Artists Archive
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Dennis Nyback was an American independent film archivist, found footage filmmaker, historian and writer. Nyback operated the Dennis Nyback Film Archive, which has over 13,000 short films, from 1895 onward, mostly in 16mm. It is located in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreFirst Nations Performing Arts is focused on cultural change, commissioning, touring and presenting Indigenous performance, as well as capacity building for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts sectors. For our all-ages intergenerational gathering we celebrate the FNPA Network Track members — a coalition of First Nations performing artists — in an evening which will evolve through sharing food, storytelling, interactive performance, music, noise, and artistic experimentation.
Learn 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 moreJason N. Le (they/them) is an arts writer, critic, and cultural worker currently based in Northwest Arkansas, where they work in exhibitions planning at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Momentary. Their academic and artistic research primarily explores queer artistic navigations of human-object relationships at the intersection of performance and sculpture. They have written for BOMB Magazine, Critical Conversations (The Ford Family Foundation & University of Oregon’s Center for Art Research), Portland Monthly Magazine, Oregon ArtsWatch, and more.
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 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 moreBorn in Algeria, Nacera Belaza has been living in France since the age of five. Following her studies in modern literature at the Université de Reims, Belaza created her own dance company in 1989. In January, 2015 she was appointed Knight of the order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. She enters dance as a self-taught interpreter, and develops a choreography that originates in an inner progress—a sensible awareness of the body, of space and of the emptiness inside herself. Her path resembles a quest, and tends towards the enhancement of the direct bond between the dancer and the spectator, open to the sense of the infinite of the stage. Each element of her pieces—light, space, time, body—responds to each other on stage to develop their own designs. With the repetition of the gesture, its infinite slowness, the stretching out of time, Belaza's pieces all explore movement as one would explore a calm, a profound and continuous breath. Belaza's desire to share and pass on has become focused on the relationship between the audiences and their territories.
Learn moreNadia Buyse is a trans-disciplinary artist and musician living in Portland. She has been in at least 30 bands she can remember. She has toured the United States and Europe, playing in a range of spaces from music festivals, punk clubs, house shows, and discotheques. She has also exhibited work internationally and nationally, including the MDW Art Fair in Chicago, Beta Spaces in New York, and dOCUMENTA (13). She has recently received an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and shortly after participated at the ART STAYS residency program in Slovenia, went on a European tour with her multimedia music project DUBAIS, and performed in the Republic of Georgia.
Learn moreNana Adusei-Poku, PhD, is Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley, California. She was previously Associate Professor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. Her book Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art was published in 2021 with Transcript Verlag and her articles have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, e-flux, Kunstforum International, Flash Art, L’Internationale and darkmatter. She curated the event “Performances of Nothingness” (Academy of Arts, Berlin, 2018) and Black Melancholia (Hessel Museum Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 2022).
Learn moreNarcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer whose work spans performance, video art, experimental music, and photography. She has presented work at The New Museum, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center, and at many nightclubs, galleries, and other alternative art spaces. Narcissister has also presented her work internationally at the Music Biennale in Zagreb Croatia; at Chicks on Speed’s Girl Monster Festival; at The City of Women Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia; and at the Camp/Anti-Camp festival in Berlin, among many others. Her art videos have been included in exhibitions and film festivals worldwide, including on MOCATV. Her film, The Self-Gratifier, won “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at the 2008 Good Vibration Erotic Film Festival and her film, Vaseline, won the main prize in 2013. Interested in the troubling divide between popular entertainment and experimental art, Narcissister appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. Narcissister had her first solo gallery exhibition, Narcissister is You, at envoy enterprises in February 2013. She was nominated for a 2013 Bessie Award for her evening-length piece, Organ Player, and has received awards from Creative Capital, Theo Westenberger, and United States Artists.
Learn moreNatalie Figueroa is an activist and community organizer that has addressed the intersections of art and revolution for over 18 years. Natalie, a Chicago native, has organized alongside youth of color to address issues of police brutality, segregation, access to comprehensive health education and racial injustice in public schools. Currently, she is working on building community in Portland through her art collective YGB.
Learn moreNatasha Kmeto is a Portland-based singer and electronic producer who turns heads everywhere she goes. Born into a musical family in California, Natasha began to develop her talents as an artist from a young age. It wasn’t until almost two decades later, on the verge of becoming a career session musician, that she grabbed the wheel and broke out in a direction that truly inspired her. Her arrival in Portland marked a big step towards new things. The past several years as seen her growth quicken, especially after signing with hometown label Dropping Gems. The string of releases that have followed showcase Natasha in her most self-realized form, in matters of love, independence, and outlook on life.
Natasha has a long list of notable live performances under her belt, including gigs at Coachella, Bumbershoot, MusicFestNW, Symbiosis, SXSW, Low End Theory (LA and SF), and Decibel Festival. She has shared the stage with a number of talented artists as well, including Squarepusher, Emancipator, Kid Cudi, Plaid, Gold Panda, Dam Funk, Shlohmo, Shigeto, and Morcheeba, just to name a few. Her radio experience includes live performances on Boiler Room and KEXP, and her tracks have been played by numerous noteworthy DJs including Mary Anne Hobbes. She just released her LP Crisis on Dropping Gems.
Selected Press
"Natasha Kmeto: Portlandian R&B Singer-Producer Grooves at Max Efficiency," Jessica Hopper, SPIN, July 16, 2013.
"Last Time," Julianne, ROOKIE, June 13, 2013
Learn moreNat Turner Project (NTP) is a fugitive space based in Portland, Oregon. NTP enables artists of color to go beyond the usual expositions inherent in presenting the art of marginalized perspectives; dispersing funds, resources, and platforms to create or express one's own language within and without the parameters of racial commodification or designation. NTP creates an environment of inclusivity –– a communal harbor for artists previously silenced by institutional constraints –– and actively provides them spatial priority.
Learn moreNature Theater of Oklahoma is an OBIE Award-winning New York-based performance group under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Since Poetics: a ballet brut, their first ensemble piece, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has been devoted to making the work they don’t know how to make, putting themselves in impossible situations, and working from out of their own ignorance and unease. Using readymade materials, found space, overheard speech, and observed gesture, and through extreme formal manipulation, and superhuman effort, they shift our perceptions of everyday reality. Selected Press Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, December 21, 2009. 'Romeo And Juliet': Just As You Misremembered It, Robert Smith, NPR, December 29, 2009. Deconstructing Romeo and Juliet, Hilton Als, The New Yorker, January 11, 2010. Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2009. Stage Notes: Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet, Tom Murrin, papermag, December 16, 2009.
Learn moreNeal Medlyn, now residing in New York City, has performed in a variety of films, bands, dance pieces and plays, designed sound scores, been a model and a go-go dancer and continues to do some of these things. But most importantly, he is a Performer who presents his programs in New York City, having at some time or another appeared in numerous U.S. cities and in Berlin Germany. He also performs as Champagne Jerry, a rapper. His performance work, primarily built around pop music, has appeared at the New Museum for Contemporary Art (THE NEAL MEDLYN EXPERIENCE LIVE! a re-enactment of Beyonce's 2007 concert DVD), the Andy Warhol Museum, the Kitchen (Wicked Clown Love), Dance Theater Workshop (...Her's a Queen), the Chocolate Factory (Brave New Girl), Joe's Pub (where he was a co-host and co-creator of Our Hit Parade, which ran for four years), PS122, Fez (Neal Medlyn, the Paris Hilton of Performance Art), Ars Nova (Neal Medlyn's Lionel Richie Opera), the Knitting Factory, Galapagos Art Space (Neal Medlyn's Coming In The Air Tonight), on tour across the U.S., Canada, Berlin, and in London as a resident performer at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. He won a 2010 New York Dance and Performance Award for his sound design for Miguel Gutierrez' Last Meadow and has also designed sound for a joint project between Gutierrez and Jenny Holzer at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. He was honored with the title of Mr. Lower East Side in 2004. He co-starred opposite Karen Finley in "George and Martha" in New York and various places across the U.S. He's also collaborated with Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys), Bridget Everett, Kenny Mellman, Adrienne Truscott and has been discussed in the Onion, NPR's Here and Now, Gothamist, the Austin Chronicle, and the New York Times, in which he has appeared several times without his shirt on. His original Internet TV show NEAL MEDLYN'S LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE was a cult sensation on Nerve.com. His dance moves have been featured in the work of choreographers Adrienne Truscott and David Neumann. He has written for New York Magazine's website and Nerve.com about various things including but not limited to R. Kelly, Blind Date, bisexuality, and Days of Our Lives (with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Lisa Carver) among others. His book, Sexual Buttocks and his albums have been purchased by at least 10 people.
Learn moreIt took the Fates colluding together for Neka & Kahlo to have a chance meeting in 2009. Their first musical collaboration was, in many ways, an effort on both their part to transgress the confines of their early upbringing. Neka, brought up in the Black Church, took to secular music in secret, falling in love with legends Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. Daughter of eastern European emigrants, Kahlo took to hip-hop as means of self expression when she realized she didn't quite fit in with the rest of the Portlandians. As a youngster she took an oath of loyalty to Nas, while still indulging in the braggadocio of Jay Z. Now you can find an eclectic playlist in the duo's headphones, anything from Michael to Miguel, Chaka Khan to Kanye, 60's acid rock to Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap.
Rather than latching on to some trendy sub-genre that critics can cheaply package as “something new”, the duo like to think of themselves as a vector for the convergence of a multitude of genres and sounds, expressed through the lens of their unique experience as queer women who refused to conform to any one identity alone. As the two say, "We pray to the Goddess of many faces."
Learn moreNIC Kay is from the Bronx, currently occupying several liminal spaces. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity/meaning gleaned from the shifting of perspective. NIC’s current transdisciplinary projects explore movement as a place of reclamation of the body, history, and spirituality.
NIC has shown work, spoken on panels, and hosted workshops at numerous venues throughout the United States, and Internationally. In 2016, they developed a web series called the Bronx Cunt Tour around their debut solo performance lil BLK for Open TV, which premiered in April, 2016. NIC Kay was a 2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Van Lier Fellow in New York City.
Learn moreNick Hallett is a composer and cultural producer who works between the worlds of music and art. Whispering Pines 10, an opera collaboration with artist Shana Moulton, was staged at PICA for TBA:11 in addition to The Kitchen, New Museum of Contemporary Art, SFMOMA, The Warhol Museum, and Carolina Performing Arts. A new cycle of the project is currently being funded by Creative Capital. He is the Music Director and producer of the Joshua Light Show—a team of live cinema artists with roots in the 1960s psychedelia movement—which appears worldwide, and more recently has performed to Hallett’s original soundscores at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium and at the Papalote Digital Dome in Mexico City, for the Mutek festival. He has staged a diverse body of work in New York and abroad, from masterpieces of John Cage, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (as co-director of the Darmstadt series) to music and live cinema at The Kitchen, to his own "ever-compelling" (Time Out) media rituals of music and light, always involving the human voice, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and PERFORMA, among others.
Selected Press
The Object Whisperer: Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines, Brian Droitcour, Rhizome, April 14, 2010.
Learn moreHis play TREVOR received multiple Ovation and Critics Circle awards for the 2015 production starring Laurie Metcalf and Jimmi Simpson. Other plays include the COWARD and VÉRITÉ, both produced by Lincoln Center/LTC3, and IMPORTANT HATS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, produced by Manhattan Theater Club.
In television, Nick worked as a writer and co-executive producer on the Netflix original series GLOW and ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, for which he has garnered multiple WGA and Emmy nominations, as well as RAMY, for which he served as Co-Executive Producer on its Peabody Award winning first season.
Upcoming projects include the film THE FACE OF THE KING with Sebastian Silva, and COMPLICITY ISLAND, an audio play commissioned by Audible. Nick earned his Literature/Creative Writing BA from Bard College and a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting degree from Juilliard, where he was a two-time winner of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize, and was recently awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters by Bard College. He began his career as a puppeteer and musician for the acclaimed madcap rock puppet musical JOLLYSHIP THE WHIZ-BANG, for which he also built puppets and wrote scripts. He is originally from Anchorage, Alaska.
Learn moreNight Shade is a group of artists rebelling against traditional flat-surface silhouettes and revolutionizing the ancient art of shadow puppetry by using light to manipulate depth and space. This art group blends hand-held lights, masks, puppets, composed music, sound-effects, and experimental storytelling into a bewitching form of cinematic puppetry that flows like film. Core artists are Alicia Cortes, Sarah Frechette, Oviedo Menendez, Jason Thibodeaux, and Alain Z, but also working under the banner Night Shade are Kevin Bouton-Scott, Michel Fiffe, Chris Rabilwongse, and Cynthia Star.
The Portland-based Night Shade collective began collaborating with Japanther back in 2005 in New York. That first show at the Arm Gallery in Williamsburg started the momentum of late night cutting and, since then, this group has performed across the US at various puppetry and art festivals, galleries, anarchist spaces, gutted bowling alleys, and pubs. In 2009 Night Shade performed their full-length epic shadow play, Night Shade, which contains over 700 intricate cut-outs, for a sold-out run at Disjecta, in Portland.
Learn moreNina Katchadourian's work, in a wide variety of media including photgraphy, sculpture, video and sound, has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PSI/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, New Langton Arts, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, Palais de Tokyo, and as part of the 2010 Time-Based Art Festival. In January 2006 the Turku Art Museum in Finland featured a solo show of works she made in that country, and in June 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph, All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a 2008 solo show of Katchadourian's video installation works, and in February 2010, as artist in residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, she had another solo show entitled Seat Assignment. She is currently at work on a permanent public piece, commissioned by the GSA, for a border crossing station between the US and Canada.
Selected Press
Found in Translation, Brian Dillon, Art Review, April, 2008.
Learn moreNivhek is a project by Liz Harris, who lives and works on the Oregon coast. ENGINE marks the first new work by Nivhek since the release of After it’s own death/Walking in a spiral towards the house in 2019.
Liz also records and performs under the names Grouper, Helen, Raum, et al on her own imprint YELLOWELECTRIC, and Kranky, Ltd.
Her music is at grouper.BandCamp.com
Her drawings, paintings, and publications are at repeatingpattern.com
Learn moreForever cascading forward in a positive direction, gleefully instinctive, No Age erupt out of your speakers, blasting away the clouds above the smoggy cityscape to reveal a solar flaring sun. With an ecstatic force bubbling around and beyond their music, they release contagious energy like they’re main-lining a field full of whirring wind turbines, while tuned into an ancient celestial power source.
No Age is the duo of Dean Spunt and Randy Randall, they are on a constant journey to explore the furthest reaches of sound. They set out with one particular rule in mind: To write songs that we would be psyched to listen to. On a first listen, discovering each new dose of their alchemy is exhilarating—they produce perfectly crafted songs, underpinned by infectious melodies and ear-piercing cacophony. This swirling mix of unstoppable momentum is catapulted into the stratosphere by sweeping bursts of symphonic growls. Their power is enunciated through their ability to take their core of catchy song-writing and expand its emotional influence through tone, structure and noise. Everything in Between, their third album and follow-up to 2008’s Nouns has now arrived.
Learn moreDJ Mami Miami is the alias of Emilly Prado, a Chicana writer and DJ based in Portland, Oregon. As the former co-host of Is Butter a Carb? on XRAY FM, Emilly played a wide range of genres from cumbias and spanish punk rock to hip hop, neo-soul, and oldies. She plays songs of her childhood and music that she’s stumbled upon later in life. Her live sets are always mood-driven but she specializes in playing jams for perreando. In 2017, she co-founded Noche Libre DJ collective. Learn more about her at www.emillyprado.com and on Instagram at @emillyp.
Inés Paulina Ramírez- aka Lapaushi- was born in Cuenca, Ecuador. She grew up dancing to classical cumbias on cassette at her family’s parties in the Andes mountains. Her work as a DJ and visual artist engages and celebrates cultural identity. Lapaushi mixes urban rhythms that include feminist hip-hop, reggaeton, electrocumbia, a wide variety of cumbia, descarga, sonidero and chicha psicodélica. - “Pura sabrosura”.
Her selections come from years of traveling, collecting and sharing music from various regions of Latin America that explore Indigenous memory and African roots while incorporating contemporary electronic beats. Soundcloud:lapaushi IG:lapaushi
Dez Ramirez aka DJ La Cósmica is a writer, artist and DJ that’s been in and out of the Los Angeles and Portland music scene for the last decade. Influenced by the Southern California Chicanx culture she grew up in, her eclectic sets are shaped by the sounds of lowrider oldies, disco, electronic, funk, new wave, post punk, rock en espanol, reggae, hip hop, and rock & roll. The daughter L.A. disco dancers, La Cosmica’s sets often pay homage to her parents, Latin discotecas, and the eccentric, glam club scene of the 1970s and 80s. Find her on IG @silver_mother or dezramirez.com
Learn moreNoel Kennon is a violist based in Seattle, WA. Kennon focuses on soundings involving resonance, texture, just intonation, and experimental improvisation.
Learn moreAs a dance artist, Noelle Stiles is interested in how and where experience is held in the body. This interest provides a framework for extracting the corporeal language that both intimately connects and individuates us. Stiles has a BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts and completed her graduate studies in dance at The Ohio State University. She has performed and presented work at venues such as the PICA's Time-Based Art Festival (2010), On The Boards, PWNW, Dance New Amsterdam, and Links Hall. Stiles' interest in teaching has taken her to places such as The Ohio State University, the Governor’s School of North Carolina and she co-founded the community focused dance class series Heavy Rotation with Kathleen Keogh of Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner. Her work has been supported by Caldera's Artist Residency program, PICA's Resource Room Residency, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the ACA Associate Artist Residency program and was selected by PICA and the NDP to travel to the Dublin Dance Festival as part of a pilot international exchange program. In 2010, Stiles merged her work as a graphic designer with her work in dance to co-create a dance publication entitled FRONT. Based out of Portland, Oregon, FRONT is Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Robert Tyree. FRONT utilizes the old-school tactics of the broadsheet newspaper to explore the new, current, future energy of dance theory and practices in the field.
Learn moreFor the past ten years, Zimbabwe-born and New York-based Chipaumire has investigated Africa and her own personal iconography. Her performances complicate, implicate, and destroy the concept of the African female body as a subjugated, colonial, and tribal unknowable. Chipaumire is a recipient of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and two New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards.
Selected Press
Nora Chipaumire: Body and Soul Podcast, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Infinite Body Podcast, April 25, 2008.
Platform 2012: Parallels, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, April, 2012.
Learn moreNXT LVL is a collective that has created a social justice platform to incite change by galvanizing people to action through parties, events, and social connection. Each NXT LVL event is carefully curated to center and amplify WOC/POC/QTPOC/LGBTQIA2S+ voices and causes.
NXT LVL involves the communities in which they work, to benefit as integral collaborators in the process. They prioritize creating safe spaces for all those who attend their events, and strive to provide fair compensation for folks who contribute their skills, time, and energy to make these events possible. NXT LVL recognizes and celebrates the opportunity and ability to shine light on and uplift communities, while fostering a supported vision for social activism fundraising.
Learn moreThe Brooklyn-based artist has always deftly balanced the experimental with the accessible: He has released several albums under his Oneohtrix Point Never moniker on various independent labels – including the 2013 3-CD/5 LP Rifts, a compilation of his early work – as well as amassing a large catalogue of mini-album tape releases. His most recent disc, 2011’s Replica, was built around samples of television commercials; Sasha Frere Jones of the New Yorker called it “music that gently triggers a series of images and feelings, none of which you can name and all of which seem entirely common.” He has built live soundscapes at the Museum of Modern Art; collaborated with Montreal-based ambient electronic music composer Tim Hecker on the largely improvised 2012 Instrumental Tourist; and recast the title track from his 2010 disc Returnal as an elegant and emotive piece for piano, featuring the otherworldly voice of Antony Hegarty. Advertising powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi tapped Lopatin for an installation event at the 2012 Cannes film fest and Sofia Coppola’s longtime cohort Brian Reitzell invited him to create original music for Coppola’s The Bling Ring. Said the Saatchi execs, “There’s this grandeur to his music, but it’s always counterbalanced by moments of irony and lightness.”
Selected Press:
"The Top 50 Albums of 2013," Pitchfork, December 2013
Learn moreScout Niblett is an English singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Niblett debuted in 2001 with her first full-length studio album Sweet Heart Fever, and has gone on to release five more studio albums.
Learn moreIranian-born visual artist Neshat is known for her hauntingly beautiful explorations of Islam and gender relations. Neshat left Iran before the revolution in 1979 and, since 1996, has been unable to return to her country due to the controversial nature of her art. Over the past 15 years, she has created work that draws from her personal experiences in exile and the widening political and ideological rift between the West and the Middle East. Neshat has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery (London), and was the recipient in 1999 of the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial. In 2009, Neshat won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice Film Festival.
Selected Press
Women Without Men: A Conversation with Shirin Neshat, Leila Darabi, PBS Frontline: Tehran Bureau, May 5, 2010.
Women Without Men - In 1953 Iran, Sisterhood Sought During a Coup, Stephen Holden, The New York Times, May 14, 2010.
Shirin Neshat: An Interview, Eleanor Heartney, Art in America, June 16, 2009.
Shirin Neshat: Women Without Men, Tehran Review.
Shirin Neshat, Arthur C. Danto, BOMB, Fall 2000.
Shirin Neshat: A long way from home, Homa Khaleeli, Guardian.co.uk, June 13, 2010.
Iran's Hidden Turmoil: Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men, Sarah Kerr, nybooks.com, May 14, 2010.
Learn moreS.J Norman (b. 1984) is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. His career has so far spanned 18 years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between Australia, Germany, the UK, and the United States.
His practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. Working extensively with durational and spatial practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks, Norman's primary medium is the body. Drawing on embodied ancestral lineages of ceremonial praxis, Norman frequently utilises relational and process-based choreographies as a mode of structural critique: reflected in his work is an abiding interest in the space of co- and inter-corporeality, the forces that suffuse it, and how the live act might be utilised as a mean to examine, disrupt and re-inscribe prevailing systems of social power.
Norman has received major commissions from the Biennale of Sydney (AU), Performance Space New York (US), Dark Mofo (AU), The National Gallery of Australia (AU), Venice International Performance Week (IT), Spill Festival of Live Art (UK), Fierce Festival (UK), In Between Time (UK), Arnolfini (UK), Liveworks (AU), Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AU), Unsound Festival (PL), Fusebox Festival (US), Melbourne Festival (AU), Tarnanthi Festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art (AU) and Tate Modern (UK), the Science Gallery London (UK), Die Fabrikanten (AT), and the Festival of Live Art (AU), to name a few. He has received numerous awards for his work including a Sidney Myer Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship, two of Australia's most prestigious honors for art.
Aside from his artistic and curatorial practice, he is also a writer of fiction, essays, and poetry. He has won or placed in numerous literary awards, including: The Peter Blazey Prize, The Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award, The ABR/Elizabeth Jolley Award for Short Story, and the Overland/Judith Wright Prize for Poetry. His award-winning debut short story collection, Permafrost, will be published by the University of Queensland press in 2021.
Learn moreTabitha Nikolai is a visual artist and educator who uses video games, installation, and writing to study life under the visceral and disorienting onslaught of mass virtuality. Currently based in New Orleans, she grew up in Utah, and is forever influenced by her experiences there. Her work orbits themes of gender, isolation, futurism, and fantasy, often with a dark and humorous twist. With a long history of running DIY spaces, Nikolai believes deeply in the lifesaving power of community-organized scenes. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including the Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; and apexart, New York, NY. Nikolai’s video games have been covered by The New York Times, VICE, and Art in America, and in academic outlets including the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds.
Learn moreSTEW: Guitars/Vocals, Text/Music
THEATER: Book, Co-Composer and Lyricist for Passing Strange (2008 Tony—Best Book, 2-time 2007 Obie (Best New Theater Piece and Best Ensemble ), Family Album (2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Notes of a Native Song (Spring 2015 Harlem Stage), Wagner, Max! Wagner! (Fall 2015 Kennedy Center) The Total Bent (Public Theater 2016), Making It (Spring 2010 St. Anne’s Warehouse), Brooklyn Omnibus (Fall 2010 Brooklyn Academy of Music) Resurrection City (2016 Studio Theatre), Chicago Omnibus (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 2012) FILM: Spike Lee’s Passing Strange. ROCK AND ROLL: Stew and The Negro Problem. Albums: Post Minstrel Syndrome, Joys and Concerns, Guest Host and The Naked Dutch Painter (both called Album of the Year by Entertainment Weekly), Welcome Black, Something Deeper than These Changes, Making It and the cast album of Passing Strange. Numerous Lincoln Center appearances, United Nations, Symphony Space.: Guest Host and Album of the Year by Entertainment Weekly TV: Stew is co-composer (w/ Heidi Rodewald) of “Gary Come Home,” for SpongeBob SquarePants. ARTS EDUCATION: Doctor of Humane Letters, Oshkosh University, Wisconsin; California Inst. of the Arts; New School; Stanford; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of the Arts, Philly. Stew is a Sundance Institute Alum and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence.
Heidi Rodewald is the Tony Award nominated, Obie Award winning co-composer of the musical Passing Strange, which transferred from The Public Theater to Broadway in 2008. Rodewald composed music for Karen Kandel's Portraits: Night and Day (2004); Brides of the Moon by The Five Lesbian Brothers (2010); and co-composed music for Shakespeare's Othello and Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet (2010-12). Rodewald joined the band The Negro Problem in 1997, where she began a longtime collaboration with singer songwriter, Stew. She has collaborated with him in a range of capacities -- as a co-composer, producer/arranger and performerSheis. the co-composer with Stew of the musical Family Album which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival during the 2014 season, Notes of a Native Song, at Harlem Stage in 2015, Wagner, Max! Wagner!! at the Kennedy Center in 2015, and The Total Bent at The Public Theater,May 2016.Heidi is the composer of The Good Swimmer, with librettist Donna DiNovelli, presented by Prototype Festival January 2016 at the space HERE in NYC,and scored her first film I Dream Too Much, which had it's world premiere at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival.
Learn moreThird Angle New Music Ensemble is one of the foremost producers and performers of contemporary chamber music in the United States, and is recognized as a primary creative force in the cultural landscape of Portland and the Pacific Northwest. Since 1985, Third Angle has presented more than 90 programs of contemporary music, commissioned more than 25 new works and released nine recordings to critical acclaim.
Learn moreTiona Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose practice explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. McClodden has exhibited and screened her work at many institutions and galleries, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and more recently, Performance Space New York. The recipient of many awards and fellowships, she most recently awarded the 2018-2019 Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism and won the 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. McClodden also curated the exhibitions A Recollection. + Predicated. featured within Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental, presented in collaboration with Bowerbird in Philadelphia in 2017 and The Kitchen in New York earlier this year.
Learn moreTyler Wallace is a Portland-based artist working in video, installation, and performance to investigate concepts of identity and personal history. Nicole Dill is a Portland-based artist whose work interrogates the function of celebrity culture in contemporary society through photography, performance, audio, sculpture, and installation. Both Wallace and Dill recently defended their theses at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and received their BFAs in May 2009.
"Between Us," Leah Bobal, PNCA UNTITLED.
Learn moreWa Na Wari is committed to the ideas of Black artists from all over the diaspora and partnering with TBA in 2021 offers us the opportunity to work even more closely with Black femme artists who are lifting up Black joy, Black resistance, and Black power.
TBA has long been the reason Seattlietes have traveled down the I-5 corridor to experience performance art from all over the world. This year is no different. Our work together will be to hold space for intense conversations about Black land and autonomy, Black bodies and historical erasure, all while combating the physiological and psychological effects of gentrification on Black people all over the Northwest
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