Artists Archive
T
ariella tai is a video artist, film scholar, and independent programmer from Queens, New York. They are interested in Black performance and cultural vernaculars in film, television and media studies. They are one half of “the first and the last,” a fellowship, workshop and screening series supporting and celebrating the work of Black women and femmes in film, video and new media art. They have shown work at Anthology Film Archives, the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival, Portland Institute For Contemporary Art, Northwest Film Center, Boathouse Microcinema, Wa Na Wari, the Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival, MOCA and Smack Mellon. Their most recent video work "safehouse" premiered at Trinity Square Video in Toronto as part of group show "Architectures after the Asylum" curated by Sajdeep Soomal.
Learn moreKayin Talton Davis started off in an artistic direction from a very young age, but later learned her love for math and science and pursued a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering at Portland State University. Her design projects were always influenced by a drive to be accessible to all. She started the soapbox theory in 2001, as a way to express herself creatively. And through these mediums, her interest is always in creating something that is positive, helpful and accessible to all but especially children from culturally underrepresented communities.
Learn moreFounded by Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez in 2003, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a young Mexican theater company reflecting the new dynamics of contemporary Mexican culture. They develop their multimedia stage productions as mechanisms to link work and life and give voice to overlooked moments in social and political historical. Lagartijas has toured widely throughout Mexico and Europe and has received awards from the Impatience Festival and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
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Learn moreRobert Trafford is a journalist by training, and an assistant director with Forensic Architecture, a human rights research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, with whom he has worked since 2017. There, he leads investigative research projects, writes and edits for exhibitions and publications, and supports other team members to bring investigations to publication, and to think about how their research can be activated across a range of forums in pursuit of accountability. His work with Forensic Architecture has covered the extrajudicial killing of civilians by Cameroon’s special forces, chemical weapons attacks by the Assad regime, and counter-protest violence by US police. He has jointly led investigations into the 2020 right-wing terror attack in Hanau, Germany, the 2011 killing of Mark Duggan by London’s police, and the agency’s acclaimed TRIPLE-CHASER investigation, which premiered at the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York.
Learn moreSarah T. Hamid (she/her/no preference) is an immigrant, Muslim, and abolitionist working at the intersection of technology and global/domestic warfare. Currently the PDX Lead Organizer for Freedom to Thrive, she co-founded and helps advise the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, an archiving and knowledge-sharing network for organizers building community defense against the design, roll-out, and experimentation of carceral technologies, and serves on the coordinating team for the inside/outside research collaboration, the Prison Tech Research Group. Sarah also sits on the board of the Lucy Parsons Lab in Chicago, and helped create the #8toAbolition campaign: a police and prison abolition resource built during the 2020 uprisings against state violence.
Learn moreTai Carpenter (she/her) is a writer, gallerist and community archivist with a passion for social impact in the realms of art and civil rights. She is also the founder of Compose Yourself Magazine, an independent online publication spotlighting music, culture and social justice. She has curated political art installations, facilitated panel discussions and organized artmaking workshops centered on civic action with Portland Art Museum, University of Oregon’s Special Collections and University Archives, Society of American Archivists, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Shift Collective and Documenting the Now, among others.
Her work allows her to intersect two passions, art and civil rights, to create a more equitable and creative world by utilizing critical research to facilitate dialogues around art in relation to current social movements.
Tai is currently the Board President of Don’t Shoot Portland, a community-based advocacy nonprofit and Director of The Black Gallery. Most recently she was Gallery Coordinator for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, Gallery Manager at HOLDING Contemporary and an Archives & Records Management Coordinator at the City of Portland Archives.
Learn moreHoping to get the unruly Tarek Halaby (performer) out of her hair, his mother signed 12 year old Tarek up for a jazz dance class. He hasn't stopped dancing since. His formal training continued at The University of Iowa, where he received his BFA in Dance Performance. During his three year stint in New York, Tarek worked closely with The Powerful People and the company ChameckiLerner. Other credits include working with Alexandra Beller, Gerald Casel, Doug Elkins, Chris DC Ramos, and behind the scenes with Susan Marshall. In September of 2004, Tarek moved to Brussels, Belgium to live, dance and study at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S.), under the direction of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
Learn moreThe Javaad Alipoor Company (TJAC) is a contemporary theater company that makes work for a changing world and a global audience. Rooted in experimental and multiplatform practice, their work asks the most pressing questions we all face. With a commitment to internationalism, complexity, diversity, and fun, they make work for the twenty-first century, transforming what people think theater can be and what it can do.
Learn moreTiona Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose practice explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. McClodden has exhibited and screened her work at many institutions and galleries, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and more recently, Performance Space New York. The recipient of many awards and fellowships, she most recently awarded the 2018-2019 Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism and won the 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. McClodden also curated the exhibitions A Recollection. + Predicated. featured within Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental, presented in collaboration with Bowerbird in Philadelphia in 2017 and The Kitchen in New York earlier this year.
Learn moreTristen Edwards is an attorney at Metropolitan Public Defender, where she represents individuals charged with major felony crimes and works on policy issues related to promoting the use of restorative justice as an alternative to prosecution. Tristen is a Coordinating Committee Member of the Restorative Justice Coalition of Oregon and leads the coalition’s legislative advocacy efforts. She also serves on Governor Kotek’s Racial Justice Council’s Criminal Justice Reform Committee and chairs the Council’s Subcommittee on the Department of Corrections, which focuses on supporting restorative justice efforts led by incarcerated men. Tristen holds a strong commitment to diversity and is the founder and chair of the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. Tristen has been recognized for her work amplifying the voices of marginalized people and promoting effective and compassionate responses to harm by the Oregon New Lawyers Division, the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association, and Oregon Women Lawyers.
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