg talks records," Nikki McCoy, Northwest Military, May 14, 2014
"Hornet Leg: Ribbon of Fear," Joe Hemmerling, Tiny Mix Tapes, 2009
Learn moreCinema Project is a collectively run, non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon, and founded in 2003, Cinema Project works to promote public awareness of avant-garde cinema past and present. Featuring artists, curators, and scholars from around the world, Cinema Project’s semi-annual series of screenings, lectures, and discussions function to broaden engagement with, and deepen critical understanding of, innovative experimental film and video art.
Learn moreClaire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box—as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes—there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.”
Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
Recent shows include El Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico D.F.; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Air de Paris, Paris; Regina Gallery, London and Moscow; MUSAC Contemporary Art Museu, Castilla y León, Spain; Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, Baltimore; Bunker Stuzki Contemporary Art Museum, Krakow; Mastermind, Casablanca; and Kunstlerhaus Wien, Vienna. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Metro Pictures, New York; T293, Napoli and Rome; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and Galerie Chantal Crousel/Air de Paris, Paris. She is now preparing a catalogue with Buchhandlung Walther König.
Learn moreClaire L. Evans is a writer and artist working in Los Angeles. She blogs at Universe, which addresses the synchronicities between art, science, technology, and the cultural world. Her “day job” is as the singer and co-author of the conceptual, multimedia, disco-pop band YACHT. Evans has performed her earnestly cosmic PowerPoint presentations at The Kitchen and MoMA PS1, and has co-authored NA/SA: New Art Science Affinities, a collaboratively written compendium on inter-disciplinarity in the arts.
Learn moreClare Croft is a historian, theorist, and dramaturg, working at the intersection of dance studies and performance studies. She specializes in 20th and 21st century American dance, cultural policy, feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory. In all of these areas, Croft considers how dance is a way of thinking and a mode for asking questions. What does it mean to acknowledge that people have bodies and that they use their bodies to make meaning, create community, and critique social structures?
Croft's current book project, Funding Footprints: Dance and American Diplomacy (Oxford University Press), examines the history of U.S. State Department funding of international dance tours. Croft's approach to writing dance history emphasizes the role of dancers in performance, asking how history might look differently if dancers, audiences, and choreographers were seen as equal partners in the creation of meaning in dance. Croft is also editing the anthology Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance, which brings together artists and print scholars in a written volume of essays and manifestos, as well as a website of performances, documented in Michigan's Duderstadt Video Studio.
Croft's writing about dance has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics, and is forthcoming in Dance Chronicle. From 2002-2005, Croft was a regular contributor to The Washington Post, and from 2005-2010, she covered dance, as well as theatre and musical theatre, for the Austin American-Statesman. Her performance criticism has appeared in other popular press venues, including The Baltimore Sun, Dance Magazine, and The Houston Chronicle.
At the University of Michigan, Croft teaches courses in the BFA and MFA dance programs, as well as in the BFA interarts program. Her courses include Approaches to Dance Dramaturgy, Dancing Women/Dancing Queer, Fantasies and Anxieties of Racial Integration in 20th Century American Performance, Problematizing Theory and Practice, and Reading and Writing Dance Criticism. She also has a keen interest in helping students develop as choreographers and dramaturgs.
Croft holds a PhD in theatre history and criticism with an emphasis in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas-Austin and an MA in performance studies from New York University. From 2010-2013, Croft was a postdoctoral scholar in the University of Michigan's Society of Fellows.
Learn moreClaude Wampler works at the intersection of art installation and performance; engages and experiments with liveness and the art object, concealment and revelation, the performance of the spectator, and the productivity of failure.
Using video, painting, photography, lighting, sound, sculpture, costume, and texts, to explore the possibilities and the value of grafting performance technique onto visual expression and vice versa, Wampler creates an experience of immediacy/excess in which the viewer leaves with a sense of mystery or magic.
Claude has had solo exhibitions and performances at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, New Museum for Contemporary Art, and P.S. 122 (New York); The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and in many international institutions including the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Witte de With & Schouwburg Theater (Rotterdam), the Yokohama Triennale, Kaaistudios (Brussels), and many others.
Learn moreMeza is a Portland-based artist and composer who studied music composition and digital music production at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She has recorded and toured with Japanther and Explode Into Colors, and has performed her own work in clubs, basements, dance halls, ballrooms, art galleries, and music festivals internationally. Meza started the young series New Musics to support new classical music and working avant-garde composers within the Portland music scene.
Learn moreClayton Lee is a Canadian curator, producer, and performance artist. He currently serves as the Artistic Director of Fierce Festival in Birmingham, UK. From 2019–2023, Clayton was the Director of Rhubarb Festival!, Canada’s longest-running festival of new and experimental performance, and previously served as the Curatorial Associate at the Luminato Festival. His performance projects have been presented in venues across Canada, the US, the UK, and New Zealand. He was one of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Artists-in-Residence in 2023. As part of the Living Room Collective, he represented Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Mexico City, Sofia Acosta's introduction to the music world started at university-based radio station Ibero 90.9 where she worked for Mercado Negro, a radio show about underground and independent music from Mexico. Her influences come from a wide variety of electronic genres including house, techno and deep basslines mixed with her favorite Latin American producers. She has been a resident DJ in many venues in Mexico City such as Cultural Center of Spain, Rhodesia, and El Imperial. In Portland she collaborates at the community radio station KBOO with “White Noise Radio” which focuses dance and experimental electronic music from around the globe as well as curating a monthly party Gran Ritmos, a night dedicated to Pan-American dance music.
Learn more.Compost Cooperative takes the tossed-out leftovers from digital culture and breaks them down to grow a more lush virtual landscape. In the ease of mass consumption and the gold rush for the supposedly infinite space provided by the Internet, much of our digital infrastructure and the tools used to make it go disconcertingly unexamined. We believe that through cultivating a biome of thoughtful appropriation, re-design, humor, and the surreal we can begin to glimpse a microcosm of new possibility and the recipe to get there. Together we make websites, video games, educational materials, and a range of other media that playfully percolates on our ever-decaying/blossoming digital world.
.Compost Cooperative is: Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zan Kerrigan, and Carly Barton. Our work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in the Maine College of Art and Design in Maine, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon, and the Utkal University of Culture in Odisha, India. Learn moreContainer Corps is a publication design studio, printshop, bindery, and exhibition space that serves as a platform for the creation, distribution, and discussion of new arts publications. We publish books-as-projects, or books-as-works in themselves, or primary sources. Our publications use the means of their production as an avenue of expression. The books we publish are collaborations between artists and their ideas and our skills as editors, publication designers, and printmakers. They are works of art in themselves, rather than documentation of works in other media.
Learn moreCornell Alston is a long time member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a not-for-profit that uses the arts as a springboard to teach life skills to individuals both inside and outside of state correctional facilities. He initiated the Youth Empowerment Through the Arts initiative that launched in Queens NY, and he continues to work as an arts-in-education advocate. He is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award. Alston performed and collaborated with Kaneza Schaal on PLEASE, BURY ME at Baryshnikov Arts Center and GO FORTH during a Performance Space 122 RAMP residency. Other performance highlights include: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 12 Angry Men, and the title role in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
Learn moreCourtenay Collins is the owner and Executive Producer of Dirty Angel Entertainment. The company currently produces The Real Comedy Spot Open Mic at Eastside Bar and Grill on Tuesday’s. DAE also produced an open mic at Harvey’s Comedy Club in Portland, OR. The company has produced showcases at Triple Nickel in Portland, Oregon and Pub 26 in Welches, OR. It also produces the NW Black Comedy Festival which is in its fifth year. The company manages comic The Real Hyjinx, who has appeared around the country and hosts all Dirty Angel Entertainment productions. He’s been on AMC and also co-produces the Festival. She also performs as DJ Wildchild and is the resident DJ for all Dirty Angel Entertainment Productions including The Real Comedy Spot Open Mics and the NWBCF. She also co-hosted the Portland Radio Project show Soulfull Saturdays.
Learn moreCraig Stephens was born in Sacramento, California in 1963. He grew up in the foothill town of Weimar. He attended American River College and later transferred to UC Davis where he received his B.A. in art studio in 1993. During his undergraduate years he had the privilege of taking classes from Gary Pruner, Roy DeForest, David Hollowell and Wayne Thiebaud. In 1996 Mr. Stephens began teaching high school art classes at Chana High School in Auburn, California.
Since 2006 he has completed a small painting on a nearly daily basis, which he shares through Instagram feed. He has found that the practice of completing a painting a day suits his disposition and aesthetic.
Mr. Stephens currently resides in Auburn, California with his wonderful wife and amazing children. His works can be found in private and corporate collections throughout North America and Europe.
Learn moreCrispin Spaeth offers private coaching, workplace trainings, and group classes that champion the beauty of our human design and its intrinsic relationship to confidence, connection, and freedom.
Her work is deeply informed by Integrative Alexander Technique (IAT), an experiential learning process that allows you to access your natural coordination so that you can move, think, and communicate more effectively and in line with your true wishes.
Learn moreIncorporating irony and humor into her work, Cristina Lucas focuses on the irrationality of human actions and ethics within contemporary aesthetics. She was born in Jaén, Spain, and earned her BFA from Complutense University, Madrid, followed by an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Lucas has recently participated in Dominó Canibal II Bienale PAC Murcia and the Liverpool Biennial. Her work has also been seen in solo exhibitions such as Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Móstoles an Carrillo Gil, Mexico DF; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, The Netherlands; and Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid; as well as in group exhibitions at NMAC Foundation, Cádiz; Aldrich Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; 28 Bienal de Sao Paulo; and X Istanbul Bienale. Lucas lives and works in Spain, where she is represented by Juana de Aizpuru Gallery, Madrid.
Selected Press
Cristina Lucas, Touch and Go, 2010, Arthur Roberts and Barbara Jones, all my colours, November 7, 2010.
Learn moreCrystal Baxley and Stefan Ransom are Portland-based artists who make events, videos, sounds, posters, prints, books, blogs, sculptures, playlists, drawings, emails, and food, individually and collaboratively. In 2012 they created a compilation album of 35 songs based on Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art, titled Songs on Conceptual Art. It is available for free online at http://songsonconceptualart.com. Baxley and Ransom have organized events and exhibited projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, the Open Engagement Conference and Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, and the Kadist Foundation in San Francisco.
Learn moreCrystal Quartez (Cortez) is a Portland based musician & creative technologist. Through field recording, synthesis and self-built instruments they create “Restorative Noise”; sculpting drones and rhythms of mechanical life, natural voices, and digital timbres to form a texture rich electronic dance music. The resulting sonic landscapes offer windows into shared networks of reality, often separated by borders of space, time, and perception. Recently, their work has involved the collection of live biodata from plants and static data from climate change, to translate these numbers and electrical impulses into sound.
Learn moreCVLLEJERX is the product of our multicultural inbetweenness as second generation immigrants and the violent colonization and subsequent diaspora of colombia, mexico, and africa, which informs our mestizx and black experiences in america. CVLLEJERX was born in the whitest city in america, portland, that has deep-seated white supremacist roots. with this and other historical and contemporary circumstances in mind, it is urgent for us to reclaim space in this city. we merge fashion, performance, and poetry as a form of resistance. through the engagement of voice, clothing, and physical movement, we are reclaiming authorship. Choosing what we wear, what we say, and how we move, we are amplifying ourselves with tools accessible to us.
Learn morePart country, part Lou Reed, part Patti Smith, part performance artist. —The Washington Post Cynthia Hopkins is an internationally acclaimed musical performance artist. Hopkins writes and sings songs, records albums, and creates groundbreaking multi-media performance works that intertwine truth and fiction—blurring the lines between edification and entertainment. Through the process of making performances, she attempts to alchemize disturbance into works of intrigue and hope that simultaneously stimulate the senses, provoke emotion, and enliven the mind. Hopkins has produced six performance works and eight albums of original music. Her work has been honored with many awards, including the 2007 Alpert Award in Theater and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. Hopkins most recently premiered A Living Documentary and is currently at work on a screenplay, Alcoholic Movie Musical (a tale of self-destruction and redemption). Selected Press "In Debt to Art? So Actor’s Piggy Bank Attests: ‘A Living Documentary,’ a Solo Show at New York Live Arts," The New York Times, March 7, 2014 "Cynthia Hopkins on How to Earn a Living as a New York City Artist," The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2014
Learn mored.a. carter is a writer, teacher, and cognac sipper. He is co-editor of The Iconic Obama, 2007-2009: Essays on Media Representations of the Candidate and New President (2012). He is currently completing Obscene Material, a book examining black girlhood and scandal in 1919 Washington, D.C. and is also a member of the Queering Slavery Working Group, an interdisciplinary scholarly collective that uses Tumblr to place black queer studies in conversation with the history of enslavement: http://qswg.tumblr.com and http://qswgremix.tumblr.com. He is an assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, with research interests in 20th Century African American History, gender and sexuality studies, and black cultural studies.
Learn moreDakota Camacho is a Matao•CHamoru multi-disciplinary artist / researcher working in spaces of Indigenous lifeways, performance, musical composition, community engagement, and education.
Learn moreLike an explosion, DBC unleashes on assault of screaming synthesizers, demonic beats, laser lit fog and passionate singing akin to a Black Mass given by Morrissey.
The Dangerous Boys Club is the baby birthed by Aaron Montaigne (singer), Mac Mann (Synth/electronique Organ) of the legendary 90′s harcore bands Antioch Arrow and Get Hustle. Started in the fog of Portland Oregon in 2009, DBC adopted Mark Burden (bass) of Silentist / Glass Candy and Sam Ott (electronique drums) of Year Future to create a very Unique experimental / pop / noise / dark wave inspired by Roxy Music, Soul Side, Suicide the Misfits and David Bowie.
in 2010 DBC released “VRIL” on Nathan Howdeshell of the GOSSIP’s Portland lable Fast Weapons and toured the west coast numerous times and tour of the east coast playing with bands such as Cold Cave, Salem, The Soft Moon and Bronze.
DBC’s second full release “PRIS” will be released on DAIS records in spring 2012 and will be touring the states and Europe.
Learn moreDavid Commander’s In Flight questions the reliability of two modern comforts: airplanes and news media. Aboard a crashing airliner, a banal drama unfolds as the puppet passengers relax with daytime talk show reruns and SkyMall infomercials. In Flight mocks our cultural embrace of misinformation and our limitless potential for mass apathy, even in the face of immediate danger. Commander has been a member of Big Art Group for 12 years, working as a performer, assistant director, videographer, and miniature set/prop builder. Outside of the group, he has written, directed, and performed in his own works at the NYC International Fringe Festival, the 2007 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and the Toy Theater After Dark Festival in Minneapolis
Learn moreCulp is an associate professor in the Communications Department at Universidad Iberoamericana, and he is currently working through his PhD thesis in art history at the UNAM. He is also one of the organizer-curators of Re-positionings: Contemporary Performing Arts Forum in Mexico City. He was the assistant curator at the Mexican Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale and is one of the founding partners of Conejoblanco Galería de Libros. His publications include film criticism articles in Nexos (Mexico) and as part of the book Cine Mexico 1970-2011 (Gran NumeronceProducciones, Mexico).
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 moreExplode into Colors is a band from Portland that won’t do it unless it’s fun. Heather Treadway, Claudia Meza, and Lisa Schonberg play heavy rhythms, pulsing bass, and melodic echo that has been described as “gritty dance-punk,” “the late-night love child of Fela Kuti and ESG,” and “completely unclassifiable.” Whether performing in basements, living rooms, galleries, or stages, their intention is to positively affect their audience with music that will make them dance. They are fond of celebrations and collaborations with talented local artists that have inspired them. They are also known to make clothes, videos, pictures of all kinds, and studies of insects.
Learn moreFin de Cinema is a recurring live film score series curated by Gina Altamura of Portland music venue and nightclub, Holocene. This series, established in 2009, allows local pop and experimental musicians to reinterpret the soundtracks to classic art films. FIN DE CINEMA returns to TBA for the third year in a row, and celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the series. This year’s edition will be an original live score of Black Orpheus (1959), composed and performed by visionary local musicians.
Learn moreFrancesca Capone is an artist working at the confluence of visual art and experimental literature. Her last solo exhibition, Oblique Archive took place at Peninsula Art Space in Brooklyn in 2014 and was reviewed by The Brooklyn Rail and The Wild Magazine. Capone recently co-curated Interrupt 3, a conference that highlights intersections of art, literature and digital media at Brown University.
Kristen Mueller is an artist and publisher (& So) whose works often intervene with existing texts, pages and books. Recent publications include 3b (ongoing); Partially Removing the Remove of Literature (Feb 2014); and Language to Cover a Page (Jan 2014). Her work has been exhibited in shows at Artists Space (New York), LUMA Foundation (Zurich) and Motto (Berlin).
Laura Warman is a performance poet based in Amherst, MA. She is the author of How Much Does It Cost? (Cars Are Real Press), DRONE LOVE (Gauss PDF), and WILL GO FAST (Hysterically Real). She is the founder of GLASS PRESS, a publisher of art and poetry on flash drives. Warman has had work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, Flying Object, and Open Engagement.
Learn moreBecoming Mexican, Helday de la Cruz | Photo credit Carly Diaz
Heldáy de la Cruz is an artist and community organizer. Through illustration and design, his work explores the identities that are lost and found within the queer and latinx diaspora. This, alongside his undocumented status, are at the very core of his community work. Heldáy's artwork and story has been shared in Milk X Magazine (Hong Kong), The Huffington Post, AIGA Portland, She Shreds Magazine, Ecotrust, Street Roots, East Oregonian, The Oregonian, ACLU of Oregon, Design Week Portland, Brand New Podcast, Social Justice League Podcast, Talking with Ghosts Podcast, Homebase Gallery, CultureStrike, and the Define American Film Festival. He also co-leads a collective called UndocuPDX that provides resources, education, and news for the undocumented community.
Learn more"Cole invites us into other people’s minds – and in doing so switches on new lights within our own” - The Guardian
Helen Cole is the Artistic Director and CEO of In Between Time. In 2001, she created the In Between Time Festival in Bristol, UK. In 2009, after three editions, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation awarded Cole a Breakthrough Award to establish In Between Time (IBT) as an independent company. In 2011, In Between Time became a National Portfolio Organization of the Arts Council of England. In 2015, IBT delivered its 6th International Festival to over 130,000 people and changed its name to IBT Bristol International Festival. In addition to her work with In Between Time, Cole is an artist. In 2008 she created the critically acclaimed installation and digital archive, We See Fireworks, described as ‘exquisite’ by the Guardian. We See Fireworks continues to tour across the world as installations, films, live performances and publications.
In December 2016, Cole will premiere her new work, Breathe at the III Venice Performance Art Festival. Breathe will gather hundreds of intimate private dances played out alone in spaces across the world. Instructed to ‘move from exuberance to exhaustion’ these dances are captured as audio and experienced as an installation of echoes. In theaters, galleries and found spaces suffused with hot white light these anonymous ‘ghost dances’ emit the tangible, poignant traces of bodies pushed to their limits, lives lived, time passing, to conjure the presence of those long since gone.
Cole mentors artists and producers, works as a writer, curator and producer and contributes to symposia and commissioning panels nationally and internationally.
Learn moreIsabelle Cornaro is a multi-material artist who grew up in post-colonial Africa, and studied 16th century art history before studying art at the Royal College of Arts in London and Beaux-Arts de Paris. She is currently based in Paris and represented by Balice Hertling Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions include The Whole World is Watching at Le Magasin, Grenoble (2012), FRAC-Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France (2012), and group exhibitions include Vide-Poche at Sculpture Center, New York (2011) and Rotary Connection at Casey Kaplan (2012). Cornaro was the recipient of the Ricard Foundation Prize (2010), a resident at ISCP New York (2009), and is included in the collections of Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris and Centre Pompidou, among many others.
Learn moreJibz Cameron is a performer, visual artist, and writer living in Los Angeles, most well known for her multimedia work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag. Over the last 20 years, Cameron has combined tragedy and comedy at such institutions as MOCA, PS1, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, The Hammer Museum, and the New Museum, among others. The New York Times has heralded her as “the funniest and most pitch-perfect performance seen in years,” and New York Magazine has called her “outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative.” Cameron has written and produced seven evening-length performance pieces and countless short works that have been performed in clubs and venues internationally. She has also produced multiple video works and three albums of original music. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2020 Creative Capital Awardee, and a 2021 United States Artist. Her film, Weirdo Night, made with director Mariah Garnett, is an official Sundance Film Festival 2021 submission. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night!, a monthly experimental comedy and performance event in Los Angeles + New York. Jibz is honored to be included in 2023’s Made In LA Biennale “Acts Of Living” at the Hammer Museum. Cameron's memoir, Hell In A Handbag, is being released by DOPAMINE Books in 2026.
Learn moreJasperse is Artistic Director/Choreographer of the New York-based John Jasperse Company/Thin Man Dance. He has created several short works and thirteen evening-length pieces for the company, as well as various projects in collaboration with other artists. His work has been presented by festivals and presenting organizations throughout the United States and Europe and in Brazil, Chile, Israel, and Japan. Jasperse and company have received numerous prizes, grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and a “Bessie” Award in recognition of their body of work. Jasperse has created works for several companies including Baryshnikov's White Oak Project, Batsheva Dance Company, and The Lyon Opera Ballet.
Selected Press
Hamming It Up, With Pink Light, Flashes of Murakami and Flowered Bikinis, Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, June 18, 2010.
John Jasperse Company, Joyce Theatre, New York, Apollinaire Scherr, Financial Times, June 18, 2010
Dance review: John Jasperse's flirty West Coast premiere at REDCAT, Victoria Looseleaf, LA Times, April 15, 2010.
True Lies: John Jasperse collaborates in search of beauty, Valerie Jean Johnson, NewCity Stage, April 5, 2010.
Of Men Who Go Naked With Women Who Aren't, Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, June 3, 2000
Learn moreKara-Lis Coverdale works in both acoustic and electronic media to create works that transcend reality. Driven by a patient devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Coverdale’s world-building work occupies new planes built upon a borderless understanding of electronic music rooted in the interlocking pathways of musical systems and languages. Named a unique navigator of the digital frontier with an ease and emotive sensitivity “we cannot yet comprehend” (FADER) and heralded as “one of the most exciting composers in North America” (The Guardian), Coverdale’s work has been met with consistent critical acclaim. Her most recent recorded release, Grafts (Boomkat, 2017), whilst rooted in a modal sensibility, explores the impermanence of identity signature to exhibit a highly idiosyncratic approach to ratio-based microtonality and overtone, grief, love, and the passing of time. Grafts has been described as an “arresting,” “masterful work” of “uncompromisingly distinct,” “indescribable beauty.” Coverdale’s recordings are architecturally considered and often understated, but her dynamic live shows can be unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, confrontational—symptoms that the artist is emotionally present— for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite as a highly dynamic and explorative artist; unpredictable and resistant to categorization and stasis.
Previous releases include Aftertouches (2015, Sacred Phrases), a distinct exploration of holographic sonics, container technologies, and digital ether, that explores music’s sacred histories while forging its mediated and culturally saturated frontiers. Extended harmonic resolutions of seventeenth century chromatic keyboard music are redolent of her approach to this part writing, voiced with hybrid keyboards, fractured samples, algorithmically rendered vocals, and VST miragery. Aftertouches was named a top album of the year by The Wire, NPR, and others. A 480 (2014, Constellation Tatsu), is a set of studies accompanied by .nfo scores sourced from the data-sourced voice to explore the sonic impermanence of identity signatures. Coverdale has collaborated with Philadelphia noise artist David Sutton (LXV) on their collaborative album Sirens (2015, Umor Rex), to explore disembodiment and fantasy in the digital age, Tim Hecker (Love Streams, Virgins), and her production credits include Marilyn Manson, How To Dress Well, Lee Bannon, and others. She has also presented an A/V collaboration with MFO (Marcel Weber). Coverdale has written scores with artist and writer Kara Crabb on several projects, including the writing of the score for Royal Jelly (a modern reworking of the Greek Tragedy Medea), and The Reproductive Life Cycle of a Flower. In 2016 and 2017, Coverdale performed over eighty shows in Europe, North America, and Australia, including performances that were “festival favourites” for Unsound, Semibreve, and Mutek. More recently, she presented new large scale works Marjamaa Laulud, a unique commission for Dance with the Estonian Vanemuine Theatre and choreographer Ruslan Stepanov, and VoxU, a pipe organ commission for Mutek Montreal (CALQ) that is centred around the collection and arrangement of the unique sonics of the Vox Humana stop in particular, the first record and instrument of vocal synthesis dating back to the fifthteenth century. The work weaves a narrative characteristic of this period, intersecting motives of emulation, the body, and transcendence.
Kara-Lis was born in Burlington, Canada, and began studying with the Royal Conservatory of Music from age 5. Her grandparents were immigrants from Estonia. She later went on to complete with degrees in musicology and composition, for which she wrote a Masters thesis “Sound Rhetoric, and the Fallacy of Fidelity,” a seed to Coverdale’s infatuation with the mutability of the real. Coverdale has worked as organist and music director at several churches across Canada since age 13, where she has also served as choir conductor. She is recipient of a “remising young artist” award by Canadian new music composer Ann Southam, has held residencies with GRM Paris, EMS Stockholm, FUGA Zaragoza and others, and presents original performances, commissions, collaborations, and installations all over the world including The Barbican, Theatre du Chatelet, AGO, MAC Montreal, Filharmonia Krakowska, Teatro Circo, Kraftwerk, and Elbphilharmonie.
Learn moreHennessy is a San Francisco-based performer, choreographer, teacher, organizer, and PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis. He directs Circo Zero and co-founded 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE in San Francisco. Hennessy tours extensively including Queer Zagreb, New York Live Arts and American Realness Festival in New York, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, and YBCA in San Francisco, among others. He has received multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie), and the United States Artist Kjenner Fellowship.
Learn moreLucy Cotter is an independent writer, curator and trained artist, holding a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. A regular contributor to journals such as Mousse, Flash Art, Frieze and Third Text, her edited book Reclaiming Artistic Research was published in 2019. She was curator of the Dutch pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale 2017, presenting artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Cotter was formerly director of the Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She is currently based in Portland, Oregon and working on new projects that experiment with the boundaries of the artistic, the curatorial and the theoretical.
Learn moreMic Capes is a hip hop artist from Portland, OR that represents the North Portland neighborhood, St.Johns. Capes is known for having vivid story telling ability, raw lyricism, and thought provoking social commentary as key components of his music. He released his debut solo album "Rise & Grind" and made a huge impact on the local hip hop scene and now gearing up for his highly anticipated sophomore offering "Concrete Dreams", slated to drop in 2015. He is a member of the Portland hip hop supergroup The Resistance of FRSH TRB.
Learn moreMichael Crowe is a writer and an artist. His diverse work has been featured in press internationally including Associated Press, BBC, the New Yorker, The Smithsonian and Financial Times Deutschland. He has exhibited in galleries including FRAC Paris, Simultanhalle in Cologne, Nottingham Contemporary and Kunsthalle St. Gallen in Switzerland. He's given talks at the New Museum New York, BFI London and taught at Tate Britain and the Camden Arts Centre. Michael's most frequent collaborator is Lenka Clayton, with whom he writes Mysterious Letters, an attempt to write a handwritten letter to everyone in the world.
Learn moreThe Miracles Club is a performance art and music group from Portland Oregon. Members Rafael Fauria, Honey Owens and Ryan Boyle explore the relationship between sound, movement, audience and artist.
Selected Press
Miracles Club, “A New Love”, Michael Manheimer, wweek.com, January 11, 2010.
Learn moreFor the past ten years, Zimbabwe-born and New York-based Chipaumire has investigated Africa and her own personal iconography. Her performances complicate, implicate, and destroy the concept of the African female body as a subjugated, colonial, and tribal unknowable. Chipaumire is a recipient of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and two New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards.
Selected Press
Nora Chipaumire: Body and Soul Podcast, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Infinite Body Podcast, April 25, 2008.
Platform 2012: Parallels, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, April, 2012.
Learn moreOlivia Camfield is a multimedia movement artist of the Muscogee Nation, born and raised in Texas Hill Country. Their work finds connection to dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism. They have performed and choreographed dance for much of their career, and their film work includes themes of the Alien as kin, time traveling relatives, and Mvskoke lifeways in experimental forms. They are a tattoo artist whose hand poke practice is based in Southeastern and Mississippian Indigenous tattoo traditions, creating designs for Southeastern people that imagine the possibilities of those tattoos in the future and the new shapes they may take. Olivia's films have screened internationally at Camden International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and have appeared in print and online publications such as Artforum and Variety. Olivia is a 2018-19 Alembic Artist In Residence, a CYCLE I featured artist of COUSIN Collective, a 2022 Sundance Institute Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive participant, and a 2022 recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s LIFT–Early Career Support for Native Artists award.
Learn morePamela Council is a New York based interdisciplinary artist creating fountains for Black joy. Guided by material, cultural, and metaphysical quests, Council’s practice embodies a darkly humorous and inventive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. Through this lens, Council uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to shed light on under-examined and under-valued narratives.
Council has created commissions, exhibitions, performances or presentations for: New Museum for Contemporary Art, United States Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoCADA. Council has been Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell, Red Bull Arts, Bemis, Rush Arts, MANA, Signal Culture, Mass MoCA, and Wassaic Project. A recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Grant, Council holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University and is currently artist in residence at ISCP.
Social Media handles
twitter / pamelacouncil
instagram / pamelacouncil
Patreon / BLAXIDERMY
venmo / pamelacouncil
cash app / $pammypammy
Learn morePaul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance.
Learn morePeter Coffin was born in Berkeley, California in 1972. He has had solo exhibitions at Herald St, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery (NY); The Wrong Gallery (NY); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (CA); Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami (FL); The Horticultural Society of New York (NY); and le Confort Moderne, Poitier, France; as well as recent group exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NY. He is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Learn moreRap Class is an eclectic DJ and producer who has been operating out of the Pacific Northwest for the better part of the last decade. His styles are routed in a heavy sample-based audio collage and disco mix champion influence. He can deliver anything; changing the ins and outs of his routine is his specialty. Every time you see him it’s like drawing a prize out from a bag. His one goal: to keep his audience guessing. Seeing him live, audiences may just learn that forward thinking electronic music doesn’t merely exist in the present, but lives as a culmination of all music history, a fact to be presented by the right DJ at the right place & time: Rap Class.
Selected Press
"Rap Class: Brothers Superhero," Christian Santana, XLR8R, August 10, 2012.
"Rap Class," Reed Jackson, Willamette Week, October 31, 2012.
Learn moreRaven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of a United States Artists fellowship in music, a Creative Capital award in visual arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
Learn moreRobert Quillen Camp is a theater artist and scholar whose current research focuses primarily on the ways in which expanded dramatic practices intersect with contemporary post-conceptual visual art. His other research areas include European modern drama and the phenomenology of performance.
He has written extensively for the stage, including writing the text for Pig Iron Theater Company’s OBIE-award winning CHEKHOV LIZARDBRAIN, which has toured internationally and been published by 53rd State Press. His most recent play, ALL HANDS, a collaboration with the Hoi Polloi Theater Company, premiered at NYC’s Incubator Arts Project in 2012, directed by Alec Duffy, with music by Dave Malloy and choreography by Dan Safer. Another collaboration with Pig Iron, the Barrymore Award nominated PAY UP, returned to the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in the fall of 2013. His plays and performance works have been produced at many venues in the US and abroad, including the Public Theater Under the Radar Festival, the Ohio Theater, the Ontological-Hysteric, Peak Performances at Montclair University, The Empty Space, Prelude Festival, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and HERE. His plays have been published in the literary journals Conjunctions, Chain, Conundrum, Factorial, and Play A Journal of Plays.
He currently teaches in the theatre department at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR.
BA Reed College, MFA Brown University, PhD University of California, Santa Barbara.
Learn moreSan Cha is a Mexican-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice blends rancheras, electronics, cumbia, and pop to explore themes of identity, power, and liberation. Born Lizette Gutierrez to Mexican immigrant parents, San Cha's artistic journey began with singing in the Catholic Church choir and evolved within the vibrant Bay Area queer drag nightlife scene. This formative period fostered a unique fusion of musical influences, including Catholic hymns, Mexican corridos, rancheras, cumbias, and punk queer electroclash, shaping her distinct artistic voice.
Rooted in the DIY, punk, and queer nightlife cultures, San Cha's work is driven by a commitment to personal, social, and political liberation. Her creative process is fueled by community narratives, lucid dreams, and cultural exploration. A transformative experience living on her aunt's farm in Jalostotitlán, Mexico inspired her to reimagine traditional ranchera music through a queer lens, subverting established forms and cultural signifiers.
San Cha's early work, such as the Capricho del Diablo EP (2018), received critical acclaim, with Bandcamp Daily naming it Album Of The Day. Her 2019 album, La Luz De La Esperanza, earned an 8.0 rating on Pitchfork and recognition as one of The Advocate's "Women Of The Year" in 2020. Her music has been featured in the Starz TV series Vida and Kacey Musgraves' film Star-Crossed: The Film, with the Los Angeles Times declaring, "San Cha sings from a divine place." Her ongoing Processions (2024) mixtape, released through Ballroom Marfa, further demonstrates her artistic versatility and commitment to exploring complex narratives.
San Cha's practice extends to collaborative projects in classical music and opera. She has engaged in projects, performances, and residencies with Performance Space New York, New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; lumber room, Portland, OR; The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Red Bull; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; Denniston Hill, Glen Wild, NY; Oak Head; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; Movimiento de Arte y Cultural Latino Americana, San Jose, CA; KQED; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Portland, OR, and more. Her work has also been supported by the California Arts Council.
Recent awards and accolades include the National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund Grant (2023), National Performance Network Documentation & Storytelling Grant (2024), Los Angeles Performance Practice Research & Development Award (2024), a 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. San Cha's work consistently pushes artistic boundaries, utilizing music and performance as powerful vehicles for sociopolitical change and liberation.
Learn moreSeba Calfuqueo are from Mapuche origin. Their work appeals to their inheritance to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural, and political status of the Mapuche subject in contemporary Chilean society and in Latin America. It includes installations, ceramics, performances, and video art that explore cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes produced from the cross between Indigenous and Western ways of thinking. Their research also has the purpose of making visible feminist and sexual dissidence issues. Seba Calfuqueo is part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, which edits YeneRevista, an online magazine of art, thought, and writing in Wallmapu and AbyaYala language.
Learn 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 moreSantiago Leyba is an artist and musician living in New Mexico. Using a minimal hardware set-up, Leyba assembles his particular form of concrete body music out of improvisations and experiments against the backdrop of the southwestern U.S. Working to break down the rules of organization and surplus frequently present in house and techno, Leyba evolves his minimal but dynamic productions into live performances that force bodies to move through driving beats. U.S. hard / contemporary is concerned with the present, the experiential, and the irreducibility of giving oneself over to impulse.
Learn moreWoolly is an aesthetically-inclined, trans-pop-culture, dance-therapy performance group formed in Portland, OR in 2006. They have performed in venues ranging between burned-out buildings, black box theaters, Mexican bars, fields of llamas, cowboy dance halls, and downtown alleyways. Traversing between hilarious absurdity and a dark intensity, they bring audiences to the precipice of tantalizing confusion.
Selected Press
Ultra Q: Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner, Lisa Radon, ultrapdx.com, January 14, 2008. (PDF)
Learn moreYOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is yhchang.com. It is also Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge. They have made work in 17 languages and presented much of it in major art institutions, including Tate London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the New Museum, New York. Selected Press "DISTANCE, HOMELESSNESS, ANONYMITY, AND INSIGNIFICANCE": AN INTERVIEW WITH YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES", Thom Swiss, The Iowa Review, December 15, 2002. Interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Hyun-Joo Yoo, dichtung-digital, February, 2005. Selected Video
Learn moreYOUNG JEAN LEE (Artistic Director) is an OBIE award-winning playwright and director who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays, The Shipment and Lear) and by Samuel French (Three Plays by Young Jean Lee). She is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, NYFA, NEA, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Rockefeller MAP Foundation. She is also the recipient of two OBIE awards, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award.
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