Artists Archive
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Alex 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 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 moreDr. Brook Colley (Wasco, Warm Springs, Eastern Cherokee; Enrolled: Eastern Band of Cherokee) is an associate professor and chair of the Native American Studies program at Southern Oregon University. Colley’s research is focused on federal Indian law and policy, Oregon Tribes, intertribal relations and conflict, and community health and healing. Her book Power in the Telling: Grand Ronde, Warm Springs, and Intertribal Relations in the Casino Era was published in 2019 by the University of Washington Press and it was a finalist for the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction. In 2014, she received her PhD in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis, and is currently working on an intertribal Indigenous-led collaboration to enhance first food access and first food production in Southern Oregon. She lives in Jackson County with her daughter and two pups named Honey and Leonard Cohen.
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 moreC Davida Ingram is an award-winning artist who is passionate about beauty and social justice. Her primary subjects are race, gender, and social relationships. Ingram’s impulse is to imagine tactics to get free—not further prescribing Otherness. With this in mind, she uses unorthodox mediums—Craigslist ads, hypnosis, drones, cell phone videos among other things to reshape what is possible in her own identification with being a black queer woman. Her art has been shown at the Frye Art Museum, Northwest African American Museum, Evergreen College, Bridge Productions, Intiman Theater, Town Hall and more. Her writings have been included in Monday, Arcade, Ms blog, James Franco Review and The Stranger. Ingram received the 2014 Stranger Genius Award in Visual Arts. She is a 2016 Neddy art award finalist. She is a former 2016 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist fellow and was recently voted both one of the “20 most talented and most influential people in Seattle” by Seattle Magazine. She is recent Jacob Lawrence fellow at the University of Washington and the winner of the Museum of Northwest Luminary Award in Innovative media.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 moreC. Riley Snorton is a scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender, sexuality, and race. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (U Minn Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (U Minn Press, 2017). Snorton is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago.
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 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 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 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 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 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 moreLili Chopra, Executive Vice President and Artistic Director of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in New York City, is founder and curator of its trans-disciplinary fall festival Crossing the Line. She has extensive experience in programming, producing, and marketing international events and performance works in both France and New York. In addition to working with various festivals and independent artists as an administrator and producer, she spent four years at New York Live Arts (formerly known as Dance Theater Workshop) working closely with David White as Associate Producer and as Curator of its Gallery. She received her Masters in Theater and Performing Arts History at Paris X University, and her M.A. in Arts Administration from Columbia University in New York.
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 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 moreMyles de Bastion develops technology and art installations that enable sound to be experienced as light and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum, and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. He has built large format installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding.
Myles is the founder of CymaSpace, a non-profit that facilitates cultural events inclusive of the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing; and Audiolux Devices, which produces products featuring light and sound synergy. 2018 Director of the first Northwest Deaf Arts Festival. Myles mentors Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing youth, has developed curriculum, and taught workshops in music and sound for Deaf schools, camps, and communities.
A current project, The Ikigai Machine, is a multimedia visual narrative with interactive installations and live performances that he is developing into a feature-length, touring production for disability hubs and art institutions. Myles has received support from Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Cultural Trust, Oregon Cultural Foundation and Randall Charitable Trust.
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 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 moreRachel Carrico is a scholar and practitioner of dance and performance. She holds a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California–Riverside and an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU. She has published her research on second lining, an improvisational dance form rooted in New Orleans's African diaspora parading traditions, in TDR: The Drama Review, TBS: The Black Scholar, and several anthologies. Fellowships and awards include the Society of Dance History Scholars' Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for excellence in dance scholarship, the UC Center for New Racial Studies Research Grant, and the Center for Gulf South Research Global South Fellowship at Tulane University. Also a practitioner, Carrico completed the Limón Institute's dance teacher training. In 2008, she co-founded Goat in the Road Productions in New Orleans, with whom she has directed two international artist residencies and launched Play/Write, a youth playwriting festival, in New Orleans schools.
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 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 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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