Artists Archive
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Autumn Knight is a New York-based, Texas-born interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, sound, and text. Drawing from her training in theater, group dynamics, and psychology, Knight makes performances that reshape power structures and upend audience expectations of live experiences. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions, including Human Resources, Los Angeles; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Shedhalle, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, New York; Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Performance Space New York, NY; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired to the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors, and fellowships, including an Art Matters Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Learn moreBILJANA 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 moreGerard & Kelly (Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly) have collaborated since 2003 to create project-based installations and performances interrogating the formation of the couple and the critical potential of intimacy. Driven by an inquiry of their own partnership, the duo uses choreography, video, and sculpture to address questions of sexuality, memory and the formation of queer consciousness. Their work has been exhibited internationally at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; and The Kitchen, New York, among other institutions. Their ongoing performance series Modern Living, in collaboration with L.A. Dance Project, was recently presented by The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, in association with Art Production Fund. Gerard & Kelly have received numerous recognitions for their work, including the New England Foundation for the Arts (2015), Art Matters grant (2014), and the 2014 Juried Award from the New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessies. Gerard & Kelly completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2010, and received their MFAs in 2013 from the Interdisciplinary Studio in the UCLA Department of Art.
Learn moreDanielle Kelly is a Las Vegas-based artist and writer, who received her BA from Beloit College and her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Working in disciplines ranging from installation to performance, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Portland.
Learn moreDawn Kasper is an interdisciplinary performance artist. Kasper's work has been exhibited widely; The Migros Museum, Zurich (2005), Human Resources, LA (2011), Tramway, Glasgow (2012), 2012 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2012) Redling Fine Art, LA (2014) David Lewis, NY (2014) Kasper lives and works in New York.
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 moreFawn Krieger is a New York-based artist whose multigenre works reimagine everyday sites like the shop and home. Her “stages” are inhabitable sculptures that transform spectators into participants and examine the politics of ownership and exchange. Krieger’s Flintstonian tactility and penchant for scale compressions reveal an unlikely collision of private and public space, where intimate moments also serve as social ruptures. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen (NY), Nice & Fit Gallery (Berlin), The Moore Space (Miami), the Rose Art Museum (Boston), and Neon>fdv (Milan). Krieger is the recipient of grants from Art Matters Foundation (2008) and the Jerome Foundation (2007).
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 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 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 moreKameelah Janan Rasheed (East Palo Alto, CA) is an artist, writer, and former public school social studies teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. In her interdisciplinary and research intensive practice, she considers ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing. She has exhibited at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Project Row Houses, among others. She has been the recipient of awards including the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Print Studio, Triple Canopy Commission at New York Public Library Labs, Artadia Grant, Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship, Art Matters Grant, among others. She is a curriculum writer for NYC public schools, the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine, a contributing editor at The New Inquiry, and on faculty at School of Visual Arts. Currently, she is an artist in residence at Smack Mellon.
Learn moreKaneza Schaal is a New York City based theater artist. Her recent work GO FORTH premiered at PS122 and then showed at the Genocide Memorial Amphitheater in Kigali, Rwanda; LMCC’s River-to-River Festival; Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; Cairo International Contemporary Theater Festival in Egypt; and at her alma mater Wesleyan University, CT. Schaal received a 2017 MAP Fund award, 2016 Creative Capital Award, and is the current Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage. This spring her new piece CARTOGRAPHY will be workshopped through New Victory Theater Lab, NYU Abu Dhabi, and will show at The Kennedy Center’s New Vision New Voices. Her work with The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, Claude Wampler, Jim Findlay, and Dean Moss has brought her to venues including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, The Whitney Museum, and MoMA.
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 moreKaren Sherman makes performances that incorporate her background in dance, writing, theater, music, and the handyman arts. Her work has been presented nationally by P.S. 122, Walker Art Center, PICA’s TBA Festival, Fusebox Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theater, American Realness, The Southern Theater, Dance Place, Diverseworks, Movement Research, ODC, Red Eye Theater, and many others. Her honors include a 2007 “Bessie” Award for her performance in Morgan Thorson's Faker, multiple McKnight Foundation Fellowships in Choreography and Dance, a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, SAGE Awards for her work as a choreographer, performer, and scenic designer, and residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Performance Lab, Movement Research, LUMBERYARD, and the Bogliasco Foundation program in Liguria, Italy. She was a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellow in The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and is currently an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-in-Residence in its dance program. A freelance stage technician for over 20 years, she was Technical Director and Production Manager of NYC’s legendary Judson Church (1994-2004), Technical Director of both Movement Research (1994-1998) and Circus Amok (1995-1997), and she has been an overhire stage technician at Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) since 2005. Her writing, including essays and poetry, has been featured on many live, web, and print forums, including e-flux journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Criticism Exchange, Culture Bodega, and The Triumph of Poverty: Poems Inspired by the Work of Nicole Eisenman. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project about blood, astronomy, and animals. Part one, a solo visual art show opened at Hair + Nails Gallery in Minneapolis in March 2018. Part two, a dance, premieres in 2019, with part three, a book, to follow.
Selected Press
"Karen Sherman's 'One with Others,' gleefully mocks artistic hooey," Sarah Kaufman, Washington Post, April 21, 2013
Learn moreKarl Larsson is an artist, poet, and editor. These diverse positions have coalesced in an artistic practice that can be described as both editorial and literary, but differs from writing in a conventional sense in its focus on spatial experience, embodiment and activism.
Learn moreKate Bredeson is a theatre historian, translator, director, and dramaturg. Her project as a scholar is to research, document, and practice the ways in which theatre can be a tool for radical activism and protest. Her books are published by Northwestern University Press: Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May '68 (2018; finalist, TLA George Freedley Award); The Inheritor: A Play (translator, 2024); The Diaries of Judith Malina, volumes 1-4 (general editor 1-4, editor 2 and 4, 2026; winner, ADE Lyman H. Butterfield Award), and Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances by Anthony Hudson (editor, 2026). Bredeson is Professor of Theatre at Reed College.
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 moreKatherine Profeta’s longest-term credits are as a dramaturg with choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon (1997-present) and as a founding member, choreographer and occasional performer with Elevator Repair Service theater company (1991-present). She has also done dramaturgical work in dance, theater and points in-between with Julie Taymor, Karin Coonrod, Annie Dorsen, David Thomson, Alexandra Beller, Nora Chipaumire, and Theatre for a New Audience. She holds a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama in the department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. Her first book, Dramaturgy in Motion, examines the labor of the dramaturg in contemporary dance and movement performance, alongside a history of her collaboration with Lemon. Her writing has also been seen in Performing Arts Journal; Theater Magazine; Movement Research Performance Journal; Theatre, Dance and Performance Training; and TCG’s The Production Notebooks. "She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Queens College, CUNY, and currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the Yale School of Drama."
Learn moreKatie Janovec is a freestyle dancer, popper, performer, teacher and event producer. She created The Beautiful Street to connect, support, and promote the Northwest street and club dance community. Katie continues to dive deeper into street and club dance culture through traveling, battling, learning from teachers who share the history, and creating community events. She is currently the Fundraising Coordinator at The Aspire Project.
Learn moreKeioui Keijuan creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Keijuan examines, deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of the black body in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials addressing blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Keijuan earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Keijuan has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; and the United Kingdom. Keijuan was an artist-in-residence at PICA as part of the Creative Exchange Lab program in Fall 2015.
Learn moreKeith Hennessy dances in and around performance. Born in northern Ontario, he lives in San Francisco since 1982 and tours internationally. His performances engage improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and public action as tools for investigating political realities. Practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, post/Modern dance, activist art, the Bay Area, wicca, punk, contact improvisation, and queer-feminism motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s work. Keith’s 2016 collaborators include Peaches, Meg Stuart, Scott Wells, Jassem Hindi, and the collaboratives Blank Map and Turbulence. He teaches in universities, independent studios, and festivals including Ponderosa, Fresh, HZT, Movement Research, Portland State University, Sandberg Institute, and Impulstanz. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artist Fellowship, a NY Bessie, multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, and a Bay Area Goldie. Keith's writings have been published in Contact Quarterly, Movement Research Journal, Performance Research (UK), Society of Dance History Scholars Journal, Dance Theatre Journal (UK), Itch, Front, and In Dance. Hennessy directs Circo Zero and was a member of Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann. He earned an MFA and PhD from UC Davis.
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 moreKemi Adeyemi (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is working on a manuscript that explores how black queer women manipulate sound and the body to reorganize the racialized networks of pleasure in the nightlife scenes of gentrifying neighborhoods. Her work has appeared in Palimpsest and Sounding Out!, and she is co-editing the first collected volume on queer nightlife studies. Kemi received a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Learn moreKendra Jayne Patrick directs an itinerant, eponymous art gallery based in New York City. The program is focused on exhibition-making and symbology related to the twenty-first century avant-garde, specializing in post-conceptual and post-internet sculpture, digital, photography, and painting. Since opening in late 2017 the gallery has shown a range of international artists and practices including Ivan Argote, Lap-See Lam, Kenya (Robinson), Jo Shane, and Arden Surdam. Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick has been featured in Artsy, Vulture, ARTnews, Barron’s, the San Francisco Chronicle, and DAZED Magazine.
Learn moreKevin Holden (Diné, Irish, German, and Norwegian)
Kevin Holden is an artist and composer based in and around Portland, Oregon.
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 moreKole Galbraith is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on sound, audio-visual, and found-object installation. Based in Seattle, WA, Kole Galbraith has been active in the underground experimental music community for the past decade performing throughout the US and Europe. Sonically, the sonic studio compositions are informed by early 20th century French musique-concrète, harsh-noise, black metal, free jazz, and contemporary composition. Thematically, the compositions are influenced by interior Salish folklore and contemporary indigenous experience. Galbraith mixes materials found in nature with electronic techniques to uncover both latent sonic capabilities and latent histories. Galbraith has released albums on his own label, Obscure & Terrible, and other labels such as SIGE, Titania Tapes, and Krim Kram. Galbraith has worked with musicians including Lori Goldston, Greg Kelley, Jessika Kenney, Jason Lazer, Steve Moore, Catherine Guesde, Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow), Nathan Young (Delaware), Patrick Wurzwallner, Maja Osojnik, morher, and Noel Kennon.
Kole Galbraith is an enrolled member of the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma and the COUSIN indigenous film collective.
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 moreKristan Kennedy is an artist, curator, and educator, who has been involved with PICA since its founding in 1995. Kennedy began working with PICA as a volunteer, then was supported by the organization as an exhibiting artist, consequently served the organization as a board member, and joined the staff in 2003. She is currently Artistic Director, Curator of Visual Art at PICA. Kennedy works collaboratively alongside co-artistic directors Roya Amirsoleymani and Erin Boberg Doughton to set the artistic vision for the organization, curate the Time-Based Art Festival, manage the Precipice Fund and create public programs. Kennedy currently directs PICA's year-round Exhibition Program, where she focuses on commissioning and developing large-scale projects, publications, and happenings with artists that exist at the borders of genres. She is a working artist who is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary Art, here in Portland Oregon. Kennedy writes and lectures about art praxis, curatorial practice, and artist‐centric ethics within and outside of institutional frameworks. She has taught in various MFA programs across the country for the last decade as an Associate and Visiting Professor teaching Contemporary Art seminars, mentoring, and developing visiting artist programs. Kennedy sits on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and is a founding member of Common Field.
Learn moreKrystal South is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and writer from Portland, Oregon who has been online every day since she was 12. South has been included in group exhibitions and projects at Recess Gallery, Carhole Gallery, and Portland Art Museum, as well as in B.Y.O.B. at New American Art Union and Wieden+Kennedy in Portland. Her writings have been featured in Bear Deluxe Magazine, YA5, and September, a project of artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen at the 2011 TBA Festival.
Selected Writing
"Observations on the Uncertain," Krystal South, September, September 16, 2011.
Selected Press
"Mirrors, Punching, Walking, Dancing," Lisa Radon, Oregon ArtsWatch, August 21, 2011.
Learn moreSuraj, coined as the "The Queen of Waacking Nouveau ", is also the Queen of many historical firsts. The first Waacking choreography videos on YouTube, influencing everyone in the industry the world over. Now, Whacking is seen in countless stage shows, concerts, commercials, music videos and more, with much of the style’s visibility tracing back to Kumari’s tireless promotion of the dance style in the 2000s. Suraj is the first Waacking choreographer to explicitly introduce the dance style to mass media by creating dance content for the FOX reality hit TV show So You Think You Can Dance. Suraj is the founder and CEO of LA's International Waack/Punk/Pose Festival (Waackfest), the first festival in the world solely devoted to the cultural education and preservation of Waacking, Whacking, Punking and Vogue. Suraj is considered as the “go-to” expert for this underground dance from the 70s, serving as an international ambassador of its history, culture and technique.
Learn moreKyle Abraham, a professional dancer and choreographer, began his training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh. He continued his dance studies in New York, receiving a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. As a performer, Abraham has worked with acclaimed modern dance companies including David Dorfman Dance, Burnt Sugar Dance Conduction Continuum, Nathan Trice/Rituals, Mimi Garrard Dance Theater, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Dance Alloy, The Kevin Wynn Collection, and Attack Theatre. In addition to performing and developing new works for his company, Abraham.In.Motion, Abraham also teaches his unique approach to postmodern dance in various schools and studios throughout the United States.
Abraham.In.Motion (AIM) is an ensemble of dancers whose work is deeply rooted in personal experience. As choreographer, Abraham intertwines his sensual and provocative movement with a strong understanding of music, creating an avenue for personal investigation. Abraham has received tremendous accolades and awards for his dancing and choreography, including a 2010 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for The Radio Show, a 2010 Princess Grace Award for Choreography, a BUILD grant, and an individual artist fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2009 he was honored as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch.”
Abraham’s work has been presented throughout the United States and abroad, most recently at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, Harlem Stage, Fall for Dance Festival at New York’s City Center, and The Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh. Abraham’s most recent work, The Corner, commissioned by Ailey 2, is currently touring internationally with great reception.
Selected Press
Sending Signals with Songs, Struts, and Static, Claudia La rocco, The New York Times, February 27, 2010. (PDF)
Owning it: Kyle Abraham in fast and slow motion, Julie Potter, San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 18, 2011. (PDF).
Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, March, 2010. (PDF)
Selected Video
The Radio Show Promotional Video from Kyle Abraham/Abraham.in.motion on Vimeo.
Solo Exceprt of Live! The Realest MC (work-in-progress) Part 4 from Kyle Abraham/Abraham.in.motion on Vimeo. Learn moreOregon native and Portland resident Linda K. Johnson has been a professional dance-based, transdisciplinary artist for 40 years. Over these decades of creative practice, Johnson has taught, performed, choreographed, curated, and produced extensively, influencing and forwarding the development of infrastructure (studios and dance programs), funding (support), and conceptual networks (information and training) for professional colleagues and students. Hybrid in her practice, Johnson’s concerns as an artist are social and environmental—curious equally about both the human and nonhuman, addressing our collective relationship to site, place and community. Since creating her first site-based, large-scale interdisciplinary performance in 1992, Finding the Forest, Johnson has gone on to author over 17 major dance/movement installations, most recently Mycelium Dreams, 2022 and Polka Dots/Pioneer Square, 2020, which have utilized forests, intersections, waterways, derelict lots, neighborhoods, green spaces, warehouses, and galleries, as well as formal performance spaces, as staging grounds for presentation. A recipient of the 1999 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, Johnson’s work has been consistently funded and commissioned by public, private, and individual sources, and has received critical review in many venues, including Dance Magazine, Landscape Architecture, NPR’s Living on Earth, Oregon ArtsWatch, and Metropolis Magazine. She has been awarded residencies at the Rauschenberg Artist Residency at Captiva, Yaddo, Caldera Arts, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology to further the development of her work. She is honored to be one of six international custodians of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal postmodern dance work Trio A, and to have been included in Kristin Timken’s 2015 book The New Explorers: Making Meaning in the 21st Century American Landscape, which includes a forward by Lucy R. Lippard. Now considered a “mother tree” (from Suzanne Simard’s work on forest ecosystems) in her community, Johnson’s current practice is devoted to advancing networks of inclusion and collective memory (Mycelium Dreams).
Learn moreNIC Kay is from the Bronx, currently occupying several liminal spaces. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity/meaning gleaned from the shifting of perspective. NIC’s current transdisciplinary projects explore movement as a place of reclamation of the body, history, and spirituality.
NIC has shown work, spoken on panels, and hosted workshops at numerous venues throughout the United States, and Internationally. In 2016, they developed a web series called the Bronx Cunt Tour around their debut solo performance lil BLK for Open TV, which premiered in April, 2016. NIC Kay was a 2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Van Lier Fellow in New York City.
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 morePeter Ksander is a Stage Designer who holds a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Previously he has lived and worked in Brooklyn NY , Chicago IL, Iowa City, IA and Los Angeles, CA.
Design credits include scenic and/or lighting designs for: Man in a Case (Big Dance Theater, Hartford Stage,) The Brothers Size (The Public Theater, The Studio Theater in Dublin, The Old Globe), There There (Kristin Kosmas / Chocolate Factory, On The Boards,) Othello (Theater for a New Audience, Intiman Theater), On the Levee (Lincoln Center Theater 3), The Scarlet Letter, Arms and the Man(Intiman theater), A House In Bali (Bang on a Can/ Cal Performances), The Misanthrope (Portland Stage Company), Making of Americans (Walker Art Center), Laude in Urbis (Compania di Colombari, Orvieto Italy), This Place is a Desert (w/ Jay Scheib, Institute of Contemporary Art, Under the Radar Festival, MIT), Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (The Theater of a Two-Headed Calf), Stanley 2006(HERE Art Center w/ Lisa D'Amour), Saint Joan of the Stockyards (Stillpoint/PS122) and several productions for the California Institute for the Arts, including Baal, The House of Bernarda Alba and...Or the Whale (an operaic adaptation of Moby Dick by boxer Julie Crocket) His design work has appeared in the Buanos Aries in Translation Festival, at The Maison des Arts de Creteil and The Ontological Hysteric Incubator, PICA's Time Based Art Festival, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2008 he won an Obie award for the scenic design of Untitled Mars (this title may change), created and directed by Jay Scheib and presented at PS122 and the National Theater of Hungary.
In 2014 he won a Bessie award along side the other designers for the visual design of This was the End.
Over the years he has worked with Richard Foreman (Bad Behavior, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, Astronome: a Night at the Opera, Idiot Savant), Erik Ehn (Ideas of Good and Evil, ICE: Cry me a river...), Karin Coonrod (Laude in Urbis, The Blackamoor Angel, Love's Labors Lost, Orfeo), Mark Wing-Davey (1:23, Small Tragedy, Behind the Eye, Pericles,) and Robert Woodruff (Oedipus).
Between 2001-2004 Ksander was associate scenic designer to Douglas Stein, working on projects both nationally and internationally. In 2006, Stein and Ksander begun co-designing projects, which have included: Carson Kreitzer's Behind the Eye and Lemon Andersen's County of Kings.
In 2005 Peter was a recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program, through which he spent two years investigating how experimental theater ideas are explored at all levels of production in the United States.
In 2006 He joined the curatorial board of the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator and for the next five years served as a curator of new and experimental work. At that time he worked along with co-curator Brendan Regimbal to develop the SHORTFORM program, a residency for artists to explore serial and sequential performance works.
In 2011 Ksander relocated to Portland OR to take up a teaching position in Scenography at Reed College. In 2013 he was on the selection panel for the Risk/Reward festival and began working with Portland companies Hand2mouth, The Portland Playhouse and the Portland Experimental Theater Ensemble.
His work as a generative performance artist includes creating, in collaboration with other artists, performances including: Seeing the Elephant, and The Sleeping Dane Effect (a collaboration with animator Melissa Chimovitz). He is co-founder of Tiny Elephant, whose first piece, The Stupid Butterfly Project, was presented by Arts at St. Ann's, as part of Puppetlab. He is a member of TENT, a company rooted in image and performance-based ensemble generated work that questions theatrical tradition. Most recently TENT developed Ugly Children do not get Cake, a rooftop performance exploring the distance between an individual and the dreams contained in the architecture of a city. Previous projects with TENT include: Zero Winter, Oh Sweet Captain or the Ahab Stomp, Your Shipwreck is No Disaster, KG: Life in a Tin Can, and He bent his head and watched his steps, for this helped him avoid thinking.
Peter also has continuing artistic relationships with the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, The Object Collection, Lear DeBessonet, Jay Scheib, Quinnopolis NY, Restless NYC, and Banana Bag and Bodice.
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.
Learn moreRoyal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE) has performed rituals at the Guggenheim Museum, Under the Radar Festival, FringeArts, Under the Radar’s Incoming! Series, Gibney Dance Center, Kate Werble Gallery, Special Effects Festival at Participant Inc., Prelude Festival, AUNTS Arts@Renaissance, and JACK. ROKE received a 2016 Creative Capital award for The Art of Luv series, and has been awarded a Franklin Furnace Fund grant (2013) and a BAX Space Grant (2014). They were part of the Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group and PS122’s RAMP residency program. They spent the summer of 2014 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and were 2015 CUNY Hunter Artists-in-Residence in ceramics. The Art of Luv (Part 1): Elliot is created with support from The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group, Gibney Dance Center, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and a residency at CUNY City Tech. Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble is supported by Immediate Medium’s AGENCY program, which provides financial, administrative, and equipment support to emerging artists. The Art of Luv is a project of Creative Capital.
Learn moreSara Krajewski is the newly appointed Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum. Krajewski was previously the Director of INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she curated an array of interdisciplinary exhibitions and performances with artists such as Xavier Cha, Mateo Tannatt, and Morgan Thorson. In 2012, Krajewski was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for research into emerging transdisciplinary artistic practices in visual art and performance. Krajewski was curator at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle from 2004 - 2012 where she focused on solo artist projects and group exhibitions exploring photography's impact on visual culture.
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