Artists Archive
Yo La Tengo is a critically acclaimed indie rock band from Hoboken, New Jersey. They’ve recorded twelve studio albums, written soundtracks to the films Junebug, Shortbus, and Old Joy, and provided a score for the surrealist aquatic films of Jean Painlevé.
Learn moreYOUNG JEAN LEE (Artistic Director) is an OBIE award-winning playwright and director who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays, The Shipment and Lear) and by Samuel French (Three Plays by Young Jean Lee). She is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, NYFA, NEA, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Rockefeller MAP Foundation. She is also the recipient of two OBIE awards, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award.
Learn moreYUKIO SUZUKI studied butoh at the Asbestos-kan (Asbestos House) from 1997 and danced in the works of Ko Murobushi and other artists. In 2000 he started the Yukio Suzuki Company. He gained attention in the dance world for his documentary style of directing and choreography that uses compelling placement of dancers with a strong emphasis on their physical presence. In recent years he has expanded his activities with projects like choreographing for dancers of the Tokyo City Ballet Company. With a highly sensitive consciousness of the body, he conducts programs around the country aimed at creating dancer-specific works. In 2008, he received the prestigious Choreographer of the Next Generation (Grand Prize) at the Toyota Choreography Awards.
Learn moreyuniya edi kwon (she/her) is a violinist, vocalist, poet, and interdisciplinary performance-maker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation and transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer space and lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal. Her work has been presented throughout the US and Europe, including Performa Biennial, Dia Art Foundation, New York Live Arts, Roulette Intermedium, Under The Radar Festival, LA Phil, On The Boards, and Monheim Triennale. As a committed collaborator, she has co-created with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Senga Nengudi, Tomeka Reid, Degenerate Art Ensemble, Roscoe Mitchell, Moor Mother, Du Yun, Shahzad Ismaily, and International Contemporary Ensemble. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Awardee, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awardee, Arts Fellow at Princeton University, Bessie Award Winner, Civitella Ranieri Fellow, and United States Artists Fellow.
Learn moreOberzan is an original member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, based in New York City. With Nature Theater, he has collaborated and performed in productions including Poetics: a ballet brut, the Obie-winning No Dice, and the one-man show, Rambo Solo. His latest theater/film work, Your brother. Remember? premiered at Brussel's Kunstenfestivaldesart. Oberzan has also released two albums of original music, most recently Athletes of Romance. He has performed with the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and is currently collaborating with the Dutch group Kassys.
Selected Press
Rambo Solo: Zachary Oberzan's Flooding With Love For the Kid, Matt Zoller Seitz, The L Magazine, January 6, 2010.
Rambo redux, as a homemade, one-man, no-budget movie, Ben Walters, Guardian.co.uk, June 17, 2009.
Learn moreZach Blas (b. Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans moving image, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction.
Blas engages the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, biometric recognition, predictive policing, airport security, the internet, and biological warfare. The Doors (2019) is an immersive environment that imagines a new psychedelic age fueled by AI, nootropics, and tech culture. SANCTUM (2018) is a sex dungeon-cum-detention center that recasts security and surveillance through BDSM. A film installation, Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 (2018) follows author Ayn Rand on an acid trip, in which she bares witness to a dystopian future of the internet. im here to learn so :)))))) (2017), a four-channel video installation and collaboration with Jemima Wyman, resurrects Microsoft AI Tay to consider the gendered politics of pattern recognition and machine learning. Facial Weaponization Suite (2012-14) consists of amorphous masks that demand opacity against biometric facial recognition systems.
Blas has exhibited, lectured, and held screenings at venues internationally, including the de Young Museum, Tate Modern, Walker Art Center, 2018 Gwangju Biennale, the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, Matadero Madrid, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art in General, Gasworks, Van Abbemuseum, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, e-flux, Whitechapel Gallery, ZKM Center for Art and Media, and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. His practice has been supported by a Creative Capital award in Emerging Fields, the Arts Council England, Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.
His work is in the collections of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Blas’s practice been written about and featured in Artforum, Frieze, ArtReview, BBC, the Guardian, and the New York Times.
Blas’s writings can be found in the collections You Are Here: Art After the Internet, Documentary Across Disciplines, and Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art, as well as e-flux journal and various exhibition catalogues. With Melody Jue and Jennifer Rhee, he is co-editor of the anthology Informatics of Domination, forthcoming from Duke University Press. His artist monograph Unknown Ideals is published by Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst and Sternberg Press.
Blas is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
Learn moreZan Yamashita was born in OSAKA, 1970, started to dance at the age of 19. He studied modern dance and classical ballet at several dance studios, while giving street performances in Osaka.
In 1990, Yamashita joined a performance group, Monochrome Circus in Kyoto as a dancer.In 1993, he choreographed his first piece "Music" for the Monochrome Circus, which was performed at the ALTY Buyoh Festival of Kyoto Prefectural Hall. He choreographed this piece as if composing a piece of music through body movements of 6 performers without using any music.
In 1994, he directed a performance work "The poetry reading" first time as an artistic director, and presented it for the Kyoto Performance Carnival. This piece was presented in a gallery space with its entire walls covered with books where the performers and the audience were placed in a nested structure. Yamashita created scenes from precisely depicting performers' subtle and detailed behaviors, movements, and the incidents that happened simultaneously throughout the space as each performer read his favorite books.
Yamashita began his career as an independent artist in 1995. His first project was "Family" in 1995, a year long project performed in the former Meirin Elementary School, the forerunner of the Kyoto Art Center (Kyoto), Toyoshina Modern Art Museum (Nagano) and Art Space Mumonkan (Kyoto). In this project, he brought the interaction with close people to the stage without altering what were already among them. After the "Family" tour, he continued to present various experimental works at theaters and galleries mostly in Western Japan.
In 2002, Yamashita presented "It is written there" at the Itami Ai Hall (Hyogo), with which the trilogy working on the relationship between language and body began. In this piece, the audience were constantly invited to turn the page of the book given at the entrance, as the stage host called the page number backward, and to enjoy switching their gaze between what was going on the stage and written on the page.In 2004, Yamashita created "Invisible man", which was presented at the Tokyo International Art Festival. And in the same year, he received the Kyoto Art Center Theatre Award for "It is just me coughing", the last piece of the trilogy.
He made an actor debut in the theater piece, "Can you hear.....?", written and directed by Shogo Ohta in 2005.
In thinking of reproducibility of the choreography, Yamashita presented "The sailors", in 2005. The performance took place on a raft-like stage shaking under the weight of 4 performers at the BankART(Yokohama) and the Kyoto Art Center (Kyoto).
In 2007, he presented "Animal Theater", a choreography focused in freedom and restriction, produced by the Kyoto Art Center Theatre Project.
In 2008, Yamashita remade and performed "It is written there" at the Kyoto Art Center Theatre Project (Kyoto), Fukuoka Theatre Arts Series (Fukuoka), KunstenFESTIVALdesArts (Belgium).
In 2009, he presented 'It is just me coughing' at Annex Garelly in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), and 'It is written there' at Istanbul International Contemporary Dance & Performance Festival (Turkey).
In 2010, he performed'It is just me coughing' at Postmainstream Performing Arts Festival (Tokyo). In February 2010, he performed as an actor in 'Ikishima - breath island' directed by Yukichi Matsumoto, produced by Seika theatre (Osaka). In April 2010, he choreographed and presented a new performance‘Daikouzui’ at St Spot Yokohama. In August 2010, he performed a remake of “Yokohama Stay” in the TBA Festival in Portland after a month of creative residency there. Yamashita performed in a perfomance by Pichet Klunchun which was presented in the Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival in Novemever 2010. In 2011, he performed, “It is just me coughing” and “Yokohama stay” as a double-bill performance at the Esplanade theatre studio(Singapore). Experimenting in original forms of communication through words and body, Yamashita presented his new performance, “It is something like a garden,” co-produced by Itami Ai Hall, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) and St Spot Yokohama.
Yamashita received a Senior Fellow Grant from The Saison Foundation in 2011,2012.
Learn moreVisual artist Juniper Shuey and choreographer Zoe Scofield began their collaboration for On the Boards’ NW New Works Festival in 2005. Since then, they have been commissioned by On the Boards and, in 2007, they choreographed a music video for Dave Matthews. Scofield and Shuey co-founded the Secret of Gold Festival, with Morgan Henderson, an annual art festival in Arlington, WA. The duo’s photographic and video collaborations have been shown at the Howard House, the 8th Northwest Biennial at Tacoma Art Museum, Arts Center/SOFA Gallery (New Zealand), and PONCHO Gallery.
Selected Press
Zoe|juniper's abstract 'Crack' offers dance in multi-dimensions, Janine Parker, Boston Globe, July 23, 2011.
zoe | juniper @ Jacob’s Pillow, 7/20/11, Tresca Weinstein, Times Union, July 21, 2011.
Zoe | Juniper dance explores 'A Crack in Everything' at Jacob's Pillow, Tresca Weinstein, The Times Union, July 15, 2011.
A confounding, memorable 'devil,' Karen Campbell, The Boston Globe, February 24, 2009.
Learn moreZoë 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 looks forward to the far future, perhaps 2070, when she will inaugurate a dance company for dancing people over 70 years old and tour on a solar airplane. In the past, she studied and worked in Canada and Belgium and could be found dancing and performing with established and emerging choreographers, mostly in Europe and North America. Since 2010 she has been based in Stockholm, Sweden, and works as Assistant Professor and Head of the Bachelor Programme in ance Performance at Stockholm University of the Arts. She is currently on parental leave.
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