Artists Archive
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Ahamefule J. Oluo (they/them) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer, comedian, and creator of live performance. They were a founding member of the award-winning experimental jazz quartet Industrial Revelation and is a Mellon Foundation Creative Research Fellow, a Creative Capital awardee, an Artist Trust Arts Innovator awardee, and a semifinalist in NBC’s Stand Up for Diversity comedy competition. Oluo co-produced comedian Hari Kondabolu’s albums Waiting for 2042 and Mainstream American Comic for Kill Rock Stars, and the album Who the Hell is Dwayne Kennedy? by the eponymous standup legend. They have premiered two autobiographical, music-based performances at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival: Now I’m Fine, 2016, which was described by The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley as “a New Orleans funeral march orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg,” and by Time Out New York as "A day later, it's as though I grabbed a live wire; I can still feel the electricity in my skin;" and Susan, 2020, which Brantley called “virtuosic” and “crackerjack.” Oluo has written for television, including the stop motion animated comedy Santa Inc. on HBO Max, starring Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen. Now I’m Fine was adapted into the feature film Thin Skin, which Oluo wrote, scored, and starred in. Thin Skin won Best Director at the 2020 Harlem Film Festival and is now available on streaming services. They have appeared on This American Life. Oluo has been commissioned, presented, invited, or supported by Under the Radar, On the Boards, PICA, Meany Center, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Seattle Theatre Group, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre, REDCAT, MacDowell, Yaddo, Wa Na Wari, Langston, and more.
Learn moreAmy O’Neal is a dancer, performer, choreographer, and dance educator based in Seattle, WA. For the last 15 years, she has taught and performed throughout the US, Japan and Mexico and choreographed for stage, commercials, rock shows, galleries, dance films and music videos. Her work is an amalgam of her diverse movement and life experiences presenting social commentary with dark humor and heavy beats. She is the recipient of numerous grants including awards from Creative Capital, the National Performance Network, the National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts and the James W. Ray Project Venture Award through Artist Trust and Frye Art Museum. Amy has been an artist-in-residence at Bates Dance Festival, Headlands Center for the Arts, the US/Japan Choreographer’s Exchange, and Velocity Dance Center. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, a DanceWEB Scholar, and two-time Stranger Genius Awards nominee. She has worked extensively with musician/comedian Reggie Watts since 2002 both on stage and screen. She choreographed his Comedy Central produced “Fuck, Shit, Stack” video and toured nationally in his show Disinformation. She has created commissioned pieces for Degenerate Art Ensemble and Spectrum Dance Theater and collaborated with Savion Glover and Daniel Bernard Roumain through Seattle Theater Group. She has performed in the work of Pat Graney, Scott/Powell Performance, and Mark Haim. From 2000 to 2010, she was co-director of locust (music/dance/video) with musician/composer Zeke Keeble, creating 6 evening length works and several shorter works. She teaches Contemporary Dance and Urban Styles at Velocity Dance Center and House at The Beacon: Massive Monkees studio in Seattle. She also teaches dance composition and improvisation for Seattle Theater Group’s Dance This program. She holds a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, and her dance writing has been published in Dance Magazine, City Arts Magazine, and ArtDish Forum.
Learn moreAmy O’Neal and Ellie Sandstrom have danced together in other people’s productions and in O’Neal’s own choreographic work for 10 years. O’Neal is a performer, choreographer, dance educator, the creator of Amyo/tinyrage, and the co-director of locust (music/dance/video) with musician/composer Zeke Keeble.
Learn moreAriel Osterweis (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) recently joined the faculty of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she will teach dance history, aesthetics, and pedagogy. She has also taught at Skidmore College, Wayne State University, and UC Berkeley. Osterweis earned her PhD in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley and her BA in Anthropology at Columbia University. Her book manuscript, Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity (working title), is under contract with Oxford University Press and examines issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary dance. Osterweis also researches Sub-Saharan African dance and mixed-race, feminist, and transgender performance that disavows dance-based virtuosity. Publications appear in Dance Research Journal, TDR/The Drama Review, Women and Performance, e-misférica, Theatre Survey, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Choreographies of 21st Century Wars (Oxford University Press, 2016). Osterweis danced with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Mia Michaels R.A.W., and Heidi Latsky, choreographs, and has served as dramaturg for John Jasperse and Narcissister. She is on the Board of Directors of the Society of Dance History Scholars and is Book Reviews Editor for Dance Research Journal.
Learn moreBorn in Ouarzazate, Morocco, and educated in France, Bouchra Ouizguen has been performing in Marrakech and France since 1995. In 2002, with Taoufiq Izeddiou and Saïd Ait El Moumen, Ouizguen founded ANANIA, a contemporary dance company in Marrakech, and created the On Marche dance festival. She also collaborated that year in forming the Al Mokhtabar contemporary dance company. Her choreographic works include AnaOunta (2002); Fina ken’ti (2002); Mort et moi (2005); Déserts, desires with Taoufiq Izeddiou (2006); Aïta with Naïma Sahmoud (2007); and Madame Plaza (2008-2009). Ouizguen has performed throughout Morocco and France, including at the prestigious Montpellier Dance Festival, and in New York at the 2010 FIAF Crossing the Line Festival in NYC. Since 2007, Ouizguen has been a co-organizer of the annual festival Recontres Chorégraphiques in Marrakech.
Selected Press
"A Moroccan Tradition in Full Cry," Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, September 23, 2010.
Learn morechelfitsch Theater Company was founded in 1997 by writer and director Toshiki Okada. Named after a deliberate mispronunciation of the English word “selfish,” chelfitsch Theater Company began to refine its textual aesthetic as that of colloquial language representing contemporary youth culture. With Five Days in March (awarded the Kunio Kishida Award for Best Script) the company began to juxtapose a noisy choreography derived from everyday mannerisms to the text. The works of chelfitsch have been presented at premier international theater festivals and venues throughout Europe, North America, and Asia. In 2011, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech received the critics’ award from the Association québécoise des critiques de théâtre for the 2010-2011 season. The troupe continues to develop its distinct methodology, which revolves around the relationship between speech and body.
Selected Press
"Writing for Foreigners (Americans)," Jason Zinoman, The New York Times, May 21, 2014
"Under the Radar 2012: An interview with chelfitsch's Toshiki Okada," Jeremy M. Barker, Culturebot, December 27, 2011.
"Temp Workers Too Twitchy to Engage in Office Politics," Ben Brantley, The New York Times, January 6, 2012.
"Hot Pepper," Tom Philips, Dance Review Times, January 7, 2012.
Learn moreDarren O'Donnell is an artist, writer, actor, and city planner. He is the director and founder of Mammalian Diving Reflex, and the author of Social Acupuncture (Coach House Books, 2006), a manifesto calling for a more socially and politically profound art and theater. His art is often described through the lens of relational aesthetics. O'Donnell is the Artistic and Research Director of Mammalian Diving Reflex (which presented projects for TBA during 2007 and 2014), a "research-art atelier" that produces performances, community-based events, and theoretical texts. The organization fosters dialogue and audience participation, and creates activist performance described by the group as "ideal entertainment for the end of the world." Its programs work to dissolve boundaries between art and life in an attempt to create an aesthetic of civic engagement.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. After working for more than forty years as Eiko & Koma, she began performing her own solo project A Body in Places in 2014. In 2017 she launched a multi-year Duet Project that she directs and performs with a diverse range of artists.
After studying with Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata in Japan and Manja Chmiel in Germany, Eiko and Koma relocated to America and went on to create 46 interdisciplinary performance works, two career exhibitions, and numerous media works. Their durational performance living installations were commissioned by the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and MoMA. Their Retrospective Project (2009 to 2012) culminated in a comprehensive monograph, Time is Not Even, Space is Not Empty, published by the Walker Art Center. Eiko & Koma were honored with the first United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and Doris Duke Artist Awards (2012). Among many other awards and honors, they were the first collaborative pair to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996) and the first Asian choreographers to receive the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award (2006).
Eiko’s solo project began with a twelve-hour performance at the Philadelphia Amtrak station. Since then, Eiko has performed variations of the project at over forty sites. In 2016, Eiko was the subject of the 10th annual Danspace Platform, a month-long curated program that brought her a special Bessie citation, an Art Matters grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In November, co-presented by Performa 2017 and Met Live Arts, Eiko occupied on each of three Sundays the three Metropolitan Museum of Art sites: For each of these daylong durational installations, Eiko created and performed in conjunction with hours-long video distillations of William Johnston’s photographs, “staining” the walls of each instillation with haunting images of herself dancing in ruined Fukushima.
Eiko teaches Delicious Movement in communities, colleges, and art schools. Using movement study as a means of inquiry along with readings and media studies, she also teaches interdisciplinary college courses about the atomic bombings and other environmental disasters. In 2016 Eiko was named Artist-in-Residence for its Dignity Project at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Eiko was a think tank fellow in Wesleyan’s College of the Environment.
Learn more"Fever One" is a B-Boy and DJ originally from Seattle, WA who relocated to New York in 1997 and eventually joined the world famous Rock Steady Crew. He is most well known for his 'gunzblazin' style which he developed while studying with his mentors Icey Ice and Lil' Lep of the New York City Breakers. Inspired by a Poppin' Battle in Seattle's Central District and the aggression he saw in breakin’, Fever One became influenced by the spirituality and competitiveness of dancing by the age of ten. Since then, Fever One became a member of the world famous Rock Steady Crew which took his career to new heights. He has performed in many prestigious venues from Lincoln Center to Madison Square Garden and Fashion Week to Dancing with the Stars. He has also lectured about the history of hip-hop at Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Washington.
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 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 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 moreMalkia Okech is an activist, Afrofuturist, and community archaeologist. She is currently a Digital Producer for the local creative agency Mighty Engine. She is also the Associate Producer for Black Spatial Relics, an artist residency and annual convening exploring slavery, justice and freedom and has been working as a Humanities Consultant for Scribe Video Center’s Precious Places Project. She is a curator in the Philadelphia Black arts collective, Bad Apple Commune. Her interests include the cross-sections of multi-modal archaeology, art, cultural heritage, and decolonization. Malkia conducts social justice work as an anti-capitalist and abolitionist with the goal of fostering radical imagination.
Learn moreNature Theater of Oklahoma is an OBIE Award-winning New York-based performance group under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Since Poetics: a ballet brut, their first ensemble piece, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has been devoted to making the work they don’t know how to make, putting themselves in impossible situations, and working from out of their own ignorance and unease. Using readymade materials, found space, overheard speech, and observed gesture, and through extreme formal manipulation, and superhuman effort, they shift our perceptions of everyday reality. Selected Press Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, December 21, 2009. 'Romeo And Juliet': Just As You Misremembered It, Robert Smith, NPR, December 29, 2009. Deconstructing Romeo and Juliet, Hilton Als, The New Yorker, January 11, 2010. Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2009. Stage Notes: Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet, Tom Murrin, papermag, December 16, 2009.
Learn moreOffsite Dance Project was started in 2008 to pioneer alternative approaches to arts presentation through site-specific performance in locations such as trains, parks, and museums. Offsite also produces an annual community forum, We dance, to stimulate Japan’s contemporary dance scene by bringing artists from various genres together in unusual circumstances that generate new ways of approaching their art.
Learn moreBorn in Israel, Meromi currently lives and works in New York City, where he is represented by Harris Lieberman Gallery. Meromi graduated from Bezalel Academy in 1992 and went on to receive his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003. He has exhibited at venues including The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; the Lyon Biennial, France; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Magasin 3, Stockholm; De Appel Museum, Amsterdam; Sculpture Center, New York; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and Art in General, New York. He has received numerous scholarships and awards, including a Percent for Art commission (2009), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2008) Grants to Artists Award, the Fund for Video and experimental film (2004), I.C. Excellence Foundation (2003), and the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli ArtPrize (1998).
Selected Press
Ohad Meromi - 500 Words, Dawn Chan, Artforum.com, December 18, 2010.
Studio Visit - Ohad Meromi, Andrea Bellini, Flash Art Online.
Re: Diaspora - Yael Bartana, Elad Lassry, Ohad Meromi and Daniel Silver in Correspondance - Israel, Nicola Trezzi, Flash Art, October 2009.
Peripheries
Kurt Schwitters: Reconstructions of the Merzbau, Karin Orchard, Tate Papers, Autumn, 2007.
Learn moreOkwui Okpokwasili is a New York-based writer, performer, and choreographer. Deemed “a magnetic performer” by The New York Times, Okpokwasili has worked with Ralph Lemon, Julie Taymor, Nora Chipaumire, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Dean Moss, and others. Bronx Gothic is her second solo performance project, after pent-up: a revenge dance. Both projects are collaborations with visual designer, filmmaker, and director Peter Born. Together they create award-winning multidisciplinary experiences of raw intimacy—a collision of body, image and sound. Okpokwasili ‘s accomplishments include MANCC Choreographic Fellow; Artist in Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Park Avenue Armory, and LMCC’s Extended Life Program; Foundation for Contemporary Arts grantee. Her current work Bronx Gothic enjoyed a sold-out run in PS122’s 2014 COIL Festival and continues to tour nationally and internationally.
Learn moreOlivia Camfield is a multimedia movement artist of the Muscogee Nation, born and raised in Texas Hill Country. Their work finds connection to dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism. They have performed and choreographed dance for much of their career, and their film work includes themes of the Alien as kin, time traveling relatives, and Mvskoke lifeways in experimental forms. They are a tattoo artist whose hand poke practice is based in Southeastern and Mississippian Indigenous tattoo traditions, creating designs for Southeastern people that imagine the possibilities of those tattoos in the future and the new shapes they may take. Olivia's films have screened internationally at Camden International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and have appeared in print and online publications such as Artforum and Variety. Olivia is a 2018-19 Alembic Artist In Residence, a CYCLE I featured artist of COUSIN Collective, a 2022 Sundance Institute Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive participant, and a 2022 recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s LIFT–Early Career Support for Native Artists award.
Learn moreBorn in Seattle when the last person leaving was supposed to turn out the lights, Omar Willey has been an experimental filmmaker and photographer since 1989. He has made six feature films and a dozen shorts that have been shown locally as well as broadcast internationally. He is currently finishing up a five year project in hyperphotography dealing with the human use of public land.
In 1988 he began writing about performing arts for KCMU radio (now KEXP). Shortly thereafter he started his first magazine, Free Forum, dedicated to literary arts and cultural analysis. After this he began another zine, Lines of Sight, dedicated to photography and film and featuring interviews and articles about contemporary artists as well as photography. After this he moved on to freelance writing for Earshot Jazz, 5/4 Music, Tablet Magazine, and other local magazines. In 2010, he joined the staff of the online blog, Seattlest, where he remained till it shuttered.
For the past three years, he has been known as the publisher of the online journal of arts and culture, The Seattle Star, in which he has continued his interest in writing about performing arts, science, experimental film, and open culture.
Mr. Willey is an alumnus of both Western Washington University and the University of Washington. He volunteers time to open source software movement, Project Gutenberg, and Creative Commons projects across the country. He teaches free workshops in critical writing and photography around town. He is interested in everything.
Learn moreOtomo Yoshihide is one of the most well known Japanese musicians and composers in the experimental music field. Performing with guitar, turntables, and electronics he first came to international prominence in the 1990s as the leader of the noise rock group Ground Zero, and has since worked in a variety of contexts, ranging from free improvisation to noise, jazz and contemporary classical. A pioneering figure in onkyo and electroacoustic improvisation scenes, Otomo has been featured on important records on labels such as Improvised Music from Japan and Erstwhile. He studied at the Meiji University from 1979, where he studied ethnomusicology, concentrating on the Japanese pop music of World War II and the development of musical instruments during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Samples of instruments and music from this period are found in several of his works. He played in rock bands while at college, but turned to improvisation after discovering free jazz and free improvisation musicians like guitarist Derek Bailey, saxophonist Kaoru Abe, and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi.
Learn morePablo de Ocampo lives in Vancouver where he is Exhibitions Curator at Western Front. He has curated screenings, exhibitions, and performances at galleries, cinemas, and festivals internationally. From 2006 to 2014, de Ocampo was Artistic Director of the Images Festival in Toronto, and in 2013, served as the programmer of the 59th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, History is What's Happening. He was a founding member of the collective screening series Cinema Project in Portland, OR.
Learn moreQueaz Otti is South Sacramento raised, a loving father, aspiring rapper, and street philosopher of the people.
Known to many as a loyal brotha and voice of understanding.
Learn moreRachid Ouramdane is a French choreographer of Algerian descent at the forefront of Europe’s conceptual dance thinkers. His projects reassess the definitions of “performer” and “choreographer” and question modes of producing and circulating artwork. Prior to founding L’A. in 2007, Ouramdane collaborated with artists such as Emmanuelle Huynh, Meg Stuart, Christian Rizzo, Alain Buffard, and choreographer Julie Nioche, with whom he co-founded Fin Novembre in 1996. Ouramdane has worked with institutions also focused on visual art, including FRAC Champagne/Ardennes, Manège de Reims, and the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris. Besides choreography, Ouramdane regularly leads artistic workshops and moderates international encounters with artists.
Peripheries
The Purple Shall Govern, Daniel Fernández Pascual, deconcrete, June 8, 2011. 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 moresidony o’neal is an artist and writer working from interdisciplinary research and pre- to post- machine computing. o’neal’s practice treats conceptual art and mathematics as related forms of industrial culture that have shaped human relationships to objects, labor, and technology over time.
Recent solo exhibitions include Et al. (SOFTMAX HARD HASP), San Francisco, CA; Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, (The Pudding Butcher), Princeton, NJ; Dracula’s Revenge (NOT TALKING UNTIL BAD COMPANY JOINS), New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Enchiridion: Aisle, Spline, Resort), Portland, OR; and Veronica (AuguRing), Seattle, WA. Duo and group exhibitions include Third Born (Continuous Dimensional Thorax), Mexico City, Mexico; ICA at Maine College of Art and Design (ENTER:), Portland, ME; and SculptureCenter (In Practice: Total Disbelief), Long Island City, NY. o’neal has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Banff Centre, Banff, AB, among others. o’neal is the co-founder of INFANT design firm. Performances as a part of DT have been presented with Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, and Performance Space New York. o'neal is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Oregon Arts Commission's Joan Shipley Award and a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. In 2023, o’neal was awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship. Learn moreOberzan is an original member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, based in New York City. With Nature Theater, he has collaborated and performed in productions including Poetics: a ballet brut, the Obie-winning No Dice, and the one-man show, Rambo Solo. His latest theater/film work, Your brother. Remember? premiered at Brussel's Kunstenfestivaldesart. Oberzan has also released two albums of original music, most recently Athletes of Romance. He has performed with the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and is currently collaborating with the Dutch group Kassys.
Selected Press
Rambo Solo: Zachary Oberzan's Flooding With Love For the Kid, Matt Zoller Seitz, The L Magazine, January 6, 2010.
Rambo redux, as a homemade, one-man, no-budget movie, Ben Walters, Guardian.co.uk, June 17, 2009.
Learn more