Artists Archive
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Alex Neerman was once the drummer of anarcho-art-punk band The Intima back in the early 2000's. After that group's demise he found a new outlet for his percussive mind building drum machines and synthesizers. Over the last 4 or 5 years he has refined his craft and emerged as one of Cascadia's finest hardware techno producers, providing "off-center dance music that throws off all sorts of wonky textures while still delivering crushing grooves that make you feel indestructible" (The Stranger). He has recently been collaborating with Patricia Hall of Soft Metals; she will join him onstage at TBA.
Learn morebart fitzgerald (b. 1991) is a pastor, scholar, and cultural critic.
Learn moreSalimatu Amabebe (they/he), is a Bay Area-based chef, multimedia artist and the founder/ director of Black Feast. Amabebe's work focuses on the intersection of food and art, drawing from family memories, Nigerian recipes, and Black culinary history.
@salimatuamabebe
Intisar Abioto is an artist working across photography, dance, and writing. Moving from the visionary and embodied root of Blackgirl Southern cross-temporal cross-modal storytelling ways, her works refer to the living breath/breadth of people of African descent against the expanse of their storied, geographic, and imaginative landscapes.
Akela Jaffi is a writer and dancer living in Portland, OR. A graduate of Jefferson High school, she is the founder of Black Artists Summer Showcase. Dance has been her method of expression and healing, and her greatest contribution to the Portland art world. She is grateful for her role in building community, and the dedication of others seeking equality and change.
Annika Hansteen-Izora (she/they) is a queer Black poet, designer, and writer from Palo Alto, California, based in Brooklyn, New York. As a multimedia artist, Annika uses poetry, design, and performance to explore themes of healing, Black liberation, afrofuturism, and queerness. She is a creative contributor at Black Feast and the head of design and UI at Ethel's Club and Somewhere Good, a to-be-released social media platform that connects people of color to each other and the things they love. Annika believes in the sacredness of Black joy, and uses her work to explore tenderness as a liberation practice. annikaizora.com @annika.izora
Jasmine Beach (she/her), is a multidisciplinary artist, skilled tradesperson, and autonomous organizer. She is currently studying environmental policy and constitutional law with aspirations around advocating for environmental equity, mutual aid, sustainability, and decolonization.Ariel Myles Hernandez (they/she), is a Black and Xicanx queer person raised in the PNW. Their interior and exterior landscapes inspire them to dabble in spaces of creativity expressed through food, visual art, poetry, music, and community organizing. After completing degrees in Black studies and Chicano studies, Myles Hernandez now focuses on creative and educational programming, project coordination for Black youth, art curation, and working as a core contributor to Black Feast.
Learn moreClaire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box—as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes—there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.”
Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
Recent shows include El Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico D.F.; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Air de Paris, Paris; Regina Gallery, London and Moscow; MUSAC Contemporary Art Museu, Castilla y León, Spain; Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, Baltimore; Bunker Stuzki Contemporary Art Museum, Krakow; Mastermind, Casablanca; and Kunstlerhaus Wien, Vienna. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Metro Pictures, New York; T293, Napoli and Rome; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and Galerie Chantal Crousel/Air de Paris, Paris. She is now preparing a catalogue with Buchhandlung Walther König.
Learn moreMusician Erik Friedlander is widely considered a master avant-garde jazz and classical cellist. Friedlander has released nine solo albums and three albums as a member of the John Zorn-led avant-jazz group Bar Kokhba. In high demand as a session musician, he has played with a wide range of artists, from pop stars Kelly Clarkson and Courtney Love, to indie folk stars Dar Williams and Paula Cole, to fellow vanguard artists Ikue Mori (TBA:07) and Laurie Anderson (TBA:06). Friedlander’s father, Lee Friedlander, has been a MacArthur Fellow whose photographs of street scenes and jazz greats have been widely shown at galleries across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art.
Learn moreA record label and a movement, a series of club nights and a cooperative project in music, visual art, video, and apparel, Fade to Mind is changing the global dance scene. Kingdom, aka Ezra Rubin, is a DJ/Producer living in Los Angeles who is also involved in the London-based Night Slugs collective. Rubin’s work is known around the world for its inventive drums, unusual bass rhythms, and full-on R&B and hip hop samples. Rubin has official releases on Fools Gold, Night Slugs, and Acephale, and his own Fade To Mind label. Total Freedom is Ashland Mines, a DJ/Producer living in Los Angeles. Besides being known internationally for brain-broadening DJ sets, Mines curates and produces nightlife events in LA. Musician and producer Massacooramaan (Dave Quam) recently moved to Portland from Chicago, where he was active DJing in and documenting the local Juke/Footwork scene. Quam also photographs and writes for XLR8R, The Wire, DJ Magazine, and Shook.
Selected Press
Kingdom Launches Fade to Mind Label, Shawn Reynaldo, XLR8R, June 22, 2011.
The Underground Kings of Fade to Mind, Chris Kelly, Postcultural, April 10, 2012.
Selected Audio
Fade to Mind on SoundCloud
Kingdom on SoundCloud
Massacooramaan on SoundCloud
Total Freedom on SoundCloud Learn moreAtlanta-based artist and DJ
Learn moreStephaun E. Wallace, MS, MOL, is a thought leader, public health researcher, project manager at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and co-director of the University of Washington’s (UW) Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) Community Action board (CAB), with a track record in developing, implementing, and evaluating major public health and human service programs in the areas of HIV/AIDS & STD prevention, care and treatment, in diverse, high-risk populations in the United States. Wallaces’ career highlights include Director of Programs/Deputy Director of the MOCHA Center, Inc.; Program/Training Coordinator of AID Atlanta, Inc. (where he co-founded the Evolution Center/Project); and Founding Executive Director of My Brothaz Keeper, Inc., and currently serves on several nonprofit boards, committees and coalitions, including maintaining active membership in national public health associations.
Mr. Wallace is a public health/social justice leader with more than 16 years of sexual/public health experience with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities and men who have sex with men (MSM), more than a decade of senior-level non-profit administrative and management experience, more than 20 of grassroots social justice/advocacy experience with LGBTQ/MSM communities, and a proven commitment to the illumination and eradication of HIV/AIDS and other health disparities via policy, research, education and advocacy. He has completed undergraduate degrees in psychology and criminal justice, Masters of Science degrees in Management and Organizational Leadership, and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy in Epidemiology.
In the house and ball community (HBC), he is known as Stephaun Blahnik, Chairman/President of the House of Blahnik. Since 2000, Wallace has been an active part of the HBC, and has provided ballroom/life guidance and talent development for many ballroom superstars. Wallace has received several ballroom awards and accolades since being a part of this community; and has walked and won Best Dressed, American Runway, Face, and Sneaker vs. Sneaker in multiple regions of the country, in addition to having the honor of judging major and mini-balls around the United States. Wallace resurrected the House of Elite in 2000, and has been a part of the Houses of Revlon, Cavalli, Valentino, and now Blahnik. Wallace founded the Western New York Council of Houses, resurrected the Atlanta Ballroom Alliance, and has directly supported the Chicago, Carolinas, Kansas City, and the West Coast Ballroom Alliances over the years. Wallace also provides consultation to the federal agencies, and local and state health departments and organizations around the country on projects addressing the needs and issues of LGBT communities, especially those in the HBC. Additionally, Wallace co-lead the development of an intervention called Project VOGUE; which the 1st EVER CREATED research-based HIV prevention intervention focused on the HBC, utilizing community-based participatory research principles.
Learn moreLinyekula lives and works in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he runs Studios Kabako, which fosters the debuts of young Congolese artists in the fields of dance, theater, music, and video by providing training and producing works. Through the Studios, he has presented ten pieces and toured extensively in Europe, United States, and Africa. Linyekula is a member of the Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne, Germany, and he has received the 2007 Principal Award of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development.
Learn moreFauxnique is the drag queen alter-ego of artist/choreographer/dancer Monique Jenkinson. Lauded for her ‘campy, intellectual juxtaposition of pop culture and high art’ and ‘rare personable flair for drama’ Fauxnique plays with artifice and authenticity and lives to question essentialist assumptions about gender, art and culture. Informed both by Jenkinson’s classical ballet training and a tradition of radical queer performance and theory, Fauxnique sees drag as a dance form and the performance of femininity as a forceful, vulnerable and subversive act.
Fauxnique has performed in such varied venues as the Stud Bar, City Hall, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and de Young Museum in San Francisco; the New Museum, Judson Church and the Stonewall in New York; the Allways in New Orleans and Rebar in Seattle; the Afterglow Festival in Provincetown and in Reykjavik, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, London, Rome, Catania and Zürich. She created space for kids to dress drag queens at the de Young Museum, performed vocals and starred in the beloved video for the dance track ‘Lipstique’ by Silencefiction (aka Marc Kate), played the DIRT (originated by Justin Bond) in Taylor Mac’s Lily’s Revenge at the Magic Theater (2011) and the eponymous role in Silver for Gold: the Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick by David J. (of Bauhaus and Love & Rockets fame) in LA (2008). She made history as the first cis-woman to win a major drag pageant. Accolades include an Irvine Fellowship at the de Young Museum, an SF Bay Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery (GOLDIE) Award for Performance, SF Weekly’s ‘Best Performance Artist 2010,’ and 7X7 Magazine’s ‘Hot 20.’
Learn moreFawn Krieger is a New York-based artist whose multigenre works reimagine everyday sites like the shop and home. Her “stages” are inhabitable sculptures that transform spectators into participants and examine the politics of ownership and exchange. Krieger’s Flintstonian tactility and penchant for scale compressions reveal an unlikely collision of private and public space, where intimate moments also serve as social ruptures. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen (NY), Nice & Fit Gallery (Berlin), The Moore Space (Miami), the Rose Art Museum (Boston), and Neon>fdv (Milan). Krieger is the recipient of grants from Art Matters Foundation (2008) and the Jerome Foundation (2007).
Learn moreFaye Driscoll (b. 1975, California, lives and works in New York) is an award winning art and performance maker who uses an alchemy of bodies and voices, objects and live sound to conjure worlds that are, like ourselves, alive and forever changeable. She creates immersive worlds of sensorial complexity and perceptual disorientation aimed to rile up the passive, numb, screened-out body. These interventions come in the shape of intimacies: a performer holding your hand, death metal song made through recording your stomping feet, a place to rest and a private guided choreography in your ear.
In Thank You For Coming, her recently completed trilogy of performance works—Attendance (2014), Play (2016), and Space (2019)—each took a distinct genre blurring while summoning the unnamed forces that surge between the viewer and the viewed. For her first solo exhibition, at Walker Art Center, Driscoll brought the immersive experience of theater into the exhibition space, inviting viewers to become active participants through a series of prompts and subtle directives from her series of audio works, Guided Choreographies for the Living and the Dead.
She is currently the Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, and is the recipient of a Doris Duke Award, Guggenheim fellowship, a Bessie award and the Jacob’s Pillow Artist Award, among many others. Select presentations include Kunstenfestivaldesarts, La Biennale di Venezia, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Walker Art Center, Melbourne Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires.
Learn moreThe Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) is a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place, and an opportunity. FAG is located in Toronto, Canada and run by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue.
Learn more"Fever One" is a B-Boy and DJ originally from Seattle, WA who relocated to New York in 1997 and eventually joined the world famous Rock Steady Crew. He is most well known for his 'gunzblazin' style which he developed while studying with his mentors Icey Ice and Lil' Lep of the New York City Breakers. Inspired by a Poppin' Battle in Seattle's Central District and the aggression he saw in breakin’, Fever One became influenced by the spirituality and competitiveness of dancing by the age of ten. Since then, Fever One became a member of the world famous Rock Steady Crew which took his career to new heights. He has performed in many prestigious venues from Lincoln Center to Madison Square Garden and Fashion Week to Dancing with the Stars. He has also lectured about the history of hip-hop at Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Washington.
Learn moreFin de Cinema is a recurring live film score series curated by Gina Altamura of Portland music venue and nightclub, Holocene. This series, established in 2009, allows local pop and experimental musicians to reinterpret the soundtracks to classic art films. FIN DE CINEMA returns to TBA for the third year in a row, and celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the series. This year’s edition will be an original live score of Black Orpheus (1959), composed and performed by visionary local musicians.
Learn moreFirst Nations Performing Arts is focused on cultural change, commissioning, touring and presenting Indigenous performance, as well as capacity building for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts sectors. For our all-ages intergenerational gathering we celebrate the FNPA Network Track members — a coalition of First Nations performing artists — in an evening which will evolve through sharing food, storytelling, interactive performance, music, noise, and artistic experimentation.
Learn morePortland based Fleshtone is a community of multi-media performers and artists including costumer/choreographer Jayme Hansen, electronic music producers Brett Whitman, visual/performance artist Joseph Bryan, and dancers Kim Hansen, Jill Scantlan, and Kara Murff.
Learn moreForced Entertainment is a collective of six theater artists who have been working together since 1984. They have long had an obsession with virtual or described performance, exploring the possibilities of conjuring extraordinary scenes, images, and stories using language alone. Their work forges a strong link between form and content, reflecting the belief that the form of a project – the kind of experience it presents, the contract it makes with its audience, and how – is an inseparable and significant part of its meaning. Often described as being experimental or innovative, their approach to each work differs from project to project, taking inspiration from movies, the internet, stand-up, dance, bad television, performance art, and music as well as from theater itself. What ties the various strands of their work together is that the projects always strive to be vivid and original, demanding a lot from audiences and giving a lot in return.
Learn moreFrancesca Capone is an artist working at the confluence of visual art and experimental literature. Her last solo exhibition, Oblique Archive took place at Peninsula Art Space in Brooklyn in 2014 and was reviewed by The Brooklyn Rail and The Wild Magazine. Capone recently co-curated Interrupt 3, a conference that highlights intersections of art, literature and digital media at Brown University.
Kristen Mueller is an artist and publisher (& So) whose works often intervene with existing texts, pages and books. Recent publications include 3b (ongoing); Partially Removing the Remove of Literature (Feb 2014); and Language to Cover a Page (Jan 2014). Her work has been exhibited in shows at Artists Space (New York), LUMA Foundation (Zurich) and Motto (Berlin).
Laura Warman is a performance poet based in Amherst, MA. She is the author of How Much Does It Cost? (Cars Are Real Press), DRONE LOVE (Gauss PDF), and WILL GO FAST (Hysterically Real). She is the founder of GLASS PRESS, a publisher of art and poetry on flash drives. Warman has had work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, Flying Object, and Open Engagement.
Learn moreFreddie Robins’ practice crosses definable categories of art, craft and design. She combines these elements elegantly, and with playful wit subverts meaning and making, fusing a melting-pot of approaches to ‘craft’.
She uses knitting to explore pertinent contemporary issues of the domestic, gender and the human condition, as well as the cultural preconceptions surrounding knitting as craft. Her work aims to disrupt the notion of the medium as passive and benign. Her pieces often incorporate both humour and fear. There is also a display of almost obsessive perfectionism in the quality of each piece’s hand-made finish.
Freddie Robins’ work is in several private and public collections, including the Government Art Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Crafts Council, Nottingham Castle Museum, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland and Kode, Bergen, Norway. She has exhibited internationally, including most recently, History in the Making: stories of materials and makers, 2000 BC – Now, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK; If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022, Hepworth Wakefield and Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; I Put a Spell on You – New Magic and Mysticism, Art Exchange, University of Essex, Colchester, UK; Creature Comforts, JGM Gallery, London, UK; Kette und Schuss, Mönchengladbach, Germany; CC binder, Puurs-Sint-Amands, Puurs, Belgium; and We are Commoners: Creative Acts of Commoning, a Craftspace national touring exhibition.
Currently Professor of Textiles at the Royal College of Art, Robins is the 2025 Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Visual Arts Program, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR. She lives and works in Essex, UK and London, UK.
Learn more"We are ignited by the ways in which contemporary dance performance is emerging in current discourse. We publicly engage, observe and shape these conversations. FRONT was initiated as a platform for contemporary dance, giving voice to many different opinions and playing with modes of distribution. Four of us initiated this project: Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Robert Tyree. We are choreographers, dancers, and contributors to contemporary dance performance, who are based out of Portland, OR. We rely on the old-school tactics of the newspaper infused with current, new, and future energy of dance theory and practices. FRONT acts as a performance in which the form stays the same but the format is ever-shifting to directly meet the needs it instigates. It is an experiment."
Learn moreFletcher is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. He has worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over fifteen years. Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland. Selected Press 500 Words: Harrell Fletcher, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, February 1, 2010 Selected Video
Learn moreIngri Midgard Fiksdal (b. 1982) is a Norwegian choreographer and performer. She is based in Oslo and has been making work since graduating from the MA in Choreography at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2006. Her work tours internationally to venues such as brut-Wien (AUS), Kampnagel (DE), Inkonst (SE), MDT (SE), In Between Time (UK), ANTI festival (FI), The Armory Show (US), LIMIT Festival (RS), HIFA (ZIM), Nordwind (DE), Baltoscandal (EST), and Homo Novus festival (LT). Fiksdal has recently been admitted into the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Program, and has from October 2013 commenced on a three-year artistic research project (PhD). Fiksdal’s work deals with perception and affectivity, and several of her pieces take shape as part performance and part live concert. The audience is always integral to the work, which aims to produce temporary collectives between performers and spectators. This notion of collectivity here refers to modes of attention and sensorial transference, rather than to interactivity. An ongoing theme within Fiksdal’s work is the ritual, and the rituals’ inherent capacity of transforming and ultimately transcending its partakers. This is approached from various angles to research how these capacities could be transferred to the performance-concerts created. Within this, the relation between cognition and affectivity, and how they operate in perception and in production of meaning, is central. Fiksdal often works in collaboration with other artists, such as visual artist, and composer Ingvild Langgård/Phaedra and scenographer Signe Becker.
Learn more“Ferver’s performances are so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms.” —The New Yorker
Jack Ferver has been creating full-length works since 2007. He has been presented at The French Institute Alliance Francaise (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA), PS 122 (NYC), The New Museum (NYC), The Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Diverse Works (Houston, TX), Danspace Project (NYC), Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Dixon Place (NYC), and Théâtre de Vanves in France. Shorter and solo works have been presented at MoMA/PS1, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Dance New Amsterdam, LaMaMa E.T.C., The Culture Project, and NP Gallery (all NYC). His work has been written about in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The New Yorker, ArtForum, Modern Painters, TimeOut New York, The New York Post, The Boston Globe, and Dance Magazine. As an actor, credits include the film Gayby, Strangers With Candy (Comedy Central), and numerous other film and theatre projects. His writing has been published in the magazine Novembre. He has curated for Danspace Project, Center for Performance Research, and Dance New Amsterdam. He also teaches at NYU, Bard College, has guest taught at SUNY Purchase, and has set choreography at The Juilliard School.
Selected Press
"Laughing and Crying at Ghosts, Fictive and Real," The New York Times, December 11, 2010
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Jack Ferver and his work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Learn moreThis Actor/Dancer/Stripperformance Artist (primarily known for live work) has performed in New York & abroad since 1988. A Pioneer in the 1990s burlesque revival, Tigger! has been "acting like a stripper" since 1992 & remains a leading influence in the world burlesque scene. He won the first ever "King of Boylesque" title at Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas as well as several Golden Pastie Awards, including "Most Likely to Get Shut Down by the Law" & "Most Unpredictable Performer." He was ranked the #4 Burlesque Performer of 2010 (the only solo male) in an international online poll. Called "the Boylesque King...a heart-pounding climax" by LA Weekly, "hysterical and acrobatic" and "wickedly arch" by The New York Times, "disturbing, funny and oddly riveting all at once" by Vancouver Sun, "delightful...simultaneously hilarious and titillating" by TheaterMania, "the taboo-defying dynamo" by NEXT Magazine. He has acted in Shakespeare, Apollinaire, Wedekind, Horváth, Tennessee Williams and numerous original works with Taylor Mac, Julie Atlas Muz and other genius friends. He has recently performed in: Italy, Denmark, Cyprus, England, Hungary, Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, France, Mexico, Canada, and all around the U.S.
Learn moreLifelong neurodivergent artist.
Two main pathways: abstract painting and dance/performance.
As a painter of close to 50 years, my work is equal parts improvisation and design: chance elements sometimes kinesthetically generated, a studied compositional eye, and a deep love of color, movement, architecture, and gesture. I create abstract acrylic paintings with many layers and sometimes collage elements. My studio is in The Drawing Studio in SE Portland, which I co-own with Phil Sylvester, adjoined by the Findlay/Sylvester Gallery, in which my paintings can be viewed.
As a contemporary modern dancer I have created and performed my own, mostly solo performance work. Also worked extensively for many years with these choreographers:
Beginning in 1980 with Jann McCauley Dryer in CIRQUE (formerly Portland Dance Theater), Gregg Bielemeier and Gregg Bielemeier Dance Project, Catherine Egan and Eggshell Productions, and Bonnie Merrill, who, in addition to the many works I danced over the years, choreographed a solo for me that I performed while heavily pregnant.
Helen Buckingham, Kiken Chin, Linda K Johnson, Kimi Okada, Mary Oslund, Sara Padilla, Judy Patton, Ray Terrill.
Collaborated with artists in performance: Alva Bradford, costumer/puppet maker, Cristina DeGennaro, visual/performance artist, Van Findlay, singer/violinist, Daniel Storto, fashion/costume designer, Tyrrell Sweetman cellist, Phil Sylvester, composer/musician, and painter/set designer.
Designed and constructed sets, costumes, props, and hair designs for many choreographers/directors, including Gregg Bielemeier, Jann Dryer, Catherine Egan, and Randee Paufve.
Studied visual art and dance in the 1970’s at Portland State University with instructors who were creative working artists. In addition to modern dance have studied tap, ballet, African, improvisation, jazz, flamenco, as well as piano and drums. Influential teachers include Gregg Bielemeier, modern dance; Ruby Burns, African dance; Jann Dryer, modern dance; Cathy Evleshin, modern and jazz dance; Fred Heidel painting; Jim Hibbard drawing; Michi Kosuge sculpture; and Vincent Martinez-Grieco, modern jazz dance; Bonnie Merrill modern improvisation and tap dance; Judy Patton modern dance and performance collaboration; Barbara Remington ballet; and Claire Roche, tap dance.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Brooklyn, Joan Frosch (producer/director) explores 21st century artmaking through the voices of often previously marginalized artists and thinkers, including the emergent voices of contemporary dancers and choreographers in Africa, and the African Diasporas of France and the USA. Joan's 30 year creative path encompasses making and directing dance theatre, writing as a dance ethnographer/activist, and, now, directing her first documentary feature. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts, Laban Institute of Movement Studies, and Columbia University. At present, Joan is Professor of Dance and co-Director of the award-winning Center for World Arts at the University of Florida, and a founding member of the The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium (USA).
Alla Kovgan (co-director/editor) is a Boston-based filmmaker/intermedia artist/curator, born in Moscow, Russia. Her films have been screened at numerous venues around the world including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New York Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and others. Among Alla's most recent endeavors is co-directing and editing “Traces of the Trade: a Story from the Deep North” by Katrina Browne about the role of the North in the US slave trade; co-producing with Russian filmmaker Efim Reznikov “Terpsychore's Captives II”, a feature documentary about Bill T. Jones and a Russian prima ballerina Natalia Balakhnicheva; and working with Kinodance Company, on a new intermedia performance "Denizen" that will premiere in May 2007 as a part of Bank of America Celebrity Series. Alla has been teaching and curating dance film and avant-garde cinema worldwide and acts as an International Director of St. Petersburg Dance Film Festival KINODANCE.
Learn moreLauren Davis Fisher (Los Angeles, CA) works between sculpture, installation, architecture and performance. She has recently performed and exhibited at The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Performa15 (New York), Parkview (Los Angeles), MoMA PS1 (New York), Shanaynay (Paris), Chapter (New York), Disjecta (Portland), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and EMPAC at RPI (Troy, NY).
Learn moreMarcus Fischer is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Portland, Oregon. A first-generation American artist who creates, collects, and transforms sound into immersive, layered compositions that accompany performances and exhibitions. Site-specific assemblages of exposed speakers, tape loops, and objects are characteristic of his installations, paired with melodies of restraint and tension. He has released numerous recordings—both solo and collaborative —on 12k, a label that has decisively defined and developed its own concept of minimalism in the realms of experimental and ambient music. Fischer contributed two sound works and two performances to the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has been selected for residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Rauschenberg Residency, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and MacDowell. In 2024 he was awarded The Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts as well as the International Music & Composition Fellowship from the Montalvo Arts Center’s Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program
Fischer has performed and recorded as a solo artist, as a member of Wild Card and in collaborations with artists such as Taylor Deupree, Aki Onda, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Laura Ortman + Raven Chacon, Stephen Vitiello, Calexico and Simon Scott.
Learn moreMelanie Flood (b.1979, NY) is an artist living and working in Portland, OR. Her practice employs photography as a tool for examining how femininity is constructed, commodified, and performed.
Flood has exhibited at Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Friend of a Friend, Denver, CO; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; ILY2, Portland, OR; Ruschwoman, Chicago, IL; and Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR. She has received support from the Oregon Arts Commission, The Ford Family Foundation, and Regional Arts and Culture Council. From 2008 to 2023, she directed Melanie Flood Projects, an artist-run exhibition space established in Brooklyn, NY. Flood holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY and an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University, Portland, OR. Flood teaches photography in the Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design.
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 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 moreBorn and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Peter Falanga decided to attend school in New Orleans, Louisiana to study music at Loyola University New Orleans. Upon volunteering at the 2009 New Orleans Film Festival, he switched his major from music to film and digital media, and added a minor in philosophy. Immediately upon earning his BA, he decided to pursue a master’s degree that would align with his interests in philosophy, film theory, community outreach, and video making.
Peter moved to Portland, Oregon last August to become a member of the MA Critical Theory and Creative Research program’s inaugural cohort at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Currently, he is working on his master’s thesis, which is an extensive study of sincerity and its expression in the works of David Foster Wallace, the films of the New Sincerity, and in the 1977 Woody Allen film Annie Hall.
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 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 moreSarah Farahat is a transdisciplinary Egyptian American* artist, cultural worker, teacher, and abolitionist dreaming of a more collective future for all beings. She holds a BA in Psychology from Occidental College, a BFA in Intermedia Studies from PNCA, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has trained in auricular acupuncture at the historic Lincoln Recovery Center in The Bronx, and participated in Beirut's Homeworkspace program on the coattails of the Arab "Spring." She teaches art at local colleges and for kids in her community, and is a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. For the past 16 years, Farahat has monitored the body within the sociopolitical landscape in the US and abroad, intervening with works that explore grief, connection, assimilation, storytelling, and engagement. Grassroots movement building informs her work. She finds joy in reading speculative fiction, talking with plants, cooking, and DJing. Her work lives in protests, archives, public and digital spaces, and is in the permanent collections of JustSeeds Collective, Pittsburgh; Arab American National Museum, Dearborn; Charles Voorhies Fine Art Library, Portland; Palestine Poster Project, Silver Spring; and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Culver City. She has been featured in publications including Artforum, The Oregonian, L'Orient-Le Jour, and The Daily Star. As a nomadic child of diaspora, Farahat plants portals through taste, smell, and sound while continually attempting to live in reciprocity with the land wherever she creates home. She is a co-founder of the SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center in Portland.
* Farahat grapples with an appropriate way to name her location amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects.
Learn moreShannon Funchess is an activist and self-taught, interdisciplinary queer performance artist. The founder, vocalist, producer of internationally revered, electronic music project LIGHT ASYLUM founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2007, she has engaged audiences in performance at DIY art spaces, museums, galleries, music festivals and nightclubs in the U.K., North America, Europe, South America, Scandinavia, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Australia and Canada. Her musical journey began in a gospel choir of a southern baptist church in Spokane, Washington at the age of nine. With an ethos rooted in community and a passion for collaboration, she has joined forces with artistic peers and allies globally. From recording studio vocal features, creating sound design and remix productions for performance artists The Knife, LEECH, Yves Tumor, TR/ST, Chris Garneau and Justin Kennedy among others to lending vocals and appearing as an actor in video installation works of Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Michelle Handelman, Gloria Maximo, Wu Tsang, Tony Ousler, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner. She has regularly been invited on stages as a guest performer / musician with artists the likes of The Knife, LCD Sound System, TV on the Radio, electronic music pioneer Laurie Anderson, Coco Rosie and Christeene. Funchess has established herself as a force across her community and is lauded for her cathartic performances as well as a DJ at established art institutions, clubs and underground events. She’s at home in all stages of her creative exploration and continues to produce music and art within her community in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreUtilizing the language and history of sculpture, installation, and conceptual art practices, Tannaz Farsi’s work highlights and re-presents objects and images that contextually start from a collective experience found in the current news or within the milieu of our cultural archive. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Disjecta (Portland, OR), Pitzer Art Galleries (Claremont, CA), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI), Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, and Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH.) She has been granted residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. She received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2014. Born in Iran, Tannaz Farsi lives and works in Eugene, Oregon where she is faculty at the University of Oregon.
Learn moreMelanie Valera (Tender Forever) was born in Southwestern France in 1977. 3 albums (on K Records) and 800 shows later, she’s now pursuing multimedia projects for venues including La Cité Internationale (Paris) and the Whitney Museum (New York). Though she lives today in Portland, OR, her pop project leaps towards a world where we can close the gaps between countries, ideologies and, ultimately, hearts.
Learn moreTesar Freeman is an artist and amateur historian whose work is concerned with the revision of history and the physical vessels of ideologies. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Peripheries
Learn moreRyan Bunao, Bianca AE Mack, Haevyn, Cay Horiuchi, Adam Lucero, Jack Malstrom, Jen Tam, Samantha Pollock
UwU Collective is a Portland-based artist collective organizing underground events with an aim to uplift our Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPOC) and Trans/Gender non-conforming (T/GNC) community. We are a collective of 8 members and over 30 collaborators. We are multidisciplinary artists whose practices include DJing, performance, sound, digital, video, and installation art. Together, we share values and visions imagining and exercising an empathetic world in which we can thrive and celebrate one another through underground music and multidisciplinary art practices.
UwU honors and contributes to the legacy of our queer BIPOC ancerstors who have paved the way for one another and those to come next against all odds. We are here today to imagine our version of the future—creating intentional space for joy, healing, and hope through music, collaboration, experimentation, empathy for one another, and the drive to create a better world.
Learn moreVictoria Fortuna is Assistant Professor of Dance at Reed College. Her teaching and research interests include Latin/x American concert and social dance, dance as a mode of political and community organization, collaborative creation methods, and cultural histories of dance in transnational perspective. Victoria is currently working on a book that examines the relationship between Buenos Aires, Argentina based contemporary dance practices and histories of political and economic violence from the 1960s to the present. She is trained in modern and contemporary dance techniques and collaborates with several Buenos Aires based dance collectives. She has received grants and awards from Fulbright, the Society of Dance History Scholars, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Latin American Studies Association. Victoria holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.
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