Artists Archive
Mobile Projection Unit (MPU) is a roving studio that presents new, experimental, site-specific outdoor video projections throughout Portland, Oregon. Our work focusses on spatializing video through projection mapping, and live interactive video performance through creative coding. Founded and directed by Sarah Turner and Fernanda D’Agostino in 2018, MPU is also a curatorial project, putting the tools of production into the hands of artists. MPU has worked with media artists Sharita Towne, Sabina Haque, Ruben Garcia Marrufo, Jaleesa Johnston, Craig Winslow, Megan McKissack, Victoria Wells, and Hasan Mahmood. MPU received a 2020 Northwest Film Center commission to create “Phases of the Moon” for the Portland International Film Festival. Recent projects include “been there,” a series of experimental works by Black filmmakers curated by Ariella Tai and presented as a drive-in movie, and screenings with Snack Bloc in support of BLM. MPU is funded in part by the Precipice Fund through The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Calligram Foundation, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Sarah Turner is an artist, new media curator, creative producer, and art director. Fernanda D’Agostino is an interactive video installation artist, public artist, and creative coder.
Learn moreMohamed El Khatib is an author, director, performer, and is based in France. His work has garnered success in such important arts events as the Avignon Festival. He attempts to confront drama with other media (films, installations, newspapers) and to observe the friction they produce. After literature studies, and time at the CADAC (Dramatic Art Center of Mexico) and a Ph.D in sociology about “the critique in the French press,” he co-founded in 2008 the collective Zirlib on a simple premise: aesthetics aren't devoid of political sense. He has started with “Nowhere to Hide,” a reflection on the notion of grief, which will last for the next 15 years. Since 2011, Mohamed El Khatib has been supported by the L’L in Brussels—a place of research where he has been developing research around the writing of the intimate and attempts to explore, to the point of exhaustion, different modes of anti-spectacular exposition. In 2014–2015, he as an associate artist at the Centre Dramatique National Orléans/Loiret/Centre.
Learn moreMona Vatamanu (Romania) and Florin Tudor (Switzerland) live in Bucharest, Romania, where they have been working together since 2000. Their practice spans film, photography, painting, performance, and installation, and reflects the social upheavals of post-communist Eastern Europe. The duo has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America, and has been featured in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and in the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Vatamanu and Tudor have had residencies at Basis Voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht, AIR Vienna, and Project Room at Ludwig Museum in Budapest, among others. They received first prize in the 2006 Fair:Play Video Festival in Berlin. Vatamanu and Tudor are represented by Lombard Fried Projects, New York.
Peripheries
Moscow's Poplar Curse, New York Magazine, April 17, 2011.
Learn moreMorgan Bassichis (they/them) is a comedian and writer who has been described as “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker. They are the author of The Odd Years and co-editor with Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky of Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, both published by Wendy’s Subway. Recent shows include A Crowded Field (Abrons Arts Center, 2023), Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue, 2022), and Don’t Rain on My Bat Mitzvah (Creative Time, 2021). Morgan’s exhibition, More Little Ditties, was co-presented by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.
Learn moreMorgan Ritter has a BA in Intermedia from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (2011). Her visual and written work has been exhibited through institutions such as the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), the Henry Art Museum (Seattle), LUMA Foundation (Zurich) and Centre Pompidou (Paris). She has been awarded residencies in New Mexico, New York, Washington and Colorado. Ritter has published three books and is working on a new book of poetry to be published by Ambient Press (NY) and a multi-media release with Musical Archive (LA).
Learn moreMorgan Thorson (Minneapolis, MN) is a dance-maker. Morgan’s recent work addresses how the body shapes time; and how time influences our perception and expression of the body in spaces where labor, coordination, identity, movement and image can flourish and decay as well as redefine our notion of dance, sexuality, belonging and life. Morgan has received support from The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (2009, 2011 and 2015), and The National Dance Project (2008, 2012, and 2015). She is a United States Artist (2012), Guggenheim (2010), and McKnight (2002, 2009) Fellow and has received multiple Sage Awards for Outstanding Choreography. Currently, she is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University.
Learn moreOz Halo is a multimedia artist building synesthetic language to heal colonial trauma and ancestral memory carried in the body as a mixed Rroma and desendent of Quileute, and a multigenerational sex worker and survivor of sex trafficking, homelessness, and domestic violence. Their soundwork falls under the name Morher.
Learn moreBorn in Johannesburg, South Africa, Moya trained in ballet under the direction of Dianne Sparks. She studied contemporary and African dance at the Tswhane University, and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. In 2003, she was nominated for a best dancer award at the “ITS” festival, and was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for dance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa. In 2005, Moya became a member of the ROSAS Dance company. Moya has worked on commissions in India, China, Germany, South Africa, and Austria. Her latest work includes “Darling,” in collaboration with Igor Shyshko which premiered at Stuk Leuven, and “A_part” which premiered in Sommerszene Salzburg in 2015. She currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Learn moreMPA promotes the body as a paradoxical site tethered to the social and political exchanges that distinguish a space. Enriched by ritual and contradiction, her performances and installations depict power as an embodiment of these relations. These works have been seen in the U.S. and abroad at venues including the Swiss Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACE, the Stedelijk Museum, and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Oaxaca. Her body of work Directing Light onto Fist of Father (2011) at Leo Koenig Inc. combined 16mm film and a plaster cast of her father’s fist in an installation inciting three durational performances. Trilogy (o) (2012) centered photographs of Nike war missiles as an orbiting moon calendar at the arts cooperative Human Resources in Los Angeles, CA. A frequent collaborator, MPA is a visible muse in many works by contemporary photographers, painters, and performers. After receiving a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant in 2013, MPA relocated from NYC to 29 Palms, CA to research somatic practices. She is a frequent visiting art lecturer in New Genres at UCLA.
Learn moreMSHR is the collaborative project of Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy from Portland, OR, USA. The duo formed in 2011 during their involvement in the art collective Oregon Painting Society. MSHR explores ceremonial, cybernetic and cyborgian realms through interactive installation, analog synthesizer design, and ritualistic performance. Using blind probe-heads for hands, they feel out the space of the hyper-object chamber, exploring textures and searching for new hallways.
Learn moreMuffie Delgado Connelly (she/her) is a dance artist, movement researcher, teacher, and somatic practitioner in Portland, Oregon. Her work as a performer and choreographer has been presented across the United States at Links Hall (Chicago), Packer Schopf Gallery (Chicago), The Art Institute of Chicago, Movement Research Festival (New York), The Gibney Dance Center (New York), and in Portland at White Bird, Performance Works Northwest, and the Newmark Theater. She is the recipient of awards from the Ford Foundation (New York), Illinois Arts Council’s Community Arts Assistance Program, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council (Portland). She has previously choreographed for Portland Center Stage in Earth Without Borders/Tierra Sin Fronteras as well as tick, tick..BOOM! She is the recipient of awards from the Ford Foundation (New York), Illinois Arts Council and the Regional Arts and Culture Council (Portland). Currently, Muffie teaches at Bodyvox and is a yearly guest teacher at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is one of five artistic leaders of the FLOCK Dance Center. IG: @muffiedelgadoconnelly
Learn moreMusic Population Project is an effort to bring chamber music back to the people, invoking times when performances were public spectacles, when operas were performed in front of enthusiastic audiences, when uprisings followed premieres and classical music was pop music. The MPP germinated in Portland, Oregon under the direction of Brede Rørstad, working closely with the Music Population Orchestra, a chamber music ensemble created to fulfill the mission of The MPP. Operating more like a band than a traditional orchestra, the ensemble performs with and without electronics in configurations varying between four and twenty musicians in bars, clubs, galleries, and more traditional concert venues. Looking back to his native Norway for inspiration, Rørstad combines classical and electronic influences in what he deems klatronic compositions for chamber ensembles, commercials and short films. Rørstad is currently working on bringing the MPP to Europe and establishing an Oslo-based Music Population Orchestra.
Learn moreMx. Dahlia Belle can be seen hosting her monthly stand-up showcase THE AFTERMATH at Alberta St Pub. She is also a frequent host of The Moth StorySLAMs.
Learn moreMx Justin Vivian Bond is a singer, painter, performance artist, and author of the Lambda Literary Award winning memoir TANGO: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels and Susie Says…, a collaboration with Gina Garan. V’s debut CD, Dendrophile, was self-released in 2011 and was followed by Silver Wells in 2012. In 2011 Justin Vivian’s art exhibition The Fall of the House of Whimsy was presented at Participant Inc. in New York City. Mx Bond was nominated for a Tony Award for Kiki and Herb Alive On Broadway in 2007. Other notable theatrical endeavors include starring as Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis in Scott Wittman’s production of Jukebox Jackie: Snatches of Jackie Curtis, originating the role of Herculine Barbin in Kate Bornstein’s groundbreaking play Hidden: A Gender, touring with the performance troupe The Big Art Group and appearing in John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus. Other films include Sunset Stories (2012), Imaginary Heroes (2004), and Fanci’s Persuasion (1995). Mx Bond is a recipient of The Ethyl Eichelberger Award, The Peter Reed Foundation Grant, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award for Performance Art/Theater, an Obie, and a Bessie.
Selected Press
Justin Vivian Bond Preps 'Snow Angel' Show For New York's 54 Below, Curtis M. Wong, Huffington Post, December 7, 2012.
"Justin Bond: 'I think everybody's trans'," Hermione Hoby, The Guardian, June 28, 2011.e
Learn moreMykele Deville is an actor, curator, poet, and rapper from the West Side of Chicago. He most recently appeared in Octagon at Jackolope Theater. He performs poetry all over Chicago. His style has been described as lo-fi liberation raps, the personal, and storytelling on his 3 recently released mixtapes Super Predator and Each One, Teach One and Peace, Fam. He is also a member of the music based poetry collective, Growing Concerns.
Learn moreMyles de Bastion, Artistic Director, Musician, and Creative-altruist who develops technology and art installations that enables sound to be experienced as light and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. He has built large scale installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding.
A dual citizen of the UK and the United States, Myles grew up in England where he obtained a BA from the University of Teesside (UK), focusing on computer science & animation, and was the chairman of the Musician's Society for two years. He has taught at Austine School for the Deaf (VT) and at the world's first Deaf Music Camp (MI), where he developed the curriculum and was responsible for the music and sound program. In 2012 Myles moved to Portland OR and founded CymaSpace, a non-profit that facilitates arts & cultural events that are inclusive of the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing, where Myles further develops his technological artistic works that translate sound into visual mediums. In 2015 Myles took his concepts into the commercial sector and founded Audiolux Devices, a technology company that now produces professional products featuring the synergy of light and sound. Myles continues to live in Portland with his partner Kimberly and CODA daughters Zebra & Juniper.
Learn moreMyles de Bastion develops technology and art installations that enable sound to be experienced as light and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum, and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. He has built large format installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding.
Myles is the founder of CymaSpace, a non-profit that facilitates cultural events inclusive of the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing; and Audiolux Devices, which produces products featuring light and sound synergy. 2018 Director of the first Northwest Deaf Arts Festival. Myles mentors Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing youth, has developed curriculum, and taught workshops in music and sound for Deaf schools, camps, and communities.
A current project, The Ikigai Machine, is a multimedia visual narrative with interactive installations and live performances that he is developing into a feature-length, touring production for disability hubs and art institutions. Myles has received support from Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Cultural Trust, Oregon Cultural Foundation and Randall Charitable Trust.
Learn moreBorn in Algeria, Nacera Belaza has been living in France since the age of five. Following her studies in modern literature at the Université de Reims, Belaza created her own dance company in 1989. In January, 2015 she was appointed Knight of the order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. She enters dance as a self-taught interpreter, and develops a choreography that originates in an inner progress—a sensible awareness of the body, of space and of the emptiness inside herself. Her path resembles a quest, and tends towards the enhancement of the direct bond between the dancer and the spectator, open to the sense of the infinite of the stage. Each element of her pieces—light, space, time, body—responds to each other on stage to develop their own designs. With the repetition of the gesture, its infinite slowness, the stretching out of time, Belaza's pieces all explore movement as one would explore a calm, a profound and continuous breath. Belaza's desire to share and pass on has become focused on the relationship between the audiences and their territories.
Learn moreNadia Buyse is a trans-disciplinary artist and musician living in Portland. She has been in at least 30 bands she can remember. She has toured the United States and Europe, playing in a range of spaces from music festivals, punk clubs, house shows, and discotheques. She has also exhibited work internationally and nationally, including the MDW Art Fair in Chicago, Beta Spaces in New York, and dOCUMENTA (13). She has recently received an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and shortly after participated at the ART STAYS residency program in Slovenia, went on a European tour with her multimedia music project DUBAIS, and performed in the Republic of Georgia.
Learn moreNana Adusei-Poku, PhD, is Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley, California. She was previously Associate Professor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. Her book Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art was published in 2021 with Transcript Verlag and her articles have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, e-flux, Kunstforum International, Flash Art, L’Internationale and darkmatter. She curated the event “Performances of Nothingness” (Academy of Arts, Berlin, 2018) and Black Melancholia (Hessel Museum Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 2022).
Learn moreNarcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer whose work spans performance, video art, experimental music, and photography. She has presented work at The New Museum, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center, and at many nightclubs, galleries, and other alternative art spaces. Narcissister has also presented her work internationally at the Music Biennale in Zagreb Croatia; at Chicks on Speed’s Girl Monster Festival; at The City of Women Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia; and at the Camp/Anti-Camp festival in Berlin, among many others. Her art videos have been included in exhibitions and film festivals worldwide, including on MOCATV. Her film, The Self-Gratifier, won “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at the 2008 Good Vibration Erotic Film Festival and her film, Vaseline, won the main prize in 2013. Interested in the troubling divide between popular entertainment and experimental art, Narcissister appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. Narcissister had her first solo gallery exhibition, Narcissister is You, at envoy enterprises in February 2013. She was nominated for a 2013 Bessie Award for her evening-length piece, Organ Player, and has received awards from Creative Capital, Theo Westenberger, and United States Artists.
Learn moreNatalie Figueroa is an activist and community organizer that has addressed the intersections of art and revolution for over 18 years. Natalie, a Chicago native, has organized alongside youth of color to address issues of police brutality, segregation, access to comprehensive health education and racial injustice in public schools. Currently, she is working on building community in Portland through her art collective YGB.
Learn moreNatasha Kmeto is a Portland-based singer and electronic producer who turns heads everywhere she goes. Born into a musical family in California, Natasha began to develop her talents as an artist from a young age. It wasn’t until almost two decades later, on the verge of becoming a career session musician, that she grabbed the wheel and broke out in a direction that truly inspired her. Her arrival in Portland marked a big step towards new things. The past several years as seen her growth quicken, especially after signing with hometown label Dropping Gems. The string of releases that have followed showcase Natasha in her most self-realized form, in matters of love, independence, and outlook on life.
Natasha has a long list of notable live performances under her belt, including gigs at Coachella, Bumbershoot, MusicFestNW, Symbiosis, SXSW, Low End Theory (LA and SF), and Decibel Festival. She has shared the stage with a number of talented artists as well, including Squarepusher, Emancipator, Kid Cudi, Plaid, Gold Panda, Dam Funk, Shlohmo, Shigeto, and Morcheeba, just to name a few. Her radio experience includes live performances on Boiler Room and KEXP, and her tracks have been played by numerous noteworthy DJs including Mary Anne Hobbes. She just released her LP Crisis on Dropping Gems.
Selected Press
"Natasha Kmeto: Portlandian R&B Singer-Producer Grooves at Max Efficiency," Jessica Hopper, SPIN, July 16, 2013.
"Last Time," Julianne, ROOKIE, June 13, 2013
Learn moreNat Turner Project (NTP) is a fugitive space based in Portland, Oregon. NTP enables artists of color to go beyond the usual expositions inherent in presenting the art of marginalized perspectives; dispersing funds, resources, and platforms to create or express one's own language within and without the parameters of racial commodification or designation. NTP creates an environment of inclusivity –– a communal harbor for artists previously silenced by institutional constraints –– and actively provides them spatial priority.
Learn moreNature Theater of Oklahoma is an OBIE Award-winning New York-based performance group under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. Since Poetics: a ballet brut, their first ensemble piece, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has been devoted to making the work they don’t know how to make, putting themselves in impossible situations, and working from out of their own ignorance and unease. Using readymade materials, found space, overheard speech, and observed gesture, and through extreme formal manipulation, and superhuman effort, they shift our perceptions of everyday reality. Selected Press Just the Gist of a Star-Cross’d Tale, Charles Isherwood, New York Times, December 21, 2009. 'Romeo And Juliet': Just As You Misremembered It, Robert Smith, NPR, December 29, 2009. Deconstructing Romeo and Juliet, Hilton Als, The New Yorker, January 11, 2010. Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2009. Stage Notes: Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Romeo and Juliet, Tom Murrin, papermag, December 16, 2009.
Learn moreNeal Medlyn, now residing in New York City, has performed in a variety of films, bands, dance pieces and plays, designed sound scores, been a model and a go-go dancer and continues to do some of these things. But most importantly, he is a Performer who presents his programs in New York City, having at some time or another appeared in numerous U.S. cities and in Berlin Germany. He also performs as Champagne Jerry, a rapper. His performance work, primarily built around pop music, has appeared at the New Museum for Contemporary Art (THE NEAL MEDLYN EXPERIENCE LIVE! a re-enactment of Beyonce's 2007 concert DVD), the Andy Warhol Museum, the Kitchen (Wicked Clown Love), Dance Theater Workshop (...Her's a Queen), the Chocolate Factory (Brave New Girl), Joe's Pub (where he was a co-host and co-creator of Our Hit Parade, which ran for four years), PS122, Fez (Neal Medlyn, the Paris Hilton of Performance Art), Ars Nova (Neal Medlyn's Lionel Richie Opera), the Knitting Factory, Galapagos Art Space (Neal Medlyn's Coming In The Air Tonight), on tour across the U.S., Canada, Berlin, and in London as a resident performer at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. He won a 2010 New York Dance and Performance Award for his sound design for Miguel Gutierrez' Last Meadow and has also designed sound for a joint project between Gutierrez and Jenny Holzer at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. He was honored with the title of Mr. Lower East Side in 2004. He co-starred opposite Karen Finley in "George and Martha" in New York and various places across the U.S. He's also collaborated with Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys), Bridget Everett, Kenny Mellman, Adrienne Truscott and has been discussed in the Onion, NPR's Here and Now, Gothamist, the Austin Chronicle, and the New York Times, in which he has appeared several times without his shirt on. His original Internet TV show NEAL MEDLYN'S LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE was a cult sensation on Nerve.com. His dance moves have been featured in the work of choreographers Adrienne Truscott and David Neumann. He has written for New York Magazine's website and Nerve.com about various things including but not limited to R. Kelly, Blind Date, bisexuality, and Days of Our Lives (with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Lisa Carver) among others. His book, Sexual Buttocks and his albums have been purchased by at least 10 people.
Learn moreIt took the Fates colluding together for Neka & Kahlo to have a chance meeting in 2009. Their first musical collaboration was, in many ways, an effort on both their part to transgress the confines of their early upbringing. Neka, brought up in the Black Church, took to secular music in secret, falling in love with legends Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. Daughter of eastern European emigrants, Kahlo took to hip-hop as means of self expression when she realized she didn't quite fit in with the rest of the Portlandians. As a youngster she took an oath of loyalty to Nas, while still indulging in the braggadocio of Jay Z. Now you can find an eclectic playlist in the duo's headphones, anything from Michael to Miguel, Chaka Khan to Kanye, 60's acid rock to Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap.
Rather than latching on to some trendy sub-genre that critics can cheaply package as “something new”, the duo like to think of themselves as a vector for the convergence of a multitude of genres and sounds, expressed through the lens of their unique experience as queer women who refused to conform to any one identity alone. As the two say, "We pray to the Goddess of many faces."
Learn moreNIC Kay is from the Bronx, currently occupying several liminal spaces. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity/meaning gleaned from the shifting of perspective. NIC’s current transdisciplinary projects explore movement as a place of reclamation of the body, history, and spirituality.
NIC has shown work, spoken on panels, and hosted workshops at numerous venues throughout the United States, and Internationally. In 2016, they developed a web series called the Bronx Cunt Tour around their debut solo performance lil BLK for Open TV, which premiered in April, 2016. NIC Kay was a 2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Van Lier Fellow in New York City.
Learn moreNick Hallett is a composer and cultural producer who works between the worlds of music and art. Whispering Pines 10, an opera collaboration with artist Shana Moulton, was staged at PICA for TBA:11 in addition to The Kitchen, New Museum of Contemporary Art, SFMOMA, The Warhol Museum, and Carolina Performing Arts. A new cycle of the project is currently being funded by Creative Capital. He is the Music Director and producer of the Joshua Light Show—a team of live cinema artists with roots in the 1960s psychedelia movement—which appears worldwide, and more recently has performed to Hallett’s original soundscores at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium and at the Papalote Digital Dome in Mexico City, for the Mutek festival. He has staged a diverse body of work in New York and abroad, from masterpieces of John Cage, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (as co-director of the Darmstadt series) to music and live cinema at The Kitchen, to his own "ever-compelling" (Time Out) media rituals of music and light, always involving the human voice, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and PERFORMA, among others.
Selected Press
The Object Whisperer: Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines, Brian Droitcour, Rhizome, April 14, 2010.
Learn moreHis play TREVOR received multiple Ovation and Critics Circle awards for the 2015 production starring Laurie Metcalf and Jimmi Simpson. Other plays include the COWARD and VÉRITÉ, both produced by Lincoln Center/LTC3, and IMPORTANT HATS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, produced by Manhattan Theater Club.
In television, Nick worked as a writer and co-executive producer on the Netflix original series GLOW and ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, for which he has garnered multiple WGA and Emmy nominations, as well as RAMY, for which he served as Co-Executive Producer on its Peabody Award winning first season.
Upcoming projects include the film THE FACE OF THE KING with Sebastian Silva, and COMPLICITY ISLAND, an audio play commissioned by Audible. Nick earned his Literature/Creative Writing BA from Bard College and a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting degree from Juilliard, where he was a two-time winner of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize, and was recently awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters by Bard College. He began his career as a puppeteer and musician for the acclaimed madcap rock puppet musical JOLLYSHIP THE WHIZ-BANG, for which he also built puppets and wrote scripts. He is originally from Anchorage, Alaska.
Learn moreNight Shade is a group of artists rebelling against traditional flat-surface silhouettes and revolutionizing the ancient art of shadow puppetry by using light to manipulate depth and space. This art group blends hand-held lights, masks, puppets, composed music, sound-effects, and experimental storytelling into a bewitching form of cinematic puppetry that flows like film. Core artists are Alicia Cortes, Sarah Frechette, Oviedo Menendez, Jason Thibodeaux, and Alain Z, but also working under the banner Night Shade are Kevin Bouton-Scott, Michel Fiffe, Chris Rabilwongse, and Cynthia Star.
The Portland-based Night Shade collective began collaborating with Japanther back in 2005 in New York. That first show at the Arm Gallery in Williamsburg started the momentum of late night cutting and, since then, this group has performed across the US at various puppetry and art festivals, galleries, anarchist spaces, gutted bowling alleys, and pubs. In 2009 Night Shade performed their full-length epic shadow play, Night Shade, which contains over 700 intricate cut-outs, for a sold-out run at Disjecta, in Portland.
Learn moreNina Katchadourian's work, in a wide variety of media including photgraphy, sculpture, video and sound, has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PSI/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, New Langton Arts, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, Palais de Tokyo, and as part of the 2010 Time-Based Art Festival. In January 2006 the Turku Art Museum in Finland featured a solo show of works she made in that country, and in June 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph, All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a 2008 solo show of Katchadourian's video installation works, and in February 2010, as artist in residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, she had another solo show entitled Seat Assignment. She is currently at work on a permanent public piece, commissioned by the GSA, for a border crossing station between the US and Canada.
Selected Press
Found in Translation, Brian Dillon, Art Review, April, 2008.
Learn moreNivhek is a project by Liz Harris, who lives and works on the Oregon coast. ENGINE marks the first new work by Nivhek since the release of After it’s own death/Walking in a spiral towards the house in 2019.
Liz also records and performs under the names Grouper, Helen, Raum, et al on her own imprint YELLOWELECTRIC, and Kranky, Ltd.
Her music is at grouper.BandCamp.com
Her drawings, paintings, and publications are at repeatingpattern.com
Learn moreForever cascading forward in a positive direction, gleefully instinctive, No Age erupt out of your speakers, blasting away the clouds above the smoggy cityscape to reveal a solar flaring sun. With an ecstatic force bubbling around and beyond their music, they release contagious energy like they’re main-lining a field full of whirring wind turbines, while tuned into an ancient celestial power source.
No Age is the duo of Dean Spunt and Randy Randall, they are on a constant journey to explore the furthest reaches of sound. They set out with one particular rule in mind: To write songs that we would be psyched to listen to. On a first listen, discovering each new dose of their alchemy is exhilarating—they produce perfectly crafted songs, underpinned by infectious melodies and ear-piercing cacophony. This swirling mix of unstoppable momentum is catapulted into the stratosphere by sweeping bursts of symphonic growls. Their power is enunciated through their ability to take their core of catchy song-writing and expand its emotional influence through tone, structure and noise. Everything in Between, their third album and follow-up to 2008’s Nouns has now arrived.
Learn moreDJ Mami Miami is the alias of Emilly Prado, a Chicana writer and DJ based in Portland, Oregon. As the former co-host of Is Butter a Carb? on XRAY FM, Emilly played a wide range of genres from cumbias and spanish punk rock to hip hop, neo-soul, and oldies. She plays songs of her childhood and music that she’s stumbled upon later in life. Her live sets are always mood-driven but she specializes in playing jams for perreando. In 2017, she co-founded Noche Libre DJ collective. Learn more about her at www.emillyprado.com and on Instagram at @emillyp.
Inés Paulina Ramírez- aka Lapaushi- was born in Cuenca, Ecuador. She grew up dancing to classical cumbias on cassette at her family’s parties in the Andes mountains. Her work as a DJ and visual artist engages and celebrates cultural identity. Lapaushi mixes urban rhythms that include feminist hip-hop, reggaeton, electrocumbia, a wide variety of cumbia, descarga, sonidero and chicha psicodélica. - “Pura sabrosura”.
Her selections come from years of traveling, collecting and sharing music from various regions of Latin America that explore Indigenous memory and African roots while incorporating contemporary electronic beats. Soundcloud:lapaushi IG:lapaushi
Dez Ramirez aka DJ La Cósmica is a writer, artist and DJ that’s been in and out of the Los Angeles and Portland music scene for the last decade. Influenced by the Southern California Chicanx culture she grew up in, her eclectic sets are shaped by the sounds of lowrider oldies, disco, electronic, funk, new wave, post punk, rock en espanol, reggae, hip hop, and rock & roll. The daughter L.A. disco dancers, La Cosmica’s sets often pay homage to her parents, Latin discotecas, and the eccentric, glam club scene of the 1970s and 80s. Find her on IG @silver_mother or dezramirez.com
Learn moreNoel Kennon is a violist based in Seattle, WA. Kennon focuses on soundings involving resonance, texture, just intonation, and experimental improvisation.
Learn moreAs a dance artist, Noelle Stiles is interested in how and where experience is held in the body. This interest provides a framework for extracting the corporeal language that both intimately connects and individuates us. Stiles has a BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts and completed her graduate studies in dance at The Ohio State University. She has performed and presented work at venues such as the PICA's Time-Based Art Festival (2010), On The Boards, PWNW, Dance New Amsterdam, and Links Hall. Stiles' interest in teaching has taken her to places such as The Ohio State University, the Governor’s School of North Carolina and she co-founded the community focused dance class series Heavy Rotation with Kathleen Keogh of Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner. Her work has been supported by Caldera's Artist Residency program, PICA's Resource Room Residency, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the ACA Associate Artist Residency program and was selected by PICA and the NDP to travel to the Dublin Dance Festival as part of a pilot international exchange program. In 2010, Stiles merged her work as a graphic designer with her work in dance to co-create a dance publication entitled FRONT. Based out of Portland, Oregon, FRONT is Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Robert Tyree. FRONT utilizes the old-school tactics of the broadsheet newspaper to explore the new, current, future energy of dance theory and practices in the field.
Learn moreFor the past ten years, Zimbabwe-born and New York-based Chipaumire has investigated Africa and her own personal iconography. Her performances complicate, implicate, and destroy the concept of the African female body as a subjugated, colonial, and tribal unknowable. Chipaumire is a recipient of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and two New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards.
Selected Press
Nora Chipaumire: Body and Soul Podcast, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Infinite Body Podcast, April 25, 2008.
Platform 2012: Parallels, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, April, 2012.
Learn moreNXT LVL is a collective that has created a social justice platform to incite change by galvanizing people to action through parties, events, and social connection. Each NXT LVL event is carefully curated to center and amplify WOC/POC/QTPOC/LGBTQIA2S+ voices and causes.
NXT LVL involves the communities in which they work, to benefit as integral collaborators in the process. They prioritize creating safe spaces for all those who attend their events, and strive to provide fair compensation for folks who contribute their skills, time, and energy to make these events possible. NXT LVL recognizes and celebrates the opportunity and ability to shine light on and uplift communities, while fostering a supported vision for social activism fundraising.
Learn moreThe United States has over 700 military bases on foreign soil in sovereign countries where we have no declaration of war. This project unites musicians, researchers, and music lovers to gather covers by American musicians of songs that originate from each of these places. By creating a new rendition of songs from occupied regions, these musicians enact a second (symbolic) occupation and encourage reflection on the implications of our nation’s exceptionally expansive reach and presence.
Throughout the world, music serves as a mobilizing force, from the musicians of Bolivian President Evo Morales’ grassroots campaign to actions by CRASS and other punks. In contrast to the frequent co-optation of music as entertainment or commodity, this project will focus on music’s power to transform awareness and create change. Songs in Wartime functions as a reciprocal window: we project a limited version of American culture into foreign territory with the presence of our bases, and these distant places reflect back into our territory when we cover and share their songs.
Learn moreOffsite Dance Project was started in 2008 to pioneer alternative approaches to arts presentation through site-specific performance in locations such as trains, parks, and museums. Offsite also produces an annual community forum, We dance, to stimulate Japan’s contemporary dance scene by bringing artists from various genres together in unusual circumstances that generate new ways of approaching their art.
Learn moreBorn in Israel, Meromi currently lives and works in New York City, where he is represented by Harris Lieberman Gallery. Meromi graduated from Bezalel Academy in 1992 and went on to receive his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003. He has exhibited at venues including The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; the Lyon Biennial, France; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Magasin 3, Stockholm; De Appel Museum, Amsterdam; Sculpture Center, New York; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and Art in General, New York. He has received numerous scholarships and awards, including a Percent for Art commission (2009), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2008) Grants to Artists Award, the Fund for Video and experimental film (2004), I.C. Excellence Foundation (2003), and the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli ArtPrize (1998).
Selected Press
Ohad Meromi - 500 Words, Dawn Chan, Artforum.com, December 18, 2010.
Studio Visit - Ohad Meromi, Andrea Bellini, Flash Art Online.
Re: Diaspora - Yael Bartana, Elad Lassry, Ohad Meromi and Daniel Silver in Correspondance - Israel, Nicola Trezzi, Flash Art, October 2009.
Peripheries
Kurt Schwitters: Reconstructions of the Merzbau, Karin Orchard, Tate Papers, Autumn, 2007.
Learn moreOkwui Okpokwasili is a New York-based writer, performer, and choreographer. Deemed “a magnetic performer” by The New York Times, Okpokwasili has worked with Ralph Lemon, Julie Taymor, Nora Chipaumire, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Dean Moss, and others. Bronx Gothic is her second solo performance project, after pent-up: a revenge dance. Both projects are collaborations with visual designer, filmmaker, and director Peter Born. Together they create award-winning multidisciplinary experiences of raw intimacy—a collision of body, image and sound. Okpokwasili ‘s accomplishments include MANCC Choreographic Fellow; Artist in Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Park Avenue Armory, and LMCC’s Extended Life Program; Foundation for Contemporary Arts grantee. Her current work Bronx Gothic enjoyed a sold-out run in PS122’s 2014 COIL Festival and continues to tour nationally and internationally.
Learn moreOlivia Camfield is a multimedia movement artist of the Muscogee Nation, born and raised in Texas Hill Country. Their work finds connection to dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism. They have performed and choreographed dance for much of their career, and their film work includes themes of the Alien as kin, time traveling relatives, and Mvskoke lifeways in experimental forms. They are a tattoo artist whose hand poke practice is based in Southeastern and Mississippian Indigenous tattoo traditions, creating designs for Southeastern people that imagine the possibilities of those tattoos in the future and the new shapes they may take. Olivia's films have screened internationally at Camden International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and have appeared in print and online publications such as Artforum and Variety. Olivia is a 2018-19 Alembic Artist In Residence, a CYCLE I featured artist of COUSIN Collective, a 2022 Sundance Institute Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive participant, and a 2022 recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s LIFT–Early Career Support for Native Artists award.
Learn moreBorn in Seattle when the last person leaving was supposed to turn out the lights, Omar Willey has been an experimental filmmaker and photographer since 1989. He has made six feature films and a dozen shorts that have been shown locally as well as broadcast internationally. He is currently finishing up a five year project in hyperphotography dealing with the human use of public land.
In 1988 he began writing about performing arts for KCMU radio (now KEXP). Shortly thereafter he started his first magazine, Free Forum, dedicated to literary arts and cultural analysis. After this he began another zine, Lines of Sight, dedicated to photography and film and featuring interviews and articles about contemporary artists as well as photography. After this he moved on to freelance writing for Earshot Jazz, 5/4 Music, Tablet Magazine, and other local magazines. In 2010, he joined the staff of the online blog, Seattlest, where he remained till it shuttered.
For the past three years, he has been known as the publisher of the online journal of arts and culture, The Seattle Star, in which he has continued his interest in writing about performing arts, science, experimental film, and open culture.
Mr. Willey is an alumnus of both Western Washington University and the University of Washington. He volunteers time to open source software movement, Project Gutenberg, and Creative Commons projects across the country. He teaches free workshops in critical writing and photography around town. He is interested in everything.
Learn moreThe Brooklyn-based artist has always deftly balanced the experimental with the accessible: He has released several albums under his Oneohtrix Point Never moniker on various independent labels – including the 2013 3-CD/5 LP Rifts, a compilation of his early work – as well as amassing a large catalogue of mini-album tape releases. His most recent disc, 2011’s Replica, was built around samples of television commercials; Sasha Frere Jones of the New Yorker called it “music that gently triggers a series of images and feelings, none of which you can name and all of which seem entirely common.” He has built live soundscapes at the Museum of Modern Art; collaborated with Montreal-based ambient electronic music composer Tim Hecker on the largely improvised 2012 Instrumental Tourist; and recast the title track from his 2010 disc Returnal as an elegant and emotive piece for piano, featuring the otherworldly voice of Antony Hegarty. Advertising powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi tapped Lopatin for an installation event at the 2012 Cannes film fest and Sofia Coppola’s longtime cohort Brian Reitzell invited him to create original music for Coppola’s The Bling Ring. Said the Saatchi execs, “There’s this grandeur to his music, but it’s always counterbalanced by moments of irony and lightness.”
Selected Press:
"The Top 50 Albums of 2013," Pitchfork, December 2013
Learn moreThe Oregon Painting Society is an art collective from Portland, Oregon, formed in 2007. They have exhibited and performed at Fontanelle Gallery (PDX) and Reed College (PDX).
Learn moreSince the Oregon Symphony was established 117 years ago, it has been recognized for its internationally acclaimed music directors, skilled performers, diverse programs, and outstanding community services in education and regional touring. The Oregon Symphony now ranks among the largest orchestras in the nation, and the oldest west of the Mississippi.
Learn moreOtomo Yoshihide is one of the most well known Japanese musicians and composers in the experimental music field. Performing with guitar, turntables, and electronics he first came to international prominence in the 1990s as the leader of the noise rock group Ground Zero, and has since worked in a variety of contexts, ranging from free improvisation to noise, jazz and contemporary classical. A pioneering figure in onkyo and electroacoustic improvisation scenes, Otomo has been featured on important records on labels such as Improvised Music from Japan and Erstwhile. He studied at the Meiji University from 1979, where he studied ethnomusicology, concentrating on the Japanese pop music of World War II and the development of musical instruments during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Samples of instruments and music from this period are found in several of his works. He played in rock bands while at college, but turned to improvisation after discovering free jazz and free improvisation musicians like guitarist Derek Bailey, saxophonist Kaoru Abe, and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi.
Learn morePablo de Ocampo lives in Vancouver where he is Exhibitions Curator at Western Front. He has curated screenings, exhibitions, and performances at galleries, cinemas, and festivals internationally. From 2006 to 2014, de Ocampo was Artistic Director of the Images Festival in Toronto, and in 2013, served as the programmer of the 59th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, History is What's Happening. He was a founding member of the collective screening series Cinema Project in Portland, OR.
Learn morePackard Jennings is an American artist who appropriates pop culture symbols and references to create new meaning using a variety of media including printmaking, sculpture, animation, video, and pamphleteering. In his early career he modified billboards, a common practice of culture jammers.
Learn morePallavi Sen is from Bombay, India. She works with installation, printmaking, textiles, and intuitive, musical movement. Current interests include planting gardens and meadows, inner lives of birds and animals, the grief of the anthropocene, South Asian costumes, domestic architecture, altars, atheism and magical thinking, pattern histories, friendship + love, past/presen/future lover, work spaces, work tables, eco-feminism, love poems, the gates to Indian homes, walking, seeds, and twice daily cooking.
She received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the Assistant Professor of Multiples + Distributed Art at Williams College and dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is the author of Dead Planet Cookbook, and is currently working on her second book about a garden based curriculum.
Learn morePamela Council is a New York based interdisciplinary artist creating fountains for Black joy. Guided by material, cultural, and metaphysical quests, Council’s practice embodies a darkly humorous and inventive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. Through this lens, Council uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to shed light on under-examined and under-valued narratives.
Council has created commissions, exhibitions, performances or presentations for: New Museum for Contemporary Art, United States Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoCADA. Council has been Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell, Red Bull Arts, Bemis, Rush Arts, MANA, Signal Culture, Mass MoCA, and Wassaic Project. A recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Grant, Council holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University and is currently artist in residence at ISCP.
Social Media handles
twitter / pamelacouncil
instagram / pamelacouncil
Patreon / BLAXIDERMY
venmo / pamelacouncil
cash app / $pammypammy
Learn moreFounded in 1991 by Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn, Pan Pan Theatre has since produced 22 productions, published a major photographic book, and produced a film, One. The ensemble has worked with a host of Irish and international performers and artists, and both worked and toured extensively throughout Ireland as well as Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Korea, and the United States.
Learn moreParenthetical Girls is a pop group. Of sorts. Charting a particularly idiosyncratic course over its complicated chronology, the ensemble has been home to a revolving cast of collaborators in multiple disciplines, with founder and creative director Zac Pennington acting as the sole constant. With a résumé that includes dalliances in chamber music, large-scale experimental theater, electronic pop, and innumerable other aesthetic and sonic diversions, the group has performed its work at a multitude of international arts and music festivals, including Donaufestival (Vienna), Primavera Sound (Barcelona), New Island Festival (NYC), Intersecciones (Gijon, Spain), PuSh Festival (Vancouver, B.C.), Bumbershoot (Seattle), and TBA:08 (Portland). Ever the pragmatists, Parenthetical Girls are in the midst of releasing their latest album, Privilege, as a series of five, blood-numbered 12” EPs, via the group’s own Slender Means Society label.
Learn morePato Hebert is an artist, teacher, and organizer. His work probes the challenges and possibilities of interconnectedness. His creative projects have appeared at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito; Beton7, Athens; the Ballarat International Foto Biennale; and the Songzhuang International Photo Biennale. Hebert is a COVID-19 long hauler, living with the ongoing impacts of the coronavirus since March of 2020, and publicly addressing the pandemic through creativity and community building. His solo exhibition about long COVID, Lingering, debuted at Pitzer College in 2022, curated by Ruti Talmor. His writing about COVID has appeared in Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic (eds. Romero, A.,Tucker, D.,Wang, D.), and The Long COVID Survival Guide: How to Take Care of Yourself and What Comes Next (ed: Fiona Lowenstein). Hebert serves as Chair and teaches in the Department of Art & Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Learn morePatrick Rock is a conceptual artist who has shown internationally, most recently with the collective AMERICAN MEAT LLC., and with the post-punk trio PISS in the Sequences Live Art Festival in Reykjavik. He is the director of ROCKSBOXCONTEMPORARYFINEART, a short-term artist residency and exhibition space in Portland, as well as the director of the Portland State University Art Department galleries, where he also teaches as an adjunct instructor of its Art Department.
Learn morePaul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance.
Learn morePeggy Piacenza has been creating work and building community in Seattle for over 30 years. She is committed to generating new work and collaborating with others to create lasting relationships that impact the artist community. Peggy’s work embodies a wide spectrum of experience drawing from explorations in improvisation, video art, performance, meditation and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her latest project, The Forever Project, utilizing video installation and live performance, premiered in January 2024 at On the Boards.
In addition to her own work, she is currently working with NYC/Toronto-based performance collective Same As Sister (S.A.S.). She has collaborated and performed with Seattle-based dance-theater companies 33 Fainting Spells and Pat Graney Company, choreographers Dayna Hanson, Stephanie Skura, Lionel Popkin, Deborah Hay and others. Peggy will be choreographing for the 2025 Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation’s Performance Cohorts showcase at Velocity Dance Center.
She is a co-founder of Base, a non-profit organization dedicated to elevating risk and invention in dance, performance and multidisciplinary art.
Peggy is the recipient of a 2024 Artist Trust Fellowship. In 2011, she was the inaugural recipient of the Helen Gurley Brown Magic Grant, supporting a project that brought Cambodian and American artists together in Cambodia for cross-cultural dialogue and dancing within classical and contemporary dance forms. A documentary film about this project was screened at Velocity Dance Center’s Speakeasy Series.
She is a 2010 graduate of Smith College’s Ada Comstock Scholars Program, where she majored in Religion and Gender Studies.
Learn morePepper Pepper is a Portland, OR-based multidisciplinary artist. His work transforms vulnerability into spectacle - using artifice, technology, and camp to metabolize trauma into luminous, often magical performance worlds. Pepper has presented performances on stages and at festivals including Risk/Reward, the Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), Performance Works Northwest, NCECA, and internationally at OFF! Biennale Budapest. Their visual and installation work has been exhibited at Oregon Contemporary, Linfield University, Seattle Central College, and The Budapest Art Fair.
Pepper has incubated new experimental works at residencies like MacDowell, Monson Arts, Playa, Caldera, Signal Fire, and PonderosaTanz (Germany), Pepper’s practice bridges experimental performance and nightlife legacy. With over 20 years in cabaret and drag production, Pepper has appeared at and been featured at The Austin International Drag Festival, OUTstages (Victoria, BC), and is co-host of The Portland Drag Theatre Festival alongside frequent collaborator Anthony Hudson.
His ongoing project Pink Moment explores PINK as queer energy, ritual, and resistance while hybridizing performance, photography, and installation into an evolving archive of embodied glamour.
@thepepperpepper
www.thepepperpepper.com Learn moreSomewhere in the murky recesses of childhood memories—of Sunday-morning television, mounds of improbably coloured junk food, and inane addictive jingles—lurks Peter Burr, a tech-gnostic agent. His mission: to subjugate the innerspace, chock open the escape hatch, and enable the immoderate two-way flow of synthesised realities. Burr’s green-screen dream is yours too. A television is broadcasting from within you as you watch it; a boiling, aberrant, hysterical fusion of mind and matter, technology and cultural form. Confronting the malaise of too much television, Burr’s diagnosis is also his prescription: more of the same!
Peter Burr (b. 1980) is an artist from Brooklyn, New York. His work has been presented in a variety of spaces including Le Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid, ES; and the International Film Festival, Rotterdam. Past residencies include the MacDowell Colony (NH); Bemis Center (NE); and IMPAKT Works, Utrecht (NL). He is also the founder of Cartune Xprez.Selected Press
"AO Interview — Peter Burr before his "SPECIAL EFFECT" performance at the Museum of the Moving Image," D. Creahan, ArtObserved, January 17, 2013.
"The Dream Outside: An Interview with Peter Burr About Cartune Xprez," Caroline Picard, Bad at Sports, June 22, 2011.
Learn morePeter Coffin was born in Berkeley, California in 1972. He has had solo exhibitions at Herald St, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery (NY); The Wrong Gallery (NY); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (CA); Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami (FL); The Horticultural Society of New York (NY); and le Confort Moderne, Poitier, France; as well as recent group exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NY. He is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Peter Falanga decided to attend school in New Orleans, Louisiana to study music at Loyola University New Orleans. Upon volunteering at the 2009 New Orleans Film Festival, he switched his major from music to film and digital media, and added a minor in philosophy. Immediately upon earning his BA, he decided to pursue a master’s degree that would align with his interests in philosophy, film theory, community outreach, and video making.
Peter moved to Portland, Oregon last August to become a member of the MA Critical Theory and Creative Research program’s inaugural cohort at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Currently, he is working on his master’s thesis, which is an extensive study of sincerity and its expression in the works of David Foster Wallace, the films of the New Sincerity, and in the 1977 Woody Allen film Annie Hall.
Learn morePeter Ksander is a Stage Designer who holds a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Previously he has lived and worked in Brooklyn NY , Chicago IL, Iowa City, IA and Los Angeles, CA.
Design credits include scenic and/or lighting designs for: Man in a Case (Big Dance Theater, Hartford Stage,) The Brothers Size (The Public Theater, The Studio Theater in Dublin, The Old Globe), There There (Kristin Kosmas / Chocolate Factory, On The Boards,) Othello (Theater for a New Audience, Intiman Theater), On the Levee (Lincoln Center Theater 3), The Scarlet Letter, Arms and the Man(Intiman theater), A House In Bali (Bang on a Can/ Cal Performances), The Misanthrope (Portland Stage Company), Making of Americans (Walker Art Center), Laude in Urbis (Compania di Colombari, Orvieto Italy), This Place is a Desert (w/ Jay Scheib, Institute of Contemporary Art, Under the Radar Festival, MIT), Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (The Theater of a Two-Headed Calf), Stanley 2006(HERE Art Center w/ Lisa D'Amour), Saint Joan of the Stockyards (Stillpoint/PS122) and several productions for the California Institute for the Arts, including Baal, The House of Bernarda Alba and...Or the Whale (an operaic adaptation of Moby Dick by boxer Julie Crocket) His design work has appeared in the Buanos Aries in Translation Festival, at The Maison des Arts de Creteil and The Ontological Hysteric Incubator, PICA's Time Based Art Festival, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2008 he won an Obie award for the scenic design of Untitled Mars (this title may change), created and directed by Jay Scheib and presented at PS122 and the National Theater of Hungary.
In 2014 he won a Bessie award along side the other designers for the visual design of This was the End.
Over the years he has worked with Richard Foreman (Bad Behavior, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, Astronome: a Night at the Opera, Idiot Savant), Erik Ehn (Ideas of Good and Evil, ICE: Cry me a river...), Karin Coonrod (Laude in Urbis, The Blackamoor Angel, Love's Labors Lost, Orfeo), Mark Wing-Davey (1:23, Small Tragedy, Behind the Eye, Pericles,) and Robert Woodruff (Oedipus).
Between 2001-2004 Ksander was associate scenic designer to Douglas Stein, working on projects both nationally and internationally. In 2006, Stein and Ksander begun co-designing projects, which have included: Carson Kreitzer's Behind the Eye and Lemon Andersen's County of Kings.
In 2005 Peter was a recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program, through which he spent two years investigating how experimental theater ideas are explored at all levels of production in the United States.
In 2006 He joined the curatorial board of the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator and for the next five years served as a curator of new and experimental work. At that time he worked along with co-curator Brendan Regimbal to develop the SHORTFORM program, a residency for artists to explore serial and sequential performance works.
In 2011 Ksander relocated to Portland OR to take up a teaching position in Scenography at Reed College. In 2013 he was on the selection panel for the Risk/Reward festival and began working with Portland companies Hand2mouth, The Portland Playhouse and the Portland Experimental Theater Ensemble.
His work as a generative performance artist includes creating, in collaboration with other artists, performances including: Seeing the Elephant, and The Sleeping Dane Effect (a collaboration with animator Melissa Chimovitz). He is co-founder of Tiny Elephant, whose first piece, The Stupid Butterfly Project, was presented by Arts at St. Ann's, as part of Puppetlab. He is a member of TENT, a company rooted in image and performance-based ensemble generated work that questions theatrical tradition. Most recently TENT developed Ugly Children do not get Cake, a rooftop performance exploring the distance between an individual and the dreams contained in the architecture of a city. Previous projects with TENT include: Zero Winter, Oh Sweet Captain or the Ahab Stomp, Your Shipwreck is No Disaster, KG: Life in a Tin Can, and He bent his head and watched his steps, for this helped him avoid thinking.
Peter also has continuing artistic relationships with the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, The Object Collection, Lear DeBessonet, Jay Scheib, Quinnopolis NY, Restless NYC, and Banana Bag and Bodice.
Learn morePeter Simensky’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum 52, New York; The Swiss Institute, New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston. Selected group exhibitions at Sculpture Center, NY; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mass Moca, North Adams; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York among others. Simensky’s Gold Dust was recently featured in Cabinet’s, Money Issue. He has received awards and grants from LMCC, NYFA, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He lives and works in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY.
Learn morePetra Kovacic was born in Split, Croatia. In 2008, she graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. Kovac’ic’ has exhibited in fifteen group and solo exhibitions and has performed her in numerous festivals in Croatia and abroad in New York, France, and Macedonia. She collaborated in workshops on artistic and pedagogical praxis and is a member of the Croatian Association of Artists, Zagreb and Split, and the Moving Academy of Performing Arts.
Learn morePhilip Grass is the electronic project helmed by Burton Schaber and Ben Durfee. The two met in 2011 while studying at University of Massachusetts, and began to slowly and increasingly orbit developments in electronic music together, attending shows on a regular basis, until they began to collaborate on their own material in early 2012. Their sound is characterized by an uncompromising instinct for change, as shuffling drums and moody pitch-shifted vocals can give way to riotous synth chords, jazz samples, or any number of other possible vibes. One can usually best identify a Philip Grass track by the sense of nocturnal nostalgia that permeates their melodic sensibility. The duo explore these seeming incredible transitions during their live performances, triggering samples, drums, and often playing live keys, with an animated air that communicates just how busy they are on stage.
Selected Press:
"Philip Grass 'All I Need'," XLR8R, by Derek Kaneko, February 18, 2014
"Devonwho's Remix of Philip Grass' 'All I Need' Is a Smoky Dream," SPIN, by Chris Martins, March 26, 2014
Learn moreBlanc is a native of France.
Learn moreBorn in 1970, Philippe Quesne received his education in Visual Arts. For 10 years he designed sets for theater, operas and exhibitions. In 2003, he created the Vivarium Studio Company, and directed his first show, La Démangeaison des ailes, based on the acts of taking off and falling down. Philippe Quesne hunts the marvelous, the tiny, and pushes to the extreme experiences of our daily lives as well as the relationship between mankind and nature. As he did as a child, collecting insects, he now works and studies small communities under his microscope. The scenography is used as an ecosystem in which he immerses his actors into. His shows, such as La Démangeaison des ailes (2003), Des expériences (2004), D’après nature (2006), L’Effet de Serge (2007), La Mélancolie des dragons (2008), Big Bang (2010), Swamp Club (2013), Next Day (2014), compose a repertory that tours all over the world. In addition to his work for the theater, he creates performances and interventions in public spaces or natural sites, and displays his installations in the context of exhibitions. Since January 2014, he has been serving as the co-director of Nanterre-Amandiers, National Dramatic Center. In 2016, he will create Caspar Western Friedrich at Kammerspiele in Munich and Welcome to Caveland! at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels
BIO PAGE IMAGE/S:
La Mélancolie des dragons 1 @ Martin Argyroglo
La Mélancolie des dragons 5 © Pierre Grosbois Learn morePhoebe Davies (London) is a Welsh artist and researcher based at Somerset House Studios. Working across video, sound, performance, and print, her practice investigates how people perceive their social framework, often working with—and in response to—individuals, and communities, generating work through collaboration, collective action, and DIT (Do It Together) strategies. She currently co-facilitates two research groups, Synaptic Island, a London-based, womxn and non-binary sound collective, and Art is Action, a UK-based social practice research group. Phoebe Davies Website
Learn morePictureplane is Travis Egedy. Having cut his teeth on killer remixes for Crystal Castles, HEALTH, Thieves Like Us, and worked with Beirut's Zach Condon, Pictureplane's debuts with the anthemic and otherworldly "Trance Doll" 7-inch. Grimy synths, broken beats, and bucolic vocals collide somewhere between early 90s house music and the gnarly soundscapes of Black Dice to forge a sound wholly unique and endlessly exciting. It begins here: Pictureplane is going to destroy dance-floors in 2009.
Learn morePieter Ampe grew up in Ghent, Belgium, and studied at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, the Arnhem Dance Academy, and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Together with Guilherme Garrido, he has created and performed Still Difficult Duet (2007) and Still Standing You (2010). In 2006, Ampe took part in danceWEB, a scholarship program at Vienna’s ImpulsTanz-festival, and since 2009, he has been an artist-in-residence at CAMPO. Ampe has worked with stage director Jan Decorte, performance duo United Sorry, artist Roland Seidel, noise-rock quartet The Germans, and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, among others. Guilherme Garrido is a Portugese-born artist, dancer, and musician. Between 2007 to 2009, he was the curator of Show Rooms within the frame of the annual Festival da Fábrica in Porto. He has performed as a dancer with Maria Clara Villa-Lobos, Ibrahim Quraishi, and Tommy Noonan/PVC company. In 2011, he premiered his first solo work, GO JOHN, at Fresh Festival in Croatia, and in 2012 he presented BEST BEAST, his first group piece as choreographer in HAU, Berlin. He has performed Still Standing You with Ampe at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Festival Transamerique in Montreal, and PuSH Festival in Vancouver, BC.
Learn moreFeaturing 10-12 musicians, Pink Martini performs its multilingual repertoire on concert stages and with symphony orchestras throughout Europe, Asia, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Australia and New Zealand, South America and North America. Pink Martini made its European debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and its orchestral debut with the Oregon Symphony in 1998 under the direction of Norman Leyden. Since then, the band has gone on to play with more than 50 orchestras around the world, including multiple engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Boston Pops, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, the San Francisco Symphony, and the BBC Concert Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall in London. Other appearances include the grand opening of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, with return sold-out engagements for New Year’s Eve 2003, 2004, 2008 and 2011; two sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall; the opening party of the remodeled Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Governor’s Ball at the 80th Annual Academy Awards in 2008; the opening of the 2008 Sydney Festival in Australia; two sold-out concerts at Paris’ legendary L’Olympia Theatre in 2011; and Paris’ fashion house Lanvin’s 10-year anniversary celebration for designer Alber Elbaz in 2012. Pink Martini’s debut album Sympathique was released independently in 1997 on the band’s own label Heinz Records (named after Lauderdale’s dog), and quickly became an international phenomenon, garnering the group nominations for “Song of the Year” and “Best New Artist” in France’s Victoires de la Musique Awards in 2000. Pink Martini released Hang On Little Tomato in 2004, Hey Eugene! in 2007 and Splendor In The Grass in 2009. In November 2010 the band released Joy To The World—a festive, multi-denominational holiday album featuring songs from around the globe. Joy To The World received glowing reviews and was carried in Starbucks stores during the 2010 and 2011 holiday seasons. All five albums have gone gold in France, Canada, Greece and Turkey, and have sold well over 2.5 million copies worldwide. In Fall 2011 the band released two albums – A Retrospective, a collection of the band’s most beloved songs spanning their 17-year career, which includes eight previously unreleased tracks, and 1969, an album of collaborations with legendary Japanese singer Saori Yuki. 1969 has been certified platinum in Japan, reaching #2 on the Japanese charts with the Japan Times raving “the love and respect Saori Yuki and Pink Martini have for the pop tradition shines through on every track.”
Learn morePrincess Bouton is a Black Transfeminine freelance filmmaker and performance artist based in Portland, Oregon. She graduated from the Portland State University film program in the spring of 2020. Her work often incorporates movement art and explores topics of intersectionality and pleasure activism. She has a dance background that includes modern dance, ballet, and vogue and she creates from a place that draws from each form. Princess Bouton is also a community builder and organizer in the Portland Kiki ballroom scene and is the princess of the kiki House Of Flora. The QTPOC models seen in her work are often individuals from her local queer community, who she invites to be highlighted and celebrated.
Learn morePublication Studio is an experiment in sustainable publication. They print and bind books on demand, creating original work with artists and writers they admire, books that both respond to the conversation of the moment and can endure. They attend to the social life of the book, cultivating a public that cares and is engaged. Publication Studio is a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense — not just the production of books, but the production of a public. This public, which is more than a market, is created through deliberate acts: the circulation of texts; discussions and gatherings in physical space; and the maintenance of a digital commons. Together these construct a space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being. At TBA, Publication Studio will conduct real-time collaborations with Festival artists and performers, strategizing and producing new books on-demand in a retail storefront.
Publication Studio was founded and is run by Matthew Stadler, formerly the literary editor of Nest Magazine and co-founder of Clear Cut Press, and Patricia No.
Selected Press
Book Publishing as Common Ground, Caroline Cummins, Oregon Humanities, Spring 2010.
A Very Long - and Very Interesting - Interview with Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio, Matthew Simmons, HTMLGIANT, March 18, 2010.
Learn moreQuasi was formed in Portland, Oregon, in 1993 by Sam Coomes & Janet Weiss. They have toured or recorded with, either individually or collectively, Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Built to Spill, Bright Eyes, Heatmiser, the Go Betweens, Pink Mountain, Blues Goblins, The Takeovers, Jandek, and numerous other less recognizable but just as seminal bands. Prior to Quasi, Coomes was in the San Francisco band Donner Party (c. 1983-1988) and both were in the Portland power trio Motorgoat (c. 1990-1992). Joanna Bolme (Jicks, The Minders, Calamity Jane) joined the band in 2006. Quasi still lives in the new, gentrified Portland and will release a new album in the fall of 2009.
Selected Discography: Quasi (self-released, 1993); Split Single 7" (w/Bugskull) (Red Rover, 1994); R&B Transmogrification (Up, 1997); Featuring "Birds" (Up, 1998); Field Studies (Up, 1999); The Sword of God (Touch & Go, 2001); Hot Shit! (Touch & Go, 2003); When the Going Gets Dark (Touch & Go, 2006).
Learn moreQueaz Otti is South Sacramento raised, a loving father, aspiring rapper, and street philosopher of the people.
Known to many as a loyal brotha and voice of understanding.
Learn moreAs an artist, Rachael Archibald plays with the conventions of art categorizations and conforms them into digital processes, as an all inclusive art form.
Currently she is expanding her practice into graphic arts and visual communication; having already designed posters and promotional media for other artists, musicians and galleries.
Although living and working in Brisbane, Australia, most of her work has been shown overseas in Bristol, Venice, Brooklyn, and online as part of the The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale.
Learn moreRachel Carrico is a scholar and practitioner of dance and performance. She holds a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California–Riverside and an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU. She has published her research on second lining, an improvisational dance form rooted in New Orleans's African diaspora parading traditions, in TDR: The Drama Review, TBS: The Black Scholar, and several anthologies. Fellowships and awards include the Society of Dance History Scholars' Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for excellence in dance scholarship, the UC Center for New Racial Studies Research Grant, and the Center for Gulf South Research Global South Fellowship at Tulane University. Also a practitioner, Carrico completed the Limón Institute's dance teacher training. In 2008, she co-founded Goat in the Road Productions in New Orleans, with whom she has directed two international artist residencies and launched Play/Write, a youth playwriting festival, in New Orleans schools.
Learn moreRachid Ouramdane is a French choreographer of Algerian descent at the forefront of Europe’s conceptual dance thinkers. His projects reassess the definitions of “performer” and “choreographer” and question modes of producing and circulating artwork. Prior to founding L’A. in 2007, Ouramdane collaborated with artists such as Emmanuelle Huynh, Meg Stuart, Christian Rizzo, Alain Buffard, and choreographer Julie Nioche, with whom he co-founded Fin Novembre in 1996. Ouramdane has worked with institutions also focused on visual art, including FRAC Champagne/Ardennes, Manège de Reims, and the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris. Besides choreography, Ouramdane regularly leads artistic workshops and moderates international encounters with artists.
Peripheries
The Purple Shall Govern, Daniel Fernández Pascual, deconcrete, June 8, 2011. Learn moreEducated at the Institut supérieur d'art dramatique (ISAD) of Tunis, choreographer Radhouane El Meddeb was rewarded as 'young hope of the Tunisian theatre' in 1996 by the Tunisian section of the International Theatre Institute. Subsequently, he was selected to participate in the education and research courses at the Théâtre National de Toulouse under the direction of Jacques Rosner.In Tunisia he worked with key artists of the Arab world such as Fadhel Jaïbi, Taoufik Jebali and Mohamed Driss. In France he collaborated with theatre directors Jacques Rosner, Lotfi Achour and Catherine Boskowitz, and with authors such as Adel Hakim and Natacha de Pontcharra. He performed in two films by Férid Boughedir (Un été à la Goulette et Halfaouine, l’enfant des terrasses) and took dance classes with Jean-Laurent Sasportès and Lisa Nelson.
In 2005 he created his first dance solo, performing himself, Pour en finir avec MOI, followed by a creation for Montpellier Danse in 2006, Huwa, ce lui. In 2007, Radhouane performed in Héla Fattoumi and Eric Lamoureux' 1000 Departures of Muscles. In 2008 he created Quelqu’un van danser…, commissioned by the festival Rencontres Chorégraphiques de Seine-Saint-Denis. That same year, invited by choreographer Salia Sanou, he conceived a culinary dance performance for the event “Sonorités et corps d’Afrique”, entitled Je danse et je vous en donne à bouffer. It premiered at Centre National de la Danse and is still a highly demanded piece. In 2010 he created his first group piece, Ce que nous sommes, premiering as well at the Centre National de la Danse. Other works since: Chant d’amour (2011), Aletroit (2011), Tunis, 14 janvier 2011 (2011), Sous leurs pieds, le paradis (2012), and Nos Limites (2012, a piece for two young circus performers, produced by the 104-Centquatre in Paris). In spring 2014 followed Au temps où les Arabes dansaient… (2014) premiered at CDC Toulouse. In April 2015, Radhouane will present a prelude to his new creation, Heroes, with ten performers, at the Paris Panthéon, premiering within the framework of the festival Séquence Danse of the 104-Centquatre, where Radhouane has been associate artist since 2011.
Learn moreElisa Harkins, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, and Zoë Poluch came together in 2019 to create Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ. The work was borne in part from a common interest in minimalism in art and music, which led to a wish to create a first work together. Elisa Harkins is a Native American (Cherokee/Muscogee) artist and composer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work is concerned with translation, language preservation, and Indigenous musicology. Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a mother, dancer, performance-maker, writer, questioner, enthusiast, and organizer born and based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her work plays with the pleasure and the haunt of the familiar as strategies of resistance and transformation. Zoë Poluch’s artistic practice puts into motion different mediums and takes shape in different rooms. Her relationship with the “contemporary dance” scene is based on a long-term and practice-based interest in the politics and poetics of moving and sensing. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Learn moreRadoslaw Rychcik is a young director living and working in Poland. He began his career as an assistant to renowned director Krystian Lupa on Factory 2 and later worked on Stanislaw Wyspianski's drama Protesilas and Laodamia. In 2008, Rychcik directed Dictator, a performance based on Charlie Chaplin’s film, for the Wybrzeze Sztuki Festival in Gdansk. Most recently, Rychcik has presented A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes at the Drama Theatre in Warsaw and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Versus: In the Jungle of Cities at the New Theatre in Krakow and the Under the Radar Festival in New York.
Selected Press
Rychcik burns actors (Solitude of Cotton Fields), Beata Frysztacka, e-splot.pl, December 20, 2009 (Translated from Polish).
Loneliness is Discovered, Agata Piecuch, e-teatr.pl, January 6, 2010 (Translated from Polish).
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The cavernous and beautiful project of renowned DJ and Further Records headmaster Chloe Harris, Raica walks a fine line between lucid animation and blurred darkness.“Originally released as a tape in 2012, Dose marked a difficult transition for Chloe Harris, the Seattle-based producer and co-head of Further Records. Before she made experimental synth music as Raica, Harris toured the world as a progressive house DJ and close associate of John Digweed, an artist who couldn’t be further removed from the music on Dose. Harris says the tape (now a record) was the sound of her trying to claw her way out of that world, or at least find a new one. Looking back on it now, Dose is a stunning document of vulnerability and volatile inspiration couched in seriously experimental, mind-bending music.” – Resident Advisor on Dose (2012)
Learn moreInspired to perform by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s injunction to "Throw your body into the fight," Hoghe was born in Wuppertal, Germany, and began his career as a writer. Until 1990, he worked as dramaturge for Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. In 1994, he produced his first solo for himself, Meinwärts, which together with the subsequent Chambre séparée (1997) and Another Dream (2000) made up a trilogy on the 20th century. Since 2002, Hoghe has choreographed group productions or duos that reinterpret classic dance pieces, including Swan Lake, 4 Acts (2005); Sacre — The Rite of the Spring (2004), with Lorenzo De Brabandere; Boléro Variations (2007) and L'Après-midi with Emmanuel Eggermont (2008).
Learn moreConceived in 2002 by Nick Jones and Raja Azar, the group began with a song, Pyrate Love, performed while they were working for the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, and the two set out to create a massive live musical pirate puppet sea saga. Four years, six “episodes,” and hours of bizarre musical material later, Jollyship the Whiz-Bang have toured the US, Canada, Ireland, and have recently finished a residency in Bangkok for the Hoontown Puppet Festival. In 2005, they released their first album, Songs to Drown By, and recorded a DVD (forthcoming) adapting Crabquistador, the latest episode of their saga.
Learn moreRaja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, a director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory. He is a three-time Princess Grace Award winner (2017, 2018, 2019), two-time Lucille Lortel Award nominee (2019, 2020), and 2019 Chita Rivera Award nominee. In 2020 he was the Obie Award winner and Outer Critics Circle Award honoree for choreography for the Pulitzer-winning musical A Strange Loop. In 2019 he was an SDCF Joe A. Callaway Award finalist for both A Strange Loop and the Pulitzer-winning play Fairview. Raja is also the 2019–2020 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2019 Creative Capital award recipient. He is a current fellow of HERE Arts, the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School. Over the past decade, Kelly has created fifteen evening-length premieres with his company the feath3r theory as well as directing and choreographing extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City. His choreography has also garnered a 2018 Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) and the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and he was Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College.
Learn moreRalph Pugay is an artist who was born in the province of Cavite, Philippines, and has resided in Portland, OR for the majority of his adult life. He creates imaginative and thought-provoking tableaus that prompt viewers to contemplate the boundaries of cultural norms, identity, and social perception. His works have been exhibited at various venues, including Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Seattle Art Museum, Upfor Gallery, Marinaro, Webb Art Gallery, Vox Populi, AA|LA, and King School Museum for Contemporary Art. Pugay is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award, a Betty Bowen Award, and an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship among others. He has also been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Joan Mitchell Center, the Rauschenberg Residency, Vermont Studio Center, PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab, Crows Shadow, and the University of Oregon’s Center for Artistic Research.
Learn moreRap Class is an eclectic DJ and producer who has been operating out of the Pacific Northwest for the better part of the last decade. His styles are routed in a heavy sample-based audio collage and disco mix champion influence. He can deliver anything; changing the ins and outs of his routine is his specialty. Every time you see him it’s like drawing a prize out from a bag. His one goal: to keep his audience guessing. Seeing him live, audiences may just learn that forward thinking electronic music doesn’t merely exist in the present, but lives as a culmination of all music history, a fact to be presented by the right DJ at the right place & time: Rap Class.
Selected Press
"Rap Class: Brothers Superhero," Christian Santana, XLR8R, August 10, 2012.
"Rap Class," Reed Jackson, Willamette Week, October 31, 2012.
Learn moreRaquel André was born in Caneças, Portugal in 1986. Her artistic path began early on. In 2009, her first performance was created out her the discovery of a box full of handwritten letters from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. André has since cultivated an interest in collecting—particularly in the performing arts—and in 2016, she completed her master’s thesis at University Federal of Rio de Janeiro on the subject.
In 2011, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where a five-month artistic residency in Companhia dos Atores turned into five years. There, she began working with director and actress Bel Garcia on several theater productions. André also worked with actor, curator, and director César Augusto in Galpão Gamboa, where she co-programmed and produced theater, dance and music. André studied in the Theater and Film School of Lisbon, and worked with several Portuguese artists from different artistic languages. Her work has been shown on television, and in Portugal, Spain, Poland, Cuba, Argentina, and Brazil.
Learn moreRaven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of a United States Artists fellowship in music, a Creative Capital award in visual arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
Learn moreRay Beldner is a sculptor and mixed media artist whose work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and can be found in many public and private collections including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the Federal Reserve Board, Washington D.C., 21c Museum, Kentucky, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California, and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others.Born in San Francisco, Beldner received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Mills College. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a California Arts Council Fellowship in New Genres, a Creative Work Fund Grant from the Haas Foundations, and a Potrero Nuevo environmental art grant. He has taught sculpture, interdisciplinary studies, and professional practices at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, San Francisco State University, and University of California, Santa Cruz.His work has been reviewed in publications including Art in America, Arte, Art On Paper, Artweek, Wired, Playboy, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.
Learn moreRebecca Gates is an Oregon based musician, artist, curator, and activist. She has toured and released albums internationally, and appeared on recordings by a range of artists including Willie Nelson, Akito Katayose and The Decemberists. Her programs and work relating to issues of sound and space, listening, and artist's roles in their communities have been hosted by PS1, Mass MOCA, WFMU's Radiovision Festival, PICA Symposium, The Museum of Contemporary Craft, New York University and galleries in the United States and Europe. Gates co-curated Ballroom Marfa's sonic exploration of land arts, "The Marfa Sessions", co-founded The Relay Project audiomagazine, and is chief wrangler at The Agency League of Musicians, a musician centered think tank and action network.
Learn moreReggie Watts made his name playing and singing in the band Maktub, a central part of the Seattle music scene throughout the 1990s. Embarking on his solo career in 2004, Watts has focused on developing a unique comedic style that synthesizes elements from R&B, beatboxing, alternative theatre and video. A prolific artist, Watts has completed projects with The Yes Men, collaborated with SOULLIVE and Yunchen Lhamo, and appeared at SXSW, the Montreal Comedy Festival, Cape Town and Edinburgh Comedy Festivals, TBA Festival in Portland, The Fuse Box Festival in Austin, Bonaroo, Sasquatch Festival, plus several BBC live radio events. He is winner of the 2005 Malcolm Hardee Oy! Oy! Award and the 2006 Andy Kaufman Comedy Award. In 2006 he was also a recipient of the Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award.
Learn moreReuben Tomás Roqueñi is a Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in San Francisco making grants to sustain artistic expression and encourage public engagement in the arts. These grants embrace a wide range of artistic disciplines, aesthetics, and cultural traditions in the areas of dance, media, music, and theater that engage people across diverse communities.
Prior to Hewlett, Reuben served 5 years as Program Director at the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, a national arts philanthropic organization, located in the Portland, Oregon area and serving Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian artists, organizations, and programs. The grantmaking strategies included artist fellowships that focusing on innovation in contemporary arts practices; project support investing in social change and community development through the arts; and operating support working in partnership with Native arts service organizations to leverage broader support for the field. Previously, Reuben served as Grants Manager at a public agency, the Tucson Pima Arts Council in Tucson, Arizona, directing all grantmaking processes and program administration, supporting the region’s nonprofit arts organizations and individual artists.
Reuben currently serves on the board of Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) whose annual Time Based Art Festival (TBA) supports the experiments of innovative contemporary performing artists. He serves on the board of The Association of American Cultures (TAAC), whose bi-annual Open Dialogue conference provides leadership in achieving equal participation in policymaking, equitable funding for all cultural institutions, and an elevation in multicultural leadership that impact cultural policies. He is also on the Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) national Thought Leader Forum on Racial Equity in Grantmaking. Previously he served on the Board of Directors at Access Tucson (public television) and was a founding Board member of the Tucson Musicians and Artists Health Alliance (TAMHA). He is a graduate of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture’s (NALAC) Leadership Training Institute and the first NALAC Arts Advocacy Institute in DC. Reuben has served on grants review panels, national to local, for the National Endowment for the Arts, ArtPlace, NALAC Fund for the Arts, Rasmuson Foundation, Artist Trust, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Regional Arts and Culture Council (Portland), Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, and Pro-Neighborhoods Tucson.
Reuben is of mixed ancestry (Yaqui/Mexican). He began his career in arts administration at the afterschool arts and business program, Old Pascua Youth Artists (OPYA), serving Yaqui youth and as an artist educator in the public school system. He spent 6 years in the private sector with American Airlines and has lived in Seattle, St Croix, New Orleans, and San Antonio. He was raised in California, received his BFA from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is a multi-media visual artist.
Learn moreReuben Tomás Roqueñi
Director of National Artists Fellowships
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
Reuben is a nationally respected arts administrator with over 15 years in progressive program development, management, artist-centric support systems and grantmaking experience. He is currently Director of National Artists Fellowships at Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, serving Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian artists, organizations, and programs across the US. Previously, Reuben was Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area, one the nation’s largest arts and culture funders. Formerly, Reuben served as Grants Program Director at the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. Reuben is a board member at MAP Fund in NYC and a former a board member at PICA. Reuben is of mixed Yaqui/Mayo/Chicanx ancestry and is currently living in Portland, Oregon.
Learn moreRhea Wolf is feminist, witch and astrologer whose life purpose is to help people awaken their inherent creativity, activate their authentic selves and deepen their connections to the larger world. Rhea is motivated by a vision of an emerging culture based on respect, beauty, justice and relatedness.
Rhea Wolf has been a workshop facilitator for fifteen years, bringing creative writing, theater arts and The Work that Reconnects to a variety of groups, including at-risk youth and women in prison. After her Saturn Return, she began her journey as a professional astrologer and a mother of two daughters.
Rhea has worked as the Program Coordinator for Write Around Portland and was a performing artist and teacher with Sowelu Ensemble Theater. Rhea has a BFA in Theater Performance from Wichita State University. In addition, she has studied theater and deep ecology at the Naropa Institute, and trained extensively with world-renowned author Joanna Macy. After 4½ years of intensive study, she graduated from Colette Gardiner's Blue Iris Mystery School in 2009.
Rhea is the author of The Light That Changes: The Moon in Astrology, Stories and Time. Her articles have appeared in The Mountain Astrologer, hipMama, Perspectives, and VoiceCatcher. For the past seven years, she has offered workshops on astrology, spirituality and creativity to groups large and small throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Rhea’s passion for astrology began in childhood when she was given an impromptu tutorial of the zodiac by her hippie teen-aged babysitter. She remembers feeling a sense of wonder and also familiarity. Since then, she's devoured countless books on astrology and has received training and guidance from astrologers such as Demetra George, Emily Trinkaus and Steven Forrest. Rhea brings her love of the Earth, the spirit of wonder and her desire to deepen relationships to all that she does. She enjoys helping people find ways to claim more beauty and magic in their daily lives.
Rhea is a Leo Sun, Leo Rising, Taurus Moon and North Node in Scorpio. Full chart information is available upon request for students and potential students.
Learn moreHelgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel founded the theatre label Rimini Protokoll in 2000 and have since worked in different constellations under this name. Work by work, they have expanded the means of the theatre to create new perspectives on reality.
Rimini Protokoll often develops their stage-works, interventions, performative installations, and audio plays together with experts who have gained their knowledge and skills beyond the theatre. Furthermore, they like to transpose rooms or social structures into theatrical formats. Many of their works feature interactivity and a playful use of technology.
Hence, Rimini Protokoll declared the “General Assembly” of Daimler stockholders a theatre play, or, with “Call Cutta” and “Call Cutta in a Box,” they set up a transatlantic conversation between a worker in an Indian call center and each audience member.
With “100% City,” they have created a worldwide, ever-newly contextualizing work in which 100 statistically selected inhabitants of the city gather on a theatre stage. Their production “World Climate Conference” mirrors the drama of diplomatic efforts to protect the Earth's atmosphere at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg. For the multiplayer video walk “Situation Rooms,” they built a hyperrealistic set in which the 20 audience members follow the tracks of people whose biographies have been shaped by weapons.
In “Utopolis,” the audience is guided through the city by 48 portable speakers that set a course for shared or contradicting utopias.
Recently, more immersive and interactive works have been created for museums, such as “win><win“ and “Urban Nature.”The pieces "All right. Good night." (2022), “Chinchilla Arsehole, eyeye” (2020), “Situation Rooms” (2014), “Wallenstein” (2006), and “Deadline” (2004) have been invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen. On top of that, Rimini Protokoll received the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis for “Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Erster Band,” the German theatre award Faust, the Grand Prix Theatre from the Swiss Federal Office for Culture, the European Theatre Award, the Silver Lion at the Theatre Biennale in Venice, as well as the German Audio Play Award and the War Blinded Audio Play Prize.
Since 2003, the production office of Rimini Protokoll has been in Berlin.
Learn moreThe multi-talented Rinde Eckert is an acclaimed performer, director, writer, composer, librettist, and musician whose virtuosic command of gesture, language, and song takes this total theatre artist beyond the traditional boundaries of what a ‘play,’ a ‘dance piece,’ an ‘opera,’ or a ‘musical’ might be. Eckert creates solo work, chamber pieces and through-composed operas with larger casts in collaborations with choreographers, composers, directors, and new music ensembles. His Opera/New Music Theatre productions have toured throughout the U.S. and to major European and Asian festivals. Current theater and music projects in which he performs include My Lai with the Kronos Quartet; The Aging Magician with Paola Prestini and Beth Morrison Productions; and Five Beasts with composer/performer Ned Rothenberg and beat box artist Adam Matta. Among his many awards, Rinde Eckert was the 2007 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
Learn morerise x fall is an in-progress multimedia collaboration between rubén garcía marrufo, maximiliano, and Jaleesa Johnston. Conjured from liminal space, this work considers the rise and fall of an empire, and the possibilities between stability and instability. Taking inspiration from the ocean’s crashing waves against the earth, rise x fall simultaneously inhabits the space between the pain and fear of death, as well as the hope and growth of rebirth.
ARTISTS' BIOS
mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist working in BLKwvv, a generative multimedia mythos: a Black reclamation rococo aesthetic and agenda based in exploring and expanding the multiplicity and fluidity of the Black self through pleasure, desirability, innocence, and imagination as performance, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, and publications.
rubén garcía marrufo is a border artist.
https://rubengarciamarrufo.com/
Jaleesa Johnston is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and arts administrator currently living and working in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has been the recipient of the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency, and Open Signal’s New Media Fellowship. She has exhibited her work in cities along the West Coast, including San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, and she occasionally facilitates workshops and classes in new media and performance art. Jaleesa also organizes public programs as Programs Lead in the Learning and Community Partnerships Department at the Portland Art Museum.
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