Artists Archive
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Andrew Tay is a hybrid performer, choreographer, curator and DJ. He is the cofounder of Wants&Needs Danse with Sasha Kleinplatz. Together, they produce the popular dance events Short&Sweet and Piss in the Pool which take place in non-traditional venues in Montreal. Tay received the Buddies in Bad Times Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation at the SummerWorks Performance Festival for his work Fame Prayer / EATING (2016). He was named the first artistic curator at Le Centre de Création O Vertigo (CCOV) in Montreal and recently became the Artistic Director of Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) one of Canada’s oldest contemporary dance companies. Tay actively thinks about community, irreverence and resistance in both his performance and curatorial practices.
Learn moreAsher Hartman is an interdisciplinary artist, director, writer, and creator of live performances. His works operate in the charged space between performance art, experimental theater, and immersive installation. In this sphere of intensely amplified perception, Hartman generates works that grapple with the myriad of social and political issues that dominate this current era of chronic crisis. Often situating personal and emotional history in relation with the ideologies that structure Western culture, his works are dense, visual, poetic, embodied texts, where clown and cringe humor are layered upon moments of desperate rage and arousal. In every work, Hartman implants evidence of his own trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit indelible feelings.
Hartman received his BA in Theater from University of California, Los Angeles and his MFA in Studio Arts from CalArts, where he has since become a faculty member in the CalArts School of Theater. He has also taught at Otis College of Art and Design, and University of California, Riverside. He is the founder and chief of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of artist-actors for whom he has written and directed since 2010. Hartman was also one half of the performative duo Krystal Krunch (with Haruko Tanaka), and over the course of their collaboration the two artists taught intuition-building work to artists, activists, and interested members of the public. From 1999-2005, Hartman co-directed Crazy Space, a performance art venue that featured artists such as Dark Bob, Mariel Caranza, Mario Gardener, Jamie McMurry, Johana Went, Kristina Wong, Liz Young, and Paul Zaloom.
Hartman's recent projects include The Mommy Leaks the Floor at New Hollywood Theater, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Blessed with Switch with Jasmine Orpilla at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024) and University of California, Irvine, The Art of Performance (2024); It’s Better to Start Out Ugly at JOAN, Los Angeles, CA (2023) and The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2023). Past Gawdafful National Theater performances include The Dope Elf, Yale Union, Portland, OR (2019) revised as Organized Around the Erotics of Doing You In at The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2021); Sorry, Atlantis, Or Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA (2017); The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2016); and Annie Okay!, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2010). Hartman's recent publications include Mad Clot on a Holy Bone (X Artists’ Books, 2020); Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Learn moreChloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree, Canadian interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
Learn moreDB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an interdisciplinary media artist who explores audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience. He frequently emphasizes the generative role of error as an opportunity for creation, resulting in media-centered projects driven by DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations, and persistent, inquisitive experimentation with available materials.
His work has garnered awards from esteemed organizations including the Jersey City Arts Council, Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Precipice Fund grant funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation and administered by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). His visual art, performances, curatorial & collaborative programming have been presented internationally at A4 Arts Foundation; the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival; Onassis Foundation; ICA at MECA&D; Luggage Store Gallery; Soundwave ((7)) Biennial; PICA; Portland Art Museum; the Honolulu Museum of Art; Honolulu Biennial 2019.
Learn moreLinda Austin deploys movement, sound, text, visuals, and props to create non-linear, poetic works laced with an eccentric wit, teetering on the edge between the immediately reprehensible and resolutely mysterious. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of Performance Works NW, a Portland non-profit dedicated to the cultivation of experimental performance. Awards include a 2019 Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship, the 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Merce Cunningham Award, and a 2015 RACC Performing Arts Fellowship. Austin has presented work at Performance Space 122, the Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, PICA’s TBA Festival, the Risk/Reward Festival, and On the Boards NW New Works Festival, among others. Her work has been supported by residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. Current projects: Ordinary Devotions (solo), a world, a world (ensemble project), and The Thief & the Traveler (collaboration with Allie Hankins.)
Selected Press
"Stop Making Sense: Linda Austin's 'A Head of Time'," Bob Hicks, Oregon Arts Watch, March 26, 2011.
Learn 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.
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