Artists Archive
This Actor/Dancer/Stripperformance Artist (primarily known for live work) has performed in New York & abroad since 1988. A Pioneer in the 1990s burlesque revival, Tigger! has been "acting like a stripper" since 1992 & remains a leading influence in the world burlesque scene. He won the first ever "King of Boylesque" title at Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas as well as several Golden Pastie Awards, including "Most Likely to Get Shut Down by the Law" & "Most Unpredictable Performer." He was ranked the #4 Burlesque Performer of 2010 (the only solo male) in an international online poll. Called "the Boylesque King...a heart-pounding climax" by LA Weekly, "hysterical and acrobatic" and "wickedly arch" by The New York Times, "disturbing, funny and oddly riveting all at once" by Vancouver Sun, "delightful...simultaneously hilarious and titillating" by TheaterMania, "the taboo-defying dynamo" by NEXT Magazine. He has acted in Shakespeare, Apollinaire, Wedekind, Horváth, Tennessee Williams and numerous original works with Taylor Mac, Julie Atlas Muz and other genius friends. He has recently performed in: Italy, Denmark, Cyprus, England, Hungary, Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, France, Mexico, Canada, and all around the U.S.
Learn moreJames Yarker studied theatre at Lancaster University, England. In 1991 he co-founded Stan’s Cafe, one of the UK’s foremost independent theatre companies, and has been artistic director of all of its productions. Stan’s Cafe tours regularly, encompassing a broad variety of media including theatre, radio, and site specific performances requiring extensive audience participation. Some of their recent work includes It’s Your Film, Be proud of Me, and The Black Maze.
Learn moreJamie Isenstein was born in Portland, Oregon in 1975, and lives and works in New York City.. She has presented her work in exhibitions including It is what it is. Or is it?, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2012); MakeUp, A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy (2012); Liverpool Biennial: Touched, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK (2010); Marina Abramovic Presents, Manchester International Festival, Manchester, UK (2009); One Minute More, The Kitchen, New York (2009); Hammer Projects: Jamie Isenstein: This Way to The Egress, The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2007); Greater New York 2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2005). Her work is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Meyer Riegger in Berlin/Karlsruhe, Germany.
Selected Press
"The Lady Vanishes," Robin Tovey, Reed Magazine, March 2012.
Learn morePeople are universally intrigued by mystery and delighted by discovery and understanding. This is the essence of science and it is why we all spend at least the first 10 years of our lives exploring the unknown universe just as scientists do. But at that age, we call it play.
With good fortune, I have been able to continue the work of my inner 10 year old and to share the mystery, discovery and understanding with my students. The delight I have in teaching comes every term when I get to see the universe through their eyes and perspectives. And in reminding everyone to tap into that 10 year old scientist that lives within.
My career in science began at age 5 with a visit to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. It almost ended when I was 12 when I set fire to the basement of my house with a chemistry set! But I survived that test (and my parents never knew!). That’s when I knew I had a future in science!
My formal education includes a B.A. in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Pittsburgh.
I started teaching astronomy and physics in 1975 at various universities and have served as director of three planetariums, including OMSI’s Kendall Planetarium. At OMSI I moved into the exhibit design and development phase of my career and totally reinforced my commitment to hands-on, discovery-based learning. That is the philosophy I use in my classes at Marylhurst University where I teach now.
I have also worked for two other Portland-based science exhibit companies, Levy Design and Promotion Products, Inc. Exhibits that I have developed are here in Portland, and museums in California, Ohio, Alaska, New Jersey, Boston, Saudi Arabia and Israel, among other places.
Learn moreJane Paik took her first dance class when she was 17 years old – ballet. And loved it. She spent 2 1/2 years studying modern at the age of 19 - Martha Graham. Old school, but solid. Since then, she has continued to be mainly self-taught, though she has had the chance to take class with some excellent teachers including Stefan Wenta, Augusta Moore, Ryan Heffington, Kitty MacNamae, and Oliver Steele.
In conjunction with her entrance into the world of dance, Jane found herself as a founding member of the San Francisco theater troupe Sassymouth. Helmed by writer/director John Fisher, the troupe earned a cult following in San Francisco with its cutting-edge examinations of gender, sex, and politics. She wore many hats with the troupe including Producer, Choreographer, Dancer, and Actor and was recognized for her various roles including Joy of Gay Sex (Best Ensemble), Combat! (Mark Goodman award for Distinguishment in Acting) , and Medea, the Musical. (HBO Aspen Comedy Festival - Pick of the Festival, GLAAD choice awards - Best Play, LA Weekly, Best Play, BATCC Awards -Best Choreography, Best Ensemble Cast)
She has appeared in a handful of independent shorts and films seen in various festivals including Outfest, Ladyfest, and the South by Southwest Film Festival.
She began producing works under the name Janet Pants in 1997 and Founded the Janet Pants Dans Theeatre (later Leg and Pants Dans Theeatre) in 2001. Often hailed as a pioneer in bringing experimental modern dance to the underground music scene - in a style that has been described as "punk rock in dance form" - she continues to mash together her take on dance/film/music in various performances, videos, and sounds.
Learn morePart Screamers intensity, part Misfits anthem, part RZA samples/beats and part Lightning Bolt art/freakshow, Japanther is quite likely the most unapologetically artsy punk-related band since the early days of Sonic Youth. Utilizing microphones made out of old-fashioned telephone handsets, electronic hardware, cassette decks, a three-stringed bass guitar and a drumkit, Japanther is a more playful and even more self-conscious update on the late-'70s no-wave scene, though deep roots in the skatepunk scene keep things from getting too precious. For the past seven years Japanther has baffled unsuspecting audiences and steadily grown a cult following. They've lived out of a van all over Europe, Australia, Mexico, Canada and the US, while working in museums on all types of "Art Projects." Recent projects include a collaboration with Dan Graham for Beyond — his first American retrospective — and Japanther in 3-D, a book and film companion to the band’s interactive rock opera, commissioned for PERFORMA 07 at P.S. 122 (New York). Synchronized swimmers, illegal performances, marionettes and giant puppets have all been employed in Japanther shows — all in an attempt to redefine what bands, groups and gangs can do.
Learn moreJasmine Elizabeth Johnson is a scholar-practitioner and Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores the politics of Black movement including dance, diasporic travel, and gentrification. Johnson’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and elsewhere.
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 moreJasmine Orpilla is a multipliced Ilokana/x-American vocal performance artist and operatic composer of experimental theatrical sound installations, in which she activates her lifelong practices of folk ritual dance, combat systems, and music of the Philippine diaspora, against the contemporary American framing of the first generation, imperialist military culture of her own childhood. Unlimited by “soprano” nor so-called classical beauty, her unfiltered voice-in-motion exorcizes eurocentric performance structures from her muscle memory, while remaining accountable to the oral legacies and languages of the Indigenous Pilipino musical systems she, her family, and community remains indebted to. With decades embodying center with her energetically intensive solo practice as a multi-instrumental and multilingual writer/performer, Orpilla’s work serves to humanize and honor the intersectionality of the Filipina/x-American body in agency, despite ongoing minimization of colonial history’s revisionist narratives.
Orpilla’s performance installations are intentionally embedded with materials from her own family archives, such as portraiture, heirloom jewelry, clay pottery, rare handwoven cloth, uniforms, medallions, defunct weaponry, soil, bone, gold, copper, hand-forged musical instruments and handwritten letters. As fragile materials that have survived wartime, she creates with them a kinetic, movement- and sound- sensitive space in which to re-visit, elevate, or question the inter-generationally impacted stories preserved in each object, while marking their decay over time in correlation to her voice and body.
Following intensive experience with world-renowned theater and opera directors such as Ariane Mnouchkine at Théâtre du Soleil, Paris, and Peter Sellars, over the past ten years Orpilla has taken space, internationally performing in genre-defying voices at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; CAP UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA; Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany; Théâtre Paris-Villette, Paris, France; HAU Hebbel Berlin, Germany; and more. Jasmine Orpilla’s solo and collaborative work has been supported by Creative Capital, United Artists, California Arts Council, Alliance for California Traditional Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Durfee Foundation, Mairie de Paris, and more.
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 moreJason Traeger has released music on Kill Rock Stars and K Records, performed with the art collective Oregon Painting Society at Portland 2010: Biennial of Contemporary Art, TBA:09, Tate Modern and he has shared the stage with some of the biggest names in stand-up comedy. He resides in Portland, OR.
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 moreReeves is a New York-based filmmaker, who has shown at the Berlin, New York, Vancouver, London, Sundance, and Seoul Film Festivals, as well as at the Whitney Biennial, Princeton University, and the Museum of Modern Art. She has made 20+ film works since 1990, pushing the boundaries of film through optical-printing, film stock “misuse,” and direct-on-film techniques including hand-painting film frames.
Selected Press
When It Was Blue, Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope, 2008.
Outward Bound, Ed Halter, artforum, October 27, 2008.
Learn moreJennifer West was born in Topanga, California and lives and works in Los Angeles. Significant commissions and special projects include High Line Art, New York (2012), 5th Biennial of the Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium (2011); The Aspen Art Museum (2010); the Turbine hall at TATE Modern (2009) and she was Artist in Residence at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2011. Solo exhibitions include Focal Point Gallery, Essex, England and Vdrome.org (2014); High Line Art, NY and S1 Artspace, Sheffield, England (2012); Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Western Bridge, Seattle and Kunstverein Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany (2010); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2008); White Columns, NY (2007). West has been included in numerous exhibitions internationally including Nottingham Contemporary, England; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunstlerhaus Graz, Austria; Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds, UK; Saatchi Gallery, London; White Columns, New York; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Drawing Center, New York; Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, New York; Tel Aviv Museum of Art ; CAPC Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; ZKM Museum for New Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and Tate St. Ives, England. West has published 12 Zines that she gives away at her exhibitions. West was shortlisted for the 2012 3rd Annual Nam June Paik Center Award in Korea. She is an Asst. Professor of Fine Arts Practice at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, Los Angeles.
Learn moreJenny Yang is a Los Angeles-based writer and stand up comedian who produces the first-ever (mostly) female, Asian American standup comedy tour, Dis/orient/ed Comedy and has been a writer and performer on the viral Buzzfeed videos "If Asians Said the Stuff White People Say" (over 8 million views), "What if Adults had Tantrums Like Toddlers?" and the "Ask An Asian" video series. Jenny was dubbed one of Los Angeles' "most fascinating people" of 2015 in LA Weekly's annual "People" issue. She was also a featured standup comic on Joan Rivers' 2013 Showtime documentary Why We Laugh: Funny Women.
Learn moreJen Rosenblit makes performance engaging bodies, architectures and ideas between New York City and Berlin. Her works focus on an improvisational approach to choreographic thought, locating ways of being together amidst impossible spaces. Recent works include Hands (upcoming, 2016, The Invisible Dog/New York Live Arts), a Natural dance (2014, The Kitchen), Pastor Pasture, in collaboration with composer Jules Gimbrone, (2013, Issue Project Room), In Mouth (2012, Dance Theater Workshop), and When Them (2010, Danspace Project). Rosenblit is a 2015-16 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a recipient of a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Emerging Choreographer for a Natural dance and was awarded the 2012 Grant to Artists from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Rosenblit was included in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York exhibition in October 2015, and has received commissions from The Kitchen, The Invisible Dog, New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, and Issue Project Room. Rosenblit has also collaborated and performed with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Young Jean Lee, Ryan McNamara, Yvonne Meier, Sasa Asentic, Anne Imhof, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K. Burns, and Kerry Downey with Joanna Seitz. Rosenblit's upcoming work, Swivel Spot, in collaboration with Geo Wyeth premiers at The Kitchen in March 2017. A new collaboration with Simone Aughterlony, Everything Fits in the Room, premieres January 2017 as a commission between HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Haus der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin as part of their 100 Years of Now festival.
Learn moreDancing has been in my blood since I can remember. It started off with hip hop dancing for my high school -- I began to recognize my skill and talent. After 4 years of that, I was introduced to the world of J-Sette by women. J-Sette historically refers to Jackson State University’s female drill team that began in the 1970s. They “created” the dance style, and thus far have made it a distinctive form of dance. I was interested in this type of dance, but not entirely until I saw a group of males performing it. At that point, I claimed the style for myself and perfected it on my body. Currently, I have my own J-Sette line, Mystic Force, and plan to increase our already considerable renown in this style of dance in our community, and eventually internationally. Previously, I served as co-captain of Dallas’ Texas Teasers. I have participated and competed in several events and competitions, including 2 SetteItOff video challenges, Atlanta Pride 2010, Tennessee Classics 2009, and Memphis Pride 2008. In 2015, I was named New Legendary by the Meet Me on the Dance Floor J-Sette council, and have gained many titles since then, such as, Best Dancer and Most Entertaining.
Re-Sette the Stage—a three-part conversation series happening in August, September, and October 2021—was conceived by Jermone Donte Beacham in partnership with jumatatu m. poe and Jamarsa Peters.
Learn moreJérôme Bel was born in 1964 and lives in Paris. He studied at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine of Angers (France) in 1984-1985. In 1992, he was an assistant for the ceremonies of the XVIth Winter Olympic Games of Albertville and Savoie. His first piece, entitled nom donné par l'auteur (1994), led to a series of intensely personal dances: Jérôme Bel (1995), Shirtology (1997), and The Last Performance (1998). In 2004, Bel began a series of performance portraits of contemporary dancers, including Véronique Doisneau, Isabel Torres, Pichet Klunchun and Myself(TBA:08), Cédric Andrieux and Lutz Förster. His work, The Show Must Go On (2001), received a Bessie Award in 2005.
Selected Press
We Are People Before We Are Dancers..., Christine Hou, The Brooklyn Rail, October, 2010.
With "Cédric Andrieux" Jérôme Bel takes us below the dance, history, Wu Yi-hua, Geneactive.ch, December 1, 2009 (Translated from French).
Learn moreJesse Hayward received his MFA from California College of Art in 2002. His work has been exhibited at PDX Contemporary Art Window Project in Portland, OR; Southern Exposure and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and at The Affair at The Jupiter Art Fair. In 2006, Hayward’s work was included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in The Oregonian, PORT, PDX Magazine, Willamette Week, and The Portland Mercury. Most recently, Hayward was shortlisted for the Portland Art Museum’s Contemporary Northwest Art Award.
Learn moreJesse Hewit is a dance artist who lives in San Francisco. He has performed and had residencies with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CounterPUSLE, Z Space, KUNST-STOFF Headlands Center for the Arts, Ponderosa Tanzland, Firkin Crane, and others. Hewitt received a 2010 SFBG Goldie Award winner and was a 2011 YBCA Bay Area Now artist. He founded the THIS IS WHAT I WANT Festival with the National Queer Arts Festival, and has curated for THEOFFCENTER and Dancer’s Group/CounterPULSE’s 2nd Sundays series.
Learn moreJesse Sugarmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance, and sculpture. His work engages the automotive industry as a manufacturer of human identity, accessing automotive history as an index of both cultural identity and social development. Jesse has exhibited work in venues such as the Getty Institute, Los Angeles; el Museo Tamayo, Mexico; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; the Banff Center, Canada; Filmbase, Ireland; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Michael Strogoff, Marfa; el Museo de Arte Moderno de Santander, Spain; Drift Station, Omaha; Spirit Abuse, Albuquerque; the Knockdown Center, New York; Fugitive Projects, Nashville; the 21c Museum, Louisville; and High Desert Test Sites 2013. His work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art Papers, ART LTD, Art Cards, Art Fag City, Frieze Magazine, and The New York Times. Jesse lives and works in Bakersfield, California.
Selected Press:
"Sitting in the Back of a Car by Chip Lord," The Architect’s Newspaper, July 2014
"Doing Battle with the Remains of Industrial America by Christian Frock," Hyperallergic, May 2014
"Jesse Sugarmann," John Motley, Frieze Magazine, March 2014
"Critic’s Picks: Jesse Sugarmann," Stephanie Snyder, Artforum, October 2013
"High Desert Test Sites, a Diary by Mutual Art," Huffington Post, October, 2013
"Subverting Deadly Materials: The Work of Jesse Sugarmann," Mack McFarland, NY Arts Magazine, October, 2013
Learn moreJessica Bissett Perea (Dena’ina/Scottish American) is an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching focus on music, sound, and media studies; critical race and gender studies; Alaska Native and Circumpolar Inuit cultures, histories, and politics; Urban Indigeneities; African and Native alliances and cultural production in the Americas; jazz and improvisational musics; research ethics and methodologies; critical theory and pedagogy. She completed her PhD in Musicology from UCLA in 2011 and was awarded a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Music at UC Berkeley from 2011-2013.
Jessica was born in Anchorage, Alaska and raised forty miles north in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. She is an enrolled member of the Knik Tribe and a shareholder in Cook Inlet Region, Inc. (an Alaska Native Corporation). Her innovative dissertation research and dedication to community outreach were recognized with a 2010 Alaska Native Visionary Award, presented by the Alaska Native Heritage Month committee and board of directors.
Jessica’s writings have appeared in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, MUSICultures (formerly the Canadian Journal for Traditional Music / La Revue de Musique Folklorique Canadienne), the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd edition), and an edited volume Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries (University of California Press, 2012).
Learn moreHutchins received her BA in Art History from Oberlin College and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hutchins has had solo exhibitions in New York and Portland, Oregon, and has been shown across the US, as well as in Iceland, the UK, and Germany. Most recently, Hutchins’ work was included in 2010: The Whitney Biennial. Later this year, Hutchins will be featured in Ephemera at Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park; in Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture at the Saatchi Gallery (London), and at Timothy Taylor Gallery (London). She is represented by Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) in New York.
Selected Press
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Stuart Horodner, BOMB, Summer 2010.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, John Motley, Art in America, June 4, 2010.
Minor Miracles, Ben Davis, Artnet.com, March 26, 2010.
Critics' Picks: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Stephanie Snyder, Artforum, March, 2010.
500 Words: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Patricia Maloney, Artforum, July 22, 2009.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins' Hours and Ours at Small A, Jeff Jahn, PORT, February 1, 2008.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Chas Bowie, Portland Mercury, February 8, 2007.
Learn moreJess Perlitz’s work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. Born in Toronto, CA, she is a graduate of Bard College and received an MFA from Tyler School of Art and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently based in Portland, OR, where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of the year-long Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project and the Experimental Arts Research Forest. Perlitz was named a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, won a Joan Shipley award, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Socrates Sculpture Park, Astoria, NY; Cambridge Art Galleries, Cambridge, CA; De Fabriek in The Netherlands; and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA, as part of the museum’s ongoing artist installation series.
Learn moreJesus Rodales is a Hillsboro native. He started his dance career as a freestyler, specializing in Tutting and Popping. He is co-founder of Find A Way Threads, a lifestyle brand dedicated to its self-explanatory purpose. Through Find A Way, they hope to help create opportunities for their community!
Learn moreJibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of three books of poems, 19 Names For Our Band (Fence, 2008), James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011), and Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2014). His art and writing projects, spanning photography, video, performance and poetry, have been exhibited and performed at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA/P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.
Learn moreJibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and author of three books of poems: Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2015); James Brown Is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011); and 19 Names for Our Band (Fence, 2008). His recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. (2014); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (2015); Jewish Museum, New York (2016); LAX ART (2016); Studio Museum in Harlem (2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); Swiss Institute, New York (2017); KMAC Museum, Louisville (2018); Ballroom Marfa, Marfa (2018); The Kitchen, New York (2018); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2019). This fall he will present a new body of work along with a selection of recent projects at Tufts University Art Galleries, as well as a solo exhibition at Magenta Plains in New York.
Learn moreJibz Cameron is a performer, visual artist, and writer living in Los Angeles, most well known for her multimedia work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag. Over the last 20 years, Cameron has combined tragedy and comedy at such institutions as MOCA, PS1, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, The Hammer Museum, and the New Museum, among others. The New York Times has heralded her as “the funniest and most pitch-perfect performance seen in years,” and New York Magazine has called her “outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative.” Cameron has written and produced seven evening-length performance pieces and countless short works that have been performed in clubs and venues internationally. She has also produced multiple video works and three albums of original music. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2020 Creative Capital Awardee, and a 2021 United States Artist. Her film, Weirdo Night, made with director Mariah Garnett, is an official Sundance Film Festival 2021 submission. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night!, a monthly experimental comedy and performance event in Los Angeles + New York. Jibz is honored to be included in 2023’s Made In LA Biennale “Acts Of Living” at the Hammer Museum. Cameron's memoir, Hell In A Handbag, is being released by DOPAMINE Books in 2026.
Learn more1. JI YANG is a PUZZLE MAKER and a FICTION BUILDER. 2. JI YANG makes art like saying “2 x 2 = 5 ?” or “ fighting with a puffy pillow.” 3. JI YANG does it underwhelmingly.
Learn moreJJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, the artist asks what stuttering can teach us about justice.
Born in 1989 in Groton, Connecticut, USA the artist lives in Norfolk, Virginia, USA with their wife, poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. JJJJJerome dreams of building a sonic bath house!
Concepts that organize the artist’s practice include: unknowing, improvisation, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, and silence. Ellis researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time.
Learn moreLifelong neurodivergent artist.
Two main pathways: abstract painting and dance/performance.
As a painter of close to 50 years, my work is equal parts improvisation and design: chance elements sometimes kinesthetically generated, a studied compositional eye, and a deep love of color, movement, architecture, and gesture. I create abstract acrylic paintings with many layers and sometimes collage elements. My studio is in The Drawing Studio in SE Portland, which I co-own with Phil Sylvester, adjoined by the Findlay/Sylvester Gallery, in which my paintings can be viewed.
As a contemporary modern dancer I have created and performed my own, mostly solo performance work. Also worked extensively for many years with these choreographers:
Beginning in 1980 with Jann McCauley Dryer in CIRQUE (formerly Portland Dance Theater), Gregg Bielemeier and Gregg Bielemeier Dance Project, Catherine Egan and Eggshell Productions, and Bonnie Merrill, who, in addition to the many works I danced over the years, choreographed a solo for me that I performed while heavily pregnant.
Helen Buckingham, Kiken Chin, Linda K Johnson, Kimi Okada, Mary Oslund, Sara Padilla, Judy Patton, Ray Terrill.
Collaborated with artists in performance: Alva Bradford, costumer/puppet maker, Cristina DeGennaro, visual/performance artist, Van Findlay, singer/violinist, Daniel Storto, fashion/costume designer, Tyrrell Sweetman cellist, Phil Sylvester, composer/musician, and painter/set designer.
Designed and constructed sets, costumes, props, and hair designs for many choreographers/directors, including Gregg Bielemeier, Jann Dryer, Catherine Egan, and Randee Paufve.
Studied visual art and dance in the 1970’s at Portland State University with instructors who were creative working artists. In addition to modern dance have studied tap, ballet, African, improvisation, jazz, flamenco, as well as piano and drums. Influential teachers include Gregg Bielemeier, modern dance; Ruby Burns, African dance; Jann Dryer, modern dance; Cathy Evleshin, modern and jazz dance; Fred Heidel painting; Jim Hibbard drawing; Michi Kosuge sculpture; and Vincent Martinez-Grieco, modern jazz dance; Bonnie Merrill modern improvisation and tap dance; Judy Patton modern dance and performance collaboration; Barbara Remington ballet; and Claire Roche, tap dance.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Brooklyn, Joan Frosch (producer/director) explores 21st century artmaking through the voices of often previously marginalized artists and thinkers, including the emergent voices of contemporary dancers and choreographers in Africa, and the African Diasporas of France and the USA. Joan's 30 year creative path encompasses making and directing dance theatre, writing as a dance ethnographer/activist, and, now, directing her first documentary feature. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts, Laban Institute of Movement Studies, and Columbia University. At present, Joan is Professor of Dance and co-Director of the award-winning Center for World Arts at the University of Florida, and a founding member of the The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium (USA).
Alla Kovgan (co-director/editor) is a Boston-based filmmaker/intermedia artist/curator, born in Moscow, Russia. Her films have been screened at numerous venues around the world including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New York Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and others. Among Alla's most recent endeavors is co-directing and editing “Traces of the Trade: a Story from the Deep North” by Katrina Browne about the role of the North in the US slave trade; co-producing with Russian filmmaker Efim Reznikov “Terpsychore's Captives II”, a feature documentary about Bill T. Jones and a Russian prima ballerina Natalia Balakhnicheva; and working with Kinodance Company, on a new intermedia performance "Denizen" that will premiere in May 2007 as a part of Bank of America Celebrity Series. Alla has been teaching and curating dance film and avant-garde cinema worldwide and acts as an International Director of St. Petersburg Dance Film Festival KINODANCE.
Learn moreJoel B. Tan is an award-winning writer/performer and an internationally recognized trailblazer in connecting arts with social justice, public health, and community development. Tan has published three volumes of poetry, edited three fiction anthologies, and his various poems, plays, essays, and short fiction on race, power and identity have appeared in numerous academic and commercial venues. Since 2004, Tan has served as the Director of Community Engagement at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where his work in the field of arts leadership has been recognized globally. Prior, he worked in Public Health for 16+ years, co-founding LA’s Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team Health Center. Tan is also Sister Baba Ganesh of the San Francisco Mother House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. As Baba, he is the creator of the widely walked “Sistoric” Castro Procession, an historical audio walking tour produced with Queer DJ collective and Honey SoundSystem. He is also the producer of Project Nunway, a fashion fundraiser that pairs Sisters with designers to create a look from recycled materials based on a theme. Nunway is currently in its 6th year in San Francisco and is now replicated in 6 other Sister cities and growing strong.
Learn moreJohanna Billing lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. The artist uses performance and video to portray group interactions, merging the real and the staged. Billing received her MFA from Kanstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in 1999. She has been the subject of numerous solo shows over the last few years in Europe and the U.S. and was included in the 9th Istanbul Biennial, the 50th Venice Biennial and the 1st Prague Biennial, Marabou Park, Sweden, P.S. 1, New York and Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago. Her work is part of the collections of the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Holland, Ulrich Museum of Art, Kansas and Moderna Musset, Stockholm.
Learn moreWorking in video and photography, Finnish artist Johanna Ketola reconstructs narrative that is built upon her quotidian observations of life. This results in both fictional and autobiographical characters and stories, which often reflect her state of being as affected by a kind of sweet and absurd hopelessness about the human condition. Her work has been exhibited at Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in Holden Gallery in Manchester, UK; in Espace Croix-Baragnon in Toulouse, France; in Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in the following Finnish museums: Jyväskylä, Rauma, Oulu, and Mikkeli; and in Gallery Jangva in Helsinki, Finland, among others.
Learn moreJasperse is Artistic Director/Choreographer of the New York-based John Jasperse Company/Thin Man Dance. He has created several short works and thirteen evening-length pieces for the company, as well as various projects in collaboration with other artists. His work has been presented by festivals and presenting organizations throughout the United States and Europe and in Brazil, Chile, Israel, and Japan. Jasperse and company have received numerous prizes, grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and a “Bessie” Award in recognition of their body of work. Jasperse has created works for several companies including Baryshnikov's White Oak Project, Batsheva Dance Company, and The Lyon Opera Ballet.
Selected Press
Hamming It Up, With Pink Light, Flashes of Murakami and Flowered Bikinis, Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, June 18, 2010.
John Jasperse Company, Joyce Theatre, New York, Apollinaire Scherr, Financial Times, June 18, 2010
Dance review: John Jasperse's flirty West Coast premiere at REDCAT, Victoria Looseleaf, LA Times, April 15, 2010.
True Lies: John Jasperse collaborates in search of beauty, Valerie Jean Johnson, NewCity Stage, April 5, 2010.
Of Men Who Go Naked With Women Who Aren't, Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, June 3, 2000
Learn moreJOHN KING, composer, guitarist and violist, has received commissions from the Kronos Quartet; Ethel; the Albany Symphony/“Dogs of Desire”, Bang On A Can All-Stars; Mannheim Ballet; New York City Ballet/Diamond Project, Stuttgart Ballet, Ballets de Monte Carlo; as well as the Merce Cunningham Dance Co. His string quartets have also been performed by the Eclipse Quartet (LA) and the Mondriaan Quartet (Amsterdam), in addition to the Secret Quartet which has premiered many of his compositions at The Stone (June 2007, May 2015), The Kitchen (April 2009), Lincoln Center Festival (July 2011); and Roulette (Oct. 2014).
Learn moreJohnny Woods is an animator, video artist, and editor based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared at the Museum of Moving Image, the Sydney Opera House, MoMA, LACMA, the Hirshhorn Museum, ICA (Philadelphia), Imagine Science Festival, Animafest Zagreb, Coachella, and Lollapalooza. Currently, Johnny is working primarily on short-form experimental films. He is co-founder of Ghosting.tv, a monthly screening event in Los Angeles featuring experimental animation and video art, programmer for Animation Breakdown at The Cinefamily, and director of Undervolt & Co., a label for experimental video artists.
Learn moreJohn Smith was born in London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art. After graduating in 1977 he became involved in the activities of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. John Smith has developed a body of work that deftly subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction.
Since 1972 John Smith has made over forty film, video and installation works and shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world. His solo exhibitions include: Royal College of Art (London), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, UK), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (Germany), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Pearl Gallery (London), and Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin). Smith’s work has been featured in retrospectives at the 2007 Venice Biennale and film festivals in Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere, Uppsala, Bristol, Regensburg, Glasgow, La Rochelle and, most recently, in the 2010 Berlin Bienniale. John Smith lives and works in London, where he teaches part-time at the University of East London as Professor of Fine Art. He is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin).
Selected Press
On the Street where You Live: The Films of John Smith, Adrian Dakes, senses of cinema, November, 2003.
Interview with John Smith, Brian Frye, Millennium Film Journal, Winter 2003.
John Smith, Michael O'Pray, LUXOnline, 2003. Learn moreDownload The Web app for iPhone, iPod, or iPad.
The Web app was developed for the Kessler's 2013 show The Web, an immersive video installation that invites the viewers to participate in the work by taking pictures on their hand held devices. Their photos get displayed on monitors throughout the exhibition as well as archived for future use.
Presented as part of Anna Craycroft's C'mon Language project and the TBA:13 Festival. For more details on weekly events, visiting artists and scholars, and other related events, please visit the C'mon Language event page below.
Jon Kessler was born in Yonkers, New York in 1957. His first exhibition was at Artist’s Space in 1983. Since that time he has exhibited widely in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe and Asia. A retrospective of his work Jon Kessler’s Asia was mounted at the Kestner-Gesselshaft in Hannover, Germany in 1994 and traveled to the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, in Graz, Austria. His exhibition, The Palace at 4 AM, began at MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center in 2005 and travelled to the Phoenix Kulturstiftung / Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen and ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. His works are in many public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and MOCA. He is a Professor in the Visual Arts Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts where he has taught since 1994. He plays guitar for the rock band Barbara Sukowa and the X-Patsys.
Learn moreJoseph Keckler is a musician, writer, and artist who often zeroes in on moments of daily life and spins them into absurd and affecting underworld voyages. His musical performances have been presented by the NPR Tiny Desk concert series, Lincoln Center, Centre Pompidou, and others. In 2019 he premiered two performance pieces—a dreamlike travelogue, Train With No Midnight, with Prototype Festival, and Let Me Die, an epic medley of operatic death scenes, with Opera Philadelphia—and toured the US as the national support act for Sleater-Kinney. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Vice, Lithub, and other publications; his debut collection Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World was published in 2018 by Turtle Point Press. This year he is an artist in residence with Dartmouth and the Ringling Museum of Art and is currently working on new videos and recordings.
"Singer with a range that shatters the conventional boundaries...The sensibility of a magician, a trickster’s dark humor and a formidable musical and literary erudition. Major vocal talent"-- Stephen Holden, The New York Times
“Tantalizing… dynamic… with magnetism and poise is so high that he seems to have been born onstage.” — The Village Voice
“Riveting and beautifully absurd, Keckler singlehandedly has the power and chops to legitimately modernize a dying art form.” — Huffington Post
“His timing is impeccable, his wit is sharp… Keckler himself is the masterpiece”– Brooklyn Rail
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 moreJoseph Rosenburger has not let hardships, tragedies, and adversities stop him from excelling in the written word. His wit matches his wisdom, both of which are plentiful beyond his years. Newly released from five years in three institutions, Joe has much to offer the people.
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 moreJUDY was created as a collaboration of DJs, artists, and friends; Ana Briseño, Megan Holmes and Kayla Oh. Originally created in response to the void of queer femme DJs in dance spaces, Judy was born as a place for people to sweat, scream, make out, and throw their shirts off to music, while feeling the openness of sexual freedom and gender expression.
Learn moreJuliana Huxtable will treat opening night audiences to a dynamic experience sonically and visually. The night will play between text, sound and video, questioning the parameters between club and gallery. In her work, Huxtable explores the intersections of race, gender, queerness, and identity. She uses a diverse set of means to engage these issues, including self-portraiture, text-based prints, performance, nightlife, music, writing, and social media. Huxtable’s work has been featured in group presentations at MoMA PS1, New York (2014); White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York (2014); “Take Ecstasy with Me,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); Frieze Projects, London (2014); and2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2015); among other venues.
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 moreA rising senior at Catlin Gabel School, Juma Sei has always found himself engrossed in predominantly white, privileged, and “liberal” school systems and communities across the world. As a result of this, Sei has deeply explored the more subtle aspects of oppression and prejudice his entire life - bringing a unique and somewhat introspective point of view to the work he does at Catlin Gabel and other organizations across Portland. In addition to his identity as a black male and African American, Sei’s parents are both Sierra Leonean immigrants, adding yet another perspective to his intersectional integrity. Arguably the most important aspect to any work he does is making sure to understand the context and history in which he’s operating.
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 moreJunaid Sarieddeen (Beirut, Lebanon) His artistic research is oriented towards focusing on the position of the artwork within the time and space contexts of events. “Lorca” (2005), the intrusive event in the streets of Beirut, followed by the installation performance “ish ibka smu sud jud...” (2006) both carried the beginning of this artistic question for him. A question which started developing after he took part in establishing Zoukak Theatre Company in 2006 and later finishing his BA in Philosophy at the Lebanese university in 2008; which led him to consider the artwork as a political proposition. Sarieddeen is the dramaturg for Leila's Death, part of PICA's 2016 TBA Festival.
Learn moreJustine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation, and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Chambers meets this question in her work by attending to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography/dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Chambers’ work has been hosted at galleries, festivals, and theaters nationally and internationally including Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy, NY; Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, ON; Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal, QC; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Sophiensaele, Berlin, Germany; National Arts Centre, Ottawa, ON; Agora de la Danse, Montreal, QC; Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford, PA; Artspeak, Vancouver, BC; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Western Front, Vancouver, BC; The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC; Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, BC; and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Chambers holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and is currently Assistant Professor in Dance at the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, and Associate Artist to The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Learn moreK8 Hardy (b. 1977, Fort Worth, Texas, USA) lives and works in New York. She’s a punk rock artist who works across varied mediums, including video, photography, and sculpture.
Through her art practice, she unwittingly becomes a brand, intentionally exploiting persona and pop culture. Long before the ubiquity of the selfie, Hardy was experimenting in documenting her looks and various fictional selves. Her work takes us to the edge of “good taste.” Hardy’s materials are an assemblage of second-hand clothing, found objects, trash, and panache, evoking the world of consumption.
Learn moreKalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist currently living and working in Brooklyn. In 2007, he was named a Guggenheim fellow; in 2008 he received a Creative Capital Grant and a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. Linzy has been hailed as one of the most innovative of a new generation of queer artists, drawing comparisons to John Waters, Jack Smith, and RuPaul. Writing in The New York Times, Holland Cotter observed of Linzy, "A star is born." Born in 1977 in Stuckey, Florida, he received an MFA from the University of South Florida in Tampa.
Linzy has performed and screened work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; British Film Institute, London; and Beursschouwburg, Brussels, Belgium. Linzy's work was included in Prospect.1 New Orleans and was recently featured in a major solo exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem, comprised of more than twenty videos and several suites of drawings. He is represented by Taxter & Spengemann in New York.
Learn moreKameelah Janan Rasheed (East Palo Alto, CA) is an artist, writer, and former public school social studies teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. In her interdisciplinary and research intensive practice, she considers ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing. She has exhibited at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Project Row Houses, among others. She has been the recipient of awards including the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Print Studio, Triple Canopy Commission at New York Public Library Labs, Artadia Grant, Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship, Art Matters Grant, among others. She is a curriculum writer for NYC public schools, the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine, a contributing editor at The New Inquiry, and on faculty at School of Visual Arts. Currently, she is an artist in residence at Smack Mellon.
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 moreKaneza Schaal is a New York City based theater artist. Her recent work GO FORTH premiered at PS122 and then showed at the Genocide Memorial Amphitheater in Kigali, Rwanda; LMCC’s River-to-River Festival; Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; Cairo International Contemporary Theater Festival in Egypt; and at her alma mater Wesleyan University, CT. Schaal received a 2017 MAP Fund award, 2016 Creative Capital Award, and is the current Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage. This spring her new piece CARTOGRAPHY will be workshopped through New Victory Theater Lab, NYU Abu Dhabi, and will show at The Kennedy Center’s New Vision New Voices. Her work with The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, Claude Wampler, Jim Findlay, and Dean Moss has brought her to venues including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, The Whitney Museum, and MoMA.
Learn moreKara-Lis Coverdale works in both acoustic and electronic media to create works that transcend reality. Driven by a patient devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Coverdale’s world-building work occupies new planes built upon a borderless understanding of electronic music rooted in the interlocking pathways of musical systems and languages. Named a unique navigator of the digital frontier with an ease and emotive sensitivity “we cannot yet comprehend” (FADER) and heralded as “one of the most exciting composers in North America” (The Guardian), Coverdale’s work has been met with consistent critical acclaim. Her most recent recorded release, Grafts (Boomkat, 2017), whilst rooted in a modal sensibility, explores the impermanence of identity signature to exhibit a highly idiosyncratic approach to ratio-based microtonality and overtone, grief, love, and the passing of time. Grafts has been described as an “arresting,” “masterful work” of “uncompromisingly distinct,” “indescribable beauty.” Coverdale’s recordings are architecturally considered and often understated, but her dynamic live shows can be unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, confrontational—symptoms that the artist is emotionally present— for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite as a highly dynamic and explorative artist; unpredictable and resistant to categorization and stasis.
Previous releases include Aftertouches (2015, Sacred Phrases), a distinct exploration of holographic sonics, container technologies, and digital ether, that explores music’s sacred histories while forging its mediated and culturally saturated frontiers. Extended harmonic resolutions of seventeenth century chromatic keyboard music are redolent of her approach to this part writing, voiced with hybrid keyboards, fractured samples, algorithmically rendered vocals, and VST miragery. Aftertouches was named a top album of the year by The Wire, NPR, and others. A 480 (2014, Constellation Tatsu), is a set of studies accompanied by .nfo scores sourced from the data-sourced voice to explore the sonic impermanence of identity signatures. Coverdale has collaborated with Philadelphia noise artist David Sutton (LXV) on their collaborative album Sirens (2015, Umor Rex), to explore disembodiment and fantasy in the digital age, Tim Hecker (Love Streams, Virgins), and her production credits include Marilyn Manson, How To Dress Well, Lee Bannon, and others. She has also presented an A/V collaboration with MFO (Marcel Weber). Coverdale has written scores with artist and writer Kara Crabb on several projects, including the writing of the score for Royal Jelly (a modern reworking of the Greek Tragedy Medea), and The Reproductive Life Cycle of a Flower. In 2016 and 2017, Coverdale performed over eighty shows in Europe, North America, and Australia, including performances that were “festival favourites” for Unsound, Semibreve, and Mutek. More recently, she presented new large scale works Marjamaa Laulud, a unique commission for Dance with the Estonian Vanemuine Theatre and choreographer Ruslan Stepanov, and VoxU, a pipe organ commission for Mutek Montreal (CALQ) that is centred around the collection and arrangement of the unique sonics of the Vox Humana stop in particular, the first record and instrument of vocal synthesis dating back to the fifthteenth century. The work weaves a narrative characteristic of this period, intersecting motives of emulation, the body, and transcendence.
Kara-Lis was born in Burlington, Canada, and began studying with the Royal Conservatory of Music from age 5. Her grandparents were immigrants from Estonia. She later went on to complete with degrees in musicology and composition, for which she wrote a Masters thesis “Sound Rhetoric, and the Fallacy of Fidelity,” a seed to Coverdale’s infatuation with the mutability of the real. Coverdale has worked as organist and music director at several churches across Canada since age 13, where she has also served as choir conductor. She is recipient of a “remising young artist” award by Canadian new music composer Ann Southam, has held residencies with GRM Paris, EMS Stockholm, FUGA Zaragoza and others, and presents original performances, commissions, collaborations, and installations all over the world including The Barbican, Theatre du Chatelet, AGO, MAC Montreal, Filharmonia Krakowska, Teatro Circo, Kraftwerk, and Elbphilharmonie.
Learn moreKaren Sherman makes performances that incorporate her background in dance, writing, theater, music, and the handyman arts. Her work has been presented nationally by P.S. 122, Walker Art Center, PICA’s TBA Festival, Fusebox Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theater, American Realness, The Southern Theater, Dance Place, Diverseworks, Movement Research, ODC, Red Eye Theater, and many others. Her honors include a 2007 “Bessie” Award for her performance in Morgan Thorson's Faker, multiple McKnight Foundation Fellowships in Choreography and Dance, a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, SAGE Awards for her work as a choreographer, performer, and scenic designer, and residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Performance Lab, Movement Research, LUMBERYARD, and the Bogliasco Foundation program in Liguria, Italy. She was a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellow in The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and is currently an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-in-Residence in its dance program. A freelance stage technician for over 20 years, she was Technical Director and Production Manager of NYC’s legendary Judson Church (1994-2004), Technical Director of both Movement Research (1994-1998) and Circus Amok (1995-1997), and she has been an overhire stage technician at Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) since 2005. Her writing, including essays and poetry, has been featured on many live, web, and print forums, including e-flux journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Criticism Exchange, Culture Bodega, and The Triumph of Poverty: Poems Inspired by the Work of Nicole Eisenman. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project about blood, astronomy, and animals. Part one, a solo visual art show opened at Hair + Nails Gallery in Minneapolis in March 2018. Part two, a dance, premieres in 2019, with part three, a book, to follow.
Selected Press
"Karen Sherman's 'One with Others,' gleefully mocks artistic hooey," Sarah Kaufman, Washington Post, April 21, 2013
Learn moreKarl Larsson is an artist, poet, and editor. These diverse positions have coalesced in an artistic practice that can be described as both editorial and literary, but differs from writing in a conventional sense in its focus on spatial experience, embodiment and activism.
Learn moreKassys is a theater-initiative of Liesbeth Gritter and Mette van der Sijs, founded in 1999 and based in Amsterdam. Kassys performances combine theater and film in an effort to expose the codes of each medium. Their subject matter explores the beauty of human success and failure and differences and similarities between “being yourself” and “pretending.” With self-mockery and humor, Kassys finds inspiration in the murky overlap of everyday human behavior, voyeurism, and fiction.
Learn moreKate Bredeson is a theatre historian, translator, director, and dramaturg. Her project as a scholar is to research, document, and practice the ways in which theatre can be a tool for radical activism and protest. Her books are published by Northwestern University Press: Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May '68 (2018; finalist, TLA George Freedley Award); The Inheritor: A Play (translator, 2024); The Diaries of Judith Malina, volumes 1-4 (general editor 1-4, editor 2 and 4, 2026; winner, ADE Lyman H. Butterfield Award), and Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances by Anthony Hudson (editor, 2026). Bredeson is Professor of Theatre at Reed College.
Learn moreGilmore’s exhibitions include the 2010 Whitney Biennial; the Brooklyn Museum; The Kitchen; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Bryant Park (Public Art Fund); Locust Projects; White Columns; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Artpace; The J. Paul Getty Museum; The Rose Art Museum; Istanbul Museum of Art; Haifa Museum of Art; and PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center (Greater New York 2005). Gilmore has been the recipient of several international awards and honors, such as the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Award for Artistic Excellence, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, The LMCC Workspace Residency, New York Foundation for The Arts Fellowship, and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Residency. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Selected Press
Soft Machines Hit Hard, Kathleen Massara, The L Magazine, August 3, 2011.
Photos from Kate Gilmore's Clay-Clawing Performance at The Pace Gallery, Benjamin Sutton, The L Magazine, July 14, 2011.
Jennifer and Kate Gilmore, BOMB, March 10, 2011.
Art in Review: Kate Gilmore, Roberta Smith, The New York Times, January 9, 2009.
Kate Gilmore, Lyra Kilston, Modern Painters, March 1, 2009.
Learn moreKate Graham is a 16-year-old artist raised in Portland, Oregon. She is currently attending boarding school in Southern California at Idyllwild Arts Academy, where she is majoring in Visual Arts. She’s an active member of the community, painting two murals for Centennial High School, Interning at OSPIRG, and volunteering on the Gresham Youth Advisory Committee for Gresham CIty Council. Much of her work is influenced by politics and current affairs, often taking a propagandistic approach. She is a huge supporter of Street Art as an opportunity for the public’s opinion to be voiced, and believes in the power of the artist.
Learn moreKatherine Bovee are based in Portland and is also a writer and regular contributor to PORT, an art criticism blog.
Learn moreKatherine Profeta’s longest-term credits are as a dramaturg with choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon (1997-present) and as a founding member, choreographer and occasional performer with Elevator Repair Service theater company (1991-present). She has also done dramaturgical work in dance, theater and points in-between with Julie Taymor, Karin Coonrod, Annie Dorsen, David Thomson, Alexandra Beller, Nora Chipaumire, and Theatre for a New Audience. She holds a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama in the department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. Her first book, Dramaturgy in Motion, examines the labor of the dramaturg in contemporary dance and movement performance, alongside a history of her collaboration with Lemon. Her writing has also been seen in Performing Arts Journal; Theater Magazine; Movement Research Performance Journal; Theatre, Dance and Performance Training; and TCG’s The Production Notebooks. "She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Queens College, CUNY, and currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the Yale School of Drama."
Learn moreKatie Janovec is a freestyle dancer, popper, performer, teacher and event producer. She created The Beautiful Street to connect, support, and promote the Northwest street and club dance community. Katie continues to dive deeper into street and club dance culture through traveling, battling, learning from teachers who share the history, and creating community events. She is currently the Fundraising Coordinator at The Aspire Project.
Learn moreKeioui Keijuan creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Keijuan examines, deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of the black body in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials addressing blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Keijuan earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Keijuan has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; and the United Kingdom. Keijuan was an artist-in-residence at PICA as part of the Creative Exchange Lab program in Fall 2015.
Learn moreKeith Hennessy dances in and around performance. Born in northern Ontario, he lives in San Francisco since 1982 and tours internationally. His performances engage improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and public action as tools for investigating political realities. Practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, post/Modern dance, activist art, the Bay Area, wicca, punk, contact improvisation, and queer-feminism motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s work. Keith’s 2016 collaborators include Peaches, Meg Stuart, Scott Wells, Jassem Hindi, and the collaboratives Blank Map and Turbulence. He teaches in universities, independent studios, and festivals including Ponderosa, Fresh, HZT, Movement Research, Portland State University, Sandberg Institute, and Impulstanz. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artist Fellowship, a NY Bessie, multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, and a Bay Area Goldie. Keith's writings have been published in Contact Quarterly, Movement Research Journal, Performance Research (UK), Society of Dance History Scholars Journal, Dance Theatre Journal (UK), Itch, Front, and In Dance. Hennessy directs Circo Zero and was a member of Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann. He earned an MFA and PhD from UC Davis.
Learn moreHennessy is a San Francisco-based performer, choreographer, teacher, organizer, and PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis. He directs Circo Zero and co-founded 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE in San Francisco. Hennessy tours extensively including Queer Zagreb, New York Live Arts and American Realness Festival in New York, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, and YBCA in San Francisco, among others. He has received multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie), and the United States Artist Kjenner Fellowship.
Learn moreKelly Pratt is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and arranger. From 2006–12, he was a full-time member of indie-pop outfit Beirut, contributing arrangements, brass/woodwinds, and vocals. He has performed and recorded with hundreds of artists including Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Coldplay, The War on Drugs, and Passion Pit. In 2012 and 2013, he collaborated with David Byrne and St. Vincent, providing arrangements for their album “Love this Giant”, as well as serving as arranger and musical director for their world tour. In 2015 he was the arranger and brass/woodwind player for Contemporary Color, a multimedia tour curated by Byrne featuring contemporary pop stars accompanied by color guards. Pratt is also the chief songwriter and vocalist of the band Bright Moments, whose debut NPR called “a wildly creative album, packed with energy.”
Learn moreKemi Adeyemi (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is working on a manuscript that explores how black queer women manipulate sound and the body to reorganize the racialized networks of pleasure in the nightlife scenes of gentrifying neighborhoods. Her work has appeared in Palimpsest and Sounding Out!, and she is co-editing the first collected volume on queer nightlife studies. Kemi received a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Learn moreKendra Jayne Patrick directs an itinerant, eponymous art gallery based in New York City. The program is focused on exhibition-making and symbology related to the twenty-first century avant-garde, specializing in post-conceptual and post-internet sculpture, digital, photography, and painting. Since opening in late 2017 the gallery has shown a range of international artists and practices including Ivan Argote, Lap-See Lam, Kenya (Robinson), Jo Shane, and Arden Surdam. Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick has been featured in Artsy, Vulture, ARTnews, Barron’s, the San Francisco Chronicle, and DAZED Magazine.
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 moreKevin Holden (Diné, Irish, German, and Norwegian)
Kevin Holden is an artist and composer based in and around Portland, Oregon.
Learn morekeyon gaskin. this is not a thing (genius, genius, genius, at Central Public Library, Portland, OR) Photo Courtesy of Robert Duncan Gray
keyon gaskin (Portland, OR) prefers not to contextualize their art with their credentials.
Learn moreKim Smith Claudel is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR, whose work intersects painting, sculpture, installation, and performance through a wide range of media. Smith Claudel's work has been exhibited internationally, including shows in Japan and Sweden, as well as throughout the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include the Painting Center, New York, NY; Mt. Hood Community College, Portland, OR; and Carnation Contemporary, Portland, OR. She is an active member of the artit collective WAVE Contemporary and Carnation Contemporary in Portland. She is the recipient of the 2025 Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and Ford Family Foundation, and was recently awarded an artist in residency at Building 5. She holds an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, as well as an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY.
Learn moreKinski bears comparison to Acid Mothers Temple, Oneida, and Tool, and it just so happens that Kinski has toured with all three of these prog-rock juggernauts. Comprising Chris Martin (guitar), Lucy Atkinson (bass), Barrett Wilke (drums), and Matthew Reid Schwartz (guitar, keyboards, flute), the band has released six full-length albums, four on the seminal Seattle label Sub Pop.
Learn moreKite aka Suzanne Kite is an award winning Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, composer and academic raised in Southern California, known for her sound and video performance with her Machine Learning hair-braid interface. Kite holds a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road).
Learn moreKnowledge of Wounds is the collaborative curatorial practice of S.J Norman (Wiradjuri) and Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation). Since its first iteration in Lenapehoking/NYC in 2020, and currently operational as a hybrid live/digital program, KoW is continually evolving in its mission to foreground the work of Indigenous creators and knowledge workers across hemispheres and disciplines. www.knowledgeofwounds.com / IG: @knowledgeofwounds
Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree sound artist approaching sound as a mode of connection. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
DB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an artist addressing audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience, often focusing on the role error plays as a generative opportunity. His media-centered installations are the result of DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations, and persistent, inquisitive experimentation of available materials.
Learn moreKohel Haver received his JD from the Northwestern Law School at Lewis & Clark College, and he is currently a partner at Swider Medeiros Haver LLP. Haver practices in the areas working with creative people and the arts, including a specialty in copyright and related intellectual property, technology, and business law. He has been serving the arts community for all of his professional life, including service on the boards of directors for community and arts based programs nationwide.
Selected Press
"Oregon's Volunteer Art Lawyers Level Up," Anne Adams, Oregon Arts Watch, June 27, 2013.
Learn moreKole Galbraith is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on sound, audio-visual, and found-object installation. Based in Seattle, WA, Kole Galbraith has been active in the underground experimental music community for the past decade performing throughout the US and Europe. Sonically, the sonic studio compositions are informed by early 20th century French musique-concrète, harsh-noise, black metal, free jazz, and contemporary composition. Thematically, the compositions are influenced by interior Salish folklore and contemporary indigenous experience. Galbraith mixes materials found in nature with electronic techniques to uncover both latent sonic capabilities and latent histories. Galbraith has released albums on his own label, Obscure & Terrible, and other labels such as SIGE, Titania Tapes, and Krim Kram. Galbraith has worked with musicians including Lori Goldston, Greg Kelley, Jessika Kenney, Jason Lazer, Steve Moore, Catherine Guesde, Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow), Nathan Young (Delaware), Patrick Wurzwallner, Maja Osojnik, morher, and Noel Kennon.
Kole Galbraith is an enrolled member of the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma and the COUSIN indigenous film collective.
Learn moreYamazaki was introduced to butoh in 1977 through the teaching of Akira Kasai. From 1996 to 2001, he created a dozen works with his first company, rosy co., and in 2002 he founded Kota Yamazaki/Fluid Hug-Hug. He has performed around the world at the TBA Festival, Bank Art, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, and Danspace Project, among others. Through residencies in Senegal, Yamazaki created FAGAALA with Germaine Acogny, which received the 2007 New York Dance and Performance Award in choreography. He is director of Body Arts Laboratory and organizer of the Whenever Wherever Festival in Tokyo.
Selected Press
Glowing among the shadows, Martha Sherman, Dance Review Times, May 3, 2012.
Face Time: Kota Yamazaki, Betsy Momich, Carnegie Magazine, Spring 2012.
Fluid Hug-Hug: ‘(glowing)’ @ EMPAC, 4/6/12, Tresca Weinstein, Albany Times Union, April 9, 2012.
Learn moreKristan Kennedy is an artist, curator, and educator, who has been involved with PICA since its founding in 1995. Kennedy began working with PICA as a volunteer, then was supported by the organization as an exhibiting artist, consequently served the organization as a board member, and joined the staff in 2003. She is currently Artistic Director, Curator of Visual Art at PICA. Kennedy works collaboratively alongside co-artistic directors Roya Amirsoleymani and Erin Boberg Doughton to set the artistic vision for the organization, curate the Time-Based Art Festival, manage the Precipice Fund and create public programs. Kennedy currently directs PICA's year-round Exhibition Program, where she focuses on commissioning and developing large-scale projects, publications, and happenings with artists that exist at the borders of genres. She is a working artist who is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary Art, here in Portland Oregon. Kennedy writes and lectures about art praxis, curatorial practice, and artist‐centric ethics within and outside of institutional frameworks. She has taught in various MFA programs across the country for the last decade as an Associate and Visiting Professor teaching Contemporary Art seminars, mentoring, and developing visiting artist programs. Kennedy sits on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and is a founding member of Common Field.
Learn moreKrystal South is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and writer from Portland, Oregon who has been online every day since she was 12. South has been included in group exhibitions and projects at Recess Gallery, Carhole Gallery, and Portland Art Museum, as well as in B.Y.O.B. at New American Art Union and Wieden+Kennedy in Portland. Her writings have been featured in Bear Deluxe Magazine, YA5, and September, a project of artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen at the 2011 TBA Festival.
Selected Writing
"Observations on the Uncertain," Krystal South, September, September 16, 2011.
Selected Press
"Mirrors, Punching, Walking, Dancing," Lisa Radon, Oregon ArtsWatch, August 21, 2011.
Learn moreSuraj, coined as the "The Queen of Waacking Nouveau ", is also the Queen of many historical firsts. The first Waacking choreography videos on YouTube, influencing everyone in the industry the world over. Now, Whacking is seen in countless stage shows, concerts, commercials, music videos and more, with much of the style’s visibility tracing back to Kumari’s tireless promotion of the dance style in the 2000s. Suraj is the first Waacking choreographer to explicitly introduce the dance style to mass media by creating dance content for the FOX reality hit TV show So You Think You Can Dance. Suraj is the founder and CEO of LA's International Waack/Punk/Pose Festival (Waackfest), the first festival in the world solely devoted to the cultural education and preservation of Waacking, Whacking, Punking and Vogue. Suraj is considered as the “go-to” expert for this underground dance from the 70s, serving as an international ambassador of its history, culture and technique.
Learn moreKunu Bearchum (Northern Cheyenne & Ho-Chunk Nation). Based in Oregon, recently producing award-winning documentaries for native-owned non-profit Wisdom of the Elders and releasing his debut Hip-Hop Album titled "Through The Battle Smoke" with local and regional mainstays in the music scene. Kunu creates his work as a tribute to traditional Native American storytelling but with a contemporary lens and toolkit.
Learn moreKurt Vandendriessche is an actor, dancer, performer and scenographer.
He worked for television, the film industry and as an independent stage artist, both as a freelance performer, and in creating work through collaboration.
Together with Charlotte Vanden Eynde he created MAP ME, an intimistic evocation of the cycle of life, which won the choreography award of the SACD and toured extensively through Europe and the United States. With Dolores Bouckaert he conceived several performances and installations, as well as providing the video- and light design and dramaturgical support for her latest piece GALOP. For several productions he joined Troubleyn, the company of Jan Fabre, playing the role of Prometheus in PROMETHEUS: Landscape II a.o. Furthermore, he has worked with Jan Decorte, Emio Greco, and so on. In 2012 he played one of the lead parts in WELCOME HOME, Tom Heene’s debut movie, which was selected for the International Film Festival of Venice. Throughout his career he did puppetry, street theatre, experimental video design and has an overall experience in many fields of the arts, led by a desire to fuse and be influenced by a broad experiential domain.
He invited Sibran Sampers and Jürgen de Blonde in 2017 to join him in a project entitled THE BODY ELECTRIC (referencing Walt Whitman’s I sing the body electric).
The initiative was an attempt to resource his personal experiences both as a spectator, as in being on stage, in need of reduction of context and meaning. Perhaps as a way of liberating the mind from imposing paradigms in order to experiment with shape, matter and definition as the standards of a universal connectedness. Since then they have presented performative happenings, non-voiced audiovisual sensory experiences, that aimed to share the perception of basic phenomenologies, initially starting from simple principles of molecular cooking, later developing to a macro-/microscopic form of land art.
Learn moreKye Alive (Kye Grant Kauffman) is a Portland-based performer awkwardly approaching middle age whose work has been described as “Madonna meets Hey Arnold meets Michael Alig meets Grace Jones meets infinity.” Their practice traverses music, dance, vocal experimentation, and collaborative social art, and has taken the form of a pedestrian parade with 5th grade crossing guards; Planet Lloyd, a community newspaper about Lloyd Center Mall; open invitation dance ensemble Public Acts of Dance Company; genre-fluid performance party CLUB ALIVE; an Only Child Support group, and the ten year alien pop star persona Jennifer Vanilla. They have performed at MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, and hundreds of other venues across the continents. Kye received an MFA in Art + Social Practice from PSU and recently debuted their existential fever dream solo show, TIMES SQUARE LAS VEGAS, to an audience of five at a Fringe Festival. Please send thoughts and prayers.
kyealive.club @kyealive
Learn moreKyle Abraham, a professional dancer and choreographer, began his training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh. He continued his dance studies in New York, receiving a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. As a performer, Abraham has worked with acclaimed modern dance companies including David Dorfman Dance, Burnt Sugar Dance Conduction Continuum, Nathan Trice/Rituals, Mimi Garrard Dance Theater, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Dance Alloy, The Kevin Wynn Collection, and Attack Theatre. In addition to performing and developing new works for his company, Abraham.In.Motion, Abraham also teaches his unique approach to postmodern dance in various schools and studios throughout the United States.
Abraham.In.Motion (AIM) is an ensemble of dancers whose work is deeply rooted in personal experience. As choreographer, Abraham intertwines his sensual and provocative movement with a strong understanding of music, creating an avenue for personal investigation. Abraham has received tremendous accolades and awards for his dancing and choreography, including a 2010 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for The Radio Show, a 2010 Princess Grace Award for Choreography, a BUILD grant, and an individual artist fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2009 he was honored as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch.”
Abraham’s work has been presented throughout the United States and abroad, most recently at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, Harlem Stage, Fall for Dance Festival at New York’s City Center, and The Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh. Abraham’s most recent work, The Corner, commissioned by Ailey 2, is currently touring internationally with great reception.
Selected Press
Sending Signals with Songs, Struts, and Static, Claudia La rocco, The New York Times, February 27, 2010. (PDF)
Owning it: Kyle Abraham in fast and slow motion, Julie Potter, San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 18, 2011. (PDF).
Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, March, 2010. (PDF)
Selected Video
The Radio Show Promotional Video from Kyle Abraham/Abraham.in.motion on Vimeo.
Solo Exceprt of Live! The Realest MC (work-in-progress) Part 4 from Kyle Abraham/Abraham.in.motion on Vimeo. Learn moreFounded by Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez in 2003, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a young Mexican theater company reflecting the new dynamics of contemporary Mexican culture. They develop their multimedia stage productions as mechanisms to link work and life and give voice to overlooked moments in social and political historical. Lagartijas has toured widely throughout Mexico and Europe and has received awards from the Impatience Festival and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
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Learn moreLalo Perez (b.Bakersfield, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR. Their practice investigates the intersections of identity through social environments, creating attention to the fragility of familiar cultural connections by grounding their practice in the action of construction and deconstruction. Through rituals, Lalo creates a dialogue between material, language, and imagery, developing a visual archive that reflects the inherited faith that leads them. Lalo has participated in artist residencies at Casa Lü in Mexico City, MX; Jupiterfab in Guadalajara, MX; and Caldera a.i.r in Sisters, OR, and has been awarded grants by The Nat Turner Project and Regional Arts and Culture Council. They are currently pursuing a BFA in Intermedia at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Learn moreIn a world in which upstart DiY talent is flooding the gates of electronic music, a few recent voices have been so strong as to be startling. Lapalux – AKA 25-year-old Stuart Howard – is certainly one such. As singular as a brilliant artist always should be, his instinctive understanding of the atmospheric power of texture grips the ear immediately on listening.
Lapalux was raised in rural Essex, midway between countryside and town; the classic, isolated hinterland that’s produced many a distinctive British voice. There’s a yearning sense to the record that it’s tempting to relate to the young Howard’s dreams about what his eventual escape into larger life might be. He certainly had a dream start when a shot-in-the-dark email to electronic hothouse Brainfeeder was immediately answered by label head Flying Lotus himself, who quickly moved on to sign him. To this day, Lapalux remains the only British artist on the Los Angeles based label.
Having made fans out of Diplo and SBTRKT, remixed everyone from Lianne La Havas via Crystal Fighters to Bonobo, Tawiah, AlunaGeorge and Speech Debelle, as well as supporting FlyLo and playing the main stage at Sonar and in Japan with Clark. Lapalux released his second full length on BRAINFEEDER this past April.
Learn moreLaRonn Katchia is a director, cinematographer, and editor. Some of LaRonn's achievements include: Shooting and editing PBS's Roadtrip Nation: Native Way Forward, a behind the scenes segment for FX's hit show Reservation Dogs, both projects in collaboration with Ryan Redcorn and Buffalo Nickel Creative.
LaRonn is also the Associate Programmer/Advisor/Jury for the Indigenous Films Program at the Oscar-qualifying Bend Film Festival. Recently, LaRonn and Bendfilm director Todd Looby hosted acting legends Gary Farmer & Tatanka Means, showcasing their work alongside the Warm Springs tribal membership.
Today, in collaboration with the Warm Springs Community Action Team, LaRonn is working on his first feature documentary about the transformation of a 125 year old, historic Commissary Building as it is moved and restored into a small business incubator to serve tribal entrepreneurs on the Warm Springs Reservation. Learn moreLarry Bamburg was born in 1974 in Houston, Texas. Selected exhibitions include: Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Austin, (2017); TalctoTile, PL’d to MDO, Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY, (2016); Talctotile, Talctotire, Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2015); UR, Room East, New York, NY (2012); It’s Endless Undoing, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY (2012); Science on the back end, Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY (2012); Heel gezellig, GRIMM, Amsterdam, NL (2011); Bamberg (sic.), GRIMM, Amsterdam, NL (solo) (2011); And the fair Moon rejoices, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA (2009); Hi, Low, and In Between, GRIMM, Amsterdam, NL (2009), Fruit Farm Film Festival 2008, McMinnville, OR (2008); Only Connect, Art in General at Bloomberg LP., New York, NY (2008). TBA:07, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2007); Stubborn Materials, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY (2007); You Are Here, Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX (2005); Exit Biennial: The Reconstruction, Exit Art, New York , NY (2003).
Learn moreLarry Krone was born in Chicago, IL in 1970, was raised in St. Louis, MO and now lives and works in New York City’s East Village. Krone has been exhibiting drawings, sculptures, installations and videos since the early 1990s, most notably at The Contemporary Baltimore, The Museum of Contemporary Craft in conjunction with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), The Whitney Museum of American Art Philip Morris Branch (New York), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Drawing Center (New York), and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis who, in 2006 presented “Larry Krone: Artist/Entertainer,” a ten-year retrospective of Krone's visual and performance work.
As a performer, Krone has appeared at music and art venues in New York including Joe’s Pub, La MaMa, Dixon Place, PS 122, Starlight Bar & Lounge, and the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as Mercer Union (Toronto), Croxhapox (Gent), Blueberry Hill (St. Louis), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Better Days Project (Hamburg), and Someday Lounge (Portland, OR).
His costume design and fabrication for his own performances has led to the creation of House of Larréon, their line of custom gowns and stage costumes, outfitting cabaret performers, dancers and rock singers including Bridget Everett, Neal Medlyn, Adrienne Truscott, and Kathleen Hanna.
He is a 2019 Caldera AIR, a 2011, 2012, and 2018 MacDowell Colony fellow, a 2017 Yaddo Fellow, a 2013 Millay Colony fellow, and a 2009 and 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow.
Learn moreLaura prefers being called Larry. She is Bay-Area based artist/performance maker. Her work has been presented at PICA's TBA Festival, Austin's Fusebox Festival, and New York's American Realness. She is a core member of Keith Hennessy's Turbulence and regularly collaborates with her brother, Jesse Hewit. She has been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, CounterPULSE, Kunst STOFF Arts, and ODC. She created and curates the SQUART performance series.
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 more