Artists Archive
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BILJANA KOSMOGINA is an avant-garde writer, performer and multimedia artist from Belgrade. Her stories are included in three anthologies of Serbian prose, translated into Italian, German and Albanian. Kosmogina is a writer and performer who forcefully deals with women’s questions, sexual and gender discourse and roles, as well as social disorders. She is subversive and politically incorrect towards all existing values!
Learn moreEmily Jones and Hannah Krafcik make performances and facilitate movement practices together. They are white settlers residing on the unceded lands of the Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clackamas, and many other Tribes, also known today as Portland, OR. Hannah (they/them) is a neurodivergent dancer and writer. Emily (she/they) is a dancer, movement educator, and bodyworker. The artists’ long-standing collaboration is driven by considering how power dynamics impact their body/minds and behaviors.
Learn moreGreasy Kid Stuff began in 1995 on freeform radio legend WFMU and relocated to Portland in 2004. Hailed as “the best kid's radio program of all time” by Alternadad Neal Pollack, the show strikes a cord with punk-inspired parents looking for alternatives to mass-market kiddie culture. greasykidstuff.vox.com
Learn moreHannah 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.
Learn moreHiro Kone is the alias of Nicky Mao, a New York-based musician and producer. She uses a combination of hardware, synths, and modular to cultivate her sound - a visceral meditation on rhythm, noise, and melody that has seen her release on leading experimental labels including DAIS Records and BANK Records. No stranger to manipulating macabre disorientations into enchanting new shapes, her music exposes the unsettling and sublime. She is known to draw upon a combination of modular synthesis, noise and field recordings. Instinctively responding to the precariousness of humanity, Kone’s cascades of twisted field recordings find an inherent partner in the effervescent current of synthesis and in the process, forge new terrains.
Learn morejaamil olawale kosoko (they/he/she/jlov) is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s work in performance is rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body as a means to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.
jaamil is the recipient of awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund award, 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency, 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and consecutive 2016-2020 USArtists International awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.
Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, their book, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, was published in spring 2022.
Premiering in 2022, Black Body Amnesia (the performance reading) examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people negotiating the psychic lifeworlds of living inside the American context. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of performers including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, and DJ Maij, with sound accompaniment by Everett Saunders. In this new work, Kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a performance device. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests, and how they then archive these personal freedom narratives to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.
Their 2020 work Chameleon is a multimedia living digital art work, film, and audio transmission project that explores the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the intersection of Blackness, gender fluidity, and queerness in a pirated virtual space. Chameleon is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; the New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency program; and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, in partnership with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and Tanz im August/HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Additional development support for Chameleon was made possible, in part, with commissioning support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, through the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program.
Their 2017 work, Séancers, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in December 2017 and has toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim. Recent highlights include Mousonturm (Frankfurt, DE), FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA), Sophiensaele (Berlin, DE), the Wexner Center (Columbus, OH), Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), and Montréal Arts Interculturels (Montréal, CA), among others.
jaamil’s previous work #negrophobia (premiered September 2015, Gibney Dance Center) was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award and toured throughout Europe appearing in major festivals including Moving in November (Finland), Take Me Somewhere (UK), SICK! (UK), Tanz im August (Berlin), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (Norway), zurich moves! (Switzerland), Beursschouwburg (Belgium) and Spielart Festival (Munich).
They are a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University where they earned their MA in Curatorial Studies.
As a performer, jaamil has created original roles in the performance works of Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. In addition, creative consultant and/or performer credits include: Terry Creach, Lisa Kraus, Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, Leah Stein Dance Company, Emergent Improvisation Ensemble, and Faustin Linyekula and Les Studios Kabako (The Democratic Republic of Congo).
In 2009, they published the chapbook Animal in Cyberspace. In 2011, jaamil published the collection Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). Other publications include the American Poetry Review, the Dunes Review, the Interlochen Review, the Broad Street Review, Silo Literary and Visual Arts Magazine.
jaamil has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Baker Artists Awards, among others. From 2014 to 2020, jaamil served as a trustee on the Board of Directors for Dance/USA, the national service organization for dance professionals. jaamil is also a founding advisory board member for the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving, and currently serves as an artistic advisory member of The Field Center in Vermont.
jaamil has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center among others, and has taught and lectured at various educational institutions across the world. In Fall of 2020, jaamil was appointed the 3rd annual Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA World Arts & Cultures/Dance Department. Additionally, they lecture regularly at Princeton University, The University of the Arts Stockholm, and Exerce Master at ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Brooklyn, Joan Frosch (producer/director) explores 21st century artmaking through the voices of often previously marginalized artists and thinkers, including the emergent voices of contemporary dancers and choreographers in Africa, and the African Diasporas of France and the USA. Joan's 30 year creative path encompasses making and directing dance theatre, writing as a dance ethnographer/activist, and, now, directing her first documentary feature. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts, Laban Institute of Movement Studies, and Columbia University. At present, Joan is Professor of Dance and co-Director of the award-winning Center for World Arts at the University of Florida, and a founding member of the The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium (USA).
Alla Kovgan (co-director/editor) is a Boston-based filmmaker/intermedia artist/curator, born in Moscow, Russia. Her films have been screened at numerous venues around the world including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New York Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and others. Among Alla's most recent endeavors is co-directing and editing “Traces of the Trade: a Story from the Deep North” by Katrina Browne about the role of the North in the US slave trade; co-producing with Russian filmmaker Efim Reznikov “Terpsychore's Captives II”, a feature documentary about Bill T. Jones and a Russian prima ballerina Natalia Balakhnicheva; and working with Kinodance Company, on a new intermedia performance "Denizen" that will premiere in May 2007 as a part of Bank of America Celebrity Series. Alla has been teaching and curating dance film and avant-garde cinema worldwide and acts as an International Director of St. Petersburg Dance Film Festival KINODANCE.
Learn moreWorking in video and photography, Finnish artist Johanna Ketola reconstructs narrative that is built upon her quotidian observations of life. This results in both fictional and autobiographical characters and stories, which often reflect her state of being as affected by a kind of sweet and absurd hopelessness about the human condition. Her work has been exhibited at Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in Holden Gallery in Manchester, UK; in Espace Croix-Baragnon in Toulouse, France; in Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in the following Finnish museums: Jyväskylä, Rauma, Oulu, and Mikkeli; and in Gallery Jangva in Helsinki, Finland, among others.
Learn moreJoseph Keckler is a musician, writer, and artist who often zeroes in on moments of daily life and spins them into absurd and affecting underworld voyages. His musical performances have been presented by the NPR Tiny Desk concert series, Lincoln Center, Centre Pompidou, and others. In 2019 he premiered two performance pieces—a dreamlike travelogue, Train With No Midnight, with Prototype Festival, and Let Me Die, an epic medley of operatic death scenes, with Opera Philadelphia—and toured the US as the national support act for Sleater-Kinney. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Vice, Lithub, and other publications; his debut collection Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World was published in 2018 by Turtle Point Press. This year he is an artist in residence with Dartmouth and the Ringling Museum of Art and is currently working on new videos and recordings.
"Singer with a range that shatters the conventional boundaries...The sensibility of a magician, a trickster’s dark humor and a formidable musical and literary erudition. Major vocal talent"-- Stephen Holden, The New York Times
“Tantalizing… dynamic… with magnetism and poise is so high that he seems to have been born onstage.” — The Village Voice
“Riveting and beautifully absurd, Keckler singlehandedly has the power and chops to legitimately modernize a dying art form.” — Huffington Post
“His timing is impeccable, his wit is sharp… Keckler himself is the masterpiece”– Brooklyn Rail
Learn moreK8 Hardy (b. 1977, Fort Worth, Texas, USA) lives and works in New York. She’s a punk rock artist who works across varied mediums, including video, photography, and sculpture.
Through her art practice, she unwittingly becomes a brand, intentionally exploiting persona and pop culture. Long before the ubiquity of the selfie, Hardy was experimenting in documenting her looks and various fictional selves. Her work takes us to the edge of “good taste.” Hardy’s materials are an assemblage of second-hand clothing, found objects, trash, and panache, evoking the world of consumption.
Learn moreKalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist currently living and working in Brooklyn. In 2007, he was named a Guggenheim fellow; in 2008 he received a Creative Capital Grant and a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. Linzy has been hailed as one of the most innovative of a new generation of queer artists, drawing comparisons to John Waters, Jack Smith, and RuPaul. Writing in The New York Times, Holland Cotter observed of Linzy, "A star is born." Born in 1977 in Stuckey, Florida, he received an MFA from the University of South Florida in Tampa.
Linzy has performed and screened work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; British Film Institute, London; and Beursschouwburg, Brussels, Belgium. Linzy's work was included in Prospect.1 New Orleans and was recently featured in a major solo exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem, comprised of more than twenty videos and several suites of drawings. He is represented by Taxter & Spengemann in New York.
Learn moreKassys is a theater-initiative of Liesbeth Gritter and Mette van der Sijs, founded in 1999 and based in Amsterdam. Kassys performances combine theater and film in an effort to expose the codes of each medium. Their subject matter explores the beauty of human success and failure and differences and similarities between “being yourself” and “pretending.” With self-mockery and humor, Kassys finds inspiration in the murky overlap of everyday human behavior, voyeurism, and fiction.
Learn moreGilmore’s exhibitions include the 2010 Whitney Biennial; the Brooklyn Museum; The Kitchen; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Bryant Park (Public Art Fund); Locust Projects; White Columns; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Artpace; The J. Paul Getty Museum; The Rose Art Museum; Istanbul Museum of Art; Haifa Museum of Art; and PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center (Greater New York 2005). Gilmore has been the recipient of several international awards and honors, such as the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Award for Artistic Excellence, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, The LMCC Workspace Residency, New York Foundation for The Arts Fellowship, and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Residency. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Selected Press
Soft Machines Hit Hard, Kathleen Massara, The L Magazine, August 3, 2011.
Photos from Kate Gilmore's Clay-Clawing Performance at The Pace Gallery, Benjamin Sutton, The L Magazine, July 14, 2011.
Jennifer and Kate Gilmore, BOMB, March 10, 2011.
Art in Review: Kate Gilmore, Roberta Smith, The New York Times, January 9, 2009.
Kate Gilmore, Lyra Kilston, Modern Painters, March 1, 2009.
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 morekeyon 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.
Learn moreKinski bears comparison to Acid Mothers Temple, Oneida, and Tool, and it just so happens that Kinski has toured with all three of these prog-rock juggernauts. Comprising Chris Martin (guitar), Lucy Atkinson (bass), Barrett Wilke (drums), and Matthew Reid Schwartz (guitar, keyboards, flute), the band has released six full-length albums, four on the seminal Seattle label Sub Pop.
Learn moreKite 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).
Learn moreKnowledge of Wounds is the collaborative curatorial practice of S.J Norman (Wiradjuri) and Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation). Since its first iteration in Lenapehoking/NYC in 2020, and currently operational as a hybrid live/digital program, KoW is continually evolving in its mission to foreground the work of Indigenous creators and knowledge workers across hemispheres and disciplines. www.knowledgeofwounds.com / IG: @knowledgeofwounds
Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree sound artist approaching sound as a mode of connection. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
DB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an artist addressing audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience, often focusing on the role error plays as a generative opportunity. His media-centered installations are the result of DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations, and persistent, inquisitive experimentation of available materials.
Learn moreYamazaki was introduced to butoh in 1977 through the teaching of Akira Kasai. From 1996 to 2001, he created a dozen works with his first company, rosy co., and in 2002 he founded Kota Yamazaki/Fluid Hug-Hug. He has performed around the world at the TBA Festival, Bank Art, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, and Danspace Project, among others. Through residencies in Senegal, Yamazaki created FAGAALA with Germaine Acogny, which received the 2007 New York Dance and Performance Award in choreography. He is director of Body Arts Laboratory and organizer of the Whenever Wherever Festival in Tokyo.
Selected Press
Glowing among the shadows, Martha Sherman, Dance Review Times, May 3, 2012.
Face Time: Kota Yamazaki, Betsy Momich, Carnegie Magazine, Spring 2012.
Fluid Hug-Hug: ‘(glowing)’ @ EMPAC, 4/6/12, Tresca Weinstein, Albany Times Union, April 9, 2012.
Learn moreNina Katchadourian's work, in a wide variety of media including photgraphy, sculpture, video and sound, has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PSI/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, New Langton Arts, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, Palais de Tokyo, and as part of the 2010 Time-Based Art Festival. In January 2006 the Turku Art Museum in Finland featured a solo show of works she made in that country, and in June 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph, All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a 2008 solo show of Katchadourian's video installation works, and in February 2010, as artist in residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, she had another solo show entitled Seat Assignment. She is currently at work on a permanent public piece, commissioned by the GSA, for a border crossing station between the US and Canada.
Selected Press
Found in Translation, Brian Dillon, Art Review, April, 2008.
Learn moreNyokabi Kariũki (she/her) is a Kenyan composer and sound artist based between Kenya and the United States. Her sonic imagination is ever-evolving, spanning across genres from classical contemporary and experimental-electronic music, to sound art, pop, film, and (East) African musical traditions. She performs with the piano, voice, electronics, and on several instruments from the African continent. Her concert works have been performed by notable ensembles such as Cello Octet Amsterdam and Third Coast Percussion, and she has received commissions from BBC Radio 3, Heartland Marimba, and more. Released in February 2022, her debut EP, ‘peace places: kenyan memories’ (SA Recordings) was described as “deft” (The Quietus) and “transcendent” (The Guardian), with Bandcamp highlighting seeing her as “becoming a crucial voice in contemporary composition and experimental music.” Nyokabi seeks to create meaningful and challenging art, illuminated by a commitment to the preservation and reflection on African thought, language, and stories.
Learn morePetra Kovacic was born in Split, Croatia. In 2008, she graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. Kovac’ic’ has exhibited in fifteen group and solo exhibitions and has performed her in numerous festivals in Croatia and abroad in New York, France, and Macedonia. She collaborated in workshops on artistic and pedagogical praxis and is a member of the Croatian Association of Artists, Zagreb and Split, and the Moving Academy of Performing Arts.
Learn moreRaja 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.
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