Artists Archive
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Alessandro Sciarroni is an Italian performing artist with an extensive background in visual art and theater. His works are featured in contemporary dance and theater festivals, museums, and art galleries, as well as in unconventional spaces and involve professionals from different disciplines.
His work goes beyond the traditional definitions of gender. He starts from a conceptual Duchamp-like matrix, makes use of a theatrical framework, and he can use some techniques and experiences from dance, as well as circus or sports. In addition to the rigor, coherence and clarity of each creation, his work tries to uncover obsessions, fears and fragilities of the act of performing, through the repetition of a practice to the limits of the physical endurance of the interpreters, looking at a different dimension of time, and to an empathic relationship between the audience and the performers.
His works have been performed in 21 European countries, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, and the United Arab Emirates. Among the main events he took part: the Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Impulstanz Festival in Wien, the Venice Biennale, the Festival d'Automne and the Festival Séquence Danse at 104 in Paris, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Juli Dans Festival in Amsterdam, and he exhibited his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the MAXXI Museum in Rome.
Alessandro Sciarroni is supported by APAP - Advancing Performing Arts Projects - and his shows are produced by Marche Teatro in collaboration with international co-producers such as the Comune di Bassano del Grappa / Centro per la Scena Contemporanea, the Biennale de la Danse / Maison de la Danse de Lyon, the Mercat de les Flors-Graner / Barcelona, Centrale Fies and the Association Corpoceleste-C.C.00# of which he is artistic director. It is also one of the artists of the Project Matilde, regional platform for the new scene in Marche. In 2015, Alessandro Sciarroni was appointed Associate Choreographer of the company of the Ballet of Rome and he is supported for his latest creation Aurora from the Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès.
Learn moreA.L. Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of the project Ridykeulous, founding member of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her works have been featured internationally at such venues as P.S.1/MoMA, Tate Modern, The New Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Centre Pompidou, The Kitchen, REDCAT, and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, among others. Her work is included in such public collections as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Steiner is currently based in Los Angeles and is faculty at the University of Southern California.
Selected Press
The Lowdown: A.L. Steiner, Io Tillet Wright, New York Times T Magazine, May 11, 2011.
Eve Fowler & A.L. Steiner, North Drive Press #4, 2007.
Would it be okay if I kept my sweater on?, Naomi Fry, Paper Monument.
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 moreAndrew Schneider is an OBIE award-winning, Drama Desk nominated performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist who creates original works for theater, video, and installation since 2003. Schneider creates and performs original performance works, builds interactive electronic art works and installations, and was a Wooster Group company member (video/performer) from 2007-2014. Rooted at the intersection of performance and technology, Schneider’s work critically investigates our over-dependence on being perpetually connected in an always-on world. Andrew’s original performance work in NYC includes AFTER (2018 Under the Radar Festival), YOUARENOWHERE (2015 OBIE award –The Invisible Dog, 2016 Drama Desk nom – 3LD); DANCE/FIELD (2014 – Dance Roulette), TIDAL (2013 – River to River festival); and WOW+FLUTTER (2010 –The Chocolate Factory Theater) among others.
Learn moreAngelo Scott is an interdisciplinary artist from the South currently living in Portland, OR and completing their BFA in Intermedia at PNCA. Their sonic compositions build shifting layers of melodic sentiments from splintering phrases, emphasizing irregularities in live sampling, synthesis, and insisting upon fleeting swells of emotive expression as a passage through intricate patterns in overwhelming soundscapes. Scott received their Associate of the Arts from Linn-Benton Community College in 2019, where they worked as the photo editor for The Commuter. While living in Corvallis, Oregon, they began operating in DIY sonic arts communities, co-organizing and curating installation and video works for Corvallis Experiments In Noise's What is Noise? festivals. In 2016, they co-initiated and co-created Sponsored Trash, an ongoing performance arts collective. They currently perform solo sound compositions as Tyronza and participate in improvisational ensembles, create video projections, and make collaborative CRT installations for interactive music events.
Learn moreAshley Stull Meyers (she/her/hers) is a writer, editor, and culture worker. She has curated exhibitions and public programming for a diverse set of arts institutions along the West Coast, including those in San Francisco, CA, Oakland, CA, Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR. She has been in academic residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE) and the Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta). She has served as Northwest Editor for Art Practical and has contributed writing to BOMB, Rhizome, ARTS.BLACK, and SFAQ/NYAQ. In 2017 Stull Meyers was named director and curator of The Art Gym and Belluschi Pavilion at Marylhurst University, and the following year was made co-curator of the 2019 Portland Biennial. Currently, she is program director for the Multicultural Resource Center at Reed College, and is contracting as an independent curator.
Learn moreBeacon Sound is a record store, label, and event space located in North Portland dedicated to connecting the sometimes-disparate dots of contemporary music both locally and globally. By design, Beacon Sound is as much a cultural node as a record store: a gathering place for like-minded people, a home for all sorts of events and happenings, a facilitator/instigator of unexpected connections and modes of production.
Learn moreChoreographer Suniti Dernovsek and visual artist David Stein began making work together in 2004 under the name Hot Little Hands, which, in 2011, evolved into the Portland-based contemporary dance company bobbevy. In addition to 18 shorter works, Dernovsek and Stein have produced six evening-length shows: This is how we disappear (2013); Palace of Crystal (2011); ill-starred (2009); Lawn of the Limp (2008); Avian Fable (2007); and Marionette (2004). They have been presented by Conduit Dance, Reed College Arts Week, Danspace in NYC, Velocity Dance Center, Northwest New Works at On the Boards, Ten Tiny Dances’ South Waterfront Project, and PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival. They have received several grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, as well as the Dance New Work Award from UWM.
Learn moreCraig Stephens was born in Sacramento, California in 1963. He grew up in the foothill town of Weimar. He attended American River College and later transferred to UC Davis where he received his B.A. in art studio in 1993. During his undergraduate years he had the privilege of taking classes from Gary Pruner, Roy DeForest, David Hollowell and Wayne Thiebaud. In 1996 Mr. Stephens began teaching high school art classes at Chana High School in Auburn, California.
Since 2006 he has completed a small painting on a nearly daily basis, which he shares through Instagram feed. He has found that the practice of completing a painting a day suits his disposition and aesthetic.
Mr. Stephens currently resides in Auburn, California with his wonderful wife and amazing children. His works can be found in private and corporate collections throughout North America and Europe.
Learn moreC. Riley Snorton is a scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender, sexuality, and race. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (U Minn Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (U Minn Press, 2017). Snorton is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago.
Learn moreCrispin Spaeth offers private coaching, workplace trainings, and group classes that champion the beauty of our human design and its intrinsic relationship to confidence, connection, and freedom.
Her work is deeply informed by Integrative Alexander Technique (IAT), an experiential learning process that allows you to access your natural coordination so that you can move, think, and communicate more effectively and in line with your true wishes.
Learn moreDao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, and visual—to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song, and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Although separate, these elements are unified by a shared (under)current that transposes itself through or despite its conduits, and endeavors toward “re-membering” and attempting to synchronize the divided ‘languages’ within the self and concerning the self as placed in the world.
Strom is the author/composer of several hybrid works, including the music/poetry project TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS (2025), and INSTRUMENT (2020), which won the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion of song-poems, TRAVELER’S ODE. She co-curated and co-edited the hybrid-literary anthology and exhibition, A Mouth Holds Many Things (2024), and released an album of ambient-folk songs, Redux (2022). She is also the author of a bilingual poetry-art collection, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, Ford Foundation, Precipice Fund, NEA, and others. She is the co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese women writers and artists making polyvocal poetry-art works; and de-canon, a literary social art project centering BIPOC writers. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevadas of northern California and now lives in Portland, OR.
Learn moreDennis Scholl is the Vice President of Arts for the Knight Foundation. He oversees the foundation's national arts program, including the Knight Arts Challenge and Random Acts of Culture. He is well known as a collector of contemporary art for over three decades. Scholl is also the founder of a series of initiatives dedicated to building the contemporary art collections of museums, including the Guggenheim, the Tate Modern and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. He is a four-time regional Emmy winner for his work in cultural documentaries. His first feature documentary “Deep City: The Birth of Miami Sound,” premiered at the 2014 SXSW Film Festival. Dennis is also the co-founder of Betts and Scholl, an award-winning wine project. In 2012, Scholl was a Harvard University Advanced Leadership Fellow, focusing on the role of culture in community engagement. Dennis is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. Previously, he was a practicing attorney and CPA.
Learn moreMiller & Shellabarger create artist books and public performances that examine queer identity, politics, and displays of affection and intimacy. They are recipients of a 2008 Artadia Chicago Award and a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Together, Miller & Shellabarger have presented their projects at venues across the United States and at art fairs including Volta in Basel; Switzerland; NEXT in Chicago; NADA in Miami; and the Affair at the Jupiter in Portland, Oregon. The two artists also maintain separate artistic practices. Miller & Shellabarger are represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago, where they live and work.
Selected Press
Run, Don't Walk, Carlos Suarez de Jesus, Miami New Times, September 17, 2009.
Learn moreEileen Isagon Skyers has worked with contemporary art and nonprofit arts organizations including the Whitney Museum, David Zwirner, Rhizome, the New Museum, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, PICA, and the Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA). Her first book, Vanishing Acts, was published by LINK Editions (Brescia, Italy) in 2015, and her writing has been published in the New Museum Catalogue Trigger: Gender as a Tool and Weapon, NATASHA, Wreath, Glass Press of the Future, Web Safe 2k16, Printed Web, and New World UNLTD, among others. Her moving image work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Mexico. Skyers holds a BA in philosophy and a BFA in studio art from the University of South Florida (Tampa, FL) and an MA in critical studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR).
Learn moreEthan Seltzer currently serves as the Interim Director of the School of Art+Design, and as a Professor in the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. He served as Director of the Toulan School from 2003 through 2009. From 1992, through August, 2003, he was the founding director of Portland State’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies, created to better connect the resources of higher education to the needs and issues of the communities in the 6-county, bistate Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region. Prior to joining Portland State University, he held positions as the Land Use Supervisor for Metro, the regional government in the Portland area, as an assistant for planning and budget issues to Portland City Commissioner Mike Lindberg, and as the Assistant Coordinator for the Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Program. Current scholarly interests include regional planning, regional development, and Cascadia. He has been a resident of the Portland metropolitan area since 1980 and has served as president of the board of the Oregon Environmental Council, the City of Portland Planning Commission, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and the 40-Mile Loop Land Trust.
Learn moreStephaun E. Wallace, MS, MOL, is a thought leader, public health researcher, project manager at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and co-director of the University of Washington’s (UW) Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) Community Action board (CAB), with a track record in developing, implementing, and evaluating major public health and human service programs in the areas of HIV/AIDS & STD prevention, care and treatment, in diverse, high-risk populations in the United States. Wallaces’ career highlights include Director of Programs/Deputy Director of the MOCHA Center, Inc.; Program/Training Coordinator of AID Atlanta, Inc. (where he co-founded the Evolution Center/Project); and Founding Executive Director of My Brothaz Keeper, Inc., and currently serves on several nonprofit boards, committees and coalitions, including maintaining active membership in national public health associations.
Mr. Wallace is a public health/social justice leader with more than 16 years of sexual/public health experience with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities and men who have sex with men (MSM), more than a decade of senior-level non-profit administrative and management experience, more than 20 of grassroots social justice/advocacy experience with LGBTQ/MSM communities, and a proven commitment to the illumination and eradication of HIV/AIDS and other health disparities via policy, research, education and advocacy. He has completed undergraduate degrees in psychology and criminal justice, Masters of Science degrees in Management and Organizational Leadership, and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy in Epidemiology.
In the house and ball community (HBC), he is known as Stephaun Blahnik, Chairman/President of the House of Blahnik. Since 2000, Wallace has been an active part of the HBC, and has provided ballroom/life guidance and talent development for many ballroom superstars. Wallace has received several ballroom awards and accolades since being a part of this community; and has walked and won Best Dressed, American Runway, Face, and Sneaker vs. Sneaker in multiple regions of the country, in addition to having the honor of judging major and mini-balls around the United States. Wallace resurrected the House of Elite in 2000, and has been a part of the Houses of Revlon, Cavalli, Valentino, and now Blahnik. Wallace founded the Western New York Council of Houses, resurrected the Atlanta Ballroom Alliance, and has directly supported the Chicago, Carolinas, Kansas City, and the West Coast Ballroom Alliances over the years. Wallace also provides consultation to the federal agencies, and local and state health departments and organizations around the country on projects addressing the needs and issues of LGBT communities, especially those in the HBC. Additionally, Wallace co-lead the development of an intervention called Project VOGUE; which the 1st EVER CREATED research-based HIV prevention intervention focused on the HBC, utilizing community-based participatory research principles.
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 moreGob Squad explores the point where theater meets art, media, and real life. They stage their work in houses, shops, underground stations, car parks, hotels, or directly on the street, and often ask the audience to step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators. Gob Squad began in Nottingham, UK in 1994, but is now based in Berlin. They’ve toured to all continents apart from Antartica.
Selected Press
Semiotics of the Kitchen, Amy Taubin, Artforum. February 1, 2012.
A Visit to Warhol's World, In All Its Goofy Glory, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, January 23, 2012. 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 morehome school is a free pop-up art school co-run by manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis, in its fifth year of curriculum presenting multimedia, genre-nonconforming edutainment and creating welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art.
manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is an artist and writer from the Bronx. They received their BA in Linguistics from Reed College in 2014, and currently live and work in a garage in southeast Portland. Recent group exhibitions with Rhizome and the New Museum (online), the Cooley Gallery (Portland), Chicken Coop Contemporary (Portland), Veronica project space (Seattle), and AA|LA Gallery (Los Angeles). Recent publications in Art in America, Rhizome, CURA, SFMoMA Open Space, AQNB, et al. abreu is the author of List of Consonants (Bottlecap Press, 2015) and transtrender (Quimérica Books, 2016), and their debut collection of critical writing is forthcoming 2018.
Victoria Anne Reis (b.1982, East Meadow, NY) is trying to be a good mom and a good person. She lives with her parents and daughter, and works on a tree farm, in Boring, OR.
Learn moreIsabella Saavedra lives and works in Portland, OR. She originally hails from rural Northern California. Saavedra received her BS in Studio Art from Southern Oregon University in 2020 and began her MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Fall 2025. Saavedra received a 2024 Career Opportunity Grant from Oregon Arts Commission, as well as consecutive Arts3C Grants from Regional Arts and Culture Council in 2023 and 2024. She has attended residencies at ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership in Cleveland, OH, and p:ear in Portland, OR. Her exhibition record includes the Newport Visual Arts Center and Portland Center Stage. Most recently, she completed Understory, a permanent large-scale public art installation commissioned by the City of Portland’s Percent for Art in Public Places Program at the Mt. Scott Community Center.
Learn moreJacqueline Shea Murphy teaches courses in critical dance studies in University of California Riverside's Dance department. She is author of The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), awarded the 2008 de la Torre Bueno Prize for Outstanding Book of the Uear in Dance Studies by the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS), co-editor of the collection Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance (Rutgers University Press, 1995), and has published in journals including Discourses in Dance, American Literary History, Theatre Research International, Interventions, and several anthologies. She was the 2009 recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to Aotearoa New Zealand, and is writing a new book about ways that contemporary Indigenous choreographers in the U.S., Canada, and Aotearoa are inhabiting Indigenous epistemologies and thereby reframing colonizing institutions in their dancing and dance making.
Professor Shea Murphy regularly teaches courses such as "Dance: Cultures and Contexts," "Introduction to Dance Studies," "Dance, Gender, Sexualities," "Yoga for Dancers," and "Rhetorical Approaches to Dance Studies." She holds a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley, a Master's in fiction writing from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars Program, and a BA from Barnard College of Columbia University. She has previously taught at San Francisco State University (American Indian Studies) and Mills College (English). She has a background in modern dance, and is a longtime practitioner and certified instructor of Iyengar yoga.
Learn moreJohn Smith was born in London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art. After graduating in 1977 he became involved in the activities of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. John Smith has developed a body of work that deftly subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction.
Since 1972 John Smith has made over forty film, video and installation works and shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world. His solo exhibitions include: Royal College of Art (London), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, UK), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (Germany), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Pearl Gallery (London), and Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin). Smith’s work has been featured in retrospectives at the 2007 Venice Biennale and film festivals in Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere, Uppsala, Bristol, Regensburg, Glasgow, La Rochelle and, most recently, in the 2010 Berlin Bienniale. John Smith lives and works in London, where he teaches part-time at the University of East London as Professor of Fine Art. He is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin).
Selected Press
On the Street where You Live: The Films of John Smith, Adrian Dakes, senses of cinema, November, 2003.
Interview with John Smith, Brian Frye, Millennium Film Journal, Winter 2003.
John Smith, Michael O'Pray, LUXOnline, 2003. Learn moreA rising senior at Catlin Gabel School, Juma Sei has always found himself engrossed in predominantly white, privileged, and “liberal” school systems and communities across the world. As a result of this, Sei has deeply explored the more subtle aspects of oppression and prejudice his entire life - bringing a unique and somewhat introspective point of view to the work he does at Catlin Gabel and other organizations across Portland. In addition to his identity as a black male and African American, Sei’s parents are both Sierra Leonean immigrants, adding yet another perspective to his intersectional integrity. Arguably the most important aspect to any work he does is making sure to understand the context and history in which he’s operating.
Learn moreJunaid Sarieddeen (Beirut, Lebanon) His artistic research is oriented towards focusing on the position of the artwork within the time and space contexts of events. “Lorca” (2005), the intrusive event in the streets of Beirut, followed by the installation performance “ish ibka smu sud jud...” (2006) both carried the beginning of this artistic question for him. A question which started developing after he took part in establishing Zoukak Theatre Company in 2006 and later finishing his BA in Philosophy at the Lebanese university in 2008; which led him to consider the artwork as a political proposition. Sarieddeen is the dramaturg for Leila's Death, part of PICA's 2016 TBA Festival.
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 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 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 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.
Related Content
Learn moreManuel Solano (Mexico City, 1987): Through painting, performance and video, Manuel Solano’s work references pop culture and personal memories to inform on Manuel’s own queer identity and bittersweet experiences. After becoming blind for life in 2014 as a result of an HIV-related infection, Manuel’s rebellious nature drove him to keep making art rather than giving up his past life. He has since shown at Museo Carrillo Gil, Zona MACO and Galería Karen Huber.
Learn moreDancepod was an architectural installation that housed live-streamed dance parties in four cities simultaneously, Portland OR, Mexico City, Berlin, and New York. It was the first exploration of concepts laid out in the Swells performance/lecture.
Learn moreMaster Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. is Black, Italian, Queer, Non-Binary, Neurodyvergent, and practices primarily in america. Their collaborative approach results in artwork by and for the people.
Stevenson’s practice has been dedicated to supporting young people ages 4 to 18 in developing the necessary skills to encourage advanced imaginative thinking and self-confident expression. In 2019 they developed the Afro Contemporary Art Class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School which has had many forms since, including Afro Futurist February, and three years of Fred Hampton Summer Camp. Supporting community efforts as well, taking the shape of support for the effort to Save Dr. Martin Luther King School from being displaced by the expansion of Interstate 5 which has triggered the need to move Harriet Tubman Middle School. Stevenson is currently working in the Albina community to develop a Living Archive at Jefferson High School with students, community, and the architectural design team. Stevenson also has a robust portfolio of artist projects centering food and gathering around it, projects involving sculpture, drawing, and photography, and new work in collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated folks. These include Tin Can Phone, a podcast all about life in and outside of prison, and Gallery Blue, a curation and exhibition project both of which are owned and operated by formerly incarcerated individuals. Stevenson pursues these professional and creative goals passionately because they believe that empowered and open-minded young people and communities are the best and most direct way toward ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future for all.
Learn moreStuart received her BFA in dance from NYU and was a member of the Randy Warhaw Dance Company for five years. On invitation from the Klapstuk Festival in Leuven in 1991, she created her first full-length piece, Disfigure Study. In 1994 Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods began a series of collaborations with visual artists, including Lawrence Malstaf, Gary Hill, and Ann Hamilton. Together with choreographer/dancer Benoît Lachambre and composer Hahn Rowe—both honored with Bessie Awards—Stuart created Forgeries, Love, and Other Matters.
Learn moreNight Shade is a group of artists rebelling against traditional flat-surface silhouettes and revolutionizing the ancient art of shadow puppetry by using light to manipulate depth and space. This art group blends hand-held lights, masks, puppets, composed music, sound-effects, and experimental storytelling into a bewitching form of cinematic puppetry that flows like film. Core artists are Alicia Cortes, Sarah Frechette, Oviedo Menendez, Jason Thibodeaux, and Alain Z, but also working under the banner Night Shade are Kevin Bouton-Scott, Michel Fiffe, Chris Rabilwongse, and Cynthia Star.
The Portland-based Night Shade collective began collaborating with Japanther back in 2005 in New York. That first show at the Arm Gallery in Williamsburg started the momentum of late night cutting and, since then, this group has performed across the US at various puppetry and art festivals, galleries, anarchist spaces, gutted bowling alleys, and pubs. In 2009 Night Shade performed their full-length epic shadow play, Night Shade, which contains over 700 intricate cut-outs, for a sold-out run at Disjecta, in Portland.
Learn moreAs a dance artist, Noelle Stiles is interested in how and where experience is held in the body. This interest provides a framework for extracting the corporeal language that both intimately connects and individuates us. Stiles has a BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts and completed her graduate studies in dance at The Ohio State University. She has performed and presented work at venues such as the PICA's Time-Based Art Festival (2010), On The Boards, PWNW, Dance New Amsterdam, and Links Hall. Stiles' interest in teaching has taken her to places such as The Ohio State University, the Governor’s School of North Carolina and she co-founded the community focused dance class series Heavy Rotation with Kathleen Keogh of Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner. Her work has been supported by Caldera's Artist Residency program, PICA's Resource Room Residency, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the ACA Associate Artist Residency program and was selected by PICA and the NDP to travel to the Dublin Dance Festival as part of a pilot international exchange program. In 2010, Stiles merged her work as a graphic designer with her work in dance to co-create a dance publication entitled FRONT. Based out of Portland, Oregon, FRONT is Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Robert Tyree. FRONT utilizes the old-school tactics of the broadsheet newspaper to explore the new, current, future energy of dance theory and practices in the field.
Learn morePeter Simensky’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum 52, New York; The Swiss Institute, New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston. Selected group exhibitions at Sculpture Center, NY; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mass Moca, North Adams; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York among others. Simensky’s Gold Dust was recently featured in Cabinet’s, Money Issue. He has received awards and grants from LMCC, NYFA, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He lives and works in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY.
Learn moreBorn in 1970, Philippe Quesne received his education in Visual Arts. For 10 years he designed sets for theater, operas and exhibitions. In 2003, he created the Vivarium Studio Company, and directed his first show, La Démangeaison des ailes, based on the acts of taking off and falling down. Philippe Quesne hunts the marvelous, the tiny, and pushes to the extreme experiences of our daily lives as well as the relationship between mankind and nature. As he did as a child, collecting insects, he now works and studies small communities under his microscope. The scenography is used as an ecosystem in which he immerses his actors into. His shows, such as La Démangeaison des ailes (2003), Des expériences (2004), D’après nature (2006), L’Effet de Serge (2007), La Mélancolie des dragons (2008), Big Bang (2010), Swamp Club (2013), Next Day (2014), compose a repertory that tours all over the world. In addition to his work for the theater, he creates performances and interventions in public spaces or natural sites, and displays his installations in the context of exhibitions. Since January 2014, he has been serving as the co-director of Nanterre-Amandiers, National Dramatic Center. In 2016, he will create Caspar Western Friedrich at Kammerspiele in Munich and Welcome to Caveland! at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels
BIO PAGE IMAGE/S:
La Mélancolie des dragons 1 @ Martin Argyroglo
La Mélancolie des dragons 5 © Pierre Grosbois 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 morePublication Studio is an experiment in sustainable publication. They print and bind books on demand, creating original work with artists and writers they admire, books that both respond to the conversation of the moment and can endure. They attend to the social life of the book, cultivating a public that cares and is engaged. Publication Studio is a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense — not just the production of books, but the production of a public. This public, which is more than a market, is created through deliberate acts: the circulation of texts; discussions and gatherings in physical space; and the maintenance of a digital commons. Together these construct a space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being. At TBA, Publication Studio will conduct real-time collaborations with Festival artists and performers, strategizing and producing new books on-demand in a retail storefront.
Publication Studio was founded and is run by Matthew Stadler, formerly the literary editor of Nest Magazine and co-founder of Clear Cut Press, and Patricia No.
Selected Press
Book Publishing as Common Ground, Caroline Cummins, Oregon Humanities, Spring 2010.
A Very Long - and Very Interesting - Interview with Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio, Matthew Simmons, HTMLGIANT, March 18, 2010.
Learn moreCurrently based in Brooklyn, New York, Stiler received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been shown internationally at galleries including Nicelle Beauchene (New York), Sandroni Rey (Los Angeles), and Annarumma 404 (Naples, Italy). Recent and upcoming exhibitions include solo projects at Callicoon Fine Arts (New York), The Suburban (Chicago) as well as the Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park (New York). Stiler has been featured in BOMBlog, Artforum.com, and Flash Art Italia and is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York.
Selected Press
Ruby Sky Stiler, Christopher Howard, Artforum, May 2009.
Ruby Sky Stiler, Rebekah Drysdale, Daily Serving, May 16, 2009.
In Words: Ruby Sky Stiler, Kelly Devine Thomas, BOMBlog May 25, 2009.
That's What He Said, Ian Cooper, The Highlights, October 2009.
Learn moreSacha Yanow is a New York City-based artist and actor. Her solo performance works include: Dad Band, New Museum, NYC (2015); Silent Film (in development), The Lab, San Francisco, Pieter, Los Angeles, and MAPP/Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY (2015), Dixon Place, NYC (2014), and Movement Research Festival, NYC (2013); and The Prince, Dixon Place, NYC (2013). Her residencies and awards include: LMCC Process Space (2016); SOMA, Mexico City (2015); Dixon Place, NYC (2014); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2012); and The Field, NYC (2011). She was creative consultant for Elisabeth Subrin’s feature film A Woman A Part (2016), and co-director and dramaturge for Dynasty Handbag’s performance piece Soggy Glasses (The Broad/REDCAT 2016, Brooklyn Academy of Music 2014). Yanow received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a graduate of the William Esper Studio Actor Training program.
Learn moreSahar al-Sawaf (she/her) is an Iraqi-American filmmaker, visual artist, and photographer based in Oregon. Born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Lebanon and Iraq, she fled to California just before the Gulf War. Her work explores war, displacement, and fragmented family memory shaped by her experiences in Iraq and the United States. Her short films “Uncle Ma’an,” “Um Abdullah,” and “Shadow of Paradise” have screened internationally, including at DOC NYC, Chicago International Film Festival, and Animafest Zagreb. She was a Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center in New York, NY, and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Video/Film. Most recently, she completed a photogravure intensive at Mullowney Printing, supported by a Regional Arts Cultural Council grant. Her photo-performance work is featured in the 2026 Artists’ Biennial, The Price of the Ticket, at Oregon Contemporary.
Learn moreGreen is a documentary filmmaker based in New York and San Francisco. His film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, and the NEA.
Selected Press
Sam Green's Love Song at SFIFF, Mike Plante, Filmmaker Magazine, May 7, 2012.
'The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller' with Yo La Tengo at SFIFF, John Angelico, SFGate Culture Blog, May 3, 2012.
A hundred visions and revisions, Sam Stander, San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 17, 2012.
Someone else's glasses: Sam Green Talks Buckminster Fuller, Moriah Ulinskas, Bay Area Video Coalition, April 25, 2012.
Learn moreSam Hamilton (Sam Tam Ham) is an independent, working class, interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent based in Portland, OR. After 20 years of working independently and professionally across experimental music and sound art, moving and still image, painting, writing, performance, stage, cinema, and curatorial projects, Hamilton's practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but verdant garden full of old and new growth, hidden places, edible arrangements, toxic weeds, garden parties, frolicking, and most importantly, the life-affirming ferment of deep existential entanglement. What physically emerges in any given season through the confluence of this garden depends most simply on what vessel(s) best serve the idea at hand.
The long song
a meandering garden path
Both an entrance and an exit
Hamilton's work has existed in a wide range of contexts, including Converge 45, Portland; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Portland Art Museum, OR; Transmediale, Berlin; Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival; Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland; as well as a research station in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, an active volcanic island crater, a billboard, a functioning Shinto shrine in Japan, an anarchist squat in Athens, Greece, the Australian outback desert, a dank underground parking lot, some dude’s apartment in Lima, Peru, and on the radio.
In addition to their solo work, they have collaborated extensively with artists across Aotearoa New Zealand, Sāmoa, Australia, Kiribati, the US, Finland, Japan, and Peru, including ten years spent working with the internationally acclaimed Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, touring major works to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAB; Ruhrtriennale, Ruhr; KVS; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; and more.
Their work has been recognized with a Creative Capital Award, Oregon Community Foundation's Creative Heights Award, and an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award, among others.
Learn moreArtist and composer Samita Sinha creates multidisciplinary performance works that investigate origins of voice. She synthesizes Indian vocal traditions and embodied practices to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation. Sinha's works have been commissioned and presented by Asia Society, Performance Space 122, Danspace, Rubin Museum, Queens Museum, Western Front, and Gibney Dance, among others. Sinha teaches voice extensively.
Learn moreSamiya Bashir’s books of poetry: Field Theories, Gospel, and Where the Apple Falls, and anthologies, including Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, exist. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. She lives in Portland, Ore, with a magic cat who shares her obsession with trees and blackbirds and occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
Samiya Bashir is the author of Field Theories (2017), as well as Gospel (2009), and Where the Apple Falls (2005), which were both Lambda Literary Award finalists. She is also the author of the chapbooks Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring (1999), American Visa (2001), and Teasing Crow (2006). She is also the editor of Black Women’s Erotica 2 (2003) and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art (2002), with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana. Her work has been most recently featured in Poetry, Drunken Boat, World Literature Today, Portland Monthly, Tuesday, An Art Project, The Offing, Ecotone, HOAX, Poet Lore, Callaloo, and The Encyclopedia Project. Samiya also collaborates with a variety of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Field Theories in Light, Sound, & Movement, with Roland Dahwen Wu and Keyon Gaskin, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, currently on exhibition at L.A. Louver. Bashir is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent. Bashir lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches creative writing at Reed College. “Breath,” Bashir says, “is everything.” Bashir’s work helps to remind us not only to breathe, but how, and why, and together.
Learn moreTBA:16 Guest Scholar Sampada Aranke (PhD, Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in Art Journal, Equid Novi: African Journalism Studies, and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. She’s currently working on her book manuscript entitled Death’s Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics.
Learn moreSan Cha is a Mexican-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice blends rancheras, electronics, cumbia, and pop to explore themes of identity, power, and liberation. Born Lizette Gutierrez to Mexican immigrant parents, San Cha's artistic journey began with singing in the Catholic Church choir and evolved within the vibrant Bay Area queer drag nightlife scene. This formative period fostered a unique fusion of musical influences, including Catholic hymns, Mexican corridos, rancheras, cumbias, and punk queer electroclash, shaping her distinct artistic voice.
Rooted in the DIY, punk, and queer nightlife cultures, San Cha's work is driven by a commitment to personal, social, and political liberation. Her creative process is fueled by community narratives, lucid dreams, and cultural exploration. A transformative experience living on her aunt's farm in Jalostotitlán, Mexico inspired her to reimagine traditional ranchera music through a queer lens, subverting established forms and cultural signifiers.
San Cha's early work, such as the Capricho del Diablo EP (2018), received critical acclaim, with Bandcamp Daily naming it Album Of The Day. Her 2019 album, La Luz De La Esperanza, earned an 8.0 rating on Pitchfork and recognition as one of The Advocate's "Women Of The Year" in 2020. Her music has been featured in the Starz TV series Vida and Kacey Musgraves' film Star-Crossed: The Film, with the Los Angeles Times declaring, "San Cha sings from a divine place." Her ongoing Processions (2024) mixtape, released through Ballroom Marfa, further demonstrates her artistic versatility and commitment to exploring complex narratives.
San Cha's practice extends to collaborative projects in classical music and opera. She has engaged in projects, performances, and residencies with Performance Space New York, New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; lumber room, Portland, OR; The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Red Bull; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; Denniston Hill, Glen Wild, NY; Oak Head; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; Movimiento de Arte y Cultural Latino Americana, San Jose, CA; KQED; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Portland, OR, and more. Her work has also been supported by the California Arts Council.
Recent awards and accolades include the National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund Grant (2023), National Performance Network Documentation & Storytelling Grant (2024), Los Angeles Performance Practice Research & Development Award (2024), a 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. San Cha's work consistently pushes artistic boundaries, utilizing music and performance as powerful vehicles for sociopolitical change and liberation.
Learn moreSanchel Brown is a mother/performer/choreographer/medicine woman originally from Baltimore, MD. She has worked professionally in commercial, concert, and theatre primarily in New York and Philadelphia. She obtained her B.F.A from Virginia Commonwealth University, and since then has continued her studies at L’Ecole De Sable in Senegal West Africa, with Rhapsody James in Los Angeles, and Rhythm One Acting with Ozzie Jones. She began her career as an apprentice with Urban Bush Women. Her performance career continued on with highlights such as World of Dance Philadelphia, The Kimmel Center's 2018 Jazz residency, Davido’s Coming to America Tour, Theatre Horizon's Black Nativity (Barrymore Win!), and Let 'Im Move You: This is a Formation (National Tour). Her choreography highlights include Theatre Horizon's "The Color Purple" Regional PREMIERE ( nominated for Outstanding Movement/Choreography) and Yale University Dramat's "Dreamgirls". Recently, she has shifted her focus into her self-produced healing works including her hit dance play "Home To Homeland” and musical titled “Wheelz of Life”. Sanchel currently teaches her original “AfroClub “ dance class fusing Baltimore House and West African Dance Forms.
Learn moreSarah Dougher is a musician, composer, and university professor. She has performed for over twenty years, including at PICA’s TBA festival and has received commissions from the Classical Greek Theater of Oregon, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Multnomah County Library, and the Cooley Gallery at Reed College.
Learn moreSarah Gilbert (she/they) is an artist and educator based in what is currently called Los Angeles, CA (Gabrileño/Tongva/Kizh Lands), where she is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Affiliate Faculty in Gender and Feminist Studies at Pitzer College. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Brown University, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Idaho.
Gilbert’s work explores craft and collectivity—how the sticky relationality of material transformation can open spaces for thinking and feeling together in more-than-human worlds. Joining a wide range of materials and processes, her promiscuously interdisciplinary practice moves between art and science, synthesizing traditional craft techniques with emerging technologies. Often unsettling clear boundaries between past and present, her work draws on material memory and tensions between figuration and abstraction as springboards for contemplating our experience of time. Moving us away from narratives of material mastery or maker-movement individualism, Gilbert's practice highlights the ethical particularities of encounters with difference, and the radical potential of embodied attunement to reorient us towards collective care.
Gilbert has exhibited widely throughout the US and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include BREAKING AND BENDING, curated by Stephanie Snyder at the Edith Feldenheimer Gallery at Reed College, Portland; GOOSEBUMPS, an interactive sound installation as part of the 7th Tallinn Applied Arts Triennial, Estonia; and TURNINGS at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including WOMEN ON THE FENCE in Desert Hot Springs; GENERIS01: COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION at Bushwick Expo, Brooklyn; BORN/MADE at Tartu Art House, Estonia; GLASSAC 17 in Lisbon; WHITHER THE AMERICAN DREAM at Punch Gallery, Seattle; and IMAGINED COMMUNITIES at Gallery Project, Ann Arbor.
In 2014, Gilbert was awarded the inaugural 4Front: Innovation From All Angles Residency at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has been a Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America, Millville; and a Resident Artist at Faro Tláhuac, Mexico City; Olustvere Mõis, Estonia; Glazenhuis, Lommel; and the LC36-Kunstverein, Cologne.
Her published writing includes:
“A Widening Chromaticism: Learning Perception in the Collective Craftwork of the Encounter” in Material Perceptions, Documents of Contemporary Craft no. 5, edited by Knut Astrup Bull and André Gali, Arnoldsche Art Publications, Stuttgart, Germany, 2018.
“Understories: A Common Ground for Art and Science,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in the Museum Catalog for Alma Heikkilä’s Exhibition: ‘ , ‘ /mediums,.’_ ” bodies,.’_ ” ° ∞ logs,∞ ‘ , ‘ /~` ‘ holes, .’ `-. ` .’ — °habitats / /`‘ * ‘-‘ . ‘ , ‘ /~`want to feel (,) you inside | * . . * * | ..* . . *./..-. ~ .’ ‘ , ‘ /~` ❅ ☼ ~, curated by Satu Oksanen, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, 2019.
“Process Epistemologies for the Careful Interplay of Art and Biology: An Afterward,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in Drawing Processes of Life: Cells, Molecules, Organisms, edited by Gemma Anderson and John Dupre, Intellect Press, Bristol, United Kingdom (forthcoming, 2023).
Learn moreSarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY. Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice in a subversive examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and performance art. She has presented her work in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes (NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan), and Second Edition (Stockholm). Hennies is currently a member of improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music.
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.
Learn moreSara Magenheimer (b. Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York: Art in General + Kim?, Riga, Latvia; COR&P, Columbus, Ohio; JOAN, Los Angeles; Recess, New York, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, and DOCUMENT, Chicago. Her videos have been screened at venues such as Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Images Festival, Toronto; and The New York Film Festival. Her work has been in group shows at White Columns, New York; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston; and Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague.
Learn moreSara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, 1976-) is a master artist from the South Coast of Oregon. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators; her training began in the home. Her lifelong mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakima). Her weaving teachers are Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation). Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. She has been represented by Augen Gallery since 2010.
Her studio work is multi-disciplinary and branches into education and institutional reform. These concepts directly influence and are reflected in her artwork and public presence. Siestreem created and runs a weaving program for the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people. She teaches collegiate studio arts and theory at PNCA. Her work in institutional reform relates to curatorial and educational practices regarding Indigenous fine art and critical race theory. She is director of the Present Future Action Lab at the OJMCHE.
Siestreem's work has been widely supported through grants, residencies, and fellowships. It has been shown in museums and institutions regionally, nationally, and internationally. Locally, her work has been on near constant public display for over a decade. Her work figures in public and private collections around the world.
She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon
Learn moreBorn in California, Moulton is a Brooklyn-based video, installation, and performance artist. She attended school at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, De Ateliers, LMCC, and Harvestworks. She was also a New Commissions artist at Art in General in 2009. Moulton has presented at venues such as The Wexner Center, MoMA P.S.1, The Kitchen, Performa 09, Electronic Arts Intermix, the Andy Warhol Museum, and Socrates Sculpture Park.
Selected Press
Whispering Pines 10 at the Kitchen, Kareem Estefan, BOMBlog, April 28, 2010.
The Object Whisperer: Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines, Brian Droitcour, Rhizome, April 14, 2010.
Learn moreBorn in Madras, India, and brought up in Paris, Shivalingappa is the child of East and West. She is a world-renowned practitioner of the classical Indian Kuchipudi technique, and she received an intense and rigorous training from the master teacher Vempati Chinna Satyam. Driven by a deep desire to bring Kuchipudi to Western audiences, she has performed in important festivals and theaters around the world, earning praise and admiration from all.
Acclaimed for her rare talent by artists and connoisseurs in India and Europe, Shantala combines a perfect technique with flowing grace and a very fine sensitivity. Since the age of 13, she has worked with some of the greatest artists of our time: Maurice Bejart, Peter Brook, Bartabas, and Pina Bausch. She began dancing with Pina Bausch in 1999 and was a featured performer in Bausch’s Nefes and Bamboo Blues.
Selected Press
A Dancer rises in the East, and now the West, Julie Bloom, New York Times, December 10, 2008.
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 moreSHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. SHAWNÉ was a 20-21 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Queer Theatre & Performance Resident and is currently teaching across the New Arts Journalism and the Film Video New Media and Animation departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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 moreIranian-born visual artist Neshat is known for her hauntingly beautiful explorations of Islam and gender relations. Neshat left Iran before the revolution in 1979 and, since 1996, has been unable to return to her country due to the controversial nature of her art. Over the past 15 years, she has created work that draws from her personal experiences in exile and the widening political and ideological rift between the West and the Middle East. Neshat has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery (London), and was the recipient in 1999 of the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial. In 2009, Neshat won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice Film Festival.
Selected Press
Women Without Men: A Conversation with Shirin Neshat, Leila Darabi, PBS Frontline: Tehran Bureau, May 5, 2010.
Women Without Men - In 1953 Iran, Sisterhood Sought During a Coup, Stephen Holden, The New York Times, May 14, 2010.
Shirin Neshat: An Interview, Eleanor Heartney, Art in America, June 16, 2009.
Shirin Neshat: Women Without Men, Tehran Review.
Shirin Neshat, Arthur C. Danto, BOMB, Fall 2000.
Shirin Neshat: A long way from home, Homa Khaleeli, Guardian.co.uk, June 13, 2010.
Iran's Hidden Turmoil: Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men, Sarah Kerr, nybooks.com, May 14, 2010.
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 moreSilvia Bottiroli is a curator, researcher and organizer in the contemporary performing arts field. After completing a Ph.D. in Visual and Performing Arts at Pisa University, she attended the EU training program SPACE / Performing Arts Managers on the Move (2009-2011), and several international seminars and gatherings, such as the conference “Beyond Curating” at Pact in Essen (2011), the marathon “Truth is Concrete” at Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz (2012), the Spring Meeting at PAF / Performing Arts Forum in St Erme (2013), the program Watch and Talk at Basel Festival (2014) and the workshop Empty Stages, Crowdes Flates on Curating the Performing Arts in Cracow (2014).
Silvia is the co-author of two books and numerous papers and essays about the XX Century and contemporary performing arts scene, focusing especially on the dimension of collective creation and collaborative practices. Additionally, she has supervised diverse critical, curatorial and educational projects in collaboration with art organizations and public institutions in Italy and abroad, including with a.o. SNDO School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, Homo Novus Festival in Riga, and Ghent University, Vooruit and Campo in Ghent.
Since 2011, Silvia has served as Adjunct Professor at Bocconi University in Milan, where she teaches Methodology, Critique and Research in the Arts and Theatre, Festivals and Live Performances. From 2008 to 2011 she worked for theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio and has been part of the Critical-organizational Committee of Santarcangelo Festival, directed by Chiara Guidi/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Enrico Casagrande/Motus and Ermanna Montanari/Teatro delle Albe. From 2012 to 2016, she has served as the artistic director of Santarcangelo Festival, one of the most relevant contemporary performing arts festivals in Italy.
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 moreS.J Norman (b. 1984) is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. His career has so far spanned 18 years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between Australia, Germany, the UK, and the United States.
His practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. Working extensively with durational and spatial practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks, Norman's primary medium is the body. Drawing on embodied ancestral lineages of ceremonial praxis, Norman frequently utilises relational and process-based choreographies as a mode of structural critique: reflected in his work is an abiding interest in the space of co- and inter-corporeality, the forces that suffuse it, and how the live act might be utilised as a mean to examine, disrupt and re-inscribe prevailing systems of social power.
Norman has received major commissions from the Biennale of Sydney (AU), Performance Space New York (US), Dark Mofo (AU), The National Gallery of Australia (AU), Venice International Performance Week (IT), Spill Festival of Live Art (UK), Fierce Festival (UK), In Between Time (UK), Arnolfini (UK), Liveworks (AU), Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AU), Unsound Festival (PL), Fusebox Festival (US), Melbourne Festival (AU), Tarnanthi Festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art (AU) and Tate Modern (UK), the Science Gallery London (UK), Die Fabrikanten (AT), and the Festival of Live Art (AU), to name a few. He has received numerous awards for his work including a Sidney Myer Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship, two of Australia's most prestigious honors for art.
Aside from his artistic and curatorial practice, he is also a writer of fiction, essays, and poetry. He has won or placed in numerous literary awards, including: The Peter Blazey Prize, The Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award, The ABR/Elizabeth Jolley Award for Short Story, and the Overland/Judith Wright Prize for Poetry. His award-winning debut short story collection, Permafrost, will be published by the University of Queensland press in 2021.
Learn moreSpencer Byrne-Seres is an artist, preparator and culture-worker based in Portland, ORE. His activities range from woodworking and custom fabrication to administrative and curatorial project management for museums, non-profits, commercial galleries, colleges, small alternative spaces and for himself.
Spencer has been making research based and socially engaged projects that look at the intersection of broad systems with the daily and the personal. Spencer is interested city infrastructure, international time standards, and submarine cables. These often opaque or invisible structures allow us to connect, and inform how we think about and move around to built environment.
He currently co-runs a conceptual art club called Sunday Painters Group in collaboration with Roz Crews, and maintains 2xfourtune, a library of recycled dimensional lumber for recycle and reuse by artists around Portland.
He has recently been experimenting with kite mapping on the Oregon coast, planting signs on college campuses, and cultivating an obscure vlog personality.
Learn moreStacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR currently based in Providence, RI. She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, family, identity. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and diaCRITICS. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018).
Learn moreStephanie DeGooyer (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is Assistant Professor of English at Willamette University. Her work focuses on the intersections of law, politics and aesthetics. She is co-author of The Right to Have Rights (forthcoming from Verso Books) and is completing a manuscript titled The Aesthetics of Democracy. Beyond the academy, DeGooyer writes for the art magazine frieze. She is also co-organizer of Moonlighter Presents, a lecture series that invites scholars to speak on topics outside their field of expertise.
Learn moreStephanie Snyder is the Anne and John Hauberg Director and Curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, a position she has held since 2003. Snyder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College and completed her graduate studies in Art History and Art Education at Columbia University. In 2008, Snyder received a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation, and in 2014 she was a Fellow in the Getty’s Museum Leadership Institute. In 2013 she received an award for her critical writing from the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the CUE Foundation, New York. The author of numerous catalog essays and other writing projects, she is a regular contributor to Artforum.com.
Learn moreStephen Slappe is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the South Carolina State Museum; The Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; The Sarai Media Lab in Delhi; Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco; and The Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR. Slappe was the recipient of a Couture award from the New American Art Union in Portland for his 2009 exhibition entitled Shelter in Place.
Learn moreTharp was raised in Ontario, Oregon, and presently resides in Portland. He received his BFA from Cornell University. His work was featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has been acquired by The Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright Knox Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Reed College. He is represented by PDX Contemporary Art (Portland), Nicole Klagsbrun (New York) and Galerie Bertrand & Gruner (Geneva). Selected Press Critic's Pick: Storm Tharp, Stephanie Snyder, Artforum.com, August 3, 2010. Perfect in the Middle, Matt Stangel, Portland Mercury, June 24, 2010. Storm Tharp's eighth show at PDX Contemporary Art features latest work, 'Hercules', John Motley, The Oregonian, July 30, 2010. Storm Tharp, Richard Speer, art ltd., May 2010. Interview with Storm Tharp, Bean Gilsdorf, Daily Serving, January 4, 2010. Virtuoso Vindicated: Storm Tharp at PDX Contemporary, Jeff Jahn, PORT, January 10, 2007. Storm Tharp: Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black, Stephanie Snyder, PLAZM, September, 2008. Selected Video Storm Tharp Artist Talk at the Portland Art Museum. Storm Tharp on OPB Art Beat
Learn moreNatya Leela's Founder & Artistic Director Subashini Ganesan choreographs to express the universal emotional depths present in her form, Bharathanatyam (South Indian Classical Dance). Two time recipient of the Regional Arts & Culture Council Individual Projects Grant, her works have been showcased at local & regional festivals including Ten Tiny Dances, NW Folk Life Festival, & the Salem Library's "World of Music." As the Director of Studio 2@Zoomtopia, in SE Portland, she founded N.E.W. (New Expressive Works), an Artist in Residency Program. Ganesan also serves on RACC's Right Brain Initiative Board (Operating Committee).
Learn moreMy art is born from the everyday dance of life—landscapes, encounters, history, politics—and from the soul stories we tell each other—crystalline moments in time that hold a myriad of meanings, summoned through the nature of re-membering and witnessing. Movement & images & sounds & words are all at play in the experiments that form the choreography of a story. The eye of life comes alive through body imagination, in memory places where life and art intersect.
Collaborations with fellow poets of memory and history define the varying SO&SO&SO&SO projects, on-going since 1976. SO&SO dance and theatre works have been performed on stages, in studios, schools, and found spaces in the US and abroad. In collaboration with four other artists, I opened the doors to Dreams Well Studio, 1990-2002, a modest, lively petri dish for performance experiments and body-mind practices. Memorable offerings of dance, theatre, multi-media storytelling, kids’ performances, poetry, music, and community ceremonies came forth from this activated dream space/laboratory.
The creative lab is the bedrock of my teaching methods in universities, classrooms, and studios over the years and of continuing practice as a writer, choreographer, and community activist.
No Strangers Here Today (premier 2008) and The Hillsboro Story (premier 2010) are multi-voiced investigations that illuminate the role my hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio, played in American civil rights history and the journey to encounter that history directly. Both theatre works, with soundtracks and live music scores by David Ornette Cherry, toured nationally and are expanded into a non-fiction book, The Hillsboro Story/A Kaleidoscope History (Spuyten-Duyvil Press, NYC).
Nu History, an educational model designed to empower students to investigate history directly, and Great Serpent, a multimedia performance score, are in development in concert with Mr. Music/theme & thought, featuring the collaborations and vision of jazz/world music composer, the late David Ornette Cherry.
I am deeply grateful to walk this path and give thanks to the great teachers who have led the way and the collaborators with whom I have shared and continue to share this journey. I believe that creative practice is essential to nourishing and understanding oneself in relationship to the natural and social worlds. The intention is to awaken the senses, embody the voice, ignite the action, and enjoy the process.
“We are not condemned to accept the future. We may invent it.”
--Eduardo Galeano
Learn moreSutapa Biswas was born in Santinekethan, India, in 1962. Her poignant films and poetic artworks have been shown in museums and art galleries worldwide. Biswas studied at the University of Leeds from 1981-85, at the Slade School of Art from 1988-1990, and at the Royal College of Art between 1996-1998. She works in a wide range of media including installation, film and video, drawing and painting. Her works are conceptual and since the mid 1990s Biswas has been interested in exploring themes of time and space particularly in relationship to gender, identity and desire.
She has exhibited extensively internationally, and her recent solo shows include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2000), Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (2004), and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon (2006). She has shown at numerous group exhibitions including: From Tarzan To Rambo, Tate Modern, London (2002-2003), Art Through the Eye of A Needle, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2001), The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (1998), and the 6th Havana Biennale, Cuba (1997), Melbourne International Arts Festival (2006). Biswas was a Fellow at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1990 and 1992. She is currently a Reader at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London and lives and works in London. Biswas is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, USA.
Learn moreSymara Sarai, a Portland, OR native currently residing in Brooklyn, NY, has immersed herself globally in interdisciplinary and choreographic studies with deep recognition. Named Dance Magazines’ 2025 “Top 25 to Watch,” a 2023 Bessie Winner for Breakout Choreographer, and a recipient of the Dai Ailian Foundation Scholarship based in Trinidad and Tobago, she is known to be a courageously committed performer and maker. The New York Times stated, “Sarai is a daring solo improviser, and her uninhibited spirit infuses.” Sarai is a 2019 graduate of the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, State University of New York. She was most recently a MoMA PS1 Greater New York Artist and was commissioned in 2025 by Danspace Project and BOFFO. Between 2024 and 2026, they were a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and an Abrons Arts Center Performance AIRspace Resident. She participated in Live Artery Festival 2025, Triple Canopy Symposium 2025, and more. Their work as a performer and maker has been reviewed and featured in prominent publications such as The New York Times and Brooklyn Rail. She has most notably danced with Urban Bush Women, Joanna Kotze, and Ogemdi Ude, among others.
Learn moreJacob Ciocci is an artist; a current Eyebeam Fellow; one third of the American art collective Paper Rad; and a prolific producer of music, installations, websites, and animations. David Wightman is completing a PhD in Music Composition at UC San Diego where he is a Lecturer of Pop Music Studies. Some of his many musical projects include Fortress of Amplitude, Powdered Wigs, and Chariots of Fire. Together, Jacob and David connect like Voltron in the high-NRG electronic music band Extreme Animals. They have toured the country every summer for the past 8 years presenting their music, videos, and art.
Selected Press
Eleven Evocations (For Paper Rad), Ed Halter, Rhizome, September 2, 2009.
Learn moreWith legendary bits like their signature audience participation costume changes and Guns n Roses trapeze act, The Wau Wau Sisters are widely recognized by their peers for revolutionizing circus aesthetics and carving out a new niche for circus events – where high physical skill, comedy chops, burlesque and outright nudity mix with just the right splashes of chaos and irreverence are so close and palpable you can see the tear in their fishnets, the sinew of their muscles and the sweat on their skin! Don’t miss them as they fly through their trapeze routines with all the adrenaline and abandon of a rock concert, deconstruct the humor and paradigms of country and heavy metal music, while playing matching guitars and barely sitting on one another’s shoulders! They do it all in a festive, freewheeling hour that keeps the audience guessing every second, who’s in control and for how long?!
They have made appearances at these fantastic festivals and venues: The World Famous Spiegeltent,(VAC, Edinburgh, Auckland, Sydney, NYC), Lincoln Center (NYC), The Mayan Theater (Los Angeles), The Roundhouse (London), Olivia Cruise Lines, Feast Festival (Adelaide), Soho Bar (London), El Cid (Los Angeles), The Grammys (Los Angeles Staples Center), Irving Plaza (NYC), The Palms (Las Vegas), CBGB’s (NYC), The Hammerstein Ballroom (NYC), Joe’s Pub (NYC), The Bowery Ballroom (NYC), The Henry Fonda Theater (Los Angeles), The Pica Festival (Portland, OR), Edinburgh Fringe Festival/The Pleasance (Scotland), The Jermyn St. Theater (West End, London) , The Art House, Crown & Anchor (Provincetown, MA), Philadelphia Fringe Festival (Philadelphia, PA), Sydney Festival, Auckland Festival among countless other cities and venues!!
They’ve been profiled or featured in the pages of: The Village Voice, The New York Post, Time Out New York, Time Out London, The New York Times, Jane, BUST and New York Magazine, The Guardian, Metro, VENUS, The Sun, LA Weekly, GONYC, French Vogue, Spectacle, The Australian, The Times (London, Scotland), Sydnay Morning Herald and countless others!
Television & Film exploits include the feature film “Shortbus” by John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), the film “Who’s the Top?” by Jenny Livingston (Paris Is Burning), ABC Australia’s “Sideshow”, Nipon TV’s “Good Morning Japan”, “The Isaac Mizrahi Show” w/ Rosie Perez, NPR’s “The Next Big Thing”, “Live From Downtown”, “The Sharon Osbourne Show”, and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Learn moreTim Smith-Stewart is a queer interdisciplinary artist based in Seattle who uses text as his primary medium for creating installations, performances and zines. For the past seven years, Tim has primarily been creating work in collaboration with artist/electrical engineer Jeffrey Azevedo. They are currently developing Salvage Rituals: a dance set on six piezoelectric tiles to premiere in the fall of 2019. Visual and durational iterations will be presented at various locations including Seattle University in the fall of 2018.
Most recently they premiered Awaiting Oblivion—Temporary Solutions for surviving the dystopian future we find ourselves within at present at On the Boards in February 2017 and The Perpetual Insurrection of Claude Cahun at the Henry Art Gallery in October 2017.
Selections of Awaiting Oblivion... have been presented at: On The Boards NW New Works festival (SEA), Risk/Reward Festival (PDX), Velocity Dance Center (SEA) and Fresh Oysters Performance Research (MSP). Tim and Jeffrey have presented multiple installations including their video/paper tapestry installation Queer City Lost at New Tomorrow, Erasure (curated by the Lion’s Main Art Collective), and the Velocity Dance Center Big Bang. They also presented Stained glass in my replacement church at the 2014 Lofi Arts Festival.
From 2010-2013 Tim & Jeffrey co-created The Eternal Glow Project—a four part performance/installation which premiered work at The Seattle Center Next50 (The Eternal Glow of Electric Hearts), On the Boards NW New Works Festival 2013 (Ω<1),and Lofi Arts Festival 2013 (Less than red, more than violet).
Learn moreHalf Straddle is an Obie-winning, Brooklyn-based ensemble of performers and designers that makes plays, performances, videos, and music led by Artistic Director Tina Satter. This critically acclaimed company began in 2008, and has toured its shows to cities throughout U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Tina Satter is an American writer, director, and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn-based, Obie-winning theater company Half Straddle. She is a recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award; a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Award, and was named an Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York. She has written and directed 9 full-length shows and a number of smaller performance and video pieces with Half Straddle that have premiered in New York City. Tina’s work has been presented at theaters and festivals in Europe, Asia, Australia, and other U.S. cities. Tina has had residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, LMCC, The Performing Garage, Kitchen L.A.B., MASS MoCA, and New Museum for Contemporary Art. She’s been a visiting artist at Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Reed College, and Fordham University—and a visiting playwriting professor at the University of Michigan. Drawing on her recent teaching work, Tina has been developing and leading generative writing and directing workshops to participants from a range of backgrounds and experience. Tina attended Mac Wellman’s graduate playwriting program at Brooklyn College and received an M.A. from Reed College and a B.A. from Bowdoin College. Her first collection of plays, Seagull (Thinking of you), was published by 53rd State Press in 2014.
Learn moreTravis Stewart is a contemporary Northwest artist of Chinook, Rogue River, and Kalapuya descent. He lives in Grand Ronde, Oregon, and works in a variety of mediums to depict stories defined by the cultural landscape and design of the Willamette Valley and Columbia River people. He also works as a curator at Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center (Grand Ronde, OR) and has devoted his life to the preservation of the art and culture of the tribes of Western Oregon. Travis is a founding member of the Shawash Ili?i Kanim Tilixam, which is a nonprofit cultural preservation group and canoe family that works to impart traditional teachings to at-risk tribal youth through song, dance, language, and art.
Learn moreWendy Red Star was born in Billings, Montana just outside of the Crow Indian reservation where she was raised. She grew up in a multi-cultural family. Her mother is of Irish decent, her father a full blood Crow Indian and her older sister is Korean. Wendy left the Crow Indian reservation when she was eighteen to attend Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana where she studied sculpture. She then went on to earn her MFA in sculpture at UCLA. Wendy has worked as an adjunct professor of fine art at Portland State University for five and a half years. In 2012 to 2013 Wendy was the manger of Chief Plenty Coups State Park located within the Crow Indian Reservation in south-central Montana. The park preserves the log home, sacred spring, museum, and farmstead of Chief Plenty Coups and is a National Historic Landmark. Wendy is currently the Program Associate for the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation.
Wendy Red Star’s work explores the intersection between life on the Crow Indian reservation and the world outside of that environment. She thinks of herself as a Crow Indian cultural archivist speaking sincerely about the experience of being a Crow Indian in contemporary society.
Her work has been shown at the Missoula Museum of the Arts, Missoula, MT, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM, The Fondation Cartier L’Art Contemporain, Paris, France, The CSULB gallery, Long Beach, CA, Research & Development, Chicago, IL, The Museum Tower at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, And/Or gallery, Dallas, TX, The UCLA New Wight gallery, Los Angeles, CA, The L.A. Municipal Art gallery, Los Angeles, CA, The Domaine De Kerguehennc, Brittany, France, The Hudson D. Walker gallery, Provincetown, MA, The Plush Gallery, Dallas TX, The Laura Bartlett Gallery, London, England, The Luckman gallery, Los Angeles, CA,The Volitant gallery, Austin, Texas, Eiteljorg Museum of Native American & Western Fine Art, Yellowstone Art Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Studio Visit with Wendy Red Star in Portland Oregon from Amelia winger-bearskin on Vimeo.
Learn moreYUKIO SUZUKI studied butoh at the Asbestos-kan (Asbestos House) from 1997 and danced in the works of Ko Murobushi and other artists. In 2000 he started the Yukio Suzuki Company. He gained attention in the dance world for his documentary style of directing and choreography that uses compelling placement of dancers with a strong emphasis on their physical presence. In recent years he has expanded his activities with projects like choreographing for dancers of the Tokyo City Ballet Company. With a highly sensitive consciousness of the body, he conducts programs around the country aimed at creating dancer-specific works. In 2008, he received the prestigious Choreographer of the Next Generation (Grand Prize) at the Toyota Choreography Awards.
Learn moreZoe Scofield (she/her) is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and a dance and visual artist based in Seattle, WA, and Los Angeles, CA. Zoe is the co-artistic director and founder with Juniper Shuey of zoe | juniper, a dance and visual art company since 2005. Her work has been commissioned and presented by Jacob’s Pillow, New York Live Arts, Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts, On the Boards, RedCat, MASS MoCA, The Frye Art Museum, The Joyce Theater, PS 122, Carolina Performing Arts, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Zoe works in performance, video installation, photography, opera, and film. She has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Princess Grace Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the National Performance Network, and more. Zoe’s current piece, Tell the truth and shame the devil, is a live dance and music collaboration with Xiu Xiu. Zoe has an MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts.
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