Artists Archive
Atlanta, Georgia, is a hotbed of contemporary art with an abundance of choreographers and performance artists seeking affordable and accessible venues. Recognizing this scarcity of performance space as an opportunity, curator and lighting designer Malina Rodriguez founded Dance Truck: a mobile project that uses the back of a rental truck as a stage. With its inventive technical direction, diverse artistic lineup, and stunning visual platform, Dance Truck has been an enormous success in “bringing dance to the people” at festivals, museums, parks, and streets throughout the Dirty South.
Selected Press
Dance Truck Pulls into the Contemporary, Andrew Alexander, Creative Loafing Atlanta, February 9, 2011.
Learn moreLike an explosion, DBC unleashes on assault of screaming synthesizers, demonic beats, laser lit fog and passionate singing akin to a Black Mass given by Morrissey.
The Dangerous Boys Club is the baby birthed by Aaron Montaigne (singer), Mac Mann (Synth/electronique Organ) of the legendary 90′s harcore bands Antioch Arrow and Get Hustle. Started in the fog of Portland Oregon in 2009, DBC adopted Mark Burden (bass) of Silentist / Glass Candy and Sam Ott (electronique drums) of Year Future to create a very Unique experimental / pop / noise / dark wave inspired by Roxy Music, Soul Side, Suicide the Misfits and David Bowie.
in 2010 DBC released “VRIL” on Nathan Howdeshell of the GOSSIP’s Portland lable Fast Weapons and toured the west coast numerous times and tour of the east coast playing with bands such as Cold Cave, Salem, The Soft Moon and Bronze.
DBC’s second full release “PRIS” will be released on DAIS records in spring 2012 and will be touring the states and Europe.
Learn moreDan Gilsdorf is a Portland-based multimedia artist whose works address sculptural physicality using immaterial technologies such as digital video, sound, and language. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Parko Gallery (Tokyo); the East/West project (Berlin); Artists’ Television Access (San Francisco); and Disjecta and Marylhurst Art Gym (Portland). Gilsdorf has been awarded grants and residencies from organizations including the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Selected Press
Interstate, Isaac Peterson, PORT, August 9, 2005.
Dark Corners: Dan Gilsdorf, Richard Speer, Willamette Week, November 26, 2008.
Selected Videos
Dan Gilsdorf talks about art and technology at DorkbotPDX (Vimeo)
Learn moreWinnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial, and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to manual forms of animation by projecting, layering, and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors. Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), The International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), and the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). Barrow is the 2007 winner of the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton award and the 2008 winner of the Images Festival’s Images Prize. Barrow is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.
Learn moreDaniel Kok is an alumnus of BA (Honours) Fine Art & Critical Theory at Goldsmiths College (London), MA (Distinction) Solo/Dance/Authorship (SODA) at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT, Berlin), and the Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies (APASS) in Brussels. From 2005 to 2010, he was Associate Artist at The Substation (Singapore). In 2008, he received the Young Artist Award from National Arts Council (Singapore).
His performance work deals with the relational politics in spectatorship and audienceship. Q&A (2009), Planet Romeo (2011), Cheerleader of Europe (2014), ALPHA (2014), PIIGS (2015) and Bunny (2016) have been presented across Asia, Europe, Australia, and the USA. Kok is currently researching queerness and a notion of trans-individuality.
As a pole dancer, he won the SG Pole Challenge (2012) and represented Singapore at the International Pole Championships (IPC, 2013). He also identifies as a bondage practitioner and Thai masseur.
Learn moreDanielle Kelly is a Las Vegas-based artist and writer, who received her BA from Beloit College and her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Working in disciplines ranging from installation to performance, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Portland.
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 moreDavid Commander’s In Flight questions the reliability of two modern comforts: airplanes and news media. Aboard a crashing airliner, a banal drama unfolds as the puppet passengers relax with daytime talk show reruns and SkyMall infomercials. In Flight mocks our cultural embrace of misinformation and our limitless potential for mass apathy, even in the face of immediate danger. Commander has been a member of Big Art Group for 12 years, working as a performer, assistant director, videographer, and miniature set/prop builder. Outside of the group, he has written, directed, and performed in his own works at the NYC International Fringe Festival, the 2007 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and the Toy Theater After Dark Festival in Minneapolis
Learn moreDavid Eckard is an artist, educator, and performer based in Portland, Oregon. His practice as a visual artist includes fabricated objects, drawings and prints, installations and performances. Through these varied approaches and diverse presentational strategies, Eckard fabricates residual, fictive artifacts, creates biomorphic, sexualized schematics, assembles arrested moments and orchestrates transient theatrics and temporary monuments for incidental audiences in civic spaces. Futility, authority, theatricality and persona enter into his creative explorations as notions to investigate, critique, utilize and exploit. Solo shows include Kim Foster Galley, New York; Fassbender Gallery, Chicago; Consolidated Works, Seattle; and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland. He has performed at PICA’s TBA Festival in 2004, 2006, and 2011, and for Northwest New Works at On The Boards, Seattle, in 2005. Eckard was awarded the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship for 2010, was one of the inaugural recipients of the Hallie Ford Fellowship in Visual Arts for 2010, and was a Juror’s Award recipient at the 2006 Oregon Biennial. Selected Press David Eckard's Liveries (summer stock) at Mark Woolley Gallery, Jeff Jahn, PORT, July 28, 2007.
Learn moreDavid Harrelson is the Cultural Resources Department Manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. He is a Grand Ronde tribal member from the Bean-Menard-Sengretta family. He was raised by a mountaineer and grandparents who worked in education and health care. Among his lineal Oregon ancestors of recent memory he counts the owner of a logging company, a mobile butcher, chief of police, and Kalapuya headman. David is active in his community and currently serves on the Oregon State Advisory Committee for Historic Preservation (SACHP) as well as the Oregon Arts Commission. He is a former board member of the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg, OR, and has previously been a conversation leader for Oregon Humanities' Conversation Project, where he led sessions on the topics of monuments and place. Working for over ten years in the field of cultural resources, David continues to champion the protection of archaeology sites, maintenance of ancestral lifeways, and proliferation of indigenous art forms throughout his Tribe's homelands centered in Western Oregon.
Learn moreA multi-disciplinary artist and 2006 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography, Dayna Hanson has been creating dance, film and performance in Seattle for more than 20 years. She was one-half of dance/theater company 33 Fainting Spells and a founding member of Run/Remain Ensemble. She has performed her work at venues including Dance Theater Workshop, On the Boards, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, and ICA in London. Hanson’s award-winning dance films have screened worldwide at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and Melbourne International Festival of Arts, and can be found on First Run Features’ Dance For Camera DVD.
As Co-Artistic Director of 33 Fainting Spells, Dayna Hanson co-curated New Dance Cinema from 1999–2003. With 33 Fainting Spells and independently, Hanson’s award-winning dance films have screened worldwide, including at Edinburgh International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Festival Internacional de Videodanza de Buenos Aires and Los Angeles International Short Film Festival. Hanson recently directed a mini-documentary for MTV.com about Seattle band The Dutchess and the Duke and choreographed a dance scene for Korean director Tae Yong Kim’s feature film, Late Autumn.
Selected Press
A clever musing on our demise, Alice Kaderlan, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 2, 2006.
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 moreDean & Britta are Dean Wareham and Britta Philips, formerly of iconic 90s band Luna. Started by Wareham in 1992, Luna made seven studio albums and played their final shows in 2005. Prior to Luna, Wareham fronted Galaxie 500. Philips joined Luna in 2000, before which she played in several bands, starred in the movie Satisfaction, and was the singing voice of 80s cartoon character JEM. The duo released L’Avventura, an album of covers and duets, in 2005, and Back Numbers in 2009. Dean & Britta have scored several films, most notably Noah Baumbach’s The Squid & The Whale.
Selected Press
For Warhol Visitors and Would-be Superstars, 4 Minutes of Mystique, Stephen Holden, The New York Times, January 19, 2009.
Learn moreDean Daderko is Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His first exhibition at CAMH, It is what it is. Or is it? (2012), explored how contemporary artists have recast the readymade to address a variety of social, political, and temporal concerns as this artistic form nears its 100th anniversary. Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane (2013) brings together a selection of works made between 1965 and 2010 by two foundational performance artists with multidisciplinary practices working in New York and Paris respectively. His upcoming CAMH exhibitions include a solo exhibition of documentary work by LaToya Ruby Frazier, which will travel to the ICA Boston. Previously working as an independent curator based in New York, Daderko has mounted curatorial projects in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montreal, Canada; and Vilnius, Lithuania, among other locations. He has also organized programming for Art in General, Artists’ Space, The Kitchen, and Visual AIDS in New York. Daderko has been a graduate seminar instructor at Yale University School of Art where he led the course Queer Strategies, and a visiting curator at Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas in Buenos Aires; Cooper Union School of the Arts in New York; the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris; M.I.T. in Cambridge, MA; and the University of Houston. He writes and speaks extensively in conjunction with his exhibitions, and his writing has been published in catalogues by CAMH, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Americas’ Society, and Rutgers University.
Learn moreYou seen her on BET comic view, and also she was a finalist in funny is Mom’s in America. She has been in the business over 30 years and has open for all the fellow comedians such as Jamie Foxx,Sinbad, And recently perform at the Northwest black comedy festival with Marsha Warfield that is just a few. She believes laughter is a healer and is known as comedy nurse because she knows the power of laughter, she is the diva Comedy Debbie Wooten.
Learn moreDeborah Hay is an American choreographer, dancer, dance theorist, and author working in the field of experimental postmodern dance. She is one of the original founders of the Judson Dance Theater.
Learn moreFounded in 2015, Deep Under Ground (DUG) is a community-based arts platform that curates intentional gatherings in support of local artistry striving to encourage young, diverse talent to change the landscape of the Portland arts community. Through organizing and making art, DUG’s intention is to uplift individuals and synchronize different avenues of expression; emphasizing artistic cultivation as an essential outlet to every individual and community.
Learn moreDemian DinéYazhi´ (born 1983) is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero-cis-gendered communities post colonization. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupy and refuse to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.
Instagram @heterogeneoushomosexual
Learn moreDescending Pharaohs is an ethno-psych project soundtracking the alleyway fight scenes to near-eastern films of the ’70s. Half structure/half improvisation, drawing influence from Arabic/Anatolian electric music, spiritual jazz, British psych, and the heavier side of Krautrock, Descending Pharaohs is Ricardo Esway (Militant Children’s Hour, Gazillions, Gamelan Sekar) on guitar; Larold Will (Les Etrangers, Topiary Kings, Brainwarmer) on drums and electronics; and Theo Khoury (Tunneler, Gaza Tunnels) on bass, oud, and djoura.
Learn moredevynn emory is a mixed Lenape/Blackfoot transgender choreographer, dance artist, bodyworker, ceremonial guide, acute care and hospice nurse currently working as a COVID-19 nurse in NYC. emory's performance company devynnemory/beastproductions draws from their multiple in-between states of being, holding space for liminal bodies bridging multiple planes of transition. their formal dance training pulls on mathematical and mapped scores to support bodies decolonizing and bleeding human truths, opening peep holes and revelations for collective performers and audiences. they are currently working on a trilogy centering medical mannequins processing transitional mediumship. deadbird with it’s touring public altar can anyone help me hold this body will be first. Cindy Sessions and boiling-rain are to follow which are interactive storytelling projects with an elder mannequin holding a collection of grandmother wisdom. As a healer they have dual licenses in "western" and "eastern" bodywork and run a private practice sage-massage that offers end of life consultation, channeled counseling and hands on care modalities in conversation with thresholds. you can find their work at devynnemory.com and sage-massage.
Learn moreDez Ramirez is a writer, filmmaker, artist and DJ. Known as DJ La Cosmica, Dez has been a member of the Noche Libre DJ Collective since 2018, and has hosted, recorded and produced episodes of Radio Noche Libre! on XRAY FM. Currently living between the Mojave Desert, Los Angeles, and Portland - La Cosmica's style and musical curation ranges widely as she draws from the influences of dramatic wilderness, urban vibrancy, and the pulse of collective and radical liberation in the communities in which she lives and creates. Recent flavors consist of electrocumbia, electronica, house, synth, R&B, bass, reggaeton, norteno, salsa, and disco.
Find her at:
@silver_mother
Learn moreDisorientalism is an ongoing collaboration between Katherine Behar and Marianne M. Kim. Through live performance, video, and photographic projects, the duo explores how technologized labor, junk culture, and consumerism mediate race, gender and bodies. In character, the Disorientals expose our hapless submersion in junk culture, and our failed attempts to rationalize it by mistakenly resorting to industriousness and work. Recent exhibitions include de la Cruz Collection in Miami, the Poznan Biennial, and The Wassiac Project. Behar and Kim have individually been supported with grants from the Franklin Furnace Fund, NEA/Dance USA, Meet the Composer, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the U.S. Consulate General in Leipzig.
Learn moreDJ Black Daria is a Portland-based DJ and selector of R&B, hip hop, funk, afro caribbean and latinx sounds. She co-hosts Everyday Mixtapes on XRAY.FM with DJ Shi Shi (Saturdays 5-6pm) and is a part of the Noche Libre collective. She draws inspiration from her Black and Latinx roots and brings a variety of bass-heavy, beat-laden sounds to the Northwest scene. She holds a residency at Dig a Pony and the 1905.
Learn moreDJ Klyph has been bringing the very best from the northwest and worldwide to the airwaves since ’09. Featuring hip hop, funk, soul, and providing a platform for artists that are often underserved to share exclusive content like in-studio interviews and on-air rhyme sessions. A fan of conscious hip hop with a lean towards the golden era east coast sound, Klyph utilizes the multimedia platforms of radio broadcast, podcasting, and visuals to impact the community consciousness and real good music.
Learn moreFounded in 2014, Dohee Lee Puri Arts (DLPA) is the producing organization of performance artist, Dohee Lee. Our mission is to create and tour multi-disciplinary performance rituals under the direction of Dohee Lee. We utilize art to heal fractured relationships in the urban environment – relationships between humans and the land and between individuals and their communities. We say "performance ritual" because Dohee's work arises from her intensive training in the practices of mudang (Korean shamanism). This tradition combines singing, dancing, drumming, costuming into communal village healing gatherings. DLPA applies this ancient, indigenous approach to community healing to our urban village of the Bay Area, updated with modern tools of multi-disciplinary immersive art. Since her arrival in the US in 2002, Dohee Lee (Artistic Director) has been a vital contributor to both the traditional and contemporary arts landscape of the Bay Area, working with Kronos Quartet, Degenerate Art Ensemble, Anna Halprin, Amara Tabor Smith, inkBoat, Kunst-Stoff Dance. Recent awards: 2016 Alpert Prize, Music; 2016 Rainin Grant; Korean Americans for Peace, 2016 Korean American Peace Award; 2015 CCI; 2015 Doris Duke Impact, Theater; 2015 Gerbode, Choreographer; 2015 Ucross Residency; 2014 Djerassi Residency; 2014 William and Flora Hewlett Honorary Fellowship; 2013 East Bay Community Foundation; 2013 Creative Capital; 2013 MAP.
Learn moreHailed by Ms. Magazine’s end of the century issue as “a choreographer making great leaps forward into the 21st century,” Donna Uchizono is the Artistic Director of Donna Uchizono Company, a New York-based company established in 1990. Since her choreographic debut in 1990, Uchizono rapidly emerged from the “downtown scene” as a choreographer known for her spicy movement, wit, and rich invention. Donna Uchizono Company has toured throughout the United States, Europe, South America, Asia and Australia and has created work for notables Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright, Paula Vogel, MacArthur Fellow, David Hammons, and neurologist/writer Oliver Sacks.
In 2011, after decades of critically-acclaimed dance works that toured nationally and internationally, Donna Uchizono was identified by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and Dance Heritage Coalition as a master choreographer whose works require preservation. Donna Uchizono Company received a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts award for Phase 1 of the archival and preservation of her work.
In addition to being a Unites States Artist, Guggenheim Fellow and a “Bessie” award winner, Uchizono has been recognized by many awards including United States Artist Award in dance, an Alpert Award in Dance, Rockefeller, the National Dance Project, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Capital Foundation, Altria Group, Inc., the Jerome Foundation, Dance Magazine Seed Grant, the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, Arts International, Foundation for Contemporary Performance, Metropolitan Life Foundation/ADF Commission, the National Performance Network, the Suitcase Fund, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Greenwall Foundation, Meet the Composer, and the Bossak Heilbron Charitable Foundation. Uchizono has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and five New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
Learn moreDorothée Munyaneza (Marseille, France) is a singer, writer and choreographer who spent her childhood in Rwanda. Her style of creating and performing on stage is directly inspired by what life has so intensely given her. Her artistic research draws from the diversity of her cultural heritage but more so by her appetite for encounters. In all her projects, the human dimension is especially of great importance. Her artistic curiosity and interest for a dialogue between music and other modes of expression blossomed through her participation in François Verret’s shows. In 2013, she created Compagnie Kadidi to start developing her own work, including “Samedi Détente,” her first work as a choreographer which has been presented 100 times touring all over Europe and in the USA.
Learn moreSeattle’s [self professed] hottest postmodern nightlife performance duo, Drama Tops was born of the artistic partnership of Elby Brosch and Shane Donohue. They began making work together seven years ago with the creation of a solo on two bodies. The dynamic between their trans body and cis body has created beautiful moments of frustration, competition, tenderness, and comedy. Drama Tops blends the worlds of nightlife and concert modern dance to create an interesting and unique blend of accessible and funny modern dance. You may have seen Drama Tops perform their smash hit Boys! Boys! Boys!, presented by Velocity Dance Center’s Made in Seattle program, or their self-produced show, Drama Tops, this is for you at Washington Hall in Seattle. Other performances include NW New Works Festival presented by On the Boards, Seattle, WA; Family Meal and Catharsis at Kremwerk, Seattle, WA; Heels! at Cha Cha, Seattle, WA; High F@ggotry, Seattle, WA, and more.
Learn moreDrew Michael was born in Bethel, Alaska, and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. He started his art career at the University of Alaska Anchorage in a carving class with Joe Senungetuk in 1997. From there, his practice has developed through the study of other artists' work and through his own experience in trial and error. He has learned under the guidance of Kathleen Carlo and Larry Ahvakana in Anchorage, AK.
His art is deeply influenced by the people and events he has encountered in his life. Currently, his work uses imagery of religious iconography blended with traditional mask making with the hopes of bringing to light different ways of healing. His work is created with a focus on using new materials and combinations of mixed media. He uses carving as a form of expression, to draw understanding and compassion from within, and is constantly using new materials to broaden the form of his work.
"With everything I create I aim to exemplify my thoughts on how our humanity exists within this world, emotions about my relationships with others, perceptions of energy in all things and the constant acceptance into balance. As I learn about my own path I blend my traditional knowledge with everyday living experience and somehow try to connect with that ancestral wisdom that I see us all having within and around."
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 moreDylan Mira is an artist moving between video and text, recording how language makes bodies within the limits of representation and the thickness of time. Her recent projects have been presented at Performa, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, and Human Resources. She holds an MFA in New Genres from University of California Los Angeles and a BFA in Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Learn moreEast Rodeo has recently become popular in the European experimental sound scene under the leadership of the Sinkauz brothers—Alen and Nenad—who were born in Pula and formed the band while studying musicology in Italy. Since the release of their third album, Morning Cluster, they have been noticed by important critics, and have gained the affections of their audiences. At the same time, the brothers Sinkauz also work in the theater, but all too rarely.
Learn moreEd Bourgeois is a theater artist of mixed—French, Iroquois, Algonquian, Italian, Scottish, diseased, orphaned, alcoholic, KKK, displaced and runaway—heritage. His Alaska Native Playwrights Project trained 32 Native playwrights from 2010-2013. Bourgeois’ plays have been included in Native Voices at the Autry’s Short Play Festival: Trail Trees; and Backstage, Blue Moon, which won the 2016 Von Marie Atchley Excellence in Playwriting Award. River of Blood was workshopped at Autry’s 2018 Playwrights Retreat and Native Earth’s 2019 Weesageechak Festival, received staged readings at LaJolla Playhouse and Oklahoma City Native American New Play Festival, and was a Semi-Finalist for the 2019 Blue Ink Playwriting Award. Through papier-mâché, recycled cardboard, and improvisational comedy, he’s working to disrupt family trauma and pass down good stories to his grandchildren.
Learn moreEdie Tsong received her MFA in ceramics from Louisiana State University. Telecommunity Portrait was recently presented as part of Bay Area Now 4 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her video Thank-you America was recently on view in April Meetings: A Festival of Expanded Media in Belgrade, Serbia. She has performed collaboratively with Pete Kuzov in the EnterActive Language Festival in Portland, Oregon, for the past three years. Tsong has held residencies at Women’s Studio Workshop in New York, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program in Roswell, New Mexico.
Learn moreEdna Vazquez | Photo credit Tania Gómez-Daza
Edna Vázquez is a fearless artist and songwriter whose powerful voice and musical talent transcend the boundaries of language with songs deeply rooted in universal human emotion. She has traveled far and wide spreading her message of light, love and cultural healing.
Learn moreCulp is an associate professor in the Communications Department at Universidad Iberoamericana, and he is currently working through his PhD thesis in art history at the UNAM. He is also one of the organizer-curators of Re-positionings: Contemporary Performing Arts Forum in Mexico City. He was the assistant curator at the Mexican Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale and is one of the founding partners of Conejoblanco Galería de Libros. His publications include film criticism articles in Nexos (Mexico) and as part of the book Cine Mexico 1970-2011 (Gran NumeronceProducciones, Mexico).
Learn moreEiko (female) and Koma (male) began working as independent artists in Tokyo in the early 1970’s, where they met and soon abandoned their studies in law and political science. Their newfound interests in performance took them to several teachers in Japan and Europe, including founders of Butoh and then followers of the German expressionist Mary Wigman in Amsterdam, where they lived and worked before moving to the United States to become permanent residents in the mid-seventies. Eiko and Koma performed their first work in the United States in 1976, White Dance, sponsored by the Japan Society.
Their creative energy has not waned in the last 25 years, they regularly perform in galleries, theaters, universities, museums, and at festivals across North America, Europe, and Japan. The pair was honored as Guggenheim Fellows in 1984 and MacArthur Fellows in 1996, they received two Bessies in 1984 for Grain and Night Tide, and another in 1990 for Passage. Eiko and Koma live and work in New York, where their touring and individual works are regularly supported by numerous grants and foundations, including the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. After working for more than forty years as Eiko & Koma, she began performing her own solo project A Body in Places in 2014. In 2017 she launched a multi-year Duet Project that she directs and performs with a diverse range of artists.
After studying with Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata in Japan and Manja Chmiel in Germany, Eiko and Koma relocated to America and went on to create 46 interdisciplinary performance works, two career exhibitions, and numerous media works. Their durational performance living installations were commissioned by the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and MoMA. Their Retrospective Project (2009 to 2012) culminated in a comprehensive monograph, Time is Not Even, Space is Not Empty, published by the Walker Art Center. Eiko & Koma were honored with the first United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and Doris Duke Artist Awards (2012). Among many other awards and honors, they were the first collaborative pair to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996) and the first Asian choreographers to receive the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award (2006).
Eiko’s solo project began with a twelve-hour performance at the Philadelphia Amtrak station. Since then, Eiko has performed variations of the project at over forty sites. In 2016, Eiko was the subject of the 10th annual Danspace Platform, a month-long curated program that brought her a special Bessie citation, an Art Matters grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In November, co-presented by Performa 2017 and Met Live Arts, Eiko occupied on each of three Sundays the three Metropolitan Museum of Art sites: For each of these daylong durational installations, Eiko created and performed in conjunction with hours-long video distillations of William Johnston’s photographs, “staining” the walls of each instillation with haunting images of herself dancing in ruined Fukushima.
Eiko teaches Delicious Movement in communities, colleges, and art schools. Using movement study as a means of inquiry along with readings and media studies, she also teaches interdisciplinary college courses about the atomic bombings and other environmental disasters. In 2016 Eiko was named Artist-in-Residence for its Dignity Project at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Eiko was a think tank fellow in Wesleyan’s College of the Environment.
Learn 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 moreEisa Jocson is a contemporary choreographer and dancer from the Philippines. Trained as a visual artist, with a background in ballet, she won her first pole-dancing competition in Manila in 2010, and also started pole ‘tagging,’ and other public interventions in Manhattan and various cities. Under successive residencies in Belgium, Eisa developed an artistic praxis that probes the stereotype and context of the female pole dancer. Her Death of the Pole Dancer solo toured Berlin, Brussels, Zurich, Vienna and Ljubljana. Eisa then trained in ‘macho dancing,’ a popular night-club entertainment form, and premiered the solo Macho Dancer in spring 2013 which then toured 4 important European summer festivals: Impulstanz, Noorderzon, Tanz im August, and Theater Spektakel in Zurich where she won the Zürcher Kantonalbank Acknowledgement Prize.
Selected Press
"Macho Macho Woman: Interview with Eisa Jocson," ArtAsiaPacific, April 23, 2014
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Eisa Jocson and her work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreFounded in 1991 by Artistic Director John Collins, Elevator Repair Service creates original works with an ongoing ensemble.
ERS’s theater pieces are built around a broad range of subject matter and literary forms; they combine elements of slapstick comedy, hi-tech and lo-tech design, both literary and found text, and the group’s own highly developed style of choreography.
ERS creates its performances through extended periods of collaboration. A typical development cycle includes 4-6 intensive work periods within a 2 year period, which conclude with work-in-progress showings. Time off between development is filled with touring and presentations of finished works. Following completion, the piece is presented in NYC for an extended run and is toured throughout the US and abroad.
Learn moreElisa Harkins is a Native American (Cherokee/Muscogee) artist and composer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work is concerned with translation, language preservation, and Indigenous musicology. Harkins uses the Cherokee and Mvskoke languages, electronic music, sculpture, and the body as her tools. Harkins received a BA from Columbia College, Chicago, and an MFA from CalArts. She has since continued her education at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited her work at Crystal Bridges, documenta 14, The Hammer Museum, The Heard Museum, and MoMA. Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is a dance performance with Hanako Hoshimi-Caines and Zoë Poluch that features music by Harkins. With support from PICA and Western Front, songs from the performance have been collected into a limited-edition double LP which can be found on Harkins’ Bandcamp. Harkins resides on the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation and is an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
Learn moreLeCompte, a founding member of the Group, has directed all of the company’s works. Her honors and awards include a NEA Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in American Theater, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a US Artists Fellowship and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. Abbas has worked with The Wooster Group since 1999 as a technical director and sound engineer. He received a Drama Desk Nominee for the Group’s To You, The Birdie! (Phédre).
Learn moreEmily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Originally from Alaska, she is currently based in Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, history, and role in community. Her work is currently supported by Creative Capital, Map Fund, a Joyce Award and The Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts. Emily is a 2013 Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at the University of Minnesota, a 2012 Headlands Center for the Arts and MacDowell Artist in Residence, a Native Arts and Cultures Fellow (2011), a MANCC Choreographer Fellow (2009/2010/2012), a MAP Fund Grant recipient (2009/2010/2012/2013), and McKnight Fellow (2009). She received a 2012 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performance for her work, The Thank-you Bar, at New York Live Arts. Her current work, Niicugni, is touring to Florida State University/MANCC/Seven Days of Opening Nights, Coil Festival/PS122/Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC), Redfern Arts Center at Keene State (NH), Arizona State University, Tigertail (Miami), Northrop Auditorium (MN), PICA (Portland, OR) and Bunnell Street Gallery (AK).
Selected Press
"Shedding Light on the Last Frontier," Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, January 4, 2013.
"Emily Johnson in Conversation with Ain Gordon," Movement Research Critical Correspondance, January 9, 2013.
Call & Response: Spandex and Basketballs, Emily Johnson, Mental Contagion, July/August 2008.
Learn moreEmily Jones (she/they) is a dancer and choreographer based in Portland, OR. Emily’s choreography materializes from sensitivity and intuition, and they are curious about the tensions that exist between social power dynamics and unnamed personal needs. In recent years Emily has been collaborating with Hannah Krafcik. Their performances together are shaped by consent, emphasizing relationality over virtuosity. Emily and Hannah’s performances have included self-made components such as sound scores and video and audio descriptions — they seek to broaden accessibility through the use of multiple mediums. Emily and Hannah’s work has been presented at New Expressive Works (Portland, OR), Art Klub NOLA (New Orleans, LA), Pieter Performance Space (Los Angeles, CA), Performance Works NW, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR). Emily has also performed in others’ works in Portland and the Bay Area. Additionally Emily facilitates movement practices and is a bodyworker.
Learn moreEmily Jones and Hannah Krafcik make performances and facilitate movement practices together. They are white settlers residing on the unceded lands of the Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clackamas, and many other Tribes, also known today as Portland, OR. Hannah (they/them) is a neurodivergent dancer and writer. Emily (she/they) is a dancer, movement educator, and bodyworker. The artists’ long-standing collaboration is driven by considering how power dynamics impact their body/minds and behaviors.
Learn moreEmma Lutz-Higgins (she/her) is a Portland-based dance maker and performer whose choreographic work uses movement, text, temporal intricacy, and nonlinear narrative to explore perception, identity, and possibility. She received her B.A. from Bard College, where she studied under the direction of the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company before relocating to New York City. She has performed at AUNTS, Brooklyn, NY; Movement Research, New York, NY; Gibney Dance, New York, NY; New York Live Arts, New York, NY; Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn, NY; and Danspace Project, New York, NY. In 2021, she moved to Portland and was a 2023–24 Alembic Resident at Performance Works NW where she premiered her first evening-length choreographic work, FLOOR. Her performances have been reviewed in Oregon Arts Watch and The New York Times.
Learn moreErika M. Anderson (EMA) is a new media artist who has been part of the West Coast experimental music scene for two decades. She grew up on the jukeboxes of South Dakota but got noise-pilled by Cali, where she formed her first touring bands and taught herself how to make records. Her signature sound reflects those influences, pairing electronic synth drones with guitar and voice. Anderson has created cross-genre works involving sound, storytelling, virtual reality, and video game technologies, but is most well known for albums released under the name EMA, which have been widely acclaimed and covered by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian, among others. Anderson has toured extensively, working her way up from warehouse shows to festivals and arenas. Her hybrid performance pieces have taken place at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; Barbican Centre, London, UK; and the New Museum, New York, NY. Anderson currently lives in Portland, OR.
Learn moreMusician Erik Friedlander is widely considered a master avant-garde jazz and classical cellist. Friedlander has released nine solo albums and three albums as a member of the John Zorn-led avant-jazz group Bar Kokhba. In high demand as a session musician, he has played with a wide range of artists, from pop stars Kelly Clarkson and Courtney Love, to indie folk stars Dar Williams and Paula Cole, to fellow vanguard artists Ikue Mori (TBA:07) and Laurie Anderson (TBA:06). Friedlander’s father, Lee Friedlander, has been a MacArthur Fellow whose photographs of street scenes and jazz greats have been widely shown at galleries across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art.
Learn moreRecently named one of "Brooklyn's 50 Funniest People" (Brooklyn Magazine), Erin Markey makes music, shows and videos. She has shown work at the Under the Radar Festival, New Museum, PS 122, New York City Comedy Festival, Ars Nova, Lincoln Center Director's Lab, UCBeast, Bard Spiegeltent, Tasmania's Festival of Voices, San Francisco Film Society and at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater. She is the recipient of a 2014 Franklin Furnace Grant, the 2012 NYFA Cutting Edge Artist Award, the Eliot Norton Award for Outstanding Performance in 2013, was named a “magnetic diva” by the New York Times, a Time Out New York Top Ten Cabaret Performer 2013-2015, and was listed in Artforum's Top Ten Best Music of 2016. She is a company member of Obie award winning Half Straddle, and co-composed music with Chris Giarmo for Tina Satter's Ghost Rings at New York Live Arts. Her musical, A Ride On The Irish Cream, co-composed with Emily Bate and Kenny Mellman, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in January 2016 and was co-presented by Abrons and American Realness Festival. Irish Cream is currently touring and recently released an album available here. Her new show, Boner Killer, which premiered at Joe's Pub for Under The Radar Festival in January 2017 will begin touring in June 2017.
Learn moreExperimental 1/2 Hour is a cable access program showcasing local and international acts produced by Eva Aguila & Brock Fansler. The show broadcasts new episodes twice a month on Portland Community Media channels 11, 22, and 23. As of July 2011 the show has been syndicated to run in New York City, NY on Manhattan Neighborhood Network Channel 67 (Time Warner) / RCN 85 / Manhattan Neighborhood Network 4 with support from Louis ESP.
Learn moreExplode into Colors is a band from Portland that won’t do it unless it’s fun. Heather Treadway, Claudia Meza, and Lisa Schonberg play heavy rhythms, pulsing bass, and melodic echo that has been described as “gritty dance-punk,” “the late-night love child of Fela Kuti and ESG,” and “completely unclassifiable.” Whether performing in basements, living rooms, galleries, or stages, their intention is to positively affect their audience with music that will make them dance. They are fond of celebrations and collaborations with talented local artists that have inspired them. They are also known to make clothes, videos, pictures of all kinds, and studies of insects.
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 moreLinyekula lives and works in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he runs Studios Kabako, which fosters the debuts of young Congolese artists in the fields of dance, theater, music, and video by providing training and producing works. Through the Studios, he has presented ten pieces and toured extensively in Europe, United States, and Africa. Linyekula is a member of the Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne, Germany, and he has received the 2007 Principal Award of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development.
Learn moreFaye Driscoll (b. 1975, California, lives and works in New York) is an award winning art and performance maker who uses an alchemy of bodies and voices, objects and live sound to conjure worlds that are, like ourselves, alive and forever changeable. She creates immersive worlds of sensorial complexity and perceptual disorientation aimed to rile up the passive, numb, screened-out body. These interventions come in the shape of intimacies: a performer holding your hand, death metal song made through recording your stomping feet, a place to rest and a private guided choreography in your ear.
In Thank You For Coming, her recently completed trilogy of performance works—Attendance (2014), Play (2016), and Space (2019)—each took a distinct genre blurring while summoning the unnamed forces that surge between the viewer and the viewed. For her first solo exhibition, at Walker Art Center, Driscoll brought the immersive experience of theater into the exhibition space, inviting viewers to become active participants through a series of prompts and subtle directives from her series of audio works, Guided Choreographies for the Living and the Dead.
She is currently the Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, and is the recipient of a Doris Duke Award, Guggenheim fellowship, a Bessie award and the Jacob’s Pillow Artist Award, among many others. Select presentations include Kunstenfestivaldesarts, La Biennale di Venezia, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Walker Art Center, Melbourne Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires.
Learn more"Fever One" is a B-Boy and DJ originally from Seattle, WA who relocated to New York in 1997 and eventually joined the world famous Rock Steady Crew. He is most well known for his 'gunzblazin' style which he developed while studying with his mentors Icey Ice and Lil' Lep of the New York City Breakers. Inspired by a Poppin' Battle in Seattle's Central District and the aggression he saw in breakin’, Fever One became influenced by the spirituality and competitiveness of dancing by the age of ten. Since then, Fever One became a member of the world famous Rock Steady Crew which took his career to new heights. He has performed in many prestigious venues from Lincoln Center to Madison Square Garden and Fashion Week to Dancing with the Stars. He has also lectured about the history of hip-hop at Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Washington.
Learn moreFirst Nations Performing Arts is focused on cultural change, commissioning, touring and presenting Indigenous performance, as well as capacity building for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts sectors. For our all-ages intergenerational gathering we celebrate the FNPA Network Track members — a coalition of First Nations performing artists — in an evening which will evolve through sharing food, storytelling, interactive performance, music, noise, and artistic experimentation.
Learn moreForced Entertainment is a collective of six theater artists who have been working together since 1984. They have long had an obsession with virtual or described performance, exploring the possibilities of conjuring extraordinary scenes, images, and stories using language alone. Their work forges a strong link between form and content, reflecting the belief that the form of a project – the kind of experience it presents, the contract it makes with its audience, and how – is an inseparable and significant part of its meaning. Often described as being experimental or innovative, their approach to each work differs from project to project, taking inspiration from movies, the internet, stand-up, dance, bad television, performance art, and music as well as from theater itself. What ties the various strands of their work together is that the projects always strive to be vivid and original, demanding a lot from audiences and giving a lot in return.
Learn more“Singulum – the melancholy of empty urban streets at night, dirtied by litter, and cleansed by rain. It sounds like a piece of club music, slowed down, and with the beats removed – the hazy memory of the night before..”
– Martin P.
Singulum, LINE_075
Musique Machine, UK (January 2017)France Jobin is a sound / installation / artist, composer and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her audio art can be qualified as “sound-sculpture”, revealing a minimalist approach to complex sound environments where analog and digital intersect. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces. Her works can be “experienced” in a variety of unconventional spaces and new technology festivals across Canada, the United States, South America, South Africa, Europe and Japan.
Jobin has created solo recordings for popmuzik records (JP), bake/staalplaat (NL), ROOM40 (AU), nvo (AT), DER (US), ATAK (JP), murmur records (JP), Baskaru (FR) and the prestigious LINE label (US). Jobin’s sound art is also part of countless compilation albums, notably on the ATAK (JP), bremsstrahlung (US), Mutek (CA), murmur records (JP), and/oar (US), tsuku boshi (FR), everest records (CH), and Contour Editions (US) labels. She is also featured in the influential book and recording, Extract, Portraits of Soundartists (book + 2 cd), released on the nonvisualobjects label (AT). The collaborative album ligne, created with sound artist Tomas Phillips, was released on the ATAK label (JP).
Her installations and screenings have been shown internationally at museums and festivals. Her work P Orbital released on LINE (Valence, LINE054) was presented in the context of ESCUCHAS, a first sound art exhibit for the Museum of Modern Art in Medellin, Colombia. P Orbital was also presented at CONTEXT-ing / Listening as CONTEXT at the Miami Art Fair in Florida, Call & Response, London Uk as well as at the Haunted formalism exhibit in LA curated by Volume. An invitation to the AIR Artist-In-Residence program in Krems, Austria enabled her to create und transit, a sound installation set in the MinoritenKirche cloister in Stein (AT). Her two ongoing collaborations with visual artist Cédrick Eymenier (FR) have resulted in EVENT HORIZON, an audio/video piece, and The Answer, a movie, with the soundtrack by France Jobin and Stephan Mathieu. EVENT HORIZON was screened in Paris (2010), at the Venezuela Biennale in Merida state (2010) and was performed live at the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles (2010) and ISEA RUHR 2010 (DE). The Answer was screened at IAC, Villeurbanne, France in March – May 2016. In 2011, Jobin was one of five international artists selected to present her sound installation, Entre-Deux, in the new media exhibit Data/Fields, curated by Richard Chartier at Artisphere in the Washington, DC area, along with Ryoji Ikeda, Mark Fell, Caleb Coppock, and Andy Graydon. Her proposition received critical acclaim from the national press. Entre-Deux has recently been presented at N38E13 in Palermo, Sicily (2017). Her latest audio visual collaboration: “Mirror Neurons” with sound artist Fabio Perletta (IT) and xx+xy visuals (IT) was screened as a world premiere at A x S / ak-sis / FESTIVAL 2014 | CURIOSITY as part of the Synergetica Screening in Los Angeles in September 2014. In October 2015, France was invited to take part in an artist residency at EMPAC (Troy,NY) which resulted in the creation of a new light sound work entitled 4.35 – R0 – 413, a collaboration with Alena Samoray, lighting designer. Her latests installations, ‘Inter/sperse’ and ‘Entre/temps’ both premiered in Italy. ‘Inter/sperse’ is a site specific installation created in the context of an international residency organized by Museolaboratorio, LUX and farmacia901. It opened May 27 2017 at Museolaboratorio, Città Sant’Angelo Italy. ‘Entre/temps’ is a site specific installation commissioned by Enzo De Leonibus, artistic director of the EaRrEtMeI festival which opened in Palena, Itally, June 4 2017.
She has also participated in numerous music and new technology festivals such as Mutek (Montreal, 2001, 2004 – 2009, 2014, 2017), EM15 (Montreal 2014), EMPAC (US 2011, 2015), roBOT 8 (Italy 2015) Angelica Festival (Italy 2016), Portobeseno (Italy 2014), Interferenze – Liminaria (Italy 2014), Flussi Media Arts Festival (Italy 2014), FIMAV, SEND + RECEIVE (Winnipeg, 2003, 2005), Club Transmediale (Berlin, 2004), Shut up and Listen (Vienna, 2009), ISEA RUHR 2010 (Germany), the surface tension tour (Japan, 2012) and the Symétrie tour (Japan 2016).
“immersound” is a concert event/philosophy concept initiated by Jobin, which proposes the creation of a dedicated listening environment by focusing on the physical comfort of the audience within a specifically designed space. The premise of “immersound” is to seek out/explore new perceptions in and experiences of the listening process by pushing the notion of “immersion” to its possible limits.
She created and produced “immersound” from 2011 to 2015 at Oboro in Montreal.
She was a finalist at the Sonic Arts Awards 2014 (IT) in the Sonic Research category. In January 2013, the Conseil québécois de la musique (CQM) awarded the prestigious Opus Prize for Concert of the year to France Jobin for her concert at AKOUSMA 8.
Jobin’s work continues to evolve as technologies enable her to create new environments.
France Jobin is published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music UK Ltd
Learn more"We are ignited by the ways in which contemporary dance performance is emerging in current discourse. We publicly engage, observe and shape these conversations. FRONT was initiated as a platform for contemporary dance, giving voice to many different opinions and playing with modes of distribution. Four of us initiated this project: Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Robert Tyree. We are choreographers, dancers, and contributors to contemporary dance performance, who are based out of Portland, OR. We rely on the old-school tactics of the newspaper infused with current, new, and future energy of dance theory and practices. FRONT acts as a performance in which the form stays the same but the format is ever-shifting to directly meet the needs it instigates. It is an experiment."
Learn moreFUTURE DEATH TOLL (F-DT) is an art-oriented collective that releases Creative Commons licensed audio and video primarily online. The elusive group creates work circumventing the normal bounds that geography (namely museums and galleries but also physical media) imposes on an art form. Armed with modular synthesizers, projectors, and uniformed in blaze orange, F-DT is a throbbing mess of noise that mutates sound and video in a sculptural fashion.
Learn moreWith strong ties to the visual art community and almost boundless creative energy, Gang Gang Dance grew out of the turn-of-the-century Null New York scene, with members who played or worked with The Cranium, Actress, Russia, SSAB Songs, and Jackie-O Motherfucker. The genesis of the band was collaborative in nature, with Brian Degraw, Tim Dewit, Lizzie Bougatsos, Nathan Maddox, and Josh Diamond experimenting in tiny practice spaces. Tragically, in 2002 Maddox was struck by lightning and killed while watching a storm on the roof of his apartment building.
By 2003, the band had refined the tribal-futurism sound to its purest form. GGD samples and processes beats and melodies, looping them into pulsating rhythms that pull from ancient traditions but deliver a modern sound. Exploring dance, performance art, theatre, DJing, film, and visual art as well as music, the group regularly performs in galleries, museums, and art fairs and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Gang Gang Dance has toured with Sonic Youth, TV on the Radio, and Animal Collective; played venues and festivals worldwide; and released four albums: Revival Of The Shittest (2004), God’s Money (2008), RAWWAR (2004), and Saint Dymphna (2004), as well as the DVD Retina Riddim (2007), a multimedia project consisting of a 33-minute art film and a 20-minute audio collage, both of which were drawn from the band’s archives and authored by band member Brian Degraw.
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 moreGarrick Imatani is an artist who uses performance, functional objects, or interaction to draw attention to one’s embodied subjectivity. Working across sculpture, photography, video, and installation, recent projects focus on reimagining racialized historical erasures into more believable and inspired futures. Past works have included collaborating with illegally-surveilled activists to readjust city archives, re-enacting labor on the transcontinental railroad, and working with the Grand Ronde tribe to replicate their sacred meteorite held at the American Museum of Natural History.
Learn moreGenesis Breyer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson; 1950) is an avant-garde, cultural engineer, Fluxus pioneer, groundbreaking performance artist, inventor of Industrial Music, founder of music projects COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, "wrecker of civilization," essayist and theoretician, Pandrogyne, and, most recently, as twin. In 2007 he/r partner Lady Jaye Breyer dropped he/r body. Genesis continues to represent the amalgam Breyer P-Orridge in the material “world” and Lady Jaye represents the amalgam Breyer P-Orridge in the immaterial “world” creating an ongoing inter-dimensional collaboration.
Instagram: pandrogyne
Twitter: GenesisBPO Learn moreGeumhyung Jeong is a South Korea-based choreographer, dancer and performer. Jeong studied Acting at Hoseo University in Asan, Korea, Dance and Performance at the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul, and Animation Film at the Korean Academy of Film Arts in Seoul. Her works have been presented by the New Museum, New York, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Switzerland; Malta Festival, Poznań, Poland; Brigittines International Festival, Brussels; SPIEL ART Festival, Munich; ImpulsTanz Festival, Vienna; iDans Festival, Istanbul; Contemporary Art Museum of Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; PACT Zollverein, Essen, Germany; and many others.
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 moreGozo Yoshimasu considered one of the most representative figures of Japanese modern literature, has published over thirty books of poetry— among them works that have been available in several languages– since the release of his first book of poetry in 1964 at the age of twenty-five. His poetry, which he challenges himself to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate, chronicles a tireless pursuit of origins. He also explores the idea of always being in movement. As a traveler his itineraries have initially followed those of the great 17th century Japanese poet Basho to widen to a more personal ‘pilgrimage’ from the isles of Japan to the American desert, Central Asia or simply common streets in most continents in the world. It’s no wonder that this constant movement— walking, driving, traveling by train or boat, is one of the foundations of his poems giving them a sense of rhythm, speed in “the pursuit of his desire to go far away”(from his poem Weaver Girl). He has also developed his poetry into other forms of artistic expression. As a performer, he has cultivated a unique style of recitation, and uses rhythm and vocal modulation to the extent that one might consider it a form of incantation. His voice—at times gentle, at times feverish—lands itself of a fascination meeting with music. His readings have been called, “electrifying revelations of the power of poetry to move the heart and mind without the air of translation.”
Learn moreGrace Johnson is a fashion photographer based in Portland, Oregon. Rooted in her competitive gymnastics background, her work blends athleticism and fashion, exploring the beauty of movement, strength, and expression. Grace spent two years photographing the Oregon State University Women’s Basketball team and is now shooting for the Thorns, Fire, and Blazers. Grace also works closely with Q6 modeling agency, building local talent's portfolios and exploring editorial and fashion photography. Her imagery carries a sense of motion and confidence, blending self-expression with modern fashion. Drawn to strong feminine energy and the evolving relationship between photographer and subject, Grace creates bold, dynamic visuals that celebrate power, individuality, and self expression.
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 moreGregg Bordowitz is an award-winning artist, writer, and activist. His films have shown internationally in screenings and exhibitions at museums including: The New Museum, NY; Artist Space, NY; TATE Modern, UK; and MoMA, NY. Bordowitz is the author of many books, including: The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003. He was a member of the groundbreaking AIDS activist group ACT UP, and a founding member of the 1980’s film collective Testing the Limits. He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Bordowitz is the Director of the Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He comes to Reed College as a Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Arts.
Learn moreGuantanamo Baywatch crawls out of their natural, basement-level habitat to perform at after their first U.S. tour, following the release of their new self-titled LP from Hovercraft and Work/Sound Records. Started in March 2009, Guantanamo Baywatch is comprised of Jason Powell, Chevelle Wiseman and Devvin Trainer. Powell and Wiseman received their BFAs from Pacific Northwest Collage of Art, where Trainer is currently a student. Guantanamo Baywatch draws their influences from piña colada lagoons, Pee Wee's Playhouse, skateboarding iguanas, Elvis films, hammerhead shark attacks and skinny dipping in the La Brea Tar Pits to create their scuzzy, high energy brand of surf-thrash R&B.
Selected Press
Totally Tubular, Ethan Jayne, Portland Mercury, June 29, 2010.
Selected Video
guantanamo baywatch from Chevelle Wiseman on Vimeo.
Learn moreHalory Goerger makes shows and installations instead of building houses or repairing animals because it’s better like that for everybody. He works on the history of ideas, because everything else was already taken by the time he came along. In most his undertakings, total destitution flirts with formal rigour, and a concern for getting out alive. Together, Julien Fournet, Antoine Defoort and Halory Goerger have co-founded l’amicale de production, a small production house in Lille / Brussels (France / Belgium
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Halory Goerger and his collaborative work with Antoine Defoort, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreHanako Hoshimi-Caines is an experimental and socially engaged dance artist, curator, dramaturge and guide. Her works play within the expanded fields of choreography, video and sculpture. She makes multi-scale works that mix high and low fi aesthetics into dense storytelling often probing pluricultural histories, motherhood and the spirit of error. Her collaborative and solo works for theatre and gallery have been shown at the PICA/TBA festival, OTB (US), Moderna dansteatern (SE), Fierce Festival (UK), MAI, OFFTA, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery and Galerie de l’UQAM (CA). As the outgoing co-curator at the Centre de Creation O Vertigo (CCOV), Hanako put forward a people centered approach with a focus on experimental gatherings such as Signal Vibrant: ceremony for the dead and Pen pals/Relations épistolaires. Alongside artistic practice, Hanako recently completed a BA in Western philosophy (Concordia University) and training in transformative mediation and collective trauma healing in support of resistance and transformation.
Learn moreHand2Mouth Theater (H2M) is a theatre ensemble that creates original work that is bold, accessible and inclusive. We support all forms of artistic expression and experimentation and seek to enrich the social fabric of society through our work.
Committed to fostering community through performance, engagement events and educational programs, H2M seeks genuine connections with audiences by speaking authentically from the voices and lives of our creative artists and our community.
H2M pushes for a kinder, more inclusive society where the public experiences the value and uniqueness of every life story, amplifying the voices of those historically silenced.
Learn moreHannah Krafcik is a Portland-based interdisciplinary neuroqueer artist and writer whose work emerges from ongoing reflections on social patterning and censorship, (over)stimulation, perseveration, and intuition. Their practices span dance and new media. They often create performances and teach dance in collaboration with artistic partner, Emily Jones.
Learn moreFletcher is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. He has worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over fifteen years. Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland. Selected Press 500 Words: Harrell Fletcher, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, February 1, 2010 Selected Video
Learn moreHEALTH is an LA-based band. HEALTH is Benjamin Jared Miller, Jake Duzsik, John Famiglietti, and Jupiter Keyes. HEALTH is noise, music, disco, and fashion—and their shows mix, recombine, and reorient the senses. On their self-titled debut album, recorded at their favorite club, LA's The Smell, HEALTH shoots through 11 songs in 30 minutes, stretching the aural confines of post-punk rock and roll. They have been compared to Deerhoof, Black Dice, the Liars, and have opened for Nine Inch Nails on part of the Lights in the Sky tour in the fall of 2008. Part of the band's unique sound comes from the use of the Zoothorn, a permutation of microphone and guitar pedal. HEALTH says that you will love each other. HEALTH's discography includes HEALTH (2007), HEALTH//DISCO (2008), and the forthcoming Get Color (2009).
Learn moreHiro Kone is the alias of Nicky Mao, a New York-based musician and producer. She uses a combination of hardware, synths, and modular to cultivate her sound - a visceral meditation on rhythm, noise, and melody that has seen her release on leading experimental labels including DAIS Records and BANK Records. No stranger to manipulating macabre disorientations into enchanting new shapes, her music exposes the unsettling and sublime. She is known to draw upon a combination of modular synthesis, noise and field recordings. Instinctively responding to the precariousness of humanity, Kone’s cascades of twisted field recordings find an inherent partner in the effervescent current of synthesis and in the process, forge new terrains.
Learn moreHitoshi Toyoda was born in New York City and grew up in Tokyo. He returned to the United States in 1990 on a grant from Neo Vision Co. For several years, Toyoda traveled throughout the U.S. taking photographs, before settling in New York in 1993. He has presented his work in public spaces, galleries, museums and film festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI), Images Festival (Toronto), Museum Of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo), Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo), Anthology Film Archives (NY), and graf media gm (Osaka).
Learn moreMIKA ARASHIKI AND MARI FUKUTOME formed dance duo Ho Ho-Do in 2001. Their work is created through exploring the delicate sensitivities and impulses they feel in everyday life based on the relationship between two individuals and by their various ways of communication. They adapt not only ordinary dance techniques, but also small, and some might say trivial, gestures from daily life as motifs that reveal their poetic world-view. They have collaborated with a range of artists including playwrights and musicians. Their recent site-specific series, Ho Ho-Do @***, typifies their signature style of presenting work outside of traditional performance venues, fusing ordinary places as an extension of daily life. As part of this series, they’ve performed in houses, on stairs, in corridors, on roof terraces, at cafés, and at street crossings. Ho Ho-Do has filmed their performances presented at these venues, posting the results monthly to YouTube since 2009.
Learn moreHolcombe Waller is one of America’s most distinct voices in music theater. He is a 2011 United States Artists Berresford Fellow in Music, an award which noted his mournful, folk-inflected style, and his approach to music “as total theater.” He is a Creative Capital artist, a recipient of the MAP Fund Award, and a 2013 Joan Shipley Fellow of the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Waller has been presented and commissioned by numerous theaters, arts institutions, and festivals. Holcombe Waller "Hardliners" Music Video from Two Penguins on Vimeo.
Learn moreHolland Andrews (they/them) is a vocalist, composer, clarinetist, and performance artist whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build soundscapes encompassing both catharsis and dissonance. Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, they create a realm of live performance that is boundlessly present. They have been commissioned by REDCAT, ISSUE Project Room, and the 2024 Whitney Biennial, where they created two sound installations and the performance work Speaker. Notable musical collaborations include Son Lux, Nils Frahm, JJJJJerome Ellis, Christina Vantzou, William Brittelle, Peter Broderick, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. Their work is presented nationally and internationally, collaborating with artists such as Bill T. Jones, Sonya Tayeh, Dorothée Munyaneza, Otobong Nkanga, Jenn Freeman, NARCISSISTER, Demian DinéYazhi, Oliver Beer, and Will Rawls. Andrews is a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Awardee, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awardee, and United States Artists Fellow.
Learn moreHolly Mititquq Nordlum is an Iñupiaq (Inuit) artist who comes from the northern village of Kotzebue, Alaska. Nordlum works in a variety of media, using each to best cast light on Indigenous people. Her tattoo work and traditional markings revitalization effort is based on a 10,000-year Inuit history and is a machine-free process that facilitates healing, pride, and celebration from the traumas of colonization and individual experience. She organizes trainings, using traditional patterns in in-depth sessions to foster real change for people—in the end, creating community in the marks left behind. Nordlum’s public artwork educates about the still-surviving tribes of Alaska: their stories, histories, and cultures. Holly speaks publicly about the systems which continue to oppress her people and prevent their thriving.
In 2004 she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Alaska, and in the last five years she has received a Time Warner Fellowship from Sundance, an Art Matters grant, an Alaska Humanities Forum grant, an Alaska Native Visionary Award, a Rasmuson Artist Project Grant and Fellowship, an NDN Collective Indigenous Artists Grant, and she was part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Artist Leadership Program.
Learn moreIlyas Ahmed has been releasing records as a solo and collaborative artist for almost 20 years. His most recent solo album, A Dream of Another, was released in 2023. He is also a member of the experimental rock band Grails, whose last record Anches En Maat was released in 2023 as well. Records forthcoming on all fronts in the next year. Ilyas lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreIndira Valey (Portland, OR) is an avant garde multidisciplinary performer and a first generation Latinx Spanish speaker. Her ancient-sounding, resonant voice is a force of nature, and she utilizes looping technology, effects pedals, and a unique palette of instruments to create mesmerizing and memorable live performances that are ever-changing due to her spontaneous improvisational magic. Her debut album Recordar is a bilingual collection of oceanically soothing, powerfully healing songs about memory and finding your own inner power.
Learn moreIngri Midgard Fiksdal (b. 1982) is a Norwegian choreographer and performer. She is based in Oslo and has been making work since graduating from the MA in Choreography at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2006. Her work tours internationally to venues such as brut-Wien (AUS), Kampnagel (DE), Inkonst (SE), MDT (SE), In Between Time (UK), ANTI festival (FI), The Armory Show (US), LIMIT Festival (RS), HIFA (ZIM), Nordwind (DE), Baltoscandal (EST), and Homo Novus festival (LT). Fiksdal has recently been admitted into the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Program, and has from October 2013 commenced on a three-year artistic research project (PhD). Fiksdal’s work deals with perception and affectivity, and several of her pieces take shape as part performance and part live concert. The audience is always integral to the work, which aims to produce temporary collectives between performers and spectators. This notion of collectivity here refers to modes of attention and sensorial transference, rather than to interactivity. An ongoing theme within Fiksdal’s work is the ritual, and the rituals’ inherent capacity of transforming and ultimately transcending its partakers. This is approached from various angles to research how these capacities could be transferred to the performance-concerts created. Within this, the relation between cognition and affectivity, and how they operate in perception and in production of meaning, is central. Fiksdal often works in collaboration with other artists, such as visual artist, and composer Ingvild Langgård/Phaedra and scenographer Signe Becker.
Learn moreIngvild Langgård is a composer, musician and artist, educated from the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo (2006), specializing in sound art. She works in different media, and composes and performs music for stage, film, and in her own main music project, Phaedra. Phaedra released the album The Sea for Norwegian avant garde label Rune Grammofon in 2011. Phaedra´s music is a mix of folk and psychedelia with a dash of blues and soul; sacred death hymns and shimmering atmospheres, combining crystalline vocals, folk instruments and deep bass lines, with a touch of pure Scandinavian darkness. As with all of Langgård´s work it blends homegrown mythology, baroque aesthetics, and the possibility of altering the perception of the audience. Her work is shown in national and international museums and galleries, such as The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Lydgalleriet, Bergen, and and Chashama Gallery in New York. Langgård also works as a curator and co-founded the artist run gallery Rekord in 2006. Langgård has been awarded several grants for her work, and received the Norwegian State´s Working Grant for young artists twice. She currently is working on the next Phaedra album, to be released 2014, as well as upcoming Fiksdal/Langgård/Becker projects.
Learn moreIntisar Abioto is an artist working across photography, dance, and writing. Moving from the visionary and embodied root of Blackgirl Southern cross-temporal cross-modal storytelling ways, her works refer to the living breath/breadth of people of African descent against the expanse of their storied, geographic, and imaginative landscapes.
Learn moreConsistently delivering a jaw-dropping performance experience, ISAIAH ESQUIRE is intensely emotive, athletic, and explosive, exhibiting an impressive and unique array of disciplines. He is most known for his mastery of face, character, intricate lip-sync, and absolute connection. A seasoned dancer/instructor/choreographer/creative director and internationally acclaimed entertainer, ISAIAH has over 13 years of professional experience. From studios to classrooms, universities to international festivals, ISAIAH instructs classes ranging from Hip-Hop to Jazz, African to Ballroom, Twerking to Heel-o-graphy, and more. The one consistent aspect to any Isaiah Esquire class is the confidence and self-awareness/acceptance that he inspires in his students.
Over the past year, in addition to joining the cast of the Super-Star Divas Megashow @ CC Slaughters, this powerhouse entertainer has been touring the country with Portland’s own gender fluid cabaret troupe, the Caravan of Glam, referred to by America’s Got Talent scouts as one of the top 10 traveling queer performance groups in the country. ISAIAH has been featured in multiple music videos (including “9inch Heels” By DJ Beyonda Doubt, “Quicksand” by Acoustic Minds, and “Put Em Up” By Priory). He has also appeared in film documentaries, magazines, websites, and even comic books.
You can catch ISAIAH and his partner, JOHNNY NURIEL, on stage and in life, headlining as their duo IZOHNNY every first Thursday for the mostly male spectacular: BOYeurism @ the Star Theater, a show created and produced by Isaiah himself.
ISAIAH continues to break down barriers of gender, sexuality, culture, and age. As a teacher he invites you to join in this movement and witness the magic as he shows you limitlessness self-expression through fearless art.
Learn moreIshmael Houston-Jones is an award winning choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation.
Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd. In 2020 he recieved a fourth "Bessie" for Service to the Field of Dance. Houston-Jones is the DraftWork curator for works-in-progress at Danspace Project in New York. He has curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now both at Danspace Project.
Learn moreErdal was born in Jerusalem in 1974 and moved to Canada in 1999. Since designing his first play with frequent collaborator James Fagan Tait, Erdal has designed over 130 shows for companies in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Berlin, London, and New York. He’s been nominated for seventeen awards in four different cities and won the 2003 Sam Payne Award for Most Promising Newcomer, the 2005 Associated Designers of Canada's Jack King Award, the 2007 Dora Mavor Moore Award, Best Design at the Dublin Fringe in 2008, and a Jessie Richardson Award in 2009. The Chop Theatre is an award winning Vancouver BC-based company that has been building and touring original performances since 2004. Their work is known for its sophisticated experimentation with authenticity and has consistently involved some of the finest artists throughout Canada.
Learn moreIvana Müller is a choreographer, artist and author of texts. Some of the recurring subjects in her work are body and its representation, self-invention, the place of the imaginary and imagination, notions of authorship, and the relationship between performer and spectator. Müller has dedicated a great part of her research and practice to the idea of Social Choreography throughout her own projects (While We Were Holding It Together, Playing Ensemble Again And Again, We Are Still Watching, In Common, Partituur)m as well as in various collaboration.
Müller’s choreographies, performances, installations, text works, video-lectures, audio pieces, guided tours and web works have been presented and co-produced over the last 10 years in venues and festivals such as Rotterdamse Schouwburg (NL), STUK Leuven (Belgium), Impuls Tanz (vienna), Frascati Theater Amsterdam, Kampnagel Hamburg, La Villette Paris, Wiener Festwochen, Theatertreffen Berlin, DTW New York, National Museum of Singapore, Saddler’s Wells London, Springdance Festival Utrecht, HAU Berlin, Centre nationale de danse Paris, and Kaaitheater Brussels. She performed her piece How Heavy Are My Thoughts in TBA:05.
In 2007 Müller received the Charlotte Koehler Prize from the Prins Bernhard Funds (NL) for her œuvre, as well as Impulse Festival and Goethe Institute Prize for her piece While We Were Holding It Together.Next to her artistic practice Ivana Müller curates festivals, organises debates and teaches as a guest lecturer. (in, amongst others, Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdams (MA in visual arts), School For New dance Development, Amsterdam (BA in choreography), Master of Choreography in Amsterdam, Insitut for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen (MA in Theatre) etc). Ivana Müller is Croatian born and she lives in Paris and works internationally.
Selected Press
"Claudia La Rocco Presents: Interview with Ivana Müller," Claudia La Rocco, Dance-tech.tv, April 7, 2011.
Learn moreIvo Dimchev is the author of more than 30 performances. He has received numerous international awards for dance and theater and has presented his work across Europe, South America, and North America. He has led master classes at the National Theater Academy in Budapest, the Royal Dance Conservatory of Belgium in Antwerp, Hochschule der Künste in Bern, Switzerland, DanceWeb in Vienna, Giessen University in Germany, the Bremen Academy of Art, and other institutions. Dimchev is the founder and director of the Humarts Foundation in Bulgaria and organizes an annual competition for contemporary Bulgarian choreography. Dimchev is currently an Artist in Residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels. In 2014, he opened MOZEI in Sofia, Bulgaria, as an independent space for presenting contemporary art and music.
Learn morejaamil olawale kosoko (they/he/she/jlov) is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s work in performance is rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body as a means to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.
jaamil is the recipient of awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund award, 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency, 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and consecutive 2016-2020 USArtists International awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.
Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, their book, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, was published in spring 2022.
Premiering in 2022, Black Body Amnesia (the performance reading) examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people negotiating the psychic lifeworlds of living inside the American context. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of performers including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, and DJ Maij, with sound accompaniment by Everett Saunders. In this new work, Kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a performance device. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests, and how they then archive these personal freedom narratives to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.
Their 2020 work Chameleon is a multimedia living digital art work, film, and audio transmission project that explores the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the intersection of Blackness, gender fluidity, and queerness in a pirated virtual space. Chameleon is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; the New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency program; and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, in partnership with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and Tanz im August/HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Additional development support for Chameleon was made possible, in part, with commissioning support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, through the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program.
Their 2017 work, Séancers, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in December 2017 and has toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim. Recent highlights include Mousonturm (Frankfurt, DE), FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA), Sophiensaele (Berlin, DE), the Wexner Center (Columbus, OH), Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), and Montréal Arts Interculturels (Montréal, CA), among others.
jaamil’s previous work #negrophobia (premiered September 2015, Gibney Dance Center) was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award and toured throughout Europe appearing in major festivals including Moving in November (Finland), Take Me Somewhere (UK), SICK! (UK), Tanz im August (Berlin), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (Norway), zurich moves! (Switzerland), Beursschouwburg (Belgium) and Spielart Festival (Munich).
They are a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University where they earned their MA in Curatorial Studies.
As a performer, jaamil has created original roles in the performance works of Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. In addition, creative consultant and/or performer credits include: Terry Creach, Lisa Kraus, Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, Leah Stein Dance Company, Emergent Improvisation Ensemble, and Faustin Linyekula and Les Studios Kabako (The Democratic Republic of Congo).
In 2009, they published the chapbook Animal in Cyberspace. In 2011, jaamil published the collection Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). Other publications include the American Poetry Review, the Dunes Review, the Interlochen Review, the Broad Street Review, Silo Literary and Visual Arts Magazine.
jaamil has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Baker Artists Awards, among others. From 2014 to 2020, jaamil served as a trustee on the Board of Directors for Dance/USA, the national service organization for dance professionals. jaamil is also a founding advisory board member for the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving, and currently serves as an artistic advisory member of The Field Center in Vermont.
jaamil has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center among others, and has taught and lectured at various educational institutions across the world. In Fall of 2020, jaamil was appointed the 3rd annual Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA World Arts & Cultures/Dance Department. Additionally, they lecture regularly at Princeton University, The University of the Arts Stockholm, and Exerce Master at ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France.
Learn more“Ferver’s performances are so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms.” —The New Yorker
Jack Ferver has been creating full-length works since 2007. He has been presented at The French Institute Alliance Francaise (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA), PS 122 (NYC), The New Museum (NYC), The Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Diverse Works (Houston, TX), Danspace Project (NYC), Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Dixon Place (NYC), and Théâtre de Vanves in France. Shorter and solo works have been presented at MoMA/PS1, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Dance New Amsterdam, LaMaMa E.T.C., The Culture Project, and NP Gallery (all NYC). His work has been written about in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The New Yorker, ArtForum, Modern Painters, TimeOut New York, The New York Post, The Boston Globe, and Dance Magazine. As an actor, credits include the film Gayby, Strangers With Candy (Comedy Central), and numerous other film and theatre projects. His writing has been published in the magazine Novembre. He has curated for Danspace Project, Center for Performance Research, and Dance New Amsterdam. He also teaches at NYU, Bard College, has guest taught at SUNY Purchase, and has set choreography at The Juilliard School.
Selected Press
"Laughing and Crying at Ghosts, Fictive and Real," The New York Times, December 11, 2010
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Jack Ferver and his work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn 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 moreJaleesa Johnston; ⅓ of rise x fall
Jaleesa Johnston is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and arts administrator currently living and working in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has been the recipient of the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency, and Open Signal’s New Media Fellowship. She has exhibited her work in cities along the West Coast, including San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, and she occasionally facilitates workshops and classes in new media and performance art. Jaleesa also organizes public programs as Programs Lead in the Learning and Community Partnerships Department at the Portland Art Museum.
Learn moreBorn in a German working-class community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during World War II, Benning studied mathematics on a basketball scholarship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; worked with migrant workers in Colorado; and started a commodity food program in the Ozarks. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, and has taught filmmaking at Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin, University of Oklahoma, UC San Diego, and California Institute for the Arts. Over the past 25 years, Benning has completed 14 feature-length films that have shown across the world. His attentive, long-take aesthetic has categorized his work as minimalistic, but inherent in his films is a career-long, deeply political awareness, informed by his life.
Selected Press
Digital Watch, Michael Ned Holte, Artforum, January 6, 2010.
Talking About Seeing: A Conversation with James Benning, Danni Zuvela, Senses of Cinema, Issue 33 2004.
Learn moreJames Mapes is a lighting designer, writer, and board game creator who's lived in Portland, OR all his life. Working primarily in dance, he's toured all over the world with companies like BodyVox, Éowyn Emerald and Dancers, and Mammalian Diving Reflex. At home, he's the Festival Director for Risk/Reward and works a whole bunch of places. He has a family, who is great, and a library, which is secret.
Learn more