Artists Archive
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MacKenzie is an experimental film artist working primarily with relic analog film equipment and hand-processed imagery. He creates works of expanded cinema, light projection installation, and projector performance. His work has screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the EXiS Experimental Film Festival in Seoul, Lightcone in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, and others. MacKenzie was the founder and curator of the Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images, the Blinding Light!! Cinema, and the Vancouver Underground Film Festival. He was an artist in residence at Atelier MTK in Grenobles, France, and Struts Gallery/ Faucet Media in New Brunswick. MacKenzie is currently Artist in Residence at Cineworks’ Analog Film Annex in Vancouver.
Learn moreDolan is an artist who lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where he is a co-curator of Appendix Space. Recent exhibitions include Infinite Cell at Autzen Gallery (Portland), Cherry Picking at Karma International (Zurich), ZERTZ Player with Koch Snowflake at West Lane South (London), and Deep Freeze at Generation Works (Tacoma). Dolan is a 2013 artist-in-residence with the Park Avenue Armory in conjunction with 89plus, an ongoing research project conducted by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets, which examines the generation of artists born in or after 1989.
Selected Press
"22 Year Old Sculptor to Do Residency at Park Avenue Armory," Kyle Petreycik, Animal New York, April 23, 2013.
Learn moreAngélica Maria Millán Lozano is a Portland based artist from Bogotá, Colombia. She creates abstract and figurative compositions on distressed fabrics that question the social injustices that affect Latinas in the home. She received her MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently the Curatorial Fellow for Community Engagement at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). Millán is also a co-founder at cvllejerx, a poc focused fashion, poetry, and performance collaboration. Millán has presented work at Disjecta, Williamson | Knight, Nationale in Portland, OR; Gallery Protocol in Gainesville, Florida; and Bridge Productions in Seattle, Washington.
Learn moreAnissa Mack received her BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art. She also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and participated in the PS1 National Studio Program. Her work has been featured solo exhibitions in New York, Atlanta, and Portland, Oregon. She has also created commissioned public projects and performances for the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (California), WaveHill Gardens (Bronx, New York), The Public Art Fund (New York), and the Queens Museum (New York). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Mack is represented by Laurel Gitlen in New York.
Selected Press
Anissa Mack at Small A Projects, Micah J. Malone, Big, RED & Shiny, March 17, 2008.
Anissa Mack: The Last Full Weekend Each September, John Motley, Portland Mercury, March 27, 2008.
Pies for a Passerby (with audio), Melissa Block, NPR, June 14, 2002.
Learn moreAnna Martine Whitehead does performance from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires; the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi Nations; as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Meskwaki; the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, and the Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) Nations. Their solo and collaborative work has been presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Chicago Symphony Orchestra, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San José Museum of Art, CA; Links Hall, Chicago; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She has developed her craft working closely with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, among others. She has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, MAP Fund, Dance/USA, PICA’S Creative Exchange Lab, Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago, 3AP (3Arts Projects), Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Whitehead has written about Blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, Frieze, and Art Practical. They have also contributed chapters to a range of publications, including Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford University Press, 2017), Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Sobsercove, 2016), and Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (Gallery 400, 2016). Whitehead is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).
Learn moreAshley Stull Meyers (she/her/hers) is a writer, editor, and culture worker. She has curated exhibitions and public programming for a diverse set of arts institutions along the West Coast, including those in San Francisco, CA, Oakland, CA, Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR. She has been in academic residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE) and the Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta). She has served as Northwest Editor for Art Practical and has contributed writing to BOMB, Rhizome, ARTS.BLACK, and SFAQ/NYAQ. In 2017 Stull Meyers was named director and curator of The Art Gym and Belluschi Pavilion at Marylhurst University, and the following year was made co-curator of the 2019 Portland Biennial. Currently, she is program director for the Multicultural Resource Center at Reed College, and is contracting as an independent curator.
Learn moreBebe Miller’s vision of dance and performance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty. Her aesthetic relies on the interplay of a work’s idea, its physicality, and the contributions of company members to fashion its singular voice. She has collaborated with artists, composers, writers and designers along with the dancers who share her studio practice and from whom she has learned what dancing can reveal. Seeking to expand the language of dance, Bebe Miller Company’s work encompasses choreography, writing, film, video and digital media.
A native New Yorker, Bebe first performed her choreography at NYC’s Dance Theater Workshop in 1978. She formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985 to pursue her interest in finding a physical language for the human condition. Since then, Bebe has created more than 50 dance works for the company that have been performed in nearly 400 engagements worldwide. BMC has been commissioned and presented by leading venues including 651 ARTS, BAM Next Wave, DTW, Jacob’s Pillow, Joyce Theater, PICA, REDCAT, Walker Art Center and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her choreography has been performed by Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M. (Abraham In Motion), Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, Salt Lake City’s Repertory Dance Theater, the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company, PACT Dance Company of Johannesburg, South Africa, and a host of colleges and universities.
Over the last decade the Company has produced a variety of digital archive projects that share the company’s creative practice with artists and audiences. Committed to keeping dance available to a wide spectrum of people and to further the conversation about the role of arts and creativity in our culture, BMC is dedicated to providing access to the creative process and expression to diverse communities.
Named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center in 2005, Bebe has been a Movement Research honoree, has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards, the David R. White Award from New York Live Arts, United States Artists and Guggenheim Fellowships, honorary doctorates from Ursinus College and Franklin & Marshall College, and is one of the inaugural class of Doris Duke Artist Award recipients. Bebe is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance and lives in Columbus, OH.
Learn moreBrock Monroe is an artist and designer, with a focus on the connection between live cinema and music. As one of the lead artists in the Joshua Light Show, Brock has collaborated with founder Joshua White on performances at Tanglewood, Mutek Mexico, Transmediale/CTM Festival (Berlin), Przemiany Festival (Warsaw), Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, New World Symphony for Performa/Art Basel Miami Beach, and the opening of Southampton's Parrish Museum, among others, with musicians ranging from Manuel Göttsching, MGMT, and Silver Apples, to The Boston Pops, Lou Reed, Terry Riley, and Oneohtrix Point Never. His collaboration with Seth Kirby, creating light art to accompany William Basinski's Vivian & Ondine has been presented at ISSUE Project Room and The Kitchen as part of Carnegie Hall's American Mavericks festival. In 2009, he collaborated with Nick Hallett on Voice + Light Systems, a four-part performance series at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Monroe and Hallett have also presented their A/V lecture opera, "Xenia," at LMAK Projects and for Art On Air/Calder Foundation, on the occasion of the 2011 Armory Show. At Mighty Robot, an underground music venue which existed in Williamsburg during the early 2000s, helping to launch the careers of bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, and Oneida, Brock served as a member of its A/V Squad, creating projections for literally hundreds of independent rock bands.
Learn moreCarlos Motta | Photo by Cory Rice
Carlos Motta’s (b. 1978, Colombia) multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.
Motta's work was the subject of the survey exhibitions Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia (2017) that traveled to Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2018); and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015). His solo exhibitions at international museums include, The Crossing (2017), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Histories for the Future (2016), Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; Réquiem (2016), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano the Buenos Aires (MALBA) (2016); Patriots, Citizens, Lovers (2015), PinchukArtCentre, Kiev; Gender Talents (2013), Tate Modern, London; La forma de la libertad (2013), Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; We Who Feel Differently (2012), New Museum, New York; Brief History (2009), MoMA/PS1, New York; and The Good Life (2008), Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia; among others.
In 2020, Motta will participate in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and the Yerevan Biennial, and he will have solo exhibitions at Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery—University of California Santa Cruz, and at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA).
Carlos Motta’s first 20-year career monograph, Carlos Motta: History’s Back Rooms was published by SKIRA in June 2020. He won the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise (2017); the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008).
Motta received grants from Art Matters (2008), NYSCA (2010), Creative Capital, and the Kindle Project (2012).He was appointed tenure-track Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department in 2019.
Learn moreCatherine Ming T'ien Duffly is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department at Reed College where she teaches courses on race and identity in American theatre, performance studies, and community-based performance, in addition to courses in acting and directing. Kate’s written work has appeared Theatre Journal and Theatre Annual. She is currently researching the use of food in socially engaged performance practices.
Learn moreCHARLES TONDERAI MUDEDE (Director, Screenwriter) is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, writer, and filmmaker. He collaborated with acclaimed director Robinson Devor on the films Police Beat and Zoo, both of which premiered at Sundance. Police Beat is part of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, and Zoo was presented at the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. Mudede is currently the film editor for Seattle’s The Stranger.
Learn moreBorn in Cannes, Christian Rizzo took his first steps as an artist in Toulouse, where he started a rock band and created a line of clothing before studying visual arts at the Villa Arson in Nice. In the ’90s, he performed with and created costumes and soundtracks for choreographers including Mathilde Monnier, Hervé Robbe, Mark Tompkins, Georges Appaix, Vera Mantero, Catherine Contour, Emmanuelle Huynh, and Rachid Ouramdane. Since founding “l’association fragile” in 1996, he has created over 30 performances and dance pieces, alternating with other projects or commissions for fashion and visual arts. He was an artist-in-residence at l’Opéra de Lille, and has performed his works around the world at the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, the Nouveau Festival du Centre Pompidou, deSingel, the Festival d’Avignon, and On the Boards.
On January 1, 2015, Christian Rizzo took over as the Director of the Centre Choréographique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillion-Midi-Pyrénées, which has been renamed ICI (International Choreographic Institute).
Learn moreMiner was born in 1973 and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. His videos address the impact of his upbringing with regard to religion, race, family, and sexuality. He received his MFA at Yale University School of Art and his BA at the University of Tennessee. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), the New Museum (New York), and at Tate Britain (London), among other institutions. Miner is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Selected Press
Christopher Miner, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, January 28, 2009.
Art in Review - Christopher Miner, Ken Johnson, New York Times, February 13, 2009.
Learn moreMeza is a Portland-based artist and composer who studied music composition and digital music production at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She has recorded and toured with Japanther and Explode Into Colors, and has performed her own work in clubs, basements, dance halls, ballrooms, art galleries, and music festivals internationally. Meza started the young series New Musics to support new classical music and working avant-garde composers within the Portland music scene.
Learn moreDana Michel is a choreographer and performer based in Montreal, Canada. Her practice is rooted in exploring the disorderly multiplicity of identity using intuitive improvisation and image creation. Before entering the BFA in Contemporary Dance program at Concordia University in her late twenties, she was a marketing executive, competitive runner, and football player. In 2011, She received a danceWEB scholarship, allowing her to deepen her research process at ImPulsTanz (Vienna, Austria). She has been making and internationally touring work for the past nine years.
Michel’s newest solo, Yellow Towel, premiered at the 2013 Festival TransAmériques (Montreal) to critical acclaim. The work featured on the “Top Ten” 2013 dance moments in Dance Current Magazine (Canada) and was recently singled out as one of the most remarkable productions at the 2014 American Realness Festival (New York City) by The New York Times. In August 2014, she received the ImpulsTanz Award for artistic excellence in life.
Learn moreDJ Mixed Messages is a local Portland, OR DJ and electronic music artist. They perform at regional venues, art spaces, and events—such as the Sines and Vines electronic music series and local club sets—often supporting community groups like the Synth Library Portland or Elbow Room.
Learn moreDorothée Munyaneza (Marseille, France) is a singer, writer and choreographer who spent her childhood in Rwanda. Her style of creating and performing on stage is directly inspired by what life has so intensely given her. Her artistic research draws from the diversity of her cultural heritage but more so by her appetite for encounters. In all her projects, the human dimension is especially of great importance. Her artistic curiosity and interest for a dialogue between music and other modes of expression blossomed through her participation in François Verret’s shows. In 2013, she created Compagnie Kadidi to start developing her own work, including “Samedi Détente,” her first work as a choreographer which has been presented 100 times touring all over Europe and in the USA.
Learn moreDrew Michael was born in Bethel, Alaska, and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. He started his art career at the University of Alaska Anchorage in a carving class with Joe Senungetuk in 1997. From there, his practice has developed through the study of other artists' work and through his own experience in trial and error. He has learned under the guidance of Kathleen Carlo and Larry Ahvakana in Anchorage, AK.
His art is deeply influenced by the people and events he has encountered in his life. Currently, his work uses imagery of religious iconography blended with traditional mask making with the hopes of bringing to light different ways of healing. His work is created with a focus on using new materials and combinations of mixed media. He uses carving as a form of expression, to draw understanding and compassion from within, and is constantly using new materials to broaden the form of his work.
"With everything I create I aim to exemplify my thoughts on how our humanity exists within this world, emotions about my relationships with others, perceptions of energy in all things and the constant acceptance into balance. As I learn about my own path I blend my traditional knowledge with everyday living experience and somehow try to connect with that ancestral wisdom that I see us all having within and around."
Learn moreMiller & Shellabarger create artist books and public performances that examine queer identity, politics, and displays of affection and intimacy. They are recipients of a 2008 Artadia Chicago Award and a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Together, Miller & Shellabarger have presented their projects at venues across the United States and at art fairs including Volta in Basel; Switzerland; NEXT in Chicago; NADA in Miami; and the Affair at the Jupiter in Portland, Oregon. The two artists also maintain separate artistic practices. Miller & Shellabarger are represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago, where they live and work.
Selected Press
Run, Don't Walk, Carlos Suarez de Jesus, Miami New Times, September 17, 2009.
Learn moreDylan Mira is an artist moving between video and text, recording how language makes bodies within the limits of representation and the thickness of time. Her recent projects have been presented at Performa, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, and Human Resources. She holds an MFA in New Genres from University of California Los Angeles and a BFA in Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Learn moreErika M. Anderson (EMA) is a new media artist who has been part of the West Coast experimental music scene for two decades. She grew up on the jukeboxes of South Dakota but got noise-pilled by Cali, where she formed her first touring bands and taught herself how to make records. Her signature sound reflects those influences, pairing electronic synth drones with guitar and voice. Anderson has created cross-genre works involving sound, storytelling, virtual reality, and video game technologies, but is most well known for albums released under the name EMA, which have been widely acclaimed and covered by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian, among others. Anderson has toured extensively, working her way up from warehouse shows to festivals and arenas. Her hybrid performance pieces have taken place at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; Barbican Centre, London, UK; and the New Museum, New York, NY. Anderson currently lives in Portland, OR.
Learn moreRecently named one of "Brooklyn's 50 Funniest People" (Brooklyn Magazine), Erin Markey makes music, shows and videos. She has shown work at the Under the Radar Festival, New Museum, PS 122, New York City Comedy Festival, Ars Nova, Lincoln Center Director's Lab, UCBeast, Bard Spiegeltent, Tasmania's Festival of Voices, San Francisco Film Society and at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater. She is the recipient of a 2014 Franklin Furnace Grant, the 2012 NYFA Cutting Edge Artist Award, the Eliot Norton Award for Outstanding Performance in 2013, was named a “magnetic diva” by the New York Times, a Time Out New York Top Ten Cabaret Performer 2013-2015, and was listed in Artforum's Top Ten Best Music of 2016. She is a company member of Obie award winning Half Straddle, and co-composed music with Chris Giarmo for Tina Satter's Ghost Rings at New York Live Arts. Her musical, A Ride On The Irish Cream, co-composed with Emily Bate and Kenny Mellman, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in January 2016 and was co-presented by Abrons and American Realness Festival. Irish Cream is currently touring and recently released an album available here. Her new show, Boner Killer, which premiered at Joe's Pub for Under The Radar Festival in January 2017 will begin touring in June 2017.
Learn 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 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 moreGerard has worked for BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and danced for jumatatu m. poe & Donte Beacham’s “Let ‘Im Move You: This Is A Formation”, Ballet Hispanico’s BHdos, and Baker + Tarpaga Dance Project, to name a few.
Gerard Minaya (all pronouns respectfully) born and raised in The Bronx, is a Dominican-American, first-generation, Queer and Gay Latina artist whose focus, as of late, has been in movement, healing, and storytelling. They obtained their BFA from University of the Arts, and since then have delved into performance and arts administration to different capacities. Gerard is currently, solely, a freelance dancer artist.
Learn moreHarun Morrison is an artist and writer based on the River Lea and Regent’s Canal. He is currently a UK associate at Delfina Foundation & Horniman Museum and Designer and Researcher in Residence at V&A Dundee. His forthcoming novel The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2023. Since 2006, Harun has collaborated with Helen Walker as part of the collective practice They Are Here. He is a former trustee of the Black Cultural Archive (est. 1981).
Learn moreHazel Hill McCarthy III (b.1980) is a Los Angeles based artist, designer and filmmaker. After graduating in 2003 from Art Center, Pasadena, CA, she established the gallery Show Cave in Los Angeles, which presented local, national and international artists working across diverse media. During this time, McCarthy’s work was centered on exploring the Hollywood tough-guy male film star as embodied by the likes of Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas. She sought to create an altered viewing experience through re-edits of film. McCarthy’s interest in the representation of gender in mainstream culture led her to create a series of touring group shows, notably Licker License, and Gentle Jousting, both of which were presented in Los Angeles; New York City; Mexico City; London; Amsterdam; Berlin and Milan.
McCarthy is co-founder of Hazelium, a broad ranging production company for her solo and collaborative work. In 2016, she directed a feature-length film, Bight of the Twin, which explores the origins of vodoun [sic] in Ouidah, Benin with artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. The work has screened internationally in US, UK, Mexico, Germany, Poland, and Russia. McCarthy has also collaborated with P-Orridge on Thee Psychick Bible, Feral House, 2009, and Thee Psychick Bible of early Psychic TV and TOPY (Temple ov Psychick Youth) Videos from the P-Orridge archives. Her short films have screened at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, the Barbican and ICA, both London.
McCarthy’s next project, Via Cruxis, is an investigation into a one-day event held annually on Good Friday in the remote village of Carrillo Puerto, Chiapas – the southernmost state of Mexico. Documenting the lead up to the festivities as well as interviewing key participants, Via Cruxis closely films the remarkable procession that is based on the 'stations of the cross' but incorporates an intriguing blend of indigenous pageantry, Catholic faith and a local view of US consumerism/imperialism.
Learn moreHolly Mititquq Nordlum is an Iñupiaq (Inuit) artist who comes from the northern village of Kotzebue, Alaska. Nordlum works in a variety of media, using each to best cast light on Indigenous people. Her tattoo work and traditional markings revitalization effort is based on a 10,000-year Inuit history and is a machine-free process that facilitates healing, pride, and celebration from the traumas of colonization and individual experience. She organizes trainings, using traditional patterns in in-depth sessions to foster real change for people—in the end, creating community in the marks left behind. Nordlum’s public artwork educates about the still-surviving tribes of Alaska: their stories, histories, and cultures. Holly speaks publicly about the systems which continue to oppress her people and prevent their thriving.
In 2004 she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Alaska, and in the last five years she has received a Time Warner Fellowship from Sundance, an Art Matters grant, an Alaska Humanities Forum grant, an Alaska Native Visionary Award, a Rasmuson Artist Project Grant and Fellowship, an NDN Collective Indigenous Artists Grant, and she was part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Artist Leadership Program.
Learn moreMisevičiūtė is a performing artist and curator, she has performed in such venues as The Kitchen, New York; dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel; de Appel art center, Amsterdam; Center Pompidou, Paris; Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius; and Performa 09 at Swiss Institute, New York.
Selected Press
"Dream Catcher," Kate Sutton, Artforum, September 1, 2012
Learn moreIvana Müller is a choreographer, artist and author of texts. Some of the recurring subjects in her work are body and its representation, self-invention, the place of the imaginary and imagination, notions of authorship, and the relationship between performer and spectator. Müller has dedicated a great part of her research and practice to the idea of Social Choreography throughout her own projects (While We Were Holding It Together, Playing Ensemble Again And Again, We Are Still Watching, In Common, Partituur)m as well as in various collaboration.
Müller’s choreographies, performances, installations, text works, video-lectures, audio pieces, guided tours and web works have been presented and co-produced over the last 10 years in venues and festivals such as Rotterdamse Schouwburg (NL), STUK Leuven (Belgium), Impuls Tanz (vienna), Frascati Theater Amsterdam, Kampnagel Hamburg, La Villette Paris, Wiener Festwochen, Theatertreffen Berlin, DTW New York, National Museum of Singapore, Saddler’s Wells London, Springdance Festival Utrecht, HAU Berlin, Centre nationale de danse Paris, and Kaaitheater Brussels. She performed her piece How Heavy Are My Thoughts in TBA:05.
In 2007 Müller received the Charlotte Koehler Prize from the Prins Bernhard Funds (NL) for her œuvre, as well as Impulse Festival and Goethe Institute Prize for her piece While We Were Holding It Together.Next to her artistic practice Ivana Müller curates festivals, organises debates and teaches as a guest lecturer. (in, amongst others, Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdams (MA in visual arts), School For New dance Development, Amsterdam (BA in choreography), Master of Choreography in Amsterdam, Insitut for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen (MA in Theatre) etc). Ivana Müller is Croatian born and she lives in Paris and works internationally.
Selected Press
"Claudia La Rocco Presents: Interview with Ivana Müller," Claudia La Rocco, Dance-tech.tv, April 7, 2011.
Learn moreJames Mapes is a lighting designer, writer, and board game creator who's lived in Portland, OR all his life. Working primarily in dance, he's toured all over the world with companies like BodyVox, Éowyn Emerald and Dancers, and Mammalian Diving Reflex. At home, he's the Festival Director for Risk/Reward and works a whole bunch of places. He has a family, who is great, and a library, which is secret.
Learn moreJasmine Mahmoud is the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professor and Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies in the School of Drama at the University of Washington, with appointments in Art History and Comparative History of Ideas. Mahmoud’s research engages experimental performance, critical race studies, public policy, and geography, including relationships between theater and gentrification.
Learn moreJennie MaryTai Liu is an artist working across performance, choreography, video, and writing. She has worked in institutions and artist-run spaces including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources, The Mistake Room, The Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and Incubator Arts Center. She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, PICA, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited Riting, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA. She is currently organizing a 2022 performance exhibition funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation engaging LA dance artists to respond to modern dance activity in early twentieth-century LA. Jennie frequently collaborates as a performer in the work of Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group.
Learn moreJennifer Monson is an American dancer and choreographer. She has been actively creating dance work since the 1980s. She works with dance improvisation and creates choreography that is at times improvised or devised through scores, as well as collaborating with other dancers, visual artists, architects and scientists.
Learn moreJoseph M. Pierce is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th-century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the forthcoming special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, The Art Newspaper, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with SJ Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
Learn moreJoti born and raised in Portland, Oregon is the first in his family to be born outside of India. He graduated from Roosevelt High School and will be majoring in film at Portland State University in the fall of 2017. Attending Roosevelt High School created many opportunities for Joti to use his passion for film and photography to talk about social issues he saw in his community. His first project #Teens4SocialJustice shined light on the issue feeling racially profiled in stores as a minority teen. His second project “American Nightmare” was a short film he created that consisted of many metaphors and symbols to represent what it felt like to be a minority in America. Joti hopes to one day create projects that reach audiences on a global scale that address issues in the society.
Learn moreJulie Atlas Muz, an internationally performing artist who is based between NYC’s Lower East Side and London, UK has been around the block more than twice. One of the most acclaimed, prolific, and experienced creators around, Julie sucker-punches the boundaries between theater, dance, puppetry, film, and burlesque with outrageously loving performances that have secured her place in the underworld of nightlife, as well as solidifying her as a bastion of the art world.
Learn moreI am a choreographer, performer, and educator based between Philadelphia and New York City who grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with my siblings and cousins. My early exposure to concert dance was through African dance and capoeira performances on California college campuses where my parents studied and worked, but I did not start formal dance training until college with Umfundalai, Kariamu Welsh’s contemporary African dance technique. My work continues to be influenced by various sources, including my foundations in those living rooms and parties, my early technical training in contemporary African dance, my continued study of contemporary dance and performance, and my recent sociological research of and technical training in J-setting with Donte Beacham. I produce dance and performance work with idiosynCrazy productions, a company I founded in 2008 and now co-direct with Shannon Murphy. Previously, I have danced with Marianela Boán, Silvana Cardell, Emmanuelle Hunyh, Tania Isaac, Kun- Yang Lin, C. Kemal Nance, Marissa Perel, Leah Stein, Keith Thompson, Kate Watson-Wallace, Reggie Wilson, and Kariamu Welsh (as a member of Kariamu & Company). As a performer, I also collaborate with Merián Soto.
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by jumatatu m. poe in partnership with Jermone Donte Beacham and Jamarsa Peters.
Learn moreOriginally from Honolulu, Hawai`i, Kanani Miyamoto is currently living in Portland, OR where she practices art, teaches, and curates. She is an individual of mixed heritage and identifies most with her Hawaiian and Japanese roots, which is celebrated in her artwork. Miyamoto holds a Master of Fine Arts in Print Media from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a Bachelor of Arts in Art Practices from Portland State University. Kanani is now the Arts Coordinator at p:ear.
Important to Miyamoto’s work as an artist is sharing and honoring her mixed cultural background to represent her community and the beauty of intersectional identities. She also explores topics such as institutional critique and hopes to create critical conversations around cultural authenticity in the arts. Miyamoto is a printmaker and uses traditional printmaking techniques to create large scale print installations and murals. In addition to being a practicing artist, she is an advocate for art education and a passionate community worker.
Learn moreTony-nominated Kenny Mellman was the co-creator and “Herb” half of the internationally acclaimed duo Kiki and Herb. His solo show “Kenny Mellman is Grace Jones” has played NYC, London, Portland, Philadelphia, and both Melbourne and Sydney Australia. At Least It’s Pink, the show he co-wrote with Bridget Everett and Michael Patrick King (Sex and The City) was one of TimeOutNY’s top 10 Cabaret shows of 2006. He is an Obie, Bessie, Glammy, Glaad Media and MAC award winning performer. in 2009, he was named one of TimeOut New York’s 40 favorite people in NYC. He performed with The Three Terrors (Stephin Merritt, LD Beghtol and Dudley Klute) and played the piano for Bob Mould’s vocal on He Didn’t, a track on The 6ths record Hyacinths and Thistles.
He is now a member of The Julie Ruin with Kathleen Hanna (Le Tigre, Bikini Kill) and Kathi Wilcox (Bikini Kill) and they are set to release their debut album in early 2013.
Learn moreLars Jan is a director, writer, visual artist, and the founding artistic director of Early Morning Opera (EMO), a genre-bending performance + art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience. He is the son of émigrés from Afghanistan and Poland.
Jan has received multiple commissions from the Whitney Museum and developed his recent projects with major commissioning and residency support from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). His works have been also presented by The BAM Next Wave Festival, Sundance Film Festival, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Symphony Space, Kirk Douglas Theatre, Ringling Museum of Art, Pasadena Museum of California Art, and Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival.
His work has been supported by multiple awards from the NEA and Center for Cultural Innovation; Rauschenberg Foundation; MAP Fund; Adam Mickiewicz Institute; Surdna Foundation; NEFA’s National Theatre Project; NPN’s Creation Fund; New York State Council on the Arts; and the Sherwood Award. He has spoken at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Performa, and the 92Y, and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Princeton Atelier; CalArts; and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, where he was an inaugural artist-in-residence.
In August 2015, EMO’s lecture performance ABACUS will be presented by Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe, and in October 2015, the public performance spectacle HOLOSCENES will be presented by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco, prior to an exhibition of related video works at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in January 2016. Jan is a TED Senior Fellow.
Learn moreFounded in 2012 by Libby Werbel, Portland Museum of Modern Art (PMOMA) is an investigative project focused on the lack of major contemporary and modern art institutions within a growing metropolis. PMOMA has produced more than 50 exhibitions and events within the context of a self-actualized and community-grown modern art museum.
Learn moreLuis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio was a Mexican playwright.
Learn moreMack McFarland is an artist, curator, educator, and dreams of being an impresario one day. As one of the Public Art Project Manager for Regional Arts & Culture Council, Mack spends his days flexing his passion and skills for supporting artists, engaging with communities and clients, all the while advocating for the impacts art and culture have on our lives. For the last twenty years, it has been his privilege to collaborate with many cultural producers in the process of bringing to life the shared cultural experiences that are so vital for sustaining and creating communities, while aiding us in grappling with and discerning meaning from the events of our world. As an artist Mack has shared his postcards, videos, and performances at Portland Biennial- Oregon, Kaunas Biennial- Lithuania, Time Based Art Festival- Portland, OR, documenta 13- Kassel Germany, Northwest Biennial- Tacoma, WA, and many other venues and festivals. As a curator he has been fortunate to work with many artists, including commissioned projects from tactical media practitioners Critical Art Ensemble, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Disorientalism; as well as solo exhibitions with Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Joe Feddersen, David Horvitz, Joe Sacco, Cauleen Smith, and many others. In May 2020 he co-founded Congress Yard Projects with Ariana Jacob, an outdoor exhibition space begun in the time of physical distancing.
Learn moreMadison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he makes films, paintings, and performances. His work invites viewers to become aware of perceptual processes and the sensuous experience of time. He frequently collaborates with musicians and composers, such as Ezra Buchla, LCollective, Laura Steenberge, Mark So, and Tashi Wada.
Learn moremadison moore is an artist, cultural critic, dj and performance-maker based in London and Berlin. His work touches pop culture, queer studies, nightlife, sound, media, visual culture and contemporary art. madison holds a ph.d. in american studies from yale university and is currently an ERC funded researcher in 'Modern Moves' in the Department of English at King's College London, where he is also the Director of the Queer@King's research centre.
madison's scholarly and popular writing has been published by The Creators Project, Splice Today, Thought Catalog, Out, Aperture, Interview, Art in America, Theater, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Dancecult: the Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture and The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-songwriter. He has given invited lectures, held residencies and performed at universities, art galleries and nightclubs around the world, including King's College London, the University of Oxford, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of St. Andrews, University College London, Reed College, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, CUNY Graduate Center, the Barbican, East Bloc (london), Elektrowerkz (London) and Performance Space Sydney. His first book, The Theory of the Fabulous Class: Creativity at the Margins, will be published by Yale University Press in 2018. He is currently working on a new project on club culture and creativity as well as an EP.
Learn moreMagic Luscious Spirit Sounds (MLSS) is a non-hierarchical cross-abilities collective that aims to create an inclusive, welcoming space where people with and without disabilities can share their love for music.
We believe in the transformative power of courageously embracing imperfection. Through collaboration, we break down barriers to music, making it accesswible and available for all.
Our collective encourages creative freedom and the courage to make music in new ways. As Octavia Butler said, "The only lasting truth is change" and we actively welcome impermanence to guide our group.
We believe that everyone is a musician, every voice should be heard and valued, and there is no right or wrong way to make music.
Learn moreMalik Nashad Sharpe, also known as Marikiscrycrycry, is a choreographer and movement director known for his provocative and formally engaging performance works that address themes of violence, alienation, horror, melancholia, and the horizon. He holds a BA in Experimental Dance with highest honors from Williams College and a certificate in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he won the Simone Michele Prize for Outstanding Choreography. He has received commissions and shown his work at venues and festivals across the UK, Europe, and Canada, and is currently an Associate Artist at The Place, London and a studio resident of Somerset House Studios, London. He has held artistic residencies at Sadler’s Wells, Barbican, Performance Situation Room, Dance4, Duckie, and Tate Modern. In 2019, he was named a Rising Star in Dance by Attitude Magazine and is a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2022, recognized for his unique and pervasive choreographic achievements. He currently lives in London and is a guest professor in dance and performance at the Stockholm University of the Arts in Sweden.
Learn moreMalkia Okech is an activist, Afrofuturist, and community archaeologist. She is currently a Digital Producer for the local creative agency Mighty Engine. She is also the Associate Producer for Black Spatial Relics, an artist residency and annual convening exploring slavery, justice and freedom and has been working as a Humanities Consultant for Scribe Video Center’s Precious Places Project. She is a curator in the Philadelphia Black arts collective, Bad Apple Commune. Her interests include the cross-sections of multi-modal archaeology, art, cultural heritage, and decolonization. Malkia conducts social justice work as an anti-capitalist and abolitionist with the goal of fostering radical imagination.
Learn moreSouth African dancer, choreographer, teacher and activist Mamela Nyamza acquired a National Diploma in Ballet at Pretoria Technikon and has trained in contemporary, African and pantsula dance—as well as at the Alvin Alley American Dance Center. Born in Gugulethu and educated under an oppressive Apartheid Bantu Education system, much of Nyamza’s performance work addresses the politics of the body and important political and social issues existing in modern day South Africa, notably issues of sexuality, race and gender. Awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award in Dance in 2011, her works include Hatched (2008), Amafongkong (2011), and I Stand Corrected (2013). Nyamza’s performances and collaborations have been presented in various international contexts including the USA, South Africa, Mali, Egypt, Lebanon, France and Slovenia.
Learn moreFounded in 1993, Mammalian Diving Reflex is a research-art atelier dedicated to investigating the social sphere, always on the lookout for contradictions to whip into aesthetically scintillating experiences. Mammalian creates site and social-specific performance events, theatre-based productions, gallery-based participatory installations, video products, art objects and theoretical texts. They create work that recognizes the social responsibility of art, fostering a dialogue between audience members, between the audience and the material, and between the performers and the audience. It is their mission to bring people from across the planet together in new and unusual ways to create ideal entertainment for the end of the world. For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Mammalian Diving Reflex's projects and philosophy, 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 moreManuel Solano (Mexico City, 1987): Through painting, performance and video, Manuel Solano’s work references pop culture and personal memories to inform on Manuel’s own queer identity and bittersweet experiences. After becoming blind for life in 2014 as a result of an HIV-related infection, Manuel’s rebellious nature drove him to keep making art rather than giving up his past life. He has since shown at Museo Carrillo Gil, Zona MACO and Galería Karen Huber.
Learn moreMa Qiusha was born in 1982 and currently lives and works in Beijing, China. Her work was recently featured in Personal Space, 24HR Contemporary Art Center, Australia; Landscape Topology, Magee Gallery, Beijing, China; Madrid, Spain; Anything is Possible, CCRN Luxembourg; and REFRESH: Emerging Chinese Artists at the Zendai Moma, Shanghai, China. Group exhibitions include the 35th International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2006); Rumor Décor, ddmwarehouse, Shanghai, China (2005); Beijing Documenta—Producing HIGH, Beijing, China (2005); 920 Kilograms, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China (2005); Archaeology of the Future: the Second Triennial of Chinese Art, Nanjing Museum, Nanjing, China (2005); 2004 Automat Contemporary Art Exhibition, Suzhou Art & Design Technology Institute, Suzhou, China (2004); and SCARIFY—China Present Independent Video Exhibition, Beijing, China (2004). Ma Qiusha is represented by Beijing Commune in Beijing, China.
Learn moreMarbles Jumbo Radio is a dancer and movement thinker who works within performance, video, and discussion based platforms that engage experiences of social marginality with politics of place, belonging, land, and identity.
Learn moreMarc Bamuthi Joseph is an inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, the winner of the 2011 Alpert Award in Theater, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. He is the founding Program Director of the exemplary non-profit Youth Speaks, and is a co-founder of Life is Living, a national series of one day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks through hip hop arts and focused environmental action. Mr. Joseph recently premiered the Creative Time commission “Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos” in New York’s Central Park, and is currently completing new works for the Chautauqua Symphony, the Philadelphia Opera and South Coast Repertory Theater while serving as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. His evening length piece “/peh-LO-tah/” has been commissioned by the Kennedy Center and will premiere at YBCA in the Fall of 2016.
Learn moreMarc Handelman is a painter who has worked across media including film/video, installation and book arts. His recent projects have frequently examined the strange afterlife of the genre of landscape and conceptions of “Nature” as an ongoing “assembly of political order, without due process.” Marc Handelman has exhibited extensively throughout the United States as well as internationally in such venues as PS1 MoMA in Long Island City; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rubin Museum, (all New York, NY); The Dayton Art Institute, OH; The Orlando Museum of Art, FL; and the Royal Academy of Art in London, UK. He is a graduate critic at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Rutgers University.
Learn moreMarc Matchak is a writer and project person currently based out of San Francisco, California. Recently work has been presented through lecture at S1 and appeared in print at the Litman Gallery, The New School Library, and Split/Fountain. They will be showing work this fall at HQ here in Portland.
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 moreMargaret Mathewson is a scholar, teacher and basket maker, weaving traditional styles since 1980. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, she did graduate work at UC Berkeley focusing on contemporary issues in the maintenance of ancestral ways among native peoples in California. She also did post-doctoral work at the Smithsonian studying old basketry collections and working with tribes to revive traditions. She continues to attend Western Native weavers’ gatherings every year and works for tribes in several states on issues of land management, access to weaving materials and ancestral food plants and on cultural resources education.
In addition, she teaches at Oregon State University and the University of Victoria, Canada, including the following courses: Native Peoples of North America, Contemporary Native Issues, Ecosystem Science of Pacific Northwest Indians, Ethnobiology, Anthropology of Art, Ancestral Technologies and Fiber Arts/Basketry Technologies.
Margaret works with museums, tribal and other, to identify basketry and to create exhibits in collaboration with tribes, focusing on Native plants and ancestral technologies. A resident of Oregon, she runs the Ancient Arts Center, a retreat and school with classes in basketry, food ways, spinning, dying and felting, hide tanning, carving, pottery, stone and bone tools and many other skills from around the world.
Her own basketry work is a mix of ancient and modern and reflects her studies of the traditions of Europe and Japan as well as North America. All her work uses natural materials.
Learn moreBorn in Cyprus, Hassabi moved to the US in 1990 and received a BFA in Performance and Choreography from the California Institute of the Arts. Since moving to New York City in 1994, she has created seven evening-length works and seven short-form pieces. Hassabi has been presented in the US at venues such as PS122 (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Dance Theater Workshop (New York), and Ballroom Marfa (Texas). Internationally, she has been featured at festivals in Austria, Spain, Russia, France, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, and Portugal. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ 2009 Grants to Artists Award.
Selected Press
Playing Connect the Dots, From Aphrodite to Lil’ Kim, Gia Kourlas, New York Times, November 13, 2009.
Learn moreMariana Valencia | Photo credit Ian Douglas
Mariana Valencia, (creator/performer) has held residencies at Chez Bushwick (2013), New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013-14), ISSUE Project Room (2015) and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2016-18). Nationally, she has held residencies at Show Box LA and Pieter Pasd (2014) in Los Angeles; and was part of PICA’s 2018 Creative Exchange Lab. Valencia is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award to Artists grant recipient (2018), a Jerome Travel and Study Grant fellow (2014-15), a Yellow House Fund of the Tides Foundation grant recipient (2010-13) and a Movement Research GPS/Global Practice Sharing artist (2016/17). Her ethnographic research has taken her to Belize, Mexico and the Balkans and she has performed in works by Jules Gimbrone, Elizabeth Orr, Kate Brandt, AK Burns, Em Rooney, robbinschilds, Kim Brandt, Fia Backstrom and MPA. Valencia is a founding member of the No Total reading group and she has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence (2016-17). She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA (2006).
Learn moreMariano 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 moreMarina Abramović was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1946. A pioneer of performance as a visual art form, Abramović has used her body as both subject and medium of her performances to test her physical, mental, and emotional limits—often pushing beyond them and even risking her life—in a quest for heightened consciousness, transcendence, and self-transformation. Characterized by endurance and pain—and by repetitive behavior, actions of long duration, and intense public interactions and energy dialogues—her work has engaged, fascinated, and sometimes repelled live audiences. The universal themes of life and death are recurring motifs, often enhanced by the use of symbolic visual elements or props such as crystals, bones, knives, tables, and pentagrams. While the sources of some works lie in her personal history (the circumstances of her childhood and family life under Communist rule in the former Yugoslavia), others lie in more recent and contemporary events, such as the wars in her homeland and other parts of the world. Marina Abramović attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade (1965–70) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (1970–72). She received an honorary doctorate from the Art Institute of Chicago (2004). She has also received many other honors, including a Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997); a Bessie (2003); and awards from the International Association of Art Critics (2003, 2007). Abramović has had major exhibitions and performances at the Garage Art Center, Moscow (2011); Manchester International Festival (2011); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2005); Whitney Biennial (2004); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2001); Irish Museum of Modern Art (2001); Documenta (1977, 1982, 1992); and the Venice Biennale (1976, 1997, 2009). Marina Abramović lives and works in New York City. -From Art21.
Learn moremario lemafa (b. 1990 / Hawai'i) is an artist and independent organizer based in Seattle, WA. their recent work includes presentations at the '19 Honolulu Biennial, SOIL Gallery, cogean?, and yəhaw̓ at King Street Station.
“when i was a child my mother used to like a certain Suave shampoo, "Tropical Breeze" (i believe it was called). it reminded her of home. nothing in the shampoo bottle reflected her material relation to the islands. while she wore a scent to remember a place, others might wear the same one with the desire to some day go there. i still think about that.”
Learn moreMarius Libman has a diverse work experience in the field of design and motion graphics, and currently holds the position of a Senior Product Designer and manager of the Design team at Elevate Labs. Libman also has a background in motion design and electronic music composition.
Learn moreMark Russell is a writer and cartoonist living in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of God Is Disappointed in You and has written several acclaimed comic book series, including the DC reboot of The Flintstones, Second Coming, and Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, which won the 2019 GLAAD Award for Outstanding Comic.
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 moreDancepod was an architectural installation that housed live-streamed dance parties in four cities simultaneously, Portland OR, Mexico City, Berlin, and New York. It was the first exploration of concepts laid out in the Swells performance/lecture.
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 moreMath Bass (Los Angeles, CA) received her MFA from UCLA. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY (2015); and Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2014). Exhibitions of Bass’s work have been presented by Cooper Union, New York, NY (2015); Tanya Leighton, Berlin, Germany (2015); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2014); White Flag Projects, Saint Louis, MO (2014); Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY (2014); Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (2014); and Silberkuppe, Berlin, Germany (2014).
Learn moreMatthew Day Jackson (born 1974) is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video,performance and installation. Since graduating with an MFA from Rutgers University in 2001, following his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, he has had numerous solo exhibitions. His work has been shown at MAMbo Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA; the Portland Museum of Art Biennial in Portland, Maine; and the Whitney Biennial Day for Night in New York.
Learn moreMatt Keegan is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. At the root of his varied practice is a strong interest in language--as it relates to cognition as well as its centrality for communication and exchange. Keegan has employed familiar phrases in recent sculpture to highlight the materiality of language and translate open-ended phrases into iconic signage. An ardent archivist and amateur social historian, Keegan has recently begun making short documentary videos that are significant components of his exhibitions. Foundational to his archival interests, Keegan was the co-founding editor of North Drive Press, an annual art publication published between 2004-2010. Last spring, he edited ==, an art edition featuring commissioned texts, interviews and multiples, published by mfc michéle didier.
Most recently, Keegan had a solo exhibition at Galeria Pedro Cera in Lisbon, and a two-person exhibition, with Eileen Quinlan, at The Kitchen, New York. Over the last two years, his work has been featured at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, FOAM Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, The Art Institute of Chicago, SculptureCenter, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Aspen Art Museum. Keegan will have a two person show with James Richards at the Rogaland Kunstsenter in Stavanger, Norway, in early 2014.
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 Mikdashi (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her current research/manuscript focuses on law, citizenship, secularity, religious conversion, sexual difference, and the war on terror. She has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014-2016 at Rutgers University, and a Faculty Fellow/Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University (2012-2014). She has published widely in journals including International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Study of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya.com, co-director of the feature length documentary About Baghdad (2004) and co- founding member of filmmaking cooperative Quilting Point Productions. A film she co-conceptualized and co-wrote with Carlos Motta, Deseos, is screening at the 2016 TBA Festival.
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 moreMEGA*CHURCH is a modern spiritual congregation exploring light, music, movement and pixels. A journey into a hybrid of technology and spirituality, the divine natural and the holy artificial, entertainment and sacrament. Audiovisual spectacles of spirituality. A hypergospel for a new world.
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 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 moreMelia Donovan lives and works in Beaverton, Oregon.
Learn moreMelissa Levin joined the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) in 2005 and is currently the Director of Cultural Programs. She is responsible for planning and programming LMCC’s Artist Residency Programs, the River To River Festival, Open Studios, and the Gallery in the Arts Center at Governors Island. Throughout more than a decade working in the arts, Melissa has been committed to innovative and holistic approaches to supporting artists and the creative process. Previous to LMCC, Melissa held positions at Andrea Rosen Gallery, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Artforum International Magazine. She has participated in panel discussions and served on juries at the National Endowment for the Arts, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, the Alliance of Artist Communities, Rhode Island School of Design, Baruch College, Lower East Side Print Shop, and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts; and lectured at the Drew University, University of Oregon in Eugene, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, New York University, Parsons: The New School for Design, and The Cleveland Institute of Art. As an indepedent curator and writer, Melissa has also worked with venues including MoMA PS1, Real Art Ways in Hartford, Culturehall.com, NurtureArt, Cuchifritos Gallery, ISE Cultural Foundation, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Los Angeles. Melissa received her B.A. with honors in Visual Art and Art History from Barnard College.
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 moreMere Tokorahi Boynton is a multitalented performance artist, singer, actor, and MC. She has had formal training in voice and developed her own unique style of performing that draws upon classical training and her Māori heritage.
Some of her most memorable singing engagements to date have been performing in Gareth Farr’s Te Papa, which was composed for the opening of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; singing and touring nationwide in the dance opera Jerusalem by Michael Parmenter; singing in the film Te Tangata Whairawa o Weneti (The Māori Merchant of Venice); and singing the lead role Taranga in ‘Maui One Man Against the Gods’ (2006). Boynton also performed with the avant-garde theater company MAU at the Vienna Mozart Festival in Requiem (2006) which was commissioned by Artistic Director Peter Sellars for the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart. Requiem was also presented in Brussels, Auckland, London and New York. In 2008 she performed in the NZIAF opera production ‘The Trial of the Cannibal Dogs’ by composer Matthew Suttor, and also performed in Ex Stasis by Gareth Farr and The Three Cornered Hat by Manuella de Falla with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.
In 2013 Boynton sang in Jack Body’s Songs and Dances of Desire with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra for the Auckland Arts Festival and Tokyo, Japan. Also that year, she performed again with MAU in the acclaimed all Māori women production Stones in Her Mouth and I Am a commemoration of the First World War Centenary WW100 in Europe, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In 2021 she collaborated with composer Gareth Farr and taonga puoro (Māori musical instruments) artist Ariana Tikao to compose and perform Ngā Hihi o Matariki with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
In 2005 Boynton released her album Waikohu, which is a collaboration with composer/percussionist Gareth Farr; this recording features an eclectic range of compositions which have been given different vocal and musical treatments, from kapahaka (cultural performance) to classical string quartet with karanga (call of welcome). Her next album release was Aroha/Ahava at the Auckland Arts Festival 2015, a collaboration with composer Jonathan Besser which explores the expression of aroha (love).As an actor she is well known for her portrayal of the character Mavis in Once Were Warriors and has also performed in several other films for cinema and television including The Piano and more recently the full feature Deadlands, Hinekura, a short film in te reo Māori, (Māori language), Colonial Combat a television series in te reo Māori and The Untold Tales of Tūteremoana also in te reo Māori. Most recently, she acted in the acclaimed Witi’s Wāhine, a theater work written and directed by Nancy Brunning for the Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival.
Learn moreMoroccan choreographer and dancer Meryem Jazouli has lived and worked in Casablanca since 1997. After pursuing dance studies and performing for several companies in Paris, Jazouli returned to her home country where her artistic work has been strongly influenced by the Moroccan context. She has worked extensively with collaborators in various disciplines, such as Mouna Sekkat, Bernardo Montet, Ambrose Bye and the visual-arts collective La Source du Lion. Works include: Temps de chien (2006), Keima…un cir à la mère (2009), Entre deux (2012), and Contessa (2013). Among other community-oriented initiatives, Jazouli established L’Espace Darja, a space in Casablanca dedicated to creation, artist residencies, training and experimentation in contemporary dance as well as a space to develop and expand exchanges and dialogues between artists of various disciplines and generations.
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 moreMic Capes is a hip hop artist from Portland, OR that represents the North Portland neighborhood, St.Johns. Capes is known for having vivid story telling ability, raw lyricism, and thought provoking social commentary as key components of his music. He released his debut solo album "Rise & Grind" and made a huge impact on the local hip hop scene and now gearing up for his highly anticipated sophomore offering "Concrete Dreams", slated to drop in 2015. He is a member of the Portland hip hop supergroup The Resistance of FRSH TRB.
Learn moreMichael Crowe is a writer and an artist. His diverse work has been featured in press internationally including Associated Press, BBC, the New Yorker, The Smithsonian and Financial Times Deutschland. He has exhibited in galleries including FRAC Paris, Simultanhalle in Cologne, Nottingham Contemporary and Kunsthalle St. Gallen in Switzerland. He's given talks at the New Museum New York, BFI London and taught at Tate Britain and the Camden Arts Centre. Michael's most frequent collaborator is Lenka Clayton, with whom he writes Mysterious Letters, an attempt to write a handwritten letter to everyone in the world.
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 moreMickey Pollizatto is a queer artist, musician, sound collaborator and dancer. They spent their earlier years in Portland creating music as the drag character Cabiria Jones, in the bands caught in candy and later CJ & The Dolls. From 2004-2013, they have contributed to Portland’s TBA festival, toured Europe, and the United States multiple times and later with Portland artists Carla Rossi, The Pepper Pepper and Jen Hackworth. They also contributed to Portland’s Risk/Reward and Dance+.
In recent years, they have provided sound and stage support for The Pepper Pepper’s productions, including Diva Practice: Duet and Solo. They also contribute as a dancer and music producer for Weighted Bodies, a fat forward dance troupe. Currently Mickey cohosts, produces and edits “What The Q,” a podcast exploring queer culture by inviting queer identified guests to have open discussions about the queer identity. Moving forward they hope to collaborate more with queer, fat and femme artists, specifically in the areas of music, dance, comedy, drag & outreach.
Learn moreMidori Hirose (b. Hood River, OR) is a Japanese American interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR.
In Hirose’s work, physical objects and materials are interchangeable with community bonds, recognizing space as a necessary part of the generative process through collaborations, historical narrative, perception (physiological and psychological), and storytelling.
Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, and Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (now called Oregon Contemporary) for the Portland Biennial. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Lumber Room in Portland, OR; East/West Project, Berlin, Germany; Newberg Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland; and Fylkingen, Stockholm, Sweden.
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 moreMika Tajima is a New York-based artist who employs sculpture, painting, media installation, and performance in her conceptual practice. In 2003, she co-founded New Humans, a collaborative group including then-artists Eric Tsai and her now-husband Howie Chen to make works involving sound, installation, and performance actions. New Humans is a moniker for Mika Tajima's projects with other musicians, artists and designers.
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