Artists Archive
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Adam Linder (b. 1983, Sydney) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. He makes stage works and provides Choreographic Services. FULL SERVICE (Services No. 1 - 5) was presented by CCA Wattis Institute (San Francisco, 2018) and Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (2019), alongside a new work for the 2019 Venice Biennale. Linder will premiere a new work at MoMA New York in 2020. Recent solo or two person shows include South London Gallery, Kunsthalle Basel, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. His works have been commissioned, presented or hired by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Kampnagel, Hamburg; Sadler’s Wells, London; American Realness, NYC; MoCA, Los Angeles; 356 Mission, LA; Frieze LIVE, London; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Linder participated in the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Liverpool Biennial and Made in LA at the Hammer Museum. He has performed with the Michael Clark Company, Meg Stuart’s Damaged Goods, and The Royal Ballet London.
Learn moreAngélica Maria Millán Lozano is a Portland based artist from Bogotá, Colombia. She creates abstract and figurative compositions on distressed fabrics that question the social injustices that affect Latinas in the home. She received her MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently the Curatorial Fellow for Community Engagement at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). Millán is also a co-founder at cvllejerx, a poc focused fashion, poetry, and performance collaboration. Millán has presented work at Disjecta, Williamson | Knight, Nationale in Portland, OR; Gallery Protocol in Gainesville, Florida; and Bridge Productions in Seattle, Washington.
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 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 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 moreLeCompte, a founding member of the Group, has directed all of the company’s works. Her honors and awards include a NEA Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in American Theater, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a US Artists Fellowship and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. Abbas has worked with The Wooster Group since 1999 as a technical director and sound engineer. He received a Drama Desk Nominee for the Group’s To You, The Birdie! (Phédre).
Learn moreLinyekula lives and works in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he runs Studios Kabako, which fosters the debuts of young Congolese artists in the fields of dance, theater, music, and video by providing training and producing works. Through the Studios, he has presented ten pieces and toured extensively in Europe, United States, and Africa. Linyekula is a member of the Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne, Germany, and he has received the 2007 Principal Award of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development.
Learn moreGare St. Lazare Players Ireland are Ireland's most travelled theatre company, having visited over 63 cities in 21 countries worldwide to perform from their repertory of over 17 Beckett productions. The group evolved out of the original Gare St. Lazare Players, an international company founded in Chicago by Bob Meyer in 1983 and based simultaneously in Ireland and France. Since 1995, Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor Lovett have been running the company. First Love premiered in 2008 in Ireland and has since toured to Argentina, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Ireland, Romania, Switzerland, Turkey and USA.
Selected Press
The Lovetts of Méricourt, Ruadhan Mac Cormaic, The Irish Times, April 10, 2010.
In Festival, Biography, Beckett and Blues, Jason Zinoman, New York Times, January 14, 2009.
Conor Lovett has a 'Love' affair with Beckett, Christina Borger, New Haven Register, June 14, 2009. Learn moreJason N. Le (they/them) is an arts writer, critic, and cultural worker currently based in Northwest Arkansas, where they work in exhibitions planning at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Momentary. Their academic and artistic research primarily explores queer artistic navigations of human-object relationships at the intersection of performance and sculpture. They have written for BOMB Magazine, Critical Conversations (The Ford Family Foundation & University of Oregon’s Center for Art Research), Portland Monthly Magazine, Oregon ArtsWatch, and more.
Learn moreJennie MaryTai Liu is an artist working across performance, choreography, video, and writing. She has worked in institutions and artist-run spaces including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources, The Mistake Room, The Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and Incubator Arts Center. She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, PICA, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited Riting, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA. She is currently organizing a 2022 performance exhibition funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation engaging LA dance artists to respond to modern dance activity in early twentieth-century LA. Jennie frequently collaborates as a performer in the work of Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group.
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 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 moreFounded by Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez in 2003, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a young Mexican theater company reflecting the new dynamics of contemporary Mexican culture. They develop their multimedia stage productions as mechanisms to link work and life and give voice to overlooked moments in social and political historical. Lagartijas has toured widely throughout Mexico and Europe and has received awards from the Impatience Festival and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
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Learn moreLalo Perez (b.Bakersfield, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR. Their practice investigates the intersections of identity through social environments, creating attention to the fragility of familiar cultural connections by grounding their practice in the action of construction and deconstruction. Through rituals, Lalo creates a dialogue between material, language, and imagery, developing a visual archive that reflects the inherited faith that leads them. Lalo has participated in artist residencies at Casa Lü in Mexico City, MX; Jupiterfab in Guadalajara, MX; and Caldera a.i.r in Sisters, OR, and has been awarded grants by The Nat Turner Project and Regional Arts and Culture Council. They are currently pursuing a BFA in Intermedia at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Learn moreLaura prefers being called Larry. She is Bay-Area based artist/performance maker. Her work has been presented at PICA's TBA Festival, Austin's Fusebox Festival, and New York's American Realness. She is a core member of Keith Hennessy's Turbulence and regularly collaborates with her brother, Jesse Hewit. She has been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, CounterPULSE, Kunst STOFF Arts, and ODC. She created and curates the SQUART performance series.
Learn moreLars Jan is a director, writer, visual artist, and the founding artistic director of Early Morning Opera (EMO), a genre-bending performance + art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience. He is the son of émigrés from Afghanistan and Poland.
Jan has received multiple commissions from the Whitney Museum and developed his recent projects with major commissioning and residency support from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). His works have been also presented by The BAM Next Wave Festival, Sundance Film Festival, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Symphony Space, Kirk Douglas Theatre, Ringling Museum of Art, Pasadena Museum of California Art, and Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival.
His work has been supported by multiple awards from the NEA and Center for Cultural Innovation; Rauschenberg Foundation; MAP Fund; Adam Mickiewicz Institute; Surdna Foundation; NEFA’s National Theatre Project; NPN’s Creation Fund; New York State Council on the Arts; and the Sherwood Award. He has spoken at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Performa, and the 92Y, and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Princeton Atelier; CalArts; and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, where he was an inaugural artist-in-residence.
In August 2015, EMO’s lecture performance ABACUS will be presented by Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe, and in October 2015, the public performance spectacle HOLOSCENES will be presented by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco, prior to an exhibition of related video works at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in January 2016. Jan is a TED Senior Fellow.
Learn moreLAURA GIBSON is a multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter who grew up in a small isolated logging town called Coquille, in the South Coast region of Oregon, the daughter of the town’s kindergarten teacher and a forest ranger. Gibson has had a wide-ranging performance career, ranging from two years of weekly gig at an AIDS hospice, to receiving a standing ovation from an auditorium full of prison inmates, to a 3 1/2 hour improvised performance art piece with sound artist Ethan Rose and filmmaker Ryan Jeffery as part of the 2009 Time-Based Art Festival. Over her career, she has recorded three solo albums and a joint venture with Ethan Rose, and worked with members of Calexico, The Dodos, The Decemberists, and Menomena, among others. Gibson recently released her third album, La Grande, on Barsuk records.
Learn moreMiniature raconteur Laura Heit performs some of the smallest puppet shows around. Atop matchbox stages, her uncanny micro-plays come to life with fire, hand-cranked action, and pop-up paper engineering. Heit is a filmmaker, performer, and puppeteer whose work has been seen at REDCAT, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; Great Small Works Toy Theater Festival at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; the Jim Henson International Festival of Puppetry; and Puppetropolis, Chicago; as well as on PBS and at international film festivals. She was co-director of the Experimental Animation program at Cal Arts until 2011.
Learn morePhoto: Sarah Marguier
Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a Brooklyn, NY composer, musician and artist. She produces solo albums, live performances and film/art soundtracks and frequently collaborates with artists in film, music, art, dance, multi-media, activitism and poetry, such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Caroline Monnet, Michelle Latimer and Martha Colburn. She plays violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, pedal steel guitar, sings through a megaphone, and makes field recordings. Ortman’s notable performances includes venues at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, MoMA P.S. 1, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, SF MoMA, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The Knitting Factory, CBGB’s, St. Marks Church, Dia Art Foundation, the Wave Farm, amongst countless other established and DIY venues in the US, Canada and Western Europe.
Learn moreLauren Davis Fisher (Los Angeles, CA) works between sculpture, installation, architecture and performance. She has recently performed and exhibited at The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Performa15 (New York), Parkview (Los Angeles), MoMA PS1 (New York), Shanaynay (Paris), Chapter (New York), Disjecta (Portland), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and EMPAC at RPI (Troy, NY).
Learn moreLeila Haile is a community organizer, tattoo artist and dancer serving and celebrating the Queer and Trans Communities of Color in Portland for the last 10 years. They currently organize with Sankofa Collective Northwest, Q Center, Black Lives Matter PDX, the Disability Arts & Culture Project and tattoo at Kuroo Tattoo in SE Portland.
Learn moreLigia Lewis is a dancer and choreographer. She has worked in multiple contexts, including those of the theatre and museum. Engaging with affect, empathy, and the sensate, her choreography considers the social inscriptions of the body while evoking its potentiality. Her work can be described as experientially rich and complex. Within her practice, Lewis continues to provoke the nuances of embodiment. In 2017, Lewis was awarded a Bessie for Outstanding Production for her latest stage work, minor matter and was awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe for her work Sorrow Swag. In 2018 she was granted a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award in the field of dance. Both her stage works minor matter (2016) preceded by Sorrow Swag (2014) continue to tour internationally. Her work has been shown at various venues and festivals including the following - Abrons Art Center/American Realness (NYC), Flax/Fahrenheit (LA), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), TATE Modern (London), Stedelijk Museum/Julidans Festival (Amsterdam), REDCAT/Pacific Standard Time (LA), and Tanz im August presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). As a dancer, Lewis has performed and toured extensively for artists including Ariel Efraim Ashbel, Mette Ingvartsen, and Eszter Salamon. She has collaborated with visual artist Wu Tsang, musical artist Twin Shadow, and with the DJ collective NON Worldwide. Ligia Lewis is currently managed and produced by HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and she is a factory artist at tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf.
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 moreLinda Austin deploys movement, sound, text, visuals, and props to create non-linear, poetic works laced with an eccentric wit, teetering on the edge between the immediately reprehensible and resolutely mysterious. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of Performance Works NW, a Portland non-profit dedicated to the cultivation of experimental performance. Awards include a 2019 Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship, the 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Merce Cunningham Award, and a 2015 RACC Performing Arts Fellowship. Austin has presented work at Performance Space 122, the Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, PICA’s TBA Festival, the Risk/Reward Festival, and On the Boards NW New Works Festival, among others. Her work has been supported by residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. Current projects: Ordinary Devotions (solo), a world, a world (ensemble project), and The Thief & the Traveler (collaboration with Allie Hankins.)
Selected Press
"Stop Making Sense: Linda Austin's 'A Head of Time'," Bob Hicks, Oregon Arts Watch, March 26, 2011.
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 moreLisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is: What will set you free? Her current work connects an interest in tracing lost histories and homelands to the Beauty Supply store and Beauty Salon as critical spaces of Black cultural production with their own sets of aesthetics, desires, and complications.
Lisa is also co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and the art collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. She is a professor at Portland State University where she teaches classes in art and social practice.
Learn moreLiz Harris lives and works on the Oregon Coast. She has been recording, performing, and releasing solo material under the name Grouper since 2005 on various imprints including Kranky, Type, and her own YELLOWELECTRIC. Her work is characterized by a fascination with paradox, literal and impressionistic experience of environment and human behavior. Her music compositions have been commissioned and shown across Europe and the United States, including Galerie Zdb in Portugal, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, and Issue Project Room in NYC. She has recently completed art and music residencies in Lisbon, Marfa, TX, and the Bunya Mountains, and was awarded residencies in 2014 with Signal Fire and The Ucross Foundation.
Learn morelocust is the performance brainchild of musician and composer Zeke Keeble and performer/choreographer Amy O’Neal. Since 2000, they have created Leave me Inside (2001), Left-out (2002), DEFACE (2004), convenience (TBA 2005), and mockumentary (2006). locust performs in theaters, nightclubs, galleries, and streets and has been presented in Seattle by On the Boards, the Seattle Art Museum, Experience Music Project, Northwest Film Forum, Seattle Theater Group, Bumbershoot, and Velocity Dance Center. Nationally, they have performed at Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out (MA), The Myrna Loy Center (MT), Joyce Soho (NYC), SUSHI Performing Arts (CA), and Bates Dance Festival (ME). locust has been described as the avant-garde garage band of the Seattle dance scene.
Learn moreLola Arias is a writer, director, performer, and songwriter from Argentina, and founder of the interdisciplinary Compañia Postnuclear. Her works include Striptease (2007), El amor es un francotirador (2007), Mi vida después (2009), Familienbande (2009), and That Enemy Within (2010). Together with Ulises Conti, she composes and plays music, and has release two albums. In 2010, Arias and Stefan Kaegi founded Ciudades Paralelas, a festival of site-specific urban performance projects in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Zurich, and Singapore. Her performances have been staged at festivals including Festival d’Avignon, In Transit Festival in Berlin, We are here in Dublin, Spielart Festival in Munich, Alkantara Festival in Lisbon, and Radicals Festival in Barcelona.
Selected Press
"An interview with Lola Arias," Brighton Festival, April 16, 2013.
Learn moreSince 2001 songwriter Carolyn Berk has established her unique voice as Lovers, with four acclaimed, haunted and heart-broken releases. The addition of waveform artist Kerby Ferris and multi-talented instrumentalist Emily Kingan (of the hardcore duo, The Haggard) focuses three wildly ambitious and boldly sincere artists on hooky beats and interactive performance. Their first CD release together will be available in September 2010 on the label Badman.
Selected Press
Leak: Lovers, "Figure 8," Dark Light (Badman Recording Co.), Casey Jarman, wweek.com, July 12, 2010.
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 moreLuke George is an artist working in dance and performance. He grew up in Tasmania and is based between Melbourne and Brooklyn. George makes his own performance work, as well as collaborates and performs with other artists. George has a BA from the Victorian College of the Arts and has been in the works of many artists including Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, Phillip Adams BalletLab, Chunky Move and Jo Lloyd. George received Melbourne's Greenroom Award for Best Male Dancer (2011) and recently performed with the Swedish band The Knife. George’s own works have been widely presented internationally. George was the recipient of the Melbourne Fringe Awards and the Russell Page Fellowship. George collaborates across disciplines on projects in theatre, film, live-art, socially engaged practices, and in queer club nights. George also works as a dramaturge and co-curates a regular Melbourne dance and discussion night called First Run.
Selected Press
"Dance Massive: Sunstruck, NOWNOWNOW," Theatre Notes, March 20, 2011
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Luke George, collaborator Hilary Clark, and their work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreLuke Gutgsell is a Portland-based dancer and dance maker. Gutgsell graduated from The Ohio State University with a BFA in Dance and attended the Naropa Institute. Gutgsell trained on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham Studio, and apprenticed with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and Shen Wei Dance Arts. He has danced with David Dorfman Dance, Tiffany Mills Company, Risa Jaroslow, and many others throughout the United States, Australia, France, Ireland, and Poland. His choreography has been presented through Danspace Project, LaMamma Theater, Dixon Place, Teatro Merida, Ten Tiny Dances, Performance Works NorthWest, Zoomtopia / Studio 2, and Velocity Dance Center. He has been a guest artist at NYU, Connecticut College, and Reed College, as well as facilitated workshops for underserved populations throughout the five Boroughs with Risa Jaroslow and Dancers. Gutgsell is perpetually fascinated with the nuances and complexities found within improvisational forms.
Learn moreLumi Tan is curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she organizes exhibitions and produces performances with artists across disciplines and generations. Most recently, Tan has worked with Half Straddle, Sara Magenheimer, and Sondra Perry. Previously she co-curated From Minimalism into Algorithm (2016), a year-long performance and exhibition series, as well as projects with artists including Ed Atkins, Gretchen Bender, Glasser, George Lewis, Anicka Yi, and Danh Vo and Xiu Xiu. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was Guest Curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, The Exhibitionist, and numerous exhibition catalogues.
Learn moreLu Yim is based between NYC and Portland, OR. They are a choreographer, movement facilitator and poet. Yim’s work is influenced by their peers and by community care practices. They create in dialogue with embodiment practices, interested in articulations of imperceptible states. Their choreography has been shown at SculptureCenter (NY), ICA London, Center for Performance Research (NY), TBA Festival (Portland, OR), and recently at No Gallery (IL) in collaboration with sculptor Catalina Ouyang. Yim co-organizes two artist-run, queer and BIPOC centered collectives: PE and pidzn club. They were a 2019 Fellow at UCross Foundation (WY) and 2020-2021 AIR at Center for Performance Research (NYC). They have been published in interdisciplinary online publications: FormIV:Issue 12, curated by Isabel Mallet, and Ear Wave:Issue Six, curated by Jules Gimbrone.
Learn moreLydia Brawner is the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at New York’s Performa. She holds a Ph.D in Performance Studies from New York University, where she also received her M.A. She is the current assistant editor of Performa Magazine, and previously was the managing print editor of the San Francisco Arts Quarterly (SFAQ), and the reviews editor of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, New York University and the College of Staten Island, serves on the advisory committee for the Center for the Arts and Religion at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, and much of her research focuses on the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary performance.
Learn moremario lemafa (b. 1990 / Hawai'i) is an artist and independent organizer based in Seattle, WA. their recent work includes presentations at the '19 Honolulu Biennial, SOIL Gallery, cogean?, and yəhaw̓ at King Street Station.
“when i was a child my mother used to like a certain Suave shampoo, "Tropical Breeze" (i believe it was called). it reminded her of home. nothing in the shampoo bottle reflected her material relation to the islands. while she wore a scent to remember a place, others might wear the same one with the desire to some day go there. i still think about that.”
Learn moreMelissa Levin joined the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) in 2005 and is currently the Director of Cultural Programs. She is responsible for planning and programming LMCC’s Artist Residency Programs, the River To River Festival, Open Studios, and the Gallery in the Arts Center at Governors Island. Throughout more than a decade working in the arts, Melissa has been committed to innovative and holistic approaches to supporting artists and the creative process. Previous to LMCC, Melissa held positions at Andrea Rosen Gallery, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Artforum International Magazine. She has participated in panel discussions and served on juries at the National Endowment for the Arts, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, the Alliance of Artist Communities, Rhode Island School of Design, Baruch College, Lower East Side Print Shop, and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts; and lectured at the Drew University, University of Oregon in Eugene, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, New York University, Parsons: The New School for Design, and The Cleveland Institute of Art. As an indepedent curator and writer, Melissa has also worked with venues including MoMA PS1, Real Art Ways in Hartford, Culturehall.com, NurtureArt, Cuchifritos Gallery, ISE Cultural Foundation, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Los Angeles. Melissa received her B.A. with honors in Visual Art and Art History from Barnard College.
Learn morePortland State University's Art Department offers free public lectures every Monday night of the school year.
PSU MFA MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES ON VIMEO
Click on the events at right to view past artists and speakers.
Learn moreRobin Lane began studying dance, gymnastics, theater, and visual art as a child. At fourteen, she created her first evening-length performance at the Robert Frost Auditorium, combining her high school gymnastic team with the dance club and creating an original score with the school orchestra playing office equipment. As a director/choreographer/writer, her focus has always been telling stories, linear and nonlinear, bringing to life the visual images, metaphors, and stories she sees in her head. She uses whatever vocabulary the images demand. Her intent is always to hone each new work to communicate and connect with her audiences. Exploration, collaboration, and ensemble building are core elements of her creative process.
In 1977, Lane founded Do Jump to explore her unique genre. Lane has created 19 original, full‐length works and countless smaller site‐specific pieces, events, and spectacles.
In 1983, Lane and company renovated the Echo Theatre in southeast Portland, OR, creating a permanent home for Do Jump! The following year she opened the Do Jump Physical Theatre School, sharing her unique teaching style with children and adults, providing a training ground for the company. Lane has toured extensively with Do Jump, including multiple extended runs in the New Victory Theater in NYC, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. “That Happened,” Lane’s first feature film, just had its first screening at PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon
Robin is the recipient of the Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship in Dance, three creativity grants from the NEA, and the 2010 Regional Arts and Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Performing Arts. Lane attended a joint program between Reed College and the Portland Museum Art School. She studied the LeCoque Method and was a member of Theatre Elan Company. In 1973, Lane studied aerial dance with Terry Sendgraff in San Francisco and Bill & Arnie Zane in NYC. In Portland, Oregon, she created and choreo/directed original works for Storefront Theater, Tygres Heart Shakespeare, Portland Family Circus, and others.
Learn moreShawna Lipton is Chair of the MA in Critical Studies Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). She received her Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a literary scholar whose work is fundamentally informed by interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies.
Learn moreShayla Lawson is (and / or, at times, has been) an amateur acrobat, an architect, a Dutch housewife, & dog mother to one irascible hound. Her work has appeared in print & online at Tin House, GRAMMA, ESPN, SALON, The Offing, Guernica, Colorado Review, Barrelhouse, & MiPOesias. She is the author of: A Speed Education in Human Being, PANTONE, & the forthcoming I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean (Saturnalia Books, 2018). She is a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellow and resident of Portland, OR.
Learn moreSimon Liu (b. 1987, Hong Kong) is an artist filmmaker working between alternate documentary forms, abstract diary films, 16mm projection performance, and video installation. He has exhibited at film festivals and institutions globally including the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, British Film Institute, The Shed, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Cinéma du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, “Dreamlands: Expanded,” and a solo-presentation at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Mondays series. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s quadruple 16mm projection “Highview” with other recent works for their Permanent Collections. Liu is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art, and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. Liu is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.
Learn moreTonya Lockyer is the Executive/Artistic Director of Velocity, Seattle’s premier arts center and essential incubator dedicated to contemporary dance and movement-based art. Lockyer has overseen the significant artistic expansion of Velocity including: the development of Velocity’s first humanities programs, initiating an Artist-in-Residence program; commissioning and developing more than forty new works of performance, installation and film; and the presentation of over a hundred contemporary performances by established and emerging artists including zoe | juniper, Keith Hennessy, Faye Driscoll, Jennifer Monson, Ralph Lemon, Miguel Gutierrez, Amy O’Neal, Danielle Agami.
As an educator Lockyer has taught inter/nationally with a focus on her research at the intersections of performance, embodiment and social action. Lockyer is an Affiliated Faculty Member of Cornish College of the Arts since 2001. She has taught Art & Social Justice, Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Movement Analysis, Somatics; as well as Dance Technique, Choreography, Improvisation, History, and Choreographic Culture since 1960. In 2010, Lockyer coordinated Cornish’s yearlong, citywide Merce Cunningham Project. Her course "Live Art and Choreographic Culture Since 1960" was an inaugural course of the Center for Performance Studies at The University of Washington. She is published in international journals, exhibition catalogues and the book Vu du Corps: Lisa Nelson Movement et Perception. Her essay "Quiet Riot: Modern Dance as Embodied Feminism" is required reading in the curriculums of Texas Women's University and Cornish College of the Arts.
Lockyer is an accomplished artist with more than twenty-years experience commissioned and presenting her work internationally. She has received awards and commissions from Arts International, The Canada Council, The Banff Center, Artist Trust and On the Boards among others, for projects including inter-cultural collaborations, 24-hour improvisations, and large-scale site-specific performances. She holds an MFA from The University of Washington, is a Certified Movement Analyst, and participated in the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance/Wesleyan.
Learn moreWeekend Leisure was founded in Vancouver, BC, in 2004 by graduates of Emily Carr Institute's Integrated Media program, to satisfy their mutual love of karaoke videos. Bridging their backgrounds in video and installation work with their involvement in design, music, and the art collective Norma, the group’s repertoire has expanded to include video art, short films, original music, and music videos, while critically analyzing the power each medium has over its audience. Their activities range from gallery exhibitions to weekly karaoke nights in Vancouver, BC.
Learn moreYo La Tengo is a critically acclaimed indie rock band from Hoboken, New Jersey. They’ve recorded twelve studio albums, written soundtracks to the films Junebug, Shortbus, and Old Joy, and provided a score for the surrealist aquatic films of Jean Painlevé.
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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