Artists Archive
Mariano Pensotti (Buenos Aires 1973) is an Argentine author and theater director. He studied cinema, visual arts and theater in Buenos Aires, Spain and Italy. He is a graduated from Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Rogelio Yrurtya (Buenos Aires) and was a fellow studient at Casa de América (Madrid) and La Loggia CISD (Italy). In theater, as an author and director, he created more than fifteen performances in the past ten years.
Among his latest creations are Cineastas (Filmmakers) (2013) premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) and presented in Wiener Festwochen, HAU Berlin, Holland Festival and Theaterformen, El Pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal) (2010/2012) premiered at Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires and presentd at Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Festival de Otoño (Madrid), Theaterformen (Hannover), Hebbel am ufer (Berlin), Auabirlewen (Bern), Norwich & Norfolk Festival (England), Kampnagel Festival (Hamburg), Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zürich), Tempo Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Fiac (Bahia), Rotterdamse Schowburg (Rotterdam), Frascati Theater (Amsterdam). Sometimes I think I can see you (2010/2011) premiered in Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer as part of Ciudades Paralelas Festival and presented in Buenos Aires, Cologne, Brussels, Zürich, Warsaw, Salamanca, Copenhage, Helsinki, Girona and Paris. Encyclopaedia of unlived lives (2010) premiered at Schauspielhaus Graz (Austria) and presented during Steirischer Herbst Festival and La Marea (2005/2011) premiered at the V Buenos Aires International Festival and later on invited to the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Hebbel am Ufer Theater (Berlin), Homo Novus Festival (Riga), Dublin Festival (Ireland), Festival Automne en Normandie (Rouen), Carrefour International de Théâtre (Québec), Festival Transamériques (Montréal), Yokohama (Japan), Festival Temporada Alta (Girona), Norfolk & Norwich Festival (England), Metropolis Copenhague (Denmark) and Push Festival (Vancouver).
Pensotti has become one of the most noted experimental directors throughout the world. He has been heralded as one of Latin America’s brightest theater talents and he and his company tour extensively throughout the year.
He formed the Grupo Marea together with set designer Mariana Tirantte.
For his work he received several awards worldwide. His texts has been published and translated to more than twenty languages. In his work he developed two different lines, one composed by stage performances where he write his own very literary texts and the play is strongly based in the work with the actors, and in paralell he produced several site specific performances where the main intention is to create a particular contrast in between fiction and reality with fiction placed in public places.
Selected Press
"Macklin Kowal interviews Mariano Pensotti," Macklin Kowal, THE OFFCENTER, February 16, 2012.
Learn moreMarisa Anderson channels the history of the guitar and stretches the boundaries of tradition. Her deeply original work applies elements of minimalism, electronic music, drone, and 20th-century classical music to guitar-based compositions rooted in blues, jazz, gospel, and country music. Anderson’s music re-imagines the landscape of American music, asking questions about tradition, adaptation and belonging, and exploring how music travels with people geographically and across generations. The New Yorker calls Anderson “one of the most distinctive guitar players of her generation,” while NPR refers to her as among “this era’s most powerful players.” Her work has been featured in Billboard, Rolling Stone, NPR, SPIN, Pitchfork, the BBC, and The Wire. Festival appearances include Big Ears, Pitchfork Midwinter, Le Guess Who and the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. In addition to her solo work, Anderson is sought after as a collaborator and composer. Swallowtail, her second record in duo with drummer Jim White, was released May 10 on Thrill Jockey Records. 2024 also saw the release of the feature film score A Perfect Day For Caribou, as well as appearances on records by Charlie Parr, Myriam Gendron, and Big|Brave. Past projects include 2021’s Lost Futures with guitarist William Tyler, and contributions to recordings by Matmos, Tara Jane O’Neil, Beth Ditto, Sharon Van Etten, and Circuit Des Yeux, among others.
Learn moreMarne Lucas aka CuntemporaryArtist is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist based in Harlem, New York, using photography, video and installation to present unique aesthetic or social philosophies. Central to her practice are investigations of nature, culture, and the body, working in conceptual overlaps: life’s energy, the environment, beauty, identity, intimacy and mortality. Lucas’ current social practice project ‘Bardo’ explores creativity as a form of spiritual palliative care, collaborating with hospice patients. Towards this project she is training to be a certified end-of-life doula, a role acting as liaison to the dying.
An experimental filmmaker, her recent black & white infrared videos Haute Flash (2017), Mālama ‘Āina (WIP), and previous collaborations with Jacob Pander, Incident Energy (2013), ‘The Operation’ (1995) use military imaging technology to reference surveillance culture and the fragility of human existence. Lucas’ long-term social practice project ‘Bardo’ explores creativity as a form of spiritual palliative care; collaborating with hospice patients. Towards this project she is training to be a certified end-of-life doula, a role acting as liaison to the dying.
Marne is known for stylistic photographic portraiture in ongoing artist portrait series ‘Sitting City’ and MLSP, a self-portraiture series since 1995, share a similar process and aesthetic. Her elaborate Eco-Baroque installations made from recycled or natural materials, express an eco-based spirituality and include installation and land art.
Lucas has received Regional Arts & Culture Council project grants, participated in a 2016 Arts/Industry Kohler Co. factory residency (Foundry, Pottery), the Land Art Mongolia 360 Residency + Biennial, a 2012 CentralTrak experimental film residency, the Portland2010 Oregon Biennial, and made a public art commission for 'PSU Smith Memorial Student Union Public Art + Residency Projects: State of Oregon for Art Program' (2009). Her artist collective Blinglab (co-founded with Bruce Conkle) performed a long-form puppet show at PICA T.B.A. 2007 “The Untold Misadventures of Lewis and Clark”. She is co-founder of the feminist artist collective Cuntemporary Artists Presents.
Her recent film Haute Flash is part of ‘Transitional States: Hormones at the Crossroads of Art and Science’ (2018) a video exhibition and lecture series at Space Plus (Lincoln, U.K.) Peltz Gallery (London), Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Spain, and Sala Borsa, Bologna, Italy.
Learn moreMaster Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. is Black, Italian, Queer, Non-Binary, Neurodyvergent, and practices primarily in america. Their collaborative approach results in artwork by and for the people.
Stevenson’s practice has been dedicated to supporting young people ages 4 to 18 in developing the necessary skills to encourage advanced imaginative thinking and self-confident expression. In 2019 they developed the Afro Contemporary Art Class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School which has had many forms since, including Afro Futurist February, and three years of Fred Hampton Summer Camp. Supporting community efforts as well, taking the shape of support for the effort to Save Dr. Martin Luther King School from being displaced by the expansion of Interstate 5 which has triggered the need to move Harriet Tubman Middle School. Stevenson is currently working in the Albina community to develop a Living Archive at Jefferson High School with students, community, and the architectural design team. Stevenson also has a robust portfolio of artist projects centering food and gathering around it, projects involving sculpture, drawing, and photography, and new work in collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated folks. These include Tin Can Phone, a podcast all about life in and outside of prison, and Gallery Blue, a curation and exhibition project both of which are owned and operated by formerly incarcerated individuals. Stevenson pursues these professional and creative goals passionately because they believe that empowered and open-minded young people and communities are the best and most direct way toward ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future for all.
Learn moremaximiliano is ⅓ of rise x fall
mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist working in BLKwvv, a generative multimedia mythos: a Black reclamation rococo aesthetic and agenda based in exploring and expanding the multiplicity and fluidity of the Black self through pleasure, desirability, innocence, and imagination as performance, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, and publications.
Learn moreMaxx Katz is a composer, musician, and performance maker based in Portland, OR, whose work draws on vocabulary from free improvisation, performance art, jazz, contemporary classical, and heavy metal. A classically trained flutist with an MA in Music from the University of Virginia, Katz uses flute, electric guitar, voice, and movement as instruments of radical transformation.
They have toured extensively across the US, Europe, and Canada as part of various collaborative and solo projects. Katz was a resident at the 2019 Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music with Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey, and Atlantic Center for the Arts with flutist Nicole Mitchell. They compose work for ongoing ensembles including Yelling Choir and Floom.
Katz has been commissioned by the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble and the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial, and has created work in collaboration with musicians and dancers including Tyshawn Sorey, Linda Austin, Tahni Holt and Muffie Delgado-Connelly, John Niekrasz, Julian Otis, lauren jean crow, and Eddie Bond.
Their Yelling Choir project has debuted compositions at the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial, the American Choral Directors Association Northwest Conference, Congress Yard Projects, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and ACRE Residency. They have led Yelling Choir workshops at Banff and ACRE as well as Portland State University, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Inward Bound Mindfulness Education teen and young adult meditation retreats, and Portland Public Schools.
Learn more"Maya Beiser treats her concert programs as expansive, evening-length compositions... deep and rich, with a lush vibrato, Ms. Beiser's rich-hued tone singing out from within a bed of sound loops ranged from the insistently rhythmic to the meltingly lyrical..." – The New York Times
"Beiser combines the best of two worlds. She is a classically trained cellist with the technical and interpretive resources to draw whatever kind of music she wishes from her instrument." – The Chicago Sun-Times
“With virtuoso chops, rock-star charisma, and an appetite for pushing her instrument to the edge of avant-garde adventurousness, Maya Beiser is the post-modern diva of the cello.” – The Boston Globe
The New Yorker magazine once referred to Maya Beiser as "the cello goddess.” The Israeli-born cellist is equal parts glamour, passion, and musical artistry of the highest level, and she brings it all to everything she does – from her collaborations with Steve Reich, to her work with Brian Eno and Shirin Neshat, to her stage shows at BAM and other prestigious venues around the world. Maya captivates audiences with her virtuosity, eclectic repertoire, and relentless quest to redefine her instrument’s boundaries. Beiser is a graduate of Yale University, a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and a featured performer on the world’s most prestigious stages from Lincoln Center to London’s South Bank Centre. Her next recording, Uncovered, will be released in August 2014.
Learn moreMaya Vivas is a multidisciplinary artist working in a variety of mediums, such as ceramic, performance, painting, and installation. Maya has exhibited work, spoken on panels, and hosted workshops throughout the United States, including venues and institutions such as The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, Louisiana State University, and Yale. Vivas is also co-founder of Ori Gallery. Whose mission is to redefine "the white cube" through amplifying the voices of Queer and Trans Artists of color, community organizing and mobilization through the arts
Maya is a 2022/3 Golden Spot Residency awardee.
Learn moreStuart received her BFA in dance from NYU and was a member of the Randy Warhaw Dance Company for five years. On invitation from the Klapstuk Festival in Leuven in 1991, she created her first full-length piece, Disfigure Study. In 1994 Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods began a series of collaborations with visual artists, including Lawrence Malstaf, Gary Hill, and Ann Hamilton. Together with choreographer/dancer Benoît Lachambre and composer Hahn Rowe—both honored with Bessie Awards—Stuart created Forgeries, Love, and Other Matters.
Learn moreMeg Whiteford writes books and makes theater. Her writing on visual art and performance has appeared in Artforum, Aperture, and X-TRA. She is the author of The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies (Plays Inverse, 2015), the Curator's Choice for the 2017 BAM Next Wave Festival Reading Room, and Callbacks (&Now and Northwestern U. Press, 2018), recipient of the 2016 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Prize. She has performed at Pieter, PAM, REDCAT, Machine Project, Coaxial, and Project Utopia. She is currently the managing editor of the Art Book Review and teaches dance and performance theory and history. Her ballet, Overture, a response to the drawings of artist Beau Rhee, will be published with Gravel Projects this fall. She is interested in creating wild rides.
Learn moreWolfe’s work has been presented at venues including REDCAT, Live Arts Exchange Festival, FRESH Festival, the New Original Works Festival, Off Center Festival/Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s, Dia Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, The Living Theater, and Movement Research at Judson Church. She has performed in the works of Vicky Shick, Jérôme Bel, Molissa Fenley, Clarinda Mac Low, and Susan Rethorst. Wolfe has had residencies at REDCAT, Performance Works NorthWest, the Djerassi Resident Artist’s Program, and the Hothouse Residency program at UCLA, among others. She is the founder and director of Show Box L.A., and was a founding co-editor of itch dance journal.
Learn morePost-post-modern diva Meow Meow’s unique brand of ‘kamikaze cabaret’ and performance art exotica has hypnotised, inspired and terrified audiences globally. The spectacular crowd-surfing queen of song ‘drags cabaret kicking and screaming into the 21st century’ (Time Out NY), with trail-blazing sell-out seasons from New York's Lincoln Center and Berlin's Bar Jeder Vernunft to London’s Apollo Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Sydney Opera House.
Named a ‘cabaret diva of the highest order’ (New York Post), ‘SENSATIONAL’ (The Times UK), One of the Top Performers of the Year by The New Yorker, ‘The Queen of Chanson’ by the Berliner Zeitung and ‘a Phenomenon’ by the Australian press, multi-award winning Meow's works have been curated by David Bowie, Pina Bausch and Mikhail Baryshnikov amongst others, and she has created original works for numerous international arts festivals and venues as well as performing everything from Schubert and Schumann with orchestra to touring with punk outfit Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls.
Meow starred recently on London's West End in Kneehigh Theatre and Michel Legrand's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and in her own solo concerts at the legendary Apollo Theatre. She had a sensational 21 show season of the Malthouse Theatre/Sydney Festival commissioned Meow Meow's Little Match Girl at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre in December and performed Cocteau's piece for Piaf, Le Bel Indifferent, for the Greenwich Music Festival U.S. She has won numerous Green Room Awards, Helpmann Theatre Awards, Sydney Theatre Critics, the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Prize, and the New York Franklin Furnace Performance Art Award amongst others.
Meow has just had her debut with The London Philharmonic under Maestro Jurowski as Jenny in Brecht/Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper in Paris Theatre des Champs-Elysees and London Royal Festival Hall. She joins the London Philharmonic again in July for further UK performances. She most recently sold out her Lincoln Center American Song Book Series concert and toured the concert halls of Australia with Barry Humphries and the Australian Chamber Orchestra in a programme of lost and re-found works from Weimar Germany in the 1920's. With long-time adored collaborator Pink Martini's Thomas M Lauderdale she has written and recorded the album Here Kitty Kitty ...The lost sessions, due for release in 2013. Meow's albums Vamp and Songs from a Little Match Girl, are available on iTunes.
Selected Press
"A Freewheeling Trot Around the Globe," Stephen Holden, The New York Times, April 1, 2013.
"Meet the Queen of Kamikaze Cabaret," David Hajdu, The New Republic, April 11, 2013.
Learn moreMia Habib (b. 1980, Houston, Texas) is an Oslo-based dancer, performer, and choreographer working at the intersection of performance, exhibitions, publications, lectures, teaching, mentoring, and curating. Her work is described as holding a critical cultural perspective on body, identity, society, and dance. She engages in labs and research with a variety of specialists including artists, scientists, and political activists.
Habib has collaborated internationally with Jassem Hindi, Guilherme Garrido, Steinunn Ketilsdottir, Julie Nioche, Rani Nair, Brynjar Bandlien, Monica Gillette, keyon gaskin, Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson, and Tommy Noonan. She danced with Carte Blanche, The Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance, from 2017-2018, for whom she also made the commissioned work, Gjallarhorn (2016).
Habib has been an associated artist of Dance House Oslo, co-initiated the artist network Sweet & Tender Collaborations, and is a former member of the board of The Norwegian Opera and Ballet. She holds an M.A in Conflict Resolution and Mediation from Tel Aviv University, and a B.A. in Choreography and Dance Pedagogy from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Habib’s work has been presented: LaMaMaMoves!, Tanz im August, Dance House Oslo, Aerowaves 2015, Black Box Theatre Oslo, BIT Teatergarasjen, Theatre Freiburg, Tanzhaus nrw Dusseldorf, Spielart Festival, Gotheborg Dance and Theatre festival, On Marche Festival Marrakech, I'TRÔTRA Festival Antananarivo, and Keðja Reykjavík.
Learn moreMia Imani is an international interdisciplinary artivist (art + activist) and arts writer based in Berlin, Germany. She creates and curates liminal spaces that invite Black and Brown communities to heal individual and communal trauma through conscious (daydreaming, visualization) and subconscious (lucid, REM sleep) dreaming. These works aim to center the agency of marginalized communities and use dreams as a portal to manifest alternative past(s), present(s), and future(s). She received her BA in media communications studies from the University of Washington and is completing her master’s degree in North American Culture and Literature studies at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.
Learn moreReinsch is a multidisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon, where he earned his MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2009. His work incorporates performance and activated sculptural props to explore human connection and disconnection, often through themes of celebration and melancholy.
Learn moreGroisman integrates visual art and physical games, devising wearable equipment to be used in various performances and interactive public encounters. He attended Uni-Rio Music College and has received art research scholarships from several Brazilian institutions, including Rioarte (2004), Vitae (2002), and Uniarte da Faperj (2000). His work has been shown in both performance festivals and museum settings, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; II Bienal, Lima, Peru; Festival de La Batiê, Geneva; and the In Transit Festival, Berlin. Since 2004, he has partnered with artist Gabriela Duvivier to develop collaborative projects.
Michel Groisman’s presentation was made possible by the Performing Americas Program (PAP), a partnership between the National Performance Network (NPN) and the Network of Cultural Promoters of Latin America and the Caribbean (La RED) designed to increase artistic exchange in the Western Hemisphere. Performing Americas Program is supported by the NPN with funding provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.
Learn moreMichelle Boulé is a NYC-based dance artist. Her work explores the intersections of traditional and contemporary healing practices with dance and aesthetic form, to create aesthetically enlivened experiences for the potential of what and who we are.
Boulé has received commissions and presentations from The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, Triple Canopy, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Summer Stages Dance @ICA Boston, River to River Festival, American Realness, The Met Breuer (with Okkyung Lee), and ISSUE Project Room. Recent awards include: Distinguished Legacy Award from the University of Illinois, New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, Boekelheide Creativity Award, Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant, and residencies from LMCC’s Extended Life Dance Development Program, MacDowell, Yaddo, Bemis Center, Movement Research, and Dance Ireland. She is a “Bessie” Award winning performer, having collaborated with Miguel Gutierrez (2001-16), Bebe Miller, John Jasperse, and Deborah Hay. She teaches internationally and maintains a healing practice.
Learn moreMichelle Ellsworth co-mingles technology, carpentry, and quilting with dance in an attempt to choreograph high-functioning coping strategies for geopolitical (and personal) phenomena. Ellsworth is currently making a 7-inch recording with drummer Sean Meehan, creating a new dance for wood camera and starting her next quilt, Quilt Complex #9. Among her honors are a Doris Duke Impact Award (2015), Creative Capital Fellowship (2013), Doris Duke Building Demand for the Arts Grant (2014), a NEFA National Dance Project Grant (2014), and an NPN Creation Fund Grant.
Learn moreMiguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, composer, performer, singer, writer, educator, and advocate who has lived in New York for over twenty years. He is fascinated by the time-based nature of performance and how it creates an ideal frame for phenomenological questions around presence, meaning-making, and the complexity of interiority. His work proposes an immersive state, where attention itself becomes a material that can be manipulated, stretched, strained, or dived into. He believes in an approach to art making that is fierce, fragile, empathetic, political, and irreverent.
In recent years he has been occupied with thinking about how he negotiates his queer, Latinx identity within the traditions of the white avant-garde. This led to This Bridge Called My Ass, a piece that bends tropes of Latinidad to identify new relationships to content and form. The piece premiered in 2019 at The Chocolate Factory as part of American Realness Festival and tours throughout 2019 and 2020 to a host of venues.
He has been presented in more than 60 cities around the world, in venues such as at Centre National de Danse, Centre Pompidou, Festival Universitario, ImPulsTanz, Fringe Arts, Walker Art Center, TBA/PICA, MCA Chicago, Live Arts Bard, American Realness, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He has received support from Creative Capital, MAP, National Dance Project, National Performance Network, and Jerome Foundation. He has received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, the Tides Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, United States Artists, an award from Foundation for Contemporary Art, a 2016 Franky Award from Prelude Festival, and four Bessies. He is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist. Other recent work includes Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us), a commission for Ballet de Lorraine inspired by the May '68 French protests. With Ishmael Houston-Jones he co-directed Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd, which received a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Revival. He has been an artist in residence at MANCC, LMCC, Centre Choréographique National de Montpellier, Centre National du Danse Pantin, Baryshnikov Art Center, and Gibney. He has created music for several of his works, for Antonio Ramos’ work, and with Colin Self for Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony. He performs with Nick Hallett as Nudity in Dance. He also currently performs a music project called SADONNA: sad versions of upbeat Madonna songs.
His book WHEN YOU RISE UP is available from 53rd State Press. His essays have been published in A Life in Dance (ed. Rebecca Stenn and Fran Kirmser), In Terms of Performance: A Keywords Anthology (ed. Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola) and his essay “Does Abstraction Belong To White People” was recently published on Bomb’s website. He is currently developing a new TV show with his sister, Margarita Gutierrez, called “Boca,” about a father’s brain trauma and its effects on his immigrant family.
He has taught regularly at a variety of festivals and intensives such as Forum Dança, La Caldera, ImPulsTanz, Camping/CND, SFADI, Lion’s Jaw, American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, MELT at Movement Research, Earthdance, Danza Común, New Aesthetics, Performatica, and Ponderosa and he has been a Visiting Guest Professor at several universities including DOCH, Konstfack, P.A.R.T.S., Bennington College, Hollins University’s MFA Dance Program, School of Art Institute of Chicago’s Low Res MFA Art Program, Yale University’s MFA Program in Sculpture, RISD, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA, Princeton University, CalArts, University of Illinois, The New School/Eugene Lang, New York University’s Experimental Theater Wing, Hunter College, and many more. He is the program director for LANDING, a peer to peer network, non-academic educational initiative at Gibney. He invented DEEP AEROBICS in 2007, disseminated it for ten years, and then killed it in 2017. He is also a Feldenkrais Method® practitioner.
Learn moreGutierrez is a New York-based dance and music artist who makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. His work has toured internationally to festivals and venues including American Realness Festival in New York; Festival d’automne à Paris; Antipodes Festival in Brest, France; Out There Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; UNAM in Mexico City; and ImPulsTanz in Vienna. He is the winner of three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards.
Learn moreMike Barber has performed as a dancer in Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Portland. He performed on Broadway in Bill Irwin’s Largely New York, was a member of the Pat Graney Company in Seattle, co-directed Portland’s aero/betty aerial dance theater, and has also danced with the Gregg Bielemeier Dance Project, Oslund + Co/Dance, and Minh Tran and Dancers. Since 2002, Mike has produced and appeared in 35 iterations of the performance series Ten Tiny Dances, for which he is the Artistic Director and Founder. He currently works with adolescents and artists as a psychotherapist in Portland.
Learn moreMike Daisey has been called “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by The New York Times for his groundbreaking monologues which weave together autobiography, gonzo journalism, and unscripted performance to tell hilarious and heartbreaking stories that cut to the bone, exposing secret histories and unexpected connections. His controversial work, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, was recognized as one of the year’s best theater pieces by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, San Jose Mercury News, and The San Francisco Bay Guardian.
This fall he will premiere All the Faces of the Moon, a 29-night epic monologue performed over an entire lunar month, at the Public Theater in New York City. That work will be available for free online for people around the world to listen and watch as the story unfolds. At more than forty hours, All the Faces of the Moon will be the largest piece of sustained theatrical narrative since the 13th century medieval mystery plays.
As a playwright, his transcript of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was downloaded over 100,000 times in the first week it was made available. Under a revolutionary open license it has seen more than sixty productions around the world and been translated into six languages. The first Chinese production opened last year in Beijing, and will tour to Hong Kong and Shenzhen this year.
Since his first monologue in 1997, Daisey has created over fifteen monologues, including the critically-acclaimed The Last Cargo Cult, the controversial How Theater Failed America, the twenty-four-hour feat All the Hours in the Day, the unrepeatable series All Stories Are Fiction, the four-part epic Great Men of Genius, and the international sensation 21 Dog Years.
He has performed in venues on five continents, ranging from Off-Broadway at the Public Theater to remote islands in the South Pacific, from the Sydney Opera House to an abandoned theater in post-Communist Tajikistan. He’s been a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, the Late Show with David Letterman, a longtime host and storyteller for The Moth, as well as a commentator and contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The Daily Beast, WIRED, Vanity Fair, Slate, Salon, NPR and the BBC. In a brief, meteoric career with This American Life, his two shows are the most listened to and downloaded episodes of that program’s eighteen year history. He is currently at work on a second book, an anthology of his monologues, and he stars in the Lawrence Krauser feature Horrible Child. He has been nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award, two Drama League Awards, and is the recipient of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, five Seattle Times Footlight Awards, the Sloan Foundation’s Galileo Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship.
Learn moreMilka Djordjevich is a choreographer, performer, and teacher based in Los Angeles. Her work has been shown at many venues, including the Kitchen, the Chocolate Factory Theater, the Whitney Museum, the American Realness Festival, and Danspace Project in New York; REDCAT, Grand Performances, Pieter, the Hammer Museum, Machine Project, Showbox LA/Bootleg Theater, and HomeLA in Los Angeles; Counterpulse and the Berkeley Art Museum in Northern California; and internationally in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, and the UK. Djordjevich was a 2006-2007 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and a 2008/2010 danceWEB Europe Scholar, and she is currently a 2017-2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellow. Her other projects include serving as guest editor for Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence, and initiating the Monday Morning Class series at Pieter. Djordjevich has co-authored works with composer Chris Peck, choreographer Dragana Bulut, designer Samuel Yang, and artist Marcos Luytens; and has performed for Heather Kravas, Jennifer Monson, Elizabeth Ward, Sam Kim, Sasa Asentic and Ana Vujanovic, among others. She has twice served as Visiting Assistant Professor in the UC Riverside Dance Department and has taught at UC Irvine, AMDA, Pomona College, Movement Research, and PICA’s TBA:15 Festival. In 2016, Djordjevich established STANA, an organization cultivating Los Angeles, national and international dance connections.
Learn moreThe Miracles Club is a performance art and music group from Portland Oregon. Members Rafael Fauria, Honey Owens and Ryan Boyle explore the relationship between sound, movement, audience and artist.
Selected Press
Miracles Club, “A New Love”, Michael Manheimer, wweek.com, January 11, 2010.
Learn moreMiranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in two Whitney Biennials. July wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’Or. Miranda July’s most recent film is The Future (2011), which she wrote and directed and stars in.
Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty countries. Her latest book is It Chooses You (McSweeney’s, 2011).
July created the participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore, with artist Harrell Fletcher and a companion book was published in 2007 (Prestel); the work is now in collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Eleven Heavy Things, an interactive sculpture garden she designed for the 2009 Venice Biennale, was on view in Union Square in New York in the summer of 2010 and is currently being presented by MOCA in Los Angeles. Raised in Berkeley, California, she currently lives in Los Angeles. Learn moreMatreyek is an animator, designer, and multimedia artist working in Los Angeles. She creates animated short films as well as works that integrate projected animation and live performance/installation. Matreyek is interested in how animation, when combined with body and space, takes on a more physical and real aspect, while body and space acquire a more fantastical quality.
Selected Press
Miwa Matreyek: Illusion and Non-Illusion, LA RECORD, August 9, 2010.
Learn moreMobile Projection Unit (MPU) is a roving studio that presents new, experimental, site-specific outdoor video projections throughout Portland, Oregon. Our work focusses on spatializing video through projection mapping, and live interactive video performance through creative coding. Founded and directed by Sarah Turner and Fernanda D’Agostino in 2018, MPU is also a curatorial project, putting the tools of production into the hands of artists. MPU has worked with media artists Sharita Towne, Sabina Haque, Ruben Garcia Marrufo, Jaleesa Johnston, Craig Winslow, Megan McKissack, Victoria Wells, and Hasan Mahmood. MPU received a 2020 Northwest Film Center commission to create “Phases of the Moon” for the Portland International Film Festival. Recent projects include “been there,” a series of experimental works by Black filmmakers curated by Ariella Tai and presented as a drive-in movie, and screenings with Snack Bloc in support of BLM. MPU is funded in part by the Precipice Fund through The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Calligram Foundation, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Sarah Turner is an artist, new media curator, creative producer, and art director. Fernanda D’Agostino is an interactive video installation artist, public artist, and creative coder.
Learn moreMohamed El Khatib is an author, director, performer, and is based in France. His work has garnered success in such important arts events as the Avignon Festival. He attempts to confront drama with other media (films, installations, newspapers) and to observe the friction they produce. After literature studies, and time at the CADAC (Dramatic Art Center of Mexico) and a Ph.D in sociology about “the critique in the French press,” he co-founded in 2008 the collective Zirlib on a simple premise: aesthetics aren't devoid of political sense. He has started with “Nowhere to Hide,” a reflection on the notion of grief, which will last for the next 15 years. Since 2011, Mohamed El Khatib has been supported by the L’L in Brussels—a place of research where he has been developing research around the writing of the intimate and attempts to explore, to the point of exhaustion, different modes of anti-spectacular exposition. In 2014–2015, he as an associate artist at the Centre Dramatique National Orléans/Loiret/Centre.
Learn moreMona Vatamanu (Romania) and Florin Tudor (Switzerland) live in Bucharest, Romania, where they have been working together since 2000. Their practice spans film, photography, painting, performance, and installation, and reflects the social upheavals of post-communist Eastern Europe. The duo has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America, and has been featured in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and in the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Vatamanu and Tudor have had residencies at Basis Voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht, AIR Vienna, and Project Room at Ludwig Museum in Budapest, among others. They received first prize in the 2006 Fair:Play Video Festival in Berlin. Vatamanu and Tudor are represented by Lombard Fried Projects, New York.
Peripheries
Moscow's Poplar Curse, New York Magazine, April 17, 2011.
Learn moreMorgan Bassichis (they/them) is a comedian and writer who has been described as “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker. They are the author of The Odd Years and co-editor with Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky of Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, both published by Wendy’s Subway. Recent shows include A Crowded Field (Abrons Arts Center, 2023), Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue, 2022), and Don’t Rain on My Bat Mitzvah (Creative Time, 2021). Morgan’s exhibition, More Little Ditties, was co-presented by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.
Learn moreMorgan Thorson (Minneapolis, MN) is a dance-maker. Morgan’s recent work addresses how the body shapes time; and how time influences our perception and expression of the body in spaces where labor, coordination, identity, movement and image can flourish and decay as well as redefine our notion of dance, sexuality, belonging and life. Morgan has received support from The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (2009, 2011 and 2015), and The National Dance Project (2008, 2012, and 2015). She is a United States Artist (2012), Guggenheim (2010), and McKnight (2002, 2009) Fellow and has received multiple Sage Awards for Outstanding Choreography. Currently, she is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University.
Learn moreOz Halo is a multimedia artist building synesthetic language to heal colonial trauma and ancestral memory carried in the body as a mixed Rroma and desendent of Quileute, and a multigenerational sex worker and survivor of sex trafficking, homelessness, and domestic violence. Their soundwork falls under the name Morher.
Learn moreMPA promotes the body as a paradoxical site tethered to the social and political exchanges that distinguish a space. Enriched by ritual and contradiction, her performances and installations depict power as an embodiment of these relations. These works have been seen in the U.S. and abroad at venues including the Swiss Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACE, the Stedelijk Museum, and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Oaxaca. Her body of work Directing Light onto Fist of Father (2011) at Leo Koenig Inc. combined 16mm film and a plaster cast of her father’s fist in an installation inciting three durational performances. Trilogy (o) (2012) centered photographs of Nike war missiles as an orbiting moon calendar at the arts cooperative Human Resources in Los Angeles, CA. A frequent collaborator, MPA is a visible muse in many works by contemporary photographers, painters, and performers. After receiving a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant in 2013, MPA relocated from NYC to 29 Palms, CA to research somatic practices. She is a frequent visiting art lecturer in New Genres at UCLA.
Learn moreMSHR is the collaborative project of Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy from Portland, OR, USA. The duo formed in 2011 during their involvement in the art collective Oregon Painting Society. MSHR explores ceremonial, cybernetic and cyborgian realms through interactive installation, analog synthesizer design, and ritualistic performance. Using blind probe-heads for hands, they feel out the space of the hyper-object chamber, exploring textures and searching for new hallways.
Learn moreMx. Dahlia Belle can be seen hosting her monthly stand-up showcase THE AFTERMATH at Alberta St Pub. She is also a frequent host of The Moth StorySLAMs.
Learn moreMx Justin Vivian Bond is a singer, painter, performance artist, and author of the Lambda Literary Award winning memoir TANGO: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels and Susie Says…, a collaboration with Gina Garan. V’s debut CD, Dendrophile, was self-released in 2011 and was followed by Silver Wells in 2012. In 2011 Justin Vivian’s art exhibition The Fall of the House of Whimsy was presented at Participant Inc. in New York City. Mx Bond was nominated for a Tony Award for Kiki and Herb Alive On Broadway in 2007. Other notable theatrical endeavors include starring as Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis in Scott Wittman’s production of Jukebox Jackie: Snatches of Jackie Curtis, originating the role of Herculine Barbin in Kate Bornstein’s groundbreaking play Hidden: A Gender, touring with the performance troupe The Big Art Group and appearing in John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus. Other films include Sunset Stories (2012), Imaginary Heroes (2004), and Fanci’s Persuasion (1995). Mx Bond is a recipient of The Ethyl Eichelberger Award, The Peter Reed Foundation Grant, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award for Performance Art/Theater, an Obie, and a Bessie.
Selected Press
Justin Vivian Bond Preps 'Snow Angel' Show For New York's 54 Below, Curtis M. Wong, Huffington Post, December 7, 2012.
"Justin Bond: 'I think everybody's trans'," Hermione Hoby, The Guardian, June 28, 2011.e
Learn moreMyles de Bastion, Artistic Director, Musician, and Creative-altruist who develops technology and art installations that enables sound to be experienced as light and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. He has built large scale installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding.
A dual citizen of the UK and the United States, Myles grew up in England where he obtained a BA from the University of Teesside (UK), focusing on computer science & animation, and was the chairman of the Musician's Society for two years. He has taught at Austine School for the Deaf (VT) and at the world's first Deaf Music Camp (MI), where he developed the curriculum and was responsible for the music and sound program. In 2012 Myles moved to Portland OR and founded CymaSpace, a non-profit that facilitates arts & cultural events that are inclusive of the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing, where Myles further develops his technological artistic works that translate sound into visual mediums. In 2015 Myles took his concepts into the commercial sector and founded Audiolux Devices, a technology company that now produces professional products featuring the synergy of light and sound. Myles continues to live in Portland with his partner Kimberly and CODA daughters Zebra & Juniper.
Learn moreMyles de Bastion develops technology and art installations that enable sound to be experienced as light and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum, and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. He has built large format installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding.
Myles is the founder of CymaSpace, a non-profit that facilitates cultural events inclusive of the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing; and Audiolux Devices, which produces products featuring light and sound synergy. 2018 Director of the first Northwest Deaf Arts Festival. Myles mentors Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing youth, has developed curriculum, and taught workshops in music and sound for Deaf schools, camps, and communities.
A current project, The Ikigai Machine, is a multimedia visual narrative with interactive installations and live performances that he is developing into a feature-length, touring production for disability hubs and art institutions. Myles has received support from Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Cultural Trust, Oregon Cultural Foundation and Randall Charitable Trust.
Learn moreBorn in Algeria, Nacera Belaza has been living in France since the age of five. Following her studies in modern literature at the Université de Reims, Belaza created her own dance company in 1989. In January, 2015 she was appointed Knight of the order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. She enters dance as a self-taught interpreter, and develops a choreography that originates in an inner progress—a sensible awareness of the body, of space and of the emptiness inside herself. Her path resembles a quest, and tends towards the enhancement of the direct bond between the dancer and the spectator, open to the sense of the infinite of the stage. Each element of her pieces—light, space, time, body—responds to each other on stage to develop their own designs. With the repetition of the gesture, its infinite slowness, the stretching out of time, Belaza's pieces all explore movement as one would explore a calm, a profound and continuous breath. Belaza's desire to share and pass on has become focused on the relationship between the audiences and their territories.
Learn moreNadia Buyse is a trans-disciplinary artist and musician living in Portland. She has been in at least 30 bands she can remember. She has toured the United States and Europe, playing in a range of spaces from music festivals, punk clubs, house shows, and discotheques. She has also exhibited work internationally and nationally, including the MDW Art Fair in Chicago, Beta Spaces in New York, and dOCUMENTA (13). She has recently received an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and shortly after participated at the ART STAYS residency program in Slovenia, went on a European tour with her multimedia music project DUBAIS, and performed in the Republic of Georgia.
Learn moreNana Adusei-Poku, PhD, is Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley, California. She was previously Associate Professor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. Her book Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art was published in 2021 with Transcript Verlag and her articles have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, e-flux, Kunstforum International, Flash Art, L’Internationale and darkmatter. She curated the event “Performances of Nothingness” (Academy of Arts, Berlin, 2018) and Black Melancholia (Hessel Museum Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 2022).
Learn moreNarcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer whose work spans performance, video art, experimental music, and photography. She has presented work at The New Museum, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center, and at many nightclubs, galleries, and other alternative art spaces. Narcissister has also presented her work internationally at the Music Biennale in Zagreb Croatia; at Chicks on Speed’s Girl Monster Festival; at The City of Women Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia; and at the Camp/Anti-Camp festival in Berlin, among many others. Her art videos have been included in exhibitions and film festivals worldwide, including on MOCATV. Her film, The Self-Gratifier, won “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at the 2008 Good Vibration Erotic Film Festival and her film, Vaseline, won the main prize in 2013. Interested in the troubling divide between popular entertainment and experimental art, Narcissister appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. Narcissister had her first solo gallery exhibition, Narcissister is You, at envoy enterprises in February 2013. She was nominated for a 2013 Bessie Award for her evening-length piece, Organ Player, and has received awards from Creative Capital, Theo Westenberger, and United States Artists.
Learn moreNatalie Figueroa is an activist and community organizer that has addressed the intersections of art and revolution for over 18 years. Natalie, a Chicago native, has organized alongside youth of color to address issues of police brutality, segregation, access to comprehensive health education and racial injustice in public schools. Currently, she is working on building community in Portland through her art collective YGB.
Learn moreNature Theater of Oklahoma is an OBIE Award-winning New York-based performance group under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Since Poetics: a ballet brut, their first ensemble piece, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has been devoted to making the work they don’t know how to make, putting themselves in impossible situations, and working from out of their own ignorance and unease. Using readymade materials, found space, overheard speech, and observed gesture, and through extreme formal manipulation, and superhuman effort, they shift our perceptions of everyday reality. Selected Press Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, December 21, 2009. 'Romeo And Juliet': Just As You Misremembered It, Robert Smith, NPR, December 29, 2009. Deconstructing Romeo and Juliet, Hilton Als, The New Yorker, January 11, 2010. Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2009. Stage Notes: Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet, Tom Murrin, papermag, December 16, 2009.
Learn moreNeal Medlyn, now residing in New York City, has performed in a variety of films, bands, dance pieces and plays, designed sound scores, been a model and a go-go dancer and continues to do some of these things. But most importantly, he is a Performer who presents his programs in New York City, having at some time or another appeared in numerous U.S. cities and in Berlin Germany. He also performs as Champagne Jerry, a rapper. His performance work, primarily built around pop music, has appeared at the New Museum for Contemporary Art (THE NEAL MEDLYN EXPERIENCE LIVE! a re-enactment of Beyonce's 2007 concert DVD), the Andy Warhol Museum, the Kitchen (Wicked Clown Love), Dance Theater Workshop (...Her's a Queen), the Chocolate Factory (Brave New Girl), Joe's Pub (where he was a co-host and co-creator of Our Hit Parade, which ran for four years), PS122, Fez (Neal Medlyn, the Paris Hilton of Performance Art), Ars Nova (Neal Medlyn's Lionel Richie Opera), the Knitting Factory, Galapagos Art Space (Neal Medlyn's Coming In The Air Tonight), on tour across the U.S., Canada, Berlin, and in London as a resident performer at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. He won a 2010 New York Dance and Performance Award for his sound design for Miguel Gutierrez' Last Meadow and has also designed sound for a joint project between Gutierrez and Jenny Holzer at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. He was honored with the title of Mr. Lower East Side in 2004. He co-starred opposite Karen Finley in "George and Martha" in New York and various places across the U.S. He's also collaborated with Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys), Bridget Everett, Kenny Mellman, Adrienne Truscott and has been discussed in the Onion, NPR's Here and Now, Gothamist, the Austin Chronicle, and the New York Times, in which he has appeared several times without his shirt on. His original Internet TV show NEAL MEDLYN'S LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE was a cult sensation on Nerve.com. His dance moves have been featured in the work of choreographers Adrienne Truscott and David Neumann. He has written for New York Magazine's website and Nerve.com about various things including but not limited to R. Kelly, Blind Date, bisexuality, and Days of Our Lives (with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Lisa Carver) among others. His book, Sexual Buttocks and his albums have been purchased by at least 10 people.
Learn moreNIC Kay is from the Bronx, currently occupying several liminal spaces. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity/meaning gleaned from the shifting of perspective. NIC’s current transdisciplinary projects explore movement as a place of reclamation of the body, history, and spirituality.
NIC has shown work, spoken on panels, and hosted workshops at numerous venues throughout the United States, and Internationally. In 2016, they developed a web series called the Bronx Cunt Tour around their debut solo performance lil BLK for Open TV, which premiered in April, 2016. NIC Kay was a 2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Van Lier Fellow in New York City.
Learn moreNick Hallett is a composer and cultural producer who works between the worlds of music and art. Whispering Pines 10, an opera collaboration with artist Shana Moulton, was staged at PICA for TBA:11 in addition to The Kitchen, New Museum of Contemporary Art, SFMOMA, The Warhol Museum, and Carolina Performing Arts. A new cycle of the project is currently being funded by Creative Capital. He is the Music Director and producer of the Joshua Light Show—a team of live cinema artists with roots in the 1960s psychedelia movement—which appears worldwide, and more recently has performed to Hallett’s original soundscores at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium and at the Papalote Digital Dome in Mexico City, for the Mutek festival. He has staged a diverse body of work in New York and abroad, from masterpieces of John Cage, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (as co-director of the Darmstadt series) to music and live cinema at The Kitchen, to his own "ever-compelling" (Time Out) media rituals of music and light, always involving the human voice, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and PERFORMA, among others.
Selected Press
The Object Whisperer: Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines, Brian Droitcour, Rhizome, April 14, 2010.
Learn moreHis play TREVOR received multiple Ovation and Critics Circle awards for the 2015 production starring Laurie Metcalf and Jimmi Simpson. Other plays include the COWARD and VÉRITÉ, both produced by Lincoln Center/LTC3, and IMPORTANT HATS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, produced by Manhattan Theater Club.
In television, Nick worked as a writer and co-executive producer on the Netflix original series GLOW and ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, for which he has garnered multiple WGA and Emmy nominations, as well as RAMY, for which he served as Co-Executive Producer on its Peabody Award winning first season.
Upcoming projects include the film THE FACE OF THE KING with Sebastian Silva, and COMPLICITY ISLAND, an audio play commissioned by Audible. Nick earned his Literature/Creative Writing BA from Bard College and a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting degree from Juilliard, where he was a two-time winner of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize, and was recently awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters by Bard College. He began his career as a puppeteer and musician for the acclaimed madcap rock puppet musical JOLLYSHIP THE WHIZ-BANG, for which he also built puppets and wrote scripts. He is originally from Anchorage, Alaska.
Learn moreNight Shade is a group of artists rebelling against traditional flat-surface silhouettes and revolutionizing the ancient art of shadow puppetry by using light to manipulate depth and space. This art group blends hand-held lights, masks, puppets, composed music, sound-effects, and experimental storytelling into a bewitching form of cinematic puppetry that flows like film. Core artists are Alicia Cortes, Sarah Frechette, Oviedo Menendez, Jason Thibodeaux, and Alain Z, but also working under the banner Night Shade are Kevin Bouton-Scott, Michel Fiffe, Chris Rabilwongse, and Cynthia Star.
The Portland-based Night Shade collective began collaborating with Japanther back in 2005 in New York. That first show at the Arm Gallery in Williamsburg started the momentum of late night cutting and, since then, this group has performed across the US at various puppetry and art festivals, galleries, anarchist spaces, gutted bowling alleys, and pubs. In 2009 Night Shade performed their full-length epic shadow play, Night Shade, which contains over 700 intricate cut-outs, for a sold-out run at Disjecta, in Portland.
Learn moreNina Katchadourian's work, in a wide variety of media including photgraphy, sculpture, video and sound, has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PSI/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, New Langton Arts, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, Palais de Tokyo, and as part of the 2010 Time-Based Art Festival. In January 2006 the Turku Art Museum in Finland featured a solo show of works she made in that country, and in June 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph, All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a 2008 solo show of Katchadourian's video installation works, and in February 2010, as artist in residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, she had another solo show entitled Seat Assignment. She is currently at work on a permanent public piece, commissioned by the GSA, for a border crossing station between the US and Canada.
Selected Press
Found in Translation, Brian Dillon, Art Review, April, 2008.
Learn moreNivhek is a project by Liz Harris, who lives and works on the Oregon coast. ENGINE marks the first new work by Nivhek since the release of After it’s own death/Walking in a spiral towards the house in 2019.
Liz also records and performs under the names Grouper, Helen, Raum, et al on her own imprint YELLOWELECTRIC, and Kranky, Ltd.
Her music is at grouper.BandCamp.com
Her drawings, paintings, and publications are at repeatingpattern.com
Learn moreForever cascading forward in a positive direction, gleefully instinctive, No Age erupt out of your speakers, blasting away the clouds above the smoggy cityscape to reveal a solar flaring sun. With an ecstatic force bubbling around and beyond their music, they release contagious energy like they’re main-lining a field full of whirring wind turbines, while tuned into an ancient celestial power source.
No Age is the duo of Dean Spunt and Randy Randall, they are on a constant journey to explore the furthest reaches of sound. They set out with one particular rule in mind: To write songs that we would be psyched to listen to. On a first listen, discovering each new dose of their alchemy is exhilarating—they produce perfectly crafted songs, underpinned by infectious melodies and ear-piercing cacophony. This swirling mix of unstoppable momentum is catapulted into the stratosphere by sweeping bursts of symphonic growls. Their power is enunciated through their ability to take their core of catchy song-writing and expand its emotional influence through tone, structure and noise. Everything in Between, their third album and follow-up to 2008’s Nouns has now arrived.
Learn moreNoel Kennon is a violist based in Seattle, WA. Kennon focuses on soundings involving resonance, texture, just intonation, and experimental improvisation.
Learn moreAs a dance artist, Noelle Stiles is interested in how and where experience is held in the body. This interest provides a framework for extracting the corporeal language that both intimately connects and individuates us. Stiles has a BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts and completed her graduate studies in dance at The Ohio State University. She has performed and presented work at venues such as the PICA's Time-Based Art Festival (2010), On The Boards, PWNW, Dance New Amsterdam, and Links Hall. Stiles' interest in teaching has taken her to places such as The Ohio State University, the Governor’s School of North Carolina and she co-founded the community focused dance class series Heavy Rotation with Kathleen Keogh of Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner. Her work has been supported by Caldera's Artist Residency program, PICA's Resource Room Residency, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the ACA Associate Artist Residency program and was selected by PICA and the NDP to travel to the Dublin Dance Festival as part of a pilot international exchange program. In 2010, Stiles merged her work as a graphic designer with her work in dance to co-create a dance publication entitled FRONT. Based out of Portland, Oregon, FRONT is Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Robert Tyree. FRONT utilizes the old-school tactics of the broadsheet newspaper to explore the new, current, future energy of dance theory and practices in the field.
Learn moreFor the past ten years, Zimbabwe-born and New York-based Chipaumire has investigated Africa and her own personal iconography. Her performances complicate, implicate, and destroy the concept of the African female body as a subjugated, colonial, and tribal unknowable. Chipaumire is a recipient of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and two New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards.
Selected Press
Nora Chipaumire: Body and Soul Podcast, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Infinite Body Podcast, April 25, 2008.
Platform 2012: Parallels, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, April, 2012.
Learn moreNyokabi Kariũki (she/her) is a Kenyan composer and sound artist based between Kenya and the United States. Her sonic imagination is ever-evolving, spanning across genres from classical contemporary and experimental-electronic music, to sound art, pop, film, and (East) African musical traditions. She performs with the piano, voice, electronics, and on several instruments from the African continent. Her concert works have been performed by notable ensembles such as Cello Octet Amsterdam and Third Coast Percussion, and she has received commissions from BBC Radio 3, Heartland Marimba, and more. Released in February 2022, her debut EP, ‘peace places: kenyan memories’ (SA Recordings) was described as “deft” (The Quietus) and “transcendent” (The Guardian), with Bandcamp highlighting seeing her as “becoming a crucial voice in contemporary composition and experimental music.” Nyokabi seeks to create meaningful and challenging art, illuminated by a commitment to the preservation and reflection on African thought, language, and stories.
Learn moreThe United States has over 700 military bases on foreign soil in sovereign countries where we have no declaration of war. This project unites musicians, researchers, and music lovers to gather covers by American musicians of songs that originate from each of these places. By creating a new rendition of songs from occupied regions, these musicians enact a second (symbolic) occupation and encourage reflection on the implications of our nation’s exceptionally expansive reach and presence.
Throughout the world, music serves as a mobilizing force, from the musicians of Bolivian President Evo Morales’ grassroots campaign to actions by CRASS and other punks. In contrast to the frequent co-optation of music as entertainment or commodity, this project will focus on music’s power to transform awareness and create change. Songs in Wartime functions as a reciprocal window: we project a limited version of American culture into foreign territory with the presence of our bases, and these distant places reflect back into our territory when we cover and share their songs.
Learn moreOffsite Dance Project was started in 2008 to pioneer alternative approaches to arts presentation through site-specific performance in locations such as trains, parks, and museums. Offsite also produces an annual community forum, We dance, to stimulate Japan’s contemporary dance scene by bringing artists from various genres together in unusual circumstances that generate new ways of approaching their art.
Learn moreBorn in Israel, Meromi currently lives and works in New York City, where he is represented by Harris Lieberman Gallery. Meromi graduated from Bezalel Academy in 1992 and went on to receive his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003. He has exhibited at venues including The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; the Lyon Biennial, France; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Magasin 3, Stockholm; De Appel Museum, Amsterdam; Sculpture Center, New York; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and Art in General, New York. He has received numerous scholarships and awards, including a Percent for Art commission (2009), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2008) Grants to Artists Award, the Fund for Video and experimental film (2004), I.C. Excellence Foundation (2003), and the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli ArtPrize (1998).
Selected Press
Ohad Meromi - 500 Words, Dawn Chan, Artforum.com, December 18, 2010.
Studio Visit - Ohad Meromi, Andrea Bellini, Flash Art Online.
Re: Diaspora - Yael Bartana, Elad Lassry, Ohad Meromi and Daniel Silver in Correspondance - Israel, Nicola Trezzi, Flash Art, October 2009.
Peripheries
Kurt Schwitters: Reconstructions of the Merzbau, Karin Orchard, Tate Papers, Autumn, 2007.
Learn moreOkwui Okpokwasili is a New York-based writer, performer, and choreographer. Deemed “a magnetic performer” by The New York Times, Okpokwasili has worked with Ralph Lemon, Julie Taymor, Nora Chipaumire, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Dean Moss, and others. Bronx Gothic is her second solo performance project, after pent-up: a revenge dance. Both projects are collaborations with visual designer, filmmaker, and director Peter Born. Together they create award-winning multidisciplinary experiences of raw intimacy—a collision of body, image and sound. Okpokwasili ‘s accomplishments include MANCC Choreographic Fellow; Artist in Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Park Avenue Armory, and LMCC’s Extended Life Program; Foundation for Contemporary Arts grantee. Her current work Bronx Gothic enjoyed a sold-out run in PS122’s 2014 COIL Festival and continues to tour nationally and internationally.
Learn moreOlivia Camfield is a multimedia movement artist of the Muscogee Nation, born and raised in Texas Hill Country. Their work finds connection to dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism. They have performed and choreographed dance for much of their career, and their film work includes themes of the Alien as kin, time traveling relatives, and Mvskoke lifeways in experimental forms. They are a tattoo artist whose hand poke practice is based in Southeastern and Mississippian Indigenous tattoo traditions, creating designs for Southeastern people that imagine the possibilities of those tattoos in the future and the new shapes they may take. Olivia's films have screened internationally at Camden International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and have appeared in print and online publications such as Artforum and Variety. Olivia is a 2018-19 Alembic Artist In Residence, a CYCLE I featured artist of COUSIN Collective, a 2022 Sundance Institute Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive participant, and a 2022 recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s LIFT–Early Career Support for Native Artists award.
Learn moreThe Brooklyn-based artist has always deftly balanced the experimental with the accessible: He has released several albums under his Oneohtrix Point Never moniker on various independent labels – including the 2013 3-CD/5 LP Rifts, a compilation of his early work – as well as amassing a large catalogue of mini-album tape releases. His most recent disc, 2011’s Replica, was built around samples of television commercials; Sasha Frere Jones of the New Yorker called it “music that gently triggers a series of images and feelings, none of which you can name and all of which seem entirely common.” He has built live soundscapes at the Museum of Modern Art; collaborated with Montreal-based ambient electronic music composer Tim Hecker on the largely improvised 2012 Instrumental Tourist; and recast the title track from his 2010 disc Returnal as an elegant and emotive piece for piano, featuring the otherworldly voice of Antony Hegarty. Advertising powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi tapped Lopatin for an installation event at the 2012 Cannes film fest and Sofia Coppola’s longtime cohort Brian Reitzell invited him to create original music for Coppola’s The Bling Ring. Said the Saatchi execs, “There’s this grandeur to his music, but it’s always counterbalanced by moments of irony and lightness.”
Selected Press:
"The Top 50 Albums of 2013," Pitchfork, December 2013
Learn moreThe Oregon Painting Society is an art collective from Portland, Oregon, formed in 2007. They have exhibited and performed at Fontanelle Gallery (PDX) and Reed College (PDX).
Learn moreSince the Oregon Symphony was established 117 years ago, it has been recognized for its internationally acclaimed music directors, skilled performers, diverse programs, and outstanding community services in education and regional touring. The Oregon Symphony now ranks among the largest orchestras in the nation, and the oldest west of the Mississippi.
Learn moreOtomo Yoshihide is one of the most well known Japanese musicians and composers in the experimental music field. Performing with guitar, turntables, and electronics he first came to international prominence in the 1990s as the leader of the noise rock group Ground Zero, and has since worked in a variety of contexts, ranging from free improvisation to noise, jazz and contemporary classical. A pioneering figure in onkyo and electroacoustic improvisation scenes, Otomo has been featured on important records on labels such as Improvised Music from Japan and Erstwhile. He studied at the Meiji University from 1979, where he studied ethnomusicology, concentrating on the Japanese pop music of World War II and the development of musical instruments during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Samples of instruments and music from this period are found in several of his works. He played in rock bands while at college, but turned to improvisation after discovering free jazz and free improvisation musicians like guitarist Derek Bailey, saxophonist Kaoru Abe, and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi.
Learn moreFounded in 1991 by Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn, Pan Pan Theatre has since produced 22 productions, published a major photographic book, and produced a film, One. The ensemble has worked with a host of Irish and international performers and artists, and both worked and toured extensively throughout Ireland as well as Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Korea, and the United States.
Learn moreParenthetical Girls is a pop group. Of sorts. Charting a particularly idiosyncratic course over its complicated chronology, the ensemble has been home to a revolving cast of collaborators in multiple disciplines, with founder and creative director Zac Pennington acting as the sole constant. With a résumé that includes dalliances in chamber music, large-scale experimental theater, electronic pop, and innumerable other aesthetic and sonic diversions, the group has performed its work at a multitude of international arts and music festivals, including Donaufestival (Vienna), Primavera Sound (Barcelona), New Island Festival (NYC), Intersecciones (Gijon, Spain), PuSh Festival (Vancouver, B.C.), Bumbershoot (Seattle), and TBA:08 (Portland). Ever the pragmatists, Parenthetical Girls are in the midst of releasing their latest album, Privilege, as a series of five, blood-numbered 12” EPs, via the group’s own Slender Means Society label.
Learn morePatrick Rock is a conceptual artist who has shown internationally, most recently with the collective AMERICAN MEAT LLC., and with the post-punk trio PISS in the Sequences Live Art Festival in Reykjavik. He is the director of ROCKSBOXCONTEMPORARYFINEART, a short-term artist residency and exhibition space in Portland, as well as the director of the Portland State University Art Department galleries, where he also teaches as an adjunct instructor of its Art Department.
Learn morePaul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance.
Learn morePepper Pepper is a Portland, OR-based multidisciplinary artist. His work transforms vulnerability into spectacle - using artifice, technology, and camp to metabolize trauma into luminous, often magical performance worlds. Pepper has presented performances on stages and at festivals including Risk/Reward, the Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), Performance Works Northwest, NCECA, and internationally at OFF! Biennale Budapest. Their visual and installation work has been exhibited at Oregon Contemporary, Linfield University, Seattle Central College, and The Budapest Art Fair.
Pepper has incubated new experimental works at residencies like MacDowell, Monson Arts, Playa, Caldera, Signal Fire, and PonderosaTanz (Germany), Pepper’s practice bridges experimental performance and nightlife legacy. With over 20 years in cabaret and drag production, Pepper has appeared at and been featured at The Austin International Drag Festival, OUTstages (Victoria, BC), and is co-host of The Portland Drag Theatre Festival alongside frequent collaborator Anthony Hudson.
His ongoing project Pink Moment explores PINK as queer energy, ritual, and resistance while hybridizing performance, photography, and installation into an evolving archive of embodied glamour.
@thepepperpepper
www.thepepperpepper.com Learn morePeter Coffin was born in Berkeley, California in 1972. He has had solo exhibitions at Herald St, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery (NY); The Wrong Gallery (NY); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (CA); Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami (FL); The Horticultural Society of New York (NY); and le Confort Moderne, Poitier, France; as well as recent group exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NY. He is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Learn morePeter Simensky’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum 52, New York; The Swiss Institute, New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston. Selected group exhibitions at Sculpture Center, NY; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mass Moca, North Adams; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York among others. Simensky’s Gold Dust was recently featured in Cabinet’s, Money Issue. He has received awards and grants from LMCC, NYFA, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He lives and works in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY.
Learn morePetra Kovacic was born in Split, Croatia. In 2008, she graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. Kovac’ic’ has exhibited in fifteen group and solo exhibitions and has performed her in numerous festivals in Croatia and abroad in New York, France, and Macedonia. She collaborated in workshops on artistic and pedagogical praxis and is a member of the Croatian Association of Artists, Zagreb and Split, and the Moving Academy of Performing Arts.
Learn moreBorn in 1970, Philippe Quesne received his education in Visual Arts. For 10 years he designed sets for theater, operas and exhibitions. In 2003, he created the Vivarium Studio Company, and directed his first show, La Démangeaison des ailes, based on the acts of taking off and falling down. Philippe Quesne hunts the marvelous, the tiny, and pushes to the extreme experiences of our daily lives as well as the relationship between mankind and nature. As he did as a child, collecting insects, he now works and studies small communities under his microscope. The scenography is used as an ecosystem in which he immerses his actors into. His shows, such as La Démangeaison des ailes (2003), Des expériences (2004), D’après nature (2006), L’Effet de Serge (2007), La Mélancolie des dragons (2008), Big Bang (2010), Swamp Club (2013), Next Day (2014), compose a repertory that tours all over the world. In addition to his work for the theater, he creates performances and interventions in public spaces or natural sites, and displays his installations in the context of exhibitions. Since January 2014, he has been serving as the co-director of Nanterre-Amandiers, National Dramatic Center. In 2016, he will create Caspar Western Friedrich at Kammerspiele in Munich and Welcome to Caveland! at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels
BIO PAGE IMAGE/S:
La Mélancolie des dragons 1 @ Martin Argyroglo
La Mélancolie des dragons 5 © Pierre Grosbois Learn morePictureplane is Travis Egedy. Having cut his teeth on killer remixes for Crystal Castles, HEALTH, Thieves Like Us, and worked with Beirut's Zach Condon, Pictureplane's debuts with the anthemic and otherworldly "Trance Doll" 7-inch. Grimy synths, broken beats, and bucolic vocals collide somewhere between early 90s house music and the gnarly soundscapes of Black Dice to forge a sound wholly unique and endlessly exciting. It begins here: Pictureplane is going to destroy dance-floors in 2009.
Learn morePieter Ampe grew up in Ghent, Belgium, and studied at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, the Arnhem Dance Academy, and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Together with Guilherme Garrido, he has created and performed Still Difficult Duet (2007) and Still Standing You (2010). In 2006, Ampe took part in danceWEB, a scholarship program at Vienna’s ImpulsTanz-festival, and since 2009, he has been an artist-in-residence at CAMPO. Ampe has worked with stage director Jan Decorte, performance duo United Sorry, artist Roland Seidel, noise-rock quartet The Germans, and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, among others. Guilherme Garrido is a Portugese-born artist, dancer, and musician. Between 2007 to 2009, he was the curator of Show Rooms within the frame of the annual Festival da Fábrica in Porto. He has performed as a dancer with Maria Clara Villa-Lobos, Ibrahim Quraishi, and Tommy Noonan/PVC company. In 2011, he premiered his first solo work, GO JOHN, at Fresh Festival in Croatia, and in 2012 he presented BEST BEAST, his first group piece as choreographer in HAU, Berlin. He has performed Still Standing You with Ampe at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Festival Transamerique in Montreal, and PuSH Festival in Vancouver, BC.
Learn moreFeaturing 10-12 musicians, Pink Martini performs its multilingual repertoire on concert stages and with symphony orchestras throughout Europe, Asia, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Australia and New Zealand, South America and North America. Pink Martini made its European debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and its orchestral debut with the Oregon Symphony in 1998 under the direction of Norman Leyden. Since then, the band has gone on to play with more than 50 orchestras around the world, including multiple engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Boston Pops, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, the San Francisco Symphony, and the BBC Concert Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall in London. Other appearances include the grand opening of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, with return sold-out engagements for New Year’s Eve 2003, 2004, 2008 and 2011; two sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall; the opening party of the remodeled Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Governor’s Ball at the 80th Annual Academy Awards in 2008; the opening of the 2008 Sydney Festival in Australia; two sold-out concerts at Paris’ legendary L’Olympia Theatre in 2011; and Paris’ fashion house Lanvin’s 10-year anniversary celebration for designer Alber Elbaz in 2012. Pink Martini’s debut album Sympathique was released independently in 1997 on the band’s own label Heinz Records (named after Lauderdale’s dog), and quickly became an international phenomenon, garnering the group nominations for “Song of the Year” and “Best New Artist” in France’s Victoires de la Musique Awards in 2000. Pink Martini released Hang On Little Tomato in 2004, Hey Eugene! in 2007 and Splendor In The Grass in 2009. In November 2010 the band released Joy To The World—a festive, multi-denominational holiday album featuring songs from around the globe. Joy To The World received glowing reviews and was carried in Starbucks stores during the 2010 and 2011 holiday seasons. All five albums have gone gold in France, Canada, Greece and Turkey, and have sold well over 2.5 million copies worldwide. In Fall 2011 the band released two albums – A Retrospective, a collection of the band’s most beloved songs spanning their 17-year career, which includes eight previously unreleased tracks, and 1969, an album of collaborations with legendary Japanese singer Saori Yuki. 1969 has been certified platinum in Japan, reaching #2 on the Japanese charts with the Japan Times raving “the love and respect Saori Yuki and Pink Martini have for the pop tradition shines through on every track.”
Learn morePublication Studio is an experiment in sustainable publication. They print and bind books on demand, creating original work with artists and writers they admire, books that both respond to the conversation of the moment and can endure. They attend to the social life of the book, cultivating a public that cares and is engaged. Publication Studio is a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense — not just the production of books, but the production of a public. This public, which is more than a market, is created through deliberate acts: the circulation of texts; discussions and gatherings in physical space; and the maintenance of a digital commons. Together these construct a space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being. At TBA, Publication Studio will conduct real-time collaborations with Festival artists and performers, strategizing and producing new books on-demand in a retail storefront.
Publication Studio was founded and is run by Matthew Stadler, formerly the literary editor of Nest Magazine and co-founder of Clear Cut Press, and Patricia No.
Selected Press
Book Publishing as Common Ground, Caroline Cummins, Oregon Humanities, Spring 2010.
A Very Long - and Very Interesting - Interview with Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio, Matthew Simmons, HTMLGIANT, March 18, 2010.
Learn moreQuasi was formed in Portland, Oregon, in 1993 by Sam Coomes & Janet Weiss. They have toured or recorded with, either individually or collectively, Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Built to Spill, Bright Eyes, Heatmiser, the Go Betweens, Pink Mountain, Blues Goblins, The Takeovers, Jandek, and numerous other less recognizable but just as seminal bands. Prior to Quasi, Coomes was in the San Francisco band Donner Party (c. 1983-1988) and both were in the Portland power trio Motorgoat (c. 1990-1992). Joanna Bolme (Jicks, The Minders, Calamity Jane) joined the band in 2006. Quasi still lives in the new, gentrified Portland and will release a new album in the fall of 2009.
Selected Discography: Quasi (self-released, 1993); Split Single 7" (w/Bugskull) (Red Rover, 1994); R&B Transmogrification (Up, 1997); Featuring "Birds" (Up, 1998); Field Studies (Up, 1999); The Sword of God (Touch & Go, 2001); Hot Shit! (Touch & Go, 2003); When the Going Gets Dark (Touch & Go, 2006).
Learn moreRachid Ouramdane is a French choreographer of Algerian descent at the forefront of Europe’s conceptual dance thinkers. His projects reassess the definitions of “performer” and “choreographer” and question modes of producing and circulating artwork. Prior to founding L’A. in 2007, Ouramdane collaborated with artists such as Emmanuelle Huynh, Meg Stuart, Christian Rizzo, Alain Buffard, and choreographer Julie Nioche, with whom he co-founded Fin Novembre in 1996. Ouramdane has worked with institutions also focused on visual art, including FRAC Champagne/Ardennes, Manège de Reims, and the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris. Besides choreography, Ouramdane regularly leads artistic workshops and moderates international encounters with artists.
Peripheries
The Purple Shall Govern, Daniel Fernández Pascual, deconcrete, June 8, 2011. Learn moreEducated at the Institut supérieur d'art dramatique (ISAD) of Tunis, choreographer Radhouane El Meddeb was rewarded as 'young hope of the Tunisian theatre' in 1996 by the Tunisian section of the International Theatre Institute. Subsequently, he was selected to participate in the education and research courses at the Théâtre National de Toulouse under the direction of Jacques Rosner.In Tunisia he worked with key artists of the Arab world such as Fadhel Jaïbi, Taoufik Jebali and Mohamed Driss. In France he collaborated with theatre directors Jacques Rosner, Lotfi Achour and Catherine Boskowitz, and with authors such as Adel Hakim and Natacha de Pontcharra. He performed in two films by Férid Boughedir (Un été à la Goulette et Halfaouine, l’enfant des terrasses) and took dance classes with Jean-Laurent Sasportès and Lisa Nelson.
In 2005 he created his first dance solo, performing himself, Pour en finir avec MOI, followed by a creation for Montpellier Danse in 2006, Huwa, ce lui. In 2007, Radhouane performed in Héla Fattoumi and Eric Lamoureux' 1000 Departures of Muscles. In 2008 he created Quelqu’un van danser…, commissioned by the festival Rencontres Chorégraphiques de Seine-Saint-Denis. That same year, invited by choreographer Salia Sanou, he conceived a culinary dance performance for the event “Sonorités et corps d’Afrique”, entitled Je danse et je vous en donne à bouffer. It premiered at Centre National de la Danse and is still a highly demanded piece. In 2010 he created his first group piece, Ce que nous sommes, premiering as well at the Centre National de la Danse. Other works since: Chant d’amour (2011), Aletroit (2011), Tunis, 14 janvier 2011 (2011), Sous leurs pieds, le paradis (2012), and Nos Limites (2012, a piece for two young circus performers, produced by the 104-Centquatre in Paris). In spring 2014 followed Au temps où les Arabes dansaient… (2014) premiered at CDC Toulouse. In April 2015, Radhouane will present a prelude to his new creation, Heroes, with ten performers, at the Paris Panthéon, premiering within the framework of the festival Séquence Danse of the 104-Centquatre, where Radhouane has been associate artist since 2011.
Learn moreElisa Harkins, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, and Zoë Poluch came together in 2019 to create Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ. The work was borne in part from a common interest in minimalism in art and music, which led to a wish to create a first work together. Elisa 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. Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a mother, dancer, performance-maker, writer, questioner, enthusiast, and organizer born and based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her work plays with the pleasure and the haunt of the familiar as strategies of resistance and transformation. Zoë Poluch’s artistic practice puts into motion different mediums and takes shape in different rooms. Her relationship with the “contemporary dance” scene is based on a long-term and practice-based interest in the politics and poetics of moving and sensing. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Learn moreRadoslaw Rychcik is a young director living and working in Poland. He began his career as an assistant to renowned director Krystian Lupa on Factory 2 and later worked on Stanislaw Wyspianski's drama Protesilas and Laodamia. In 2008, Rychcik directed Dictator, a performance based on Charlie Chaplin’s film, for the Wybrzeze Sztuki Festival in Gdansk. Most recently, Rychcik has presented A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes at the Drama Theatre in Warsaw and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Versus: In the Jungle of Cities at the New Theatre in Krakow and the Under the Radar Festival in New York.
Selected Press
Rychcik burns actors (Solitude of Cotton Fields), Beata Frysztacka, e-splot.pl, December 20, 2009 (Translated from Polish).
Loneliness is Discovered, Agata Piecuch, e-teatr.pl, January 6, 2010 (Translated from Polish).
Learn moreInspired to perform by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s injunction to "Throw your body into the fight," Hoghe was born in Wuppertal, Germany, and began his career as a writer. Until 1990, he worked as dramaturge for Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. In 1994, he produced his first solo for himself, Meinwärts, which together with the subsequent Chambre séparée (1997) and Another Dream (2000) made up a trilogy on the 20th century. Since 2002, Hoghe has choreographed group productions or duos that reinterpret classic dance pieces, including Swan Lake, 4 Acts (2005); Sacre — The Rite of the Spring (2004), with Lorenzo De Brabandere; Boléro Variations (2007) and L'Après-midi with Emmanuel Eggermont (2008).
Learn moreConceived in 2002 by Nick Jones and Raja Azar, the group began with a song, Pyrate Love, performed while they were working for the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, and the two set out to create a massive live musical pirate puppet sea saga. Four years, six “episodes,” and hours of bizarre musical material later, Jollyship the Whiz-Bang have toured the US, Canada, Ireland, and have recently finished a residency in Bangkok for the Hoontown Puppet Festival. In 2005, they released their first album, Songs to Drown By, and recorded a DVD (forthcoming) adapting Crabquistador, the latest episode of their saga.
Learn moreRaja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, a director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory. He is a three-time Princess Grace Award winner (2017, 2018, 2019), two-time Lucille Lortel Award nominee (2019, 2020), and 2019 Chita Rivera Award nominee. In 2020 he was the Obie Award winner and Outer Critics Circle Award honoree for choreography for the Pulitzer-winning musical A Strange Loop. In 2019 he was an SDCF Joe A. Callaway Award finalist for both A Strange Loop and the Pulitzer-winning play Fairview. Raja is also the 2019–2020 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2019 Creative Capital award recipient. He is a current fellow of HERE Arts, the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School. Over the past decade, Kelly has created fifteen evening-length premieres with his company the feath3r theory as well as directing and choreographing extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City. His choreography has also garnered a 2018 Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) and the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and he was Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College.
Learn moreWith a career spanning over 25 years, Rakesh has captivated audiences worldwide as a versatile performer, choreographer, teacher, and producer. His journey through the realms of artistry began in Bollywood dance, where he lent his talents to numerous films in South India. Evolving his craft, Rakesh found a new passion in Contemporary movement art, drawing inspiration from his family's lineage of yoga and disciplines like Kalarippayattu and other Indian dance forms.
For the past 15 years, he has traversed the globe, immersing himself in diverse cultures and artistic landscapes, shaping his unique perspective and vision. Experience the culmination of Rakesh's passion, dedication, and global influences in every performance and creation.
Learn moreRaquel André was born in Caneças, Portugal in 1986. Her artistic path began early on. In 2009, her first performance was created out her the discovery of a box full of handwritten letters from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. André has since cultivated an interest in collecting—particularly in the performing arts—and in 2016, she completed her master’s thesis at University Federal of Rio de Janeiro on the subject.
In 2011, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where a five-month artistic residency in Companhia dos Atores turned into five years. There, she began working with director and actress Bel Garcia on several theater productions. André also worked with actor, curator, and director César Augusto in Galpão Gamboa, where she co-programmed and produced theater, dance and music. André studied in the Theater and Film School of Lisbon, and worked with several Portuguese artists from different artistic languages. Her work has been shown on television, and in Portugal, Spain, Poland, Cuba, Argentina, and Brazil.
Learn moreRaven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of a United States Artists fellowship in music, a Creative Capital award in visual arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
Learn moreArtist, musician, engineer, teacher, mentor... Reese is an accomplished, multi-disciplinary designer with nearly two decades of experience designing, testing, and building products for the technology industry. His personal work has been exhibited in Portland at galleries like PDX Contemporary and Disjecta, and he has been performing across genres in electronic music at multiple venues across the city (S1, Holocene, Disjecta, Ace Hotel, KEX, the NW Film Center...).
His various works, prototypes, writings, and music performances are showcased at reesebowes.com.
Learn moreReuben Tomás Roqueñi is a Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in San Francisco making grants to sustain artistic expression and encourage public engagement in the arts. These grants embrace a wide range of artistic disciplines, aesthetics, and cultural traditions in the areas of dance, media, music, and theater that engage people across diverse communities.
Prior to Hewlett, Reuben served 5 years as Program Director at the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, a national arts philanthropic organization, located in the Portland, Oregon area and serving Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian artists, organizations, and programs. The grantmaking strategies included artist fellowships that focusing on innovation in contemporary arts practices; project support investing in social change and community development through the arts; and operating support working in partnership with Native arts service organizations to leverage broader support for the field. Previously, Reuben served as Grants Manager at a public agency, the Tucson Pima Arts Council in Tucson, Arizona, directing all grantmaking processes and program administration, supporting the region’s nonprofit arts organizations and individual artists.
Reuben currently serves on the board of Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) whose annual Time Based Art Festival (TBA) supports the experiments of innovative contemporary performing artists. He serves on the board of The Association of American Cultures (TAAC), whose bi-annual Open Dialogue conference provides leadership in achieving equal participation in policymaking, equitable funding for all cultural institutions, and an elevation in multicultural leadership that impact cultural policies. He is also on the Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) national Thought Leader Forum on Racial Equity in Grantmaking. Previously he served on the Board of Directors at Access Tucson (public television) and was a founding Board member of the Tucson Musicians and Artists Health Alliance (TAMHA). He is a graduate of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture’s (NALAC) Leadership Training Institute and the first NALAC Arts Advocacy Institute in DC. Reuben has served on grants review panels, national to local, for the National Endowment for the Arts, ArtPlace, NALAC Fund for the Arts, Rasmuson Foundation, Artist Trust, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Regional Arts and Culture Council (Portland), Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, and Pro-Neighborhoods Tucson.
Reuben is of mixed ancestry (Yaqui/Mexican). He began his career in arts administration at the afterschool arts and business program, Old Pascua Youth Artists (OPYA), serving Yaqui youth and as an artist educator in the public school system. He spent 6 years in the private sector with American Airlines and has lived in Seattle, St Croix, New Orleans, and San Antonio. He was raised in California, received his BFA from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is a multi-media visual artist.
Learn moreReuben Tomás Roqueñi
Director of National Artists Fellowships
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
Reuben is a nationally respected arts administrator with over 15 years in progressive program development, management, artist-centric support systems and grantmaking experience. He is currently Director of National Artists Fellowships at Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, serving Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian artists, organizations, and programs across the US. Previously, Reuben was Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area, one the nation’s largest arts and culture funders. Formerly, Reuben served as Grants Program Director at the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. Reuben is a board member at MAP Fund in NYC and a former a board member at PICA. Reuben is of mixed Yaqui/Mayo/Chicanx ancestry and is currently living in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreThe multi-talented Rinde Eckert is an acclaimed performer, director, writer, composer, librettist, and musician whose virtuosic command of gesture, language, and song takes this total theatre artist beyond the traditional boundaries of what a ‘play,’ a ‘dance piece,’ an ‘opera,’ or a ‘musical’ might be. Eckert creates solo work, chamber pieces and through-composed operas with larger casts in collaborations with choreographers, composers, directors, and new music ensembles. His Opera/New Music Theatre productions have toured throughout the U.S. and to major European and Asian festivals. Current theater and music projects in which he performs include My Lai with the Kronos Quartet; The Aging Magician with Paola Prestini and Beth Morrison Productions; and Five Beasts with composer/performer Ned Rothenberg and beat box artist Adam Matta. Among his many awards, Rinde Eckert was the 2007 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
Learn morerise x fall is an in-progress multimedia collaboration between rubén garcía marrufo, maximiliano, and Jaleesa Johnston. Conjured from liminal space, this work considers the rise and fall of an empire, and the possibilities between stability and instability. Taking inspiration from the ocean’s crashing waves against the earth, rise x fall simultaneously inhabits the space between the pain and fear of death, as well as the hope and growth of rebirth.
ARTISTS' BIOS
mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist working in BLKwvv, a generative multimedia mythos: a Black reclamation rococo aesthetic and agenda based in exploring and expanding the multiplicity and fluidity of the Black self through pleasure, desirability, innocence, and imagination as performance, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, and publications.
rubén garcía marrufo is a border artist.
https://rubengarciamarrufo.com/
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 moreRobbie Wing is a sound artist and musician from Tulsa, OK. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. His practice focuses on acoustic geographies, ecological sound art, installation, and composition. He is a multi-instrumentalist, field recordist & researcher. He has an undergraduate degree in Environmental Sustainability and a master's degree in Urban Design from the University of Oklahoma.
Learn morerobbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins) have presented choreographed and video works since 2003, in venues including P.S. 122, Marfa Ballroom, The New Museum, and Autumn Skatebowl. Most recently, robbinschilds was commissioned to create original choreography for David Byrne and premiered a new work, Sonya and Layla Go Camping, at The Kitchen.
Learn moreBoyd's work has been exhibited at venues such as the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong (2009); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY (2008); Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT (2008); Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2008); Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (2008); The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis (2007); 303 Gallery, NY (2007); PKM Gallery, Beijing (2006); Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2006); and Participant Inc, NY (2006). His work is included in several public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création in Paris.
Learn moreRobert Tyree is a dance artist, writer and educator. He has trained in dance at the University of Washington, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Montréal's after-hours clubs, and Vienna's danceWEB (2011). Tyree has enjoyed working with choreographers Lucy Yim, Kaj-anne Pepper and Meshi Chavez, but maintains a longstanding practice with Tahni Holt since 2008. Tyree's performance writings have been published via several art blogs as well as in FRONT, a Portland-based dance newspaper that he co-publishes.
Learn moreRobin Deacon (born 1973 Eastbourne, England) is a British artist, writer and filmmaker currently based in the USA. Active from the 1990’s, his work explores questions of memory, absence and fiction in performance, through a constant reconfiguration of his role as an artist - as journalist and biographer, operator and technician, imposter and stooge. His recent research projects have explored histories of video documentation and outmoded media formats, and the practice and ethics of performance re-enactment. His live and screen based work has been commissioned and programmed throughout Europe, the US, and Asia. A MacDowell Fellow, he has been a recipient of a variety of awards and fellowships from organizations such as the Delfina Foundation, British Arts Council, Live Art Development Agency and Franklin Furnace Inc.
Learn moreRoland Dahwen Wu is a filmmaker whose work explores migration, race and memory. His films and installations have been shown at CalArts, Portland Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival, Northwest Film Center, and numerous galleries. His films span nonfiction, experimental, and narrative genres, and are commonly marked by poetry: from his first documentary about the whistling language of the Canary Islands (There are no birds in the nests of yesterday) to his recent short film about 20th century Asian migration (Haft-Seen).
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