Artists Archive

robbinschilds: 7 Events; robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins) have presented choreographed and video works since 2003, in venues including P.S. 122, Marfa Ballroom, The New Museum, and Autumn Skatebowl. Most recently, robbinschilds was commissioned to create original choreography for David Byrne and premiered a new work, Sonya and Layla Go Camping, at The Kitchen.
Robert Boyd: 3 Events; Boyd's work has been exhibited at venues such as the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong (2009); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY (2008); Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT (2008); Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2008); Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (2008); The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis (2007); 303 Gallery, NY (2007); PKM Gallery, Beijing (2006); Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2006); and Participant Inc, NY (2006). His work is included in several public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création in Paris.
Robert Quillen Camp: 2 Events; Robert Quillen Camp is a theater artist and scholar whose current research focuses primarily on the ways in which expanded dramatic practices intersect with contemporary post-conceptual visual art. His other research areas include European modern drama and the phenomenology of performance.
He has written extensively for the stage, including writing the text for Pig Iron Theater Company’s OBIE-award winning CHEKHOV LIZARDBRAIN, which has toured internationally and been published by 53rd State Press. His most recent play, ALL HANDS, a collaboration with the Hoi Polloi Theater Company, premiered at NYC’s Incubator Arts Project in 2012, directed by Alec Duffy, with music by Dave Malloy and choreography by Dan Safer. Another collaboration with Pig Iron, the Barrymore Award nominated PAY UP, returned to the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in the fall of 2013. His plays and performance works have been produced at many venues in the US and abroad, including the Public Theater Under the Radar Festival, the Ohio Theater, the Ontological-Hysteric, Peak Performances at Montclair University, The Empty Space, Prelude Festival, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and HERE. His plays have been published in the literary journals Conjunctions, Chain, Conundrum, Factorial, and Play A Journal of Plays.
He currently teaches in the theatre department at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR.
BA Reed College, MFA Brown University, PhD University of California, Santa Barbara.
Rob Halverson: 1 Event; Rob Halverson is an artist and curator living and working in Los Angeles, California. Recent solo exhibitions include XO the Sky Billions Star, Chapter NY, New York, Warm Side of Zero, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles and List Grows Eyeball, Ditch Projects, Springfield, Oregon. Halverson has been included in exhibitions at Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles, Queer Thoughts, Lake Nicaragua, Nicaragua and Misako & Rosen Tokyo, Japan. Halverson will be part of a two person exhibition with Chadwick Rantanen at Soloway, Brooklyn, New York in December. In 2016 Halverson will be curating Lasting Concept at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.
Robin Deacon: 3 Events; Robin Deacon (born 1973 Eastbourne, England) is a British artist, writer and filmmaker currently based in the USA. Active from the 1990’s, his work explores questions of memory, absence and fiction in performance, through a constant reconfiguration of his role as an artist - as journalist and biographer, operator and technician, imposter and stooge. His recent research projects have explored histories of video documentation and outmoded media formats, and the practice and ethics of performance re-enactment. His live and screen based work has been commissioned and programmed throughout Europe, the US, and Asia. A MacDowell Fellow, he has been a recipient of a variety of awards and fellowships from organizations such as the Delfina Foundation, British Arts Council, Live Art Development Agency and Franklin Furnace Inc.
Robin Lane: 1 Event; Robin Lane began studying dance, gymnastics, theater, and visual art as a child. At fourteen, she created her first evening-length performance at the Robert Frost Auditorium, combining her high school gymnastic team with the dance club and creating an original score with the school orchestra playing office equipment. As a director/choreographer/writer, her focus has always been telling stories, linear and nonlinear, bringing to life the visual images, metaphors, and stories she sees in her head. She uses whatever vocabulary the images demand. Her intent is always to hone each new work to communicate and connect with her audiences. Exploration, collaboration, and ensemble building are core elements of her creative process.
In 1977, Lane founded Do Jump to explore her unique genre. Lane has created 19 original, full‐length works and countless smaller site‐specific pieces, events, and spectacles.
In 1983, Lane and company renovated the Echo Theatre in southeast Portland, OR, creating a permanent home for Do Jump! The following year she opened the Do Jump Physical Theatre School, sharing her unique teaching style with children and adults, providing a training ground for the company. Lane has toured extensively with Do Jump, including multiple extended runs in the New Victory Theater in NYC, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. “That Happened,” Lane’s first feature film, just had its first screening at PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon
Robin is the recipient of the Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship in Dance, three creativity grants from the NEA, and the 2010 Regional Arts and Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Performing Arts. Lane attended a joint program between Reed College and the Portland Museum Art School. She studied the LeCoque Method and was a member of Theatre Elan Company. In 1973, Lane studied aerial dance with Terry Sendgraff in San Francisco and Bill & Arnie Zane in NYC. In Portland, Oregon, she created and choreo/directed original works for Storefront Theater, Tygres Heart Shakespeare, Portland Family Circus, and others.
Roland Dahwen Wu: 2 Events; Roland Dahwen Wu is a filmmaker whose work explores migration, race and memory. His films and installations have been shown at CalArts, Portland Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival, Northwest Film Center, and numerous galleries. His films span nonfiction, experimental, and narrative genres, and are commonly marked by poetry: from his first documentary about the whistling language of the Canary Islands (There are no birds in the nests of yesterday) to his recent short film about 20th century Asian migration (Haft-Seen).
Ronaldo V. Wilson: 1 Event; Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Prize, Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2017). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. His Off the Dome: Rants, Raps, and Meditations, an online album, exists on The Conversant. His short films “Grey,” “White,” “Blue,” “Red,” “Green,” “Brown,” “Pink,” “Black,” can also be found online at the Center for Art and Thought. Wilson is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and co-directing the Creative Writing Program. He splits his time between Santa Cruz, CA and Long Island, New York.
Ronnie Bass: 6 Events; Bass is a visual artist and musician who lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally at institutions and galleries including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), The Kitchen (New York), James Cohen Gallery (New York), The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), The Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, Scotland), and The Contemporary Art Center of Tel Aviv (Israel). Musical compositions include the score for Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Hugo Boss Prize Exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Bass is currently producing a hip-hop album intended for release in 2012.
Selected Press
500 Words: Ronnie Bass, Miriam Katz, Artforum.com, December 9, 2009.
⁠2009, A Space Odyssey-Ronnie Bass at Marginal Utility, Libby Rosof, The Artblog, November 8, 2009.
Art in Review: Ronnie Bass, Ken Johnson, New York Times, October 17, 2008.
Selected Videos
Rose Bond: 1 Event; Rose Bond creates work at the juncture of expanded cinema and experimental animation. Her large-scale animated installations navigate the allegories of place and illuminate urban space with fragments of the often overlooked – the ‘other’. With roots in frame-by-frame, hand drawn animation, she has since turned her focus towards public media performances. Her current work-in-progress, Earths to Come, an interdisciplinary collaboration with composer inti figgis-vizueta and Roomful of Teeth, pushes her cinema-born aesthetic into the spatialized terrain of VR and domes. Earths to Come, was developed in part at a Multi-disciplinary residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in NYC and at the 2024 Venice Biennale Immersive College.
Recent work includes large-scale, multi-screen live projections for symphony with works by avant-garde composers Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, 2020 and Olivier Messiaen‘s Turangalîla- Symphonie, 2016. Other animated installations include: two pieces for the permanent collection at the Portland Chinatown Museum, 2018; Illumination No.1 reprise at Portland’s Old Town Society Hotel, 2014; a prototype for a media installation in the Smithsonian’s Arts & Industries Building, 2012;Broadsided! at Exeter Castle, 2010; Intra Muros, shown during the 2007 Platform International Animation Festival and reprised for the Holland Animation Film Festival, Utrecht, 2008, and Nuit Blanche, Toronto 2011.
Bond’s paint-on-film animated films have been presented at major international festivals and are held in the MoMA Film Collection. She has received support from The Princess Grace Foundation, Bloomberg LP, Prince Bernhard Culture Foundation, Creative Heights Oregon Community Arts, the National Film Board of Canada, Arts Council England, the Canada Council for the Arts, American Film Institute, and the National Endowment for the arts. Her work has been cited in numerous publications including Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art, Re-imagining Animation: The Changing Face of the Moving Image, The Animation Bible, Experimental and Expanded Animation: New Perspectives & Practices, and the Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital. Rose Bond is a Canadian born media artist based in Portland Oregon.
Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble: 2 Events; Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE) has performed rituals at the Guggenheim Museum, Under the Radar Festival, FringeArts, Under the Radar’s Incoming! Series, Gibney Dance Center, Kate Werble Gallery, Special Effects Festival at Participant Inc., Prelude Festival, AUNTS Arts@Renaissance, and JACK. ROKE received a 2016 Creative Capital award for The Art of Luv series, and has been awarded a Franklin Furnace Fund grant (2013) and a BAX Space Grant (2014). They were part of the Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group and PS122’s RAMP residency program. They spent the summer of 2014 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and were 2015 CUNY Hunter Artists-in-Residence in ceramics. The Art of Luv (Part 1): Elliot is created with support from The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group, Gibney Dance Center, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and a residency at CUNY City Tech. Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble is supported by Immediate Medium’s AGENCY program, which provides financial, administrative, and equipment support to emerging artists. The Art of Luv is a project of Creative Capital.
Roy Pérez: 2 Events; Roy Pérez teaches and writes about gender, sex and race in contemporary literature, art, and performance. He is an associate professor of English, American Ethnic Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. His poems and essays have appeared in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017), Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (OSUP, 2017), Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, the Best of Panic! poetry anthology, Bully Bloggers, and FENCE Magazine, and he is co-editor with Kadji Amin and Amber Musser of "Queer Form," a special issue of ASAP/Journal. He is writing a book titled Proximities: Queer Configurations of Race in Latinx Literature and Performance.
Roza Moshtaghi: 1 Event; Roza Moshtaghi (Tehran/Iran) lives and works in Oslo. Her works are situated within the performing arts field as a choreographer and performer. Questions of how she, buildings, streets, nature, events, bodies, and objects in general react or adapt to structures have been crucial to most of her work. Roza holds an MA in choreography from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She presents her works internationally and continues to develop projects with other artists, both as a collaborator and as a performer. Her most recent projects are Only Forever (2018), Flonch (2017), The Smell of Its Shirt (2016), Water Graffiti (2016).
rubén garcía marrufo: 3 Events; rubén garcía marrufo is a border artist and ⅓ of rise x fall.
Ruby Sky Stiler: 4 Events; Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Stiler received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been shown internationally at galleries including Nicelle Beauchene (New York), Sandroni Rey (Los Angeles), and Annarumma 404 (Naples, Italy). Recent and upcoming exhibitions include solo projects at Callicoon Fine Arts (New York), The Suburban (Chicago) as well as the Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park (New York). Stiler has been featured in BOMBlog, Artforum.com, and Flash Art Italia and is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York.
Selected Press
Ruby Sky Stiler, Christopher Howard, Artforum, May 2009.
Ruby Sky Stiler, Rebekah Drysdale, Daily Serving, May 16, 2009.
In Words: Ruby Sky Stiler, Kelly Devine Thomas, BOMBlog May 25, 2009.
That's What He Said, Ian Cooper, The Highlights, October 2009.
Rude Mechs: 3 Events; Since 1995, Rude Mechs has created a mercurial slate of 23 theatrical productions that represent a genre-defying cocktail of big ideas, cheap laughs, and dizzying spectacle. What these works hold in common is the use of play to make performance, the use of theaters as meeting places for audiences and artists, and the use of humor as a tool for intellectual investigation. The company tours these performances nationally and abroad; maintains The Off Center, a performance venue in Austin for arts groups of every discipline; and operates a year-round arts mentoring program for teenage girls.
Selected Press
The Rude Mechs' "The Method Gun" at DTW, Jeremy M. Barker, Culturebot, March 3, 2011.
Many Methods to Collaborative Madness, Joan Anderman, The New York Times, February 22, 2011.
Rufus Wainwright: 2 Events; The son of folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, Rufus Wainwright has achieved success by carving out his own singular sound in the worlds of rock, opera, theater, dance and film. He has released seven albums and three DVDs, as well as collaborating with artists including Elton John, David Byrne, and Burt Bacharach. Wainwright was nominated for a Grammy for the live recording from his Judy Garland tribute concert, Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall. His opera, Prima Donna, premiered at the 2009 Manchester International Festival, and has been presented as part of Toronto's Luminato Festival and at London’s Sadler’s Wells.
Selected Press
A flair for the popular, Andrew Clark, Financial Times, July 13, 2009.
How We Met: Janis Kelly & Rufus Wainwright, Rhiannon Harries, The Independent, March 21, 2010.
Rush-N-Disco: 1 Event; The original YouTube cover band, Portland-based Rush-N-Disco reappropriates found media into an absurdly entertaining assault on the senses. Like a postmodern Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Greg Arden and Alicia McDaid commit fully to their invocations of failed pop stars, celebutante breakdowns, amateur pet videos, and exercise gurus. Acting as oral historians of our information-overloaded age, they flow each vignette into the next, creating an arc that takes the audience through an incantation, a birthing, a love story, a descent into betrayal and death, resurrection, therapy, insanity, religious zealotry, and finally, redemption—depending on the show.
Though material is mostly inspired by Youtube, Arden and McDaid create characters and situations that stand alone, regardless of one's familiarity with the 'Tube. While some audiences might recognize everything from "Talking Cats" to "Britney On Drugs," those who have not seen any of the source material are still consistently engaged and drawn into the performances. From the brink of cable access stardom to the edge of sanity, Rush-N-Disco are the carnies of this hilarious yet poignant roller coaster ride of song, dance, and stairway-to-stardom castaways.
Sable Elyse Smith: 1 Event; Sable Elyse Smith’s work has been exhibited in numerous institutions, with solo shows at the Queens Museum in New York and the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee. In the forthcoming year Smith’s work will be featured in exhibitions at the New Museum, NY, the Wexner Center of the Arts in Columbus, OH, MoMA PS1, NY and she will be an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency. Most recently, her work was on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA as part of Colored People Time, which traveled from the ICA Philadelphia. Her work was included in Great Force at the ICA at Virginia Commonwealth University, and solo shows include Carlos Ishikawa in London (2019) and JTT in New York (2018). Smith was a 2018/2019 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem which culminated in an exhibition at MoMA PS1, NY. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Matthew Brown Los Angeles, the Highline in New York, for which she also curated an event at The Kitchen, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, SITE Santa Fe, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, El Museo Del Barrio, and Andrea Rosen Gallery.
Sacha Yanow: 2 Events; Sacha Yanow is a New York City-based artist and actor. Her solo performance works include: Dad Band, New Museum, NYC (2015); Silent Film (in development), The Lab, San Francisco, Pieter, Los Angeles, and MAPP/Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY (2015), Dixon Place, NYC (2014), and Movement Research Festival, NYC (2013); and The Prince, Dixon Place, NYC (2013). Her residencies and awards include: LMCC Process Space (2016); SOMA, Mexico City (2015); Dixon Place, NYC (2014); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2012); and The Field, NYC (2011). She was creative consultant for Elisabeth Subrin’s feature film A Woman A Part (2016), and co-director and dramaturge for Dynasty Handbag’s performance piece Soggy Glasses (The Broad/REDCAT 2016, Brooklyn Academy of Music 2014). Yanow received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a graduate of the William Esper Studio Actor Training program.
Sahar al-Sawaf: 1 Event; Sahar al-Sawaf (she/her) is an Iraqi-American filmmaker, visual artist, and photographer based in Oregon. Born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Lebanon and Iraq, she fled to California just before the Gulf War. Her work explores war, displacement, and fragmented family memory shaped by her experiences in Iraq and the United States. Her short films “Uncle Ma’an,” “Um Abdullah,” and “Shadow of Paradise” have screened internationally, including at DOC NYC, Chicago International Film Festival, and Animafest Zagreb. She was a Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center in New York, NY, and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Video/Film. Most recently, she completed a photogravure intensive at Mullowney Printing, supported by a Regional Arts Cultural Council grant. Her photo-performance work is featured in the 2026 Artists’ Biennial, The Price of the Ticket, at Oregon Contemporary.
https://www.salsawaffles.com
Salimatu Amabebe: 1 Event; Salimatu Amabebe (they/he), is a Bay Area-based chef, multimedia artist and the founder/ director of Black Feast. Amabebe's work focuses on the intersection of food and art, drawing from family memories, Nigerian recipes, and Black culinary history.
@salimatuamabebe
Sam Gould: 1 Event; Sam Gould is the co-founder and editor of Red76, an experimental publication platform. Established in Portland, Oregon in January of 2000, Red76 often works towards forming publics through print and other methods like meals and public projects that open space to discuss social, educational, and political life in America today.
Gould has taught within the graduate department for Social Practice at the California College of the Arts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has written, as well as lectured extensively within the United States and abroad.
Sam Green: 2 Events; Green is a documentary filmmaker based in New York and San Francisco. His film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, and the NEA.
Selected Press
Sam Green's Love Song at SFIFF, Mike Plante, Filmmaker Magazine, May 7, 2012.
'The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller' with Yo La Tengo at SFIFF, John Angelico, SFGate Culture Blog, May 3, 2012.
A hundred visions and revisions, Sam Stander, San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 17, 2012.
Someone else's glasses: Sam Green Talks Buckminster Fuller, Moriah Ulinskas, Bay Area Video Coalition, April 25, 2012.
Sam Hamilton: 2 Events; Sam Hamilton (Sam Tam Ham) is an independent, working class, interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent based in Portland, OR. After 20 years of working independently and professionally across experimental music and sound art, moving and still image, painting, writing, performance, stage, cinema, and curatorial projects, Hamilton's practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but verdant garden full of old and new growth, hidden places, edible arrangements, toxic weeds, garden parties, frolicking, and most importantly, the life-affirming ferment of deep existential entanglement. What physically emerges in any given season through the confluence of this garden depends most simply on what vessel(s) best serve the idea at hand.

The long song
a meandering garden path
Both an entrance and an exit

Hamilton's work has existed in a wide range of contexts, including Converge 45, Portland; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Portland Art Museum, OR; Transmediale, Berlin; Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival; Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland; as well as a research station in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, an active volcanic island crater, a billboard, a functioning Shinto shrine in Japan, an anarchist squat in Athens, Greece, the Australian outback desert, a dank underground parking lot, some dude’s apartment in Lima, Peru, and on the radio.

In addition to their solo work, they have collaborated extensively with artists across Aotearoa New Zealand, Sāmoa, Australia, Kiribati, the US, Finland, Japan, and Peru, including ten years spent working with the internationally acclaimed Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, touring major works to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAB; Ruhrtriennale, Ruhr; KVS; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; and more.

Their work has been recognized with a Creative Capital Award, Oregon Community Foundation's Creative Heights Award, and an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award, among others.
Samita Sinha: 3 Events; Artist and composer Samita Sinha creates multidisciplinary performance works that investigate origins of voice. She synthesizes Indian vocal traditions and embodied practices to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation. Sinha's works have been commissioned and presented by Asia Society, Performance Space 122, Danspace, Rubin Museum, Queens Museum, Western Front, and Gibney Dance, among others. Sinha teaches voice extensively.
www.samitasinha.com
Samiya Bashir: 3 Events; Samiya Bashir’s books of poetry: Field Theories, Gospel, and Where the Apple Falls, and anthologies, including Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, exist. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. She lives in Portland, Ore, with a magic cat who shares her obsession with trees and blackbirds and occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
Samiya Bashir is the author of Field Theories (2017), as well as Gospel (2009), and Where the Apple Falls (2005), which were both Lambda Literary Award finalists. She is also the author of the chapbooks Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring (1999), American Visa (2001), and Teasing Crow (2006). She is also the editor of Black Women’s Erotica 2 (2003) and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art (2002), with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana. Her work has been most recently featured in Poetry, Drunken Boat, World Literature Today, Portland Monthly, Tuesday, An Art Project, The Offing, Ecotone, HOAX, Poet Lore, Callaloo, and The Encyclopedia Project. Samiya also collaborates with a variety of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Field Theories in Light, Sound, & Movement, with Roland Dahwen Wu and Keyon Gaskin, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, currently on exhibition at L.A. Louver. Bashir is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent. Bashir lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches creative writing at Reed College. “Breath,” Bashir says, “is everything.” Bashir’s work helps to remind us not only to breathe, but how, and why, and together.
Sampada Aranke: 8 Events; TBA:16 Guest Scholar Sampada Aranke (PhD, Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in Art Journal, Equid Novi: African Journalism Studies, and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. She’s currently working on her book manuscript entitled Death’s Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics.
San Cha: 5 Events; San Cha is a Mexican-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice blends rancheras, electronics, cumbia, and pop to explore themes of identity, power, and liberation. Born Lizette Gutierrez to Mexican immigrant parents, San Cha's artistic journey began with singing in the Catholic Church choir and evolved within the vibrant Bay Area queer drag nightlife scene. This formative period fostered a unique fusion of musical influences, including Catholic hymns, Mexican corridos, rancheras, cumbias, and punk queer electroclash, shaping her distinct artistic voice.
Rooted in the DIY, punk, and queer nightlife cultures, San Cha's work is driven by a commitment to personal, social, and political liberation. Her creative process is fueled by community narratives, lucid dreams, and cultural exploration. A transformative experience living on her aunt's farm in Jalostotitlán, Mexico inspired her to reimagine traditional ranchera music through a queer lens, subverting established forms and cultural signifiers.
San Cha's early work, such as the Capricho del Diablo EP (2018), received critical acclaim, with Bandcamp Daily naming it Album Of The Day. Her 2019 album, La Luz De La Esperanza, earned an 8.0 rating on Pitchfork and recognition as one of The Advocate's "Women Of The Year" in 2020. Her music has been featured in the Starz TV series Vida and Kacey Musgraves' film Star-Crossed: The Film, with the Los Angeles Times declaring, "San Cha sings from a divine place." Her ongoing Processions (2024) mixtape, released through Ballroom Marfa, further demonstrates her artistic versatility and commitment to exploring complex narratives.
San Cha's practice extends to collaborative projects in classical music and opera. She has engaged in projects, performances, and residencies with Performance Space New York, New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; lumber room, Portland, OR; The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Red Bull; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; Denniston Hill, Glen Wild, NY; Oak Head; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; Movimiento de Arte y Cultural Latino Americana, San Jose, CA; KQED; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Portland, OR, and more. Her work has also been supported by the California Arts Council.
Recent awards and accolades include the National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund Grant (2023), National Performance Network Documentation & Storytelling Grant (2024), Los Angeles Performance Practice Research & Development Award (2024), a 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. San Cha's work consistently pushes artistic boundaries, utilizing music and performance as powerful vehicles for sociopolitical change and liberation.
Sanchel Brown: 1 Event; Sanchel Brown is a mother/performer/choreographer/medicine woman originally from Baltimore, MD. She has worked professionally in commercial, concert, and theatre primarily in New York and Philadelphia. She obtained her B.F.A from Virginia Commonwealth University, and since then has continued her studies at L’Ecole De Sable in Senegal West Africa, with Rhapsody James in Los Angeles, and Rhythm One Acting with Ozzie Jones. She began her career as an apprentice with Urban Bush Women. Her performance career continued on with highlights such as World of Dance Philadelphia, The Kimmel Center's 2018 Jazz residency, Davido’s Coming to America Tour, Theatre Horizon's Black Nativity (Barrymore Win!), and Let 'Im Move You: This is a Formation (National Tour). Her choreography highlights include Theatre Horizon's "The Color Purple" Regional PREMIERE ( nominated for Outstanding Movement/Choreography) and Yale University Dramat's "Dreamgirls". Recently, she has shifted her focus into her self-produced healing works including her hit dance play "Home To Homeland” and musical titled “Wheelz of Life”. Sanchel currently teaches her original “AfroClub “ dance class fusing Baltimore House and West African Dance Forms.
Sara Greenberger Rafferty: 1 Event; Sara Greenberger Rafferty is an artist and art writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her photos, paintings, and sculptures reveal a fascination with comedy, performance, and intentional accidents (foot + banana peel, photo + spilled water, pie + face). She received her BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and her MFA in Sculpture and New Genres from Columbia in New York. Greenberger has had solo exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; The Kitchen, New York; P.S.1, New York; and The Suburban, Chicago. She has also produced a project for the 2007 Time-Based Art Festival. From 2005–07, Rafferty was co-editor of the annual publication North Drive Press; her own writing about art and comedy has been published in several notable art and culture publications. Rafferty is represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery New York.
Sarah AbuAbdallah: 1 Event; Sarah AbuAbdallah lives and works in Qatif, Saudi Arabia and studied art in both Rhode Island School of Design for a Masters in Digital Media, and in the College of Art and Design in University of Sharjah. She is currently an artist and puzzlemaker. Working with video, installation, poetry and images. Shown work in Sharjah Biennial 11, Serpentine Galleries Marathons, Fluidity in Kunstverein in Hamburg, Co-Workers in Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Do it Arabic, Prospectif Cinéma/Filter Bubble in Centre Pompidou and Luma Foundation, Private Settings in Warsaw Museum of Modern Art; Arab Contemporary in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Rhizoma in the 55th Venice Biennale, amongst others
She is the recipient of Sharjah Art Foundation’s production programme grant (2016) in collaboration with Josh Bitelli for their project To Gaze at Ten Suns Shining and is a shortlisted artist for Abraaj Group Art Prize 2017.
Sarah Dougher: 3 Events; Sarah Dougher is a musician, composer, and university professor. She has performed for over twenty years, including at PICA’s TBA festival and has received commissions from the Classical Greek Theater of Oregon, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Multnomah County Library, and the Cooley Gallery at Reed College.
Sarah Farahat: 1 Event; Sarah Farahat is a transdisciplinary Egyptian American* artist, cultural worker, teacher, and abolitionist dreaming of a more collective future for all beings. She holds a BA in Psychology from Occidental College, a BFA in Intermedia Studies from PNCA, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has trained in auricular acupuncture at the historic Lincoln Recovery Center in The Bronx, and participated in Beirut's Homeworkspace program on the coattails of the Arab "Spring." She teaches art at local colleges and for kids in her community, and is a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. For the past 16 years, Farahat has monitored the body within the sociopolitical landscape in the US and abroad, intervening with works that explore grief, connection, assimilation, storytelling, and engagement. Grassroots movement building informs her work. She finds joy in reading speculative fiction, talking with plants, cooking, and DJing. Her work lives in protests, archives, public and digital spaces, and is in the permanent collections of JustSeeds Collective, Pittsburgh; Arab American National Museum, Dearborn; Charles Voorhies Fine Art Library, Portland; Palestine Poster Project, Silver Spring; and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Culver City. She has been featured in publications including Artforum, The Oregonian, L'Orient-Le Jour, and The Daily Star. As a nomadic child of diaspora, Farahat plants portals through taste, smell, and sound while continually attempting to live in reciprocity with the land wherever she creates home. She is a co-founder of the SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center in Portland.
* Farahat grapples with an appropriate way to name her location amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects.
Sarah Gilbert: 2 Events; Sarah Gilbert (she/they) is an artist and educator based in what is currently called Los Angeles, CA (Gabrileño/Tongva/Kizh Lands), where she is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Affiliate Faculty in Gender and Feminist Studies at Pitzer College. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Brown University, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Idaho.
Gilbert’s work explores craft and collectivity—how the sticky relationality of material transformation can open spaces for thinking and feeling together in more-than-human worlds. Joining a wide range of materials and processes, her promiscuously interdisciplinary practice moves between art and science, synthesizing traditional craft techniques with emerging technologies. Often unsettling clear boundaries between past and present, her work draws on material memory and tensions between figuration and abstraction as springboards for contemplating our experience of time. Moving us away from narratives of material mastery or maker-movement individualism, Gilbert's practice highlights the ethical particularities of encounters with difference, and the radical potential of embodied attunement to reorient us towards collective care.
Gilbert has exhibited widely throughout the US and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include BREAKING AND BENDING, curated by Stephanie Snyder at the Edith Feldenheimer Gallery at Reed College, Portland; GOOSEBUMPS, an interactive sound installation as part of the 7th Tallinn Applied Arts Triennial, Estonia; and TURNINGS at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including WOMEN ON THE FENCE in Desert Hot Springs; GENERIS01: COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION at Bushwick Expo, Brooklyn; BORN/MADE at Tartu Art House, Estonia; GLASSAC 17 in Lisbon; WHITHER THE AMERICAN DREAM at Punch Gallery, Seattle; and IMAGINED COMMUNITIES at Gallery Project, Ann Arbor.
In 2014, Gilbert was awarded the inaugural 4Front: Innovation From All Angles Residency at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has been a Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America, Millville; and a Resident Artist at Faro Tláhuac, Mexico City; Olustvere Mõis, Estonia; Glazenhuis, Lommel; and the LC36-Kunstverein, Cologne.
Her published writing includes:
“A Widening Chromaticism: Learning Perception in the Collective Craftwork of the Encounter” in Material Perceptions, Documents of Contemporary Craft no. 5, edited by Knut Astrup Bull and André Gali, Arnoldsche Art Publications, Stuttgart, Germany, 2018.
“Understories: A Common Ground for Art and Science,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in the Museum Catalog for Alma Heikkilä’s Exhibition: ‘ , ‘ /mediums,.’_ ” bodies,.’_ ” ° ∞ logs,∞ ‘ , ‘ /~` ‘ holes, .’ `-. ` .’ — °habitats / /`‘ * ‘-‘ . ‘ , ‘ /~`want to feel (,) you inside | * . . * * | ..* . . *./..-. ~ .’ ‘ , ‘ /~` ❅ ☼ ~, curated by Satu Oksanen, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, 2019.
“Process Epistemologies for the Careful Interplay of Art and Biology: An Afterward,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in Drawing Processes of Life: Cells, Molecules, Organisms, edited by Gemma Anderson and John Dupre, Intellect Press, Bristol, United Kingdom (forthcoming, 2023).
Sarah Hennies: 2 Events; Sarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY. Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice in a subversive examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and performance art. She has presented her work in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes (NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan), and Second Edition (Stockholm). Hennies is currently a member of improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music.
Sara Jaffe: 3 Events; Sara Jaffe is a writer living in Portland, OR. Hurricane Envy, a short story collection, was published in Fall 2025 by Rescue Press. Dryland, a novel, was published by Tin House Books and Cipher Press (UK ). Her short fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in publications including Joyland, Fence, BOMB, NOON, and Maggot Brain. She co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians, drawing on her experience as a guitarist for post-punk band Erase Errata.
Sara has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, RADAR Productions, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council. She is also co-founding editor of New Herring Press, a publisher of prose chapbooks. She teaches creative writing as part of the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low-Residency Creative Writing MFA.
Sara Krajewski: 3 Events; Sara Krajewski is the newly appointed Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum. Krajewski was previously the Director of INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she curated an array of interdisciplinary exhibitions and performances with artists such as Xavier Cha, Mateo Tannatt, and Morgan Thorson. In 2012, Krajewski was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for research into emerging transdisciplinary artistic practices in visual art and performance. Krajewski was curator at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle from 2004 - 2012 where she focused on solo artist projects and group exhibitions exploring photography's impact on visual culture.
Sara Ludy: 1 Event; Sara Ludy is an American artist whose work explores confluence of the physical and virtual. Her practice incorporates photography, Second Life, animation, video and sound. Past exhibition of her work have included Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Berkeley Art Museum, California; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles; bitforms gallery, New York; Postmasters Gallery, New York; Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Western Front, Vancouver; Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Barbican Centre, London; Carroll Fletcher, London; and Xpo Gallery, Paris.
Sara Magenheimer: 2 Events; Sara Magenheimer (b. Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York: Art in General + Kim?, Riga, Latvia; COR&P, Columbus, Ohio; JOAN, Los Angeles; Recess, New York, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, and DOCUMENT, Chicago. Her videos have been screened at venues such as Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Images Festival, Toronto; and The New York Film Festival. Her work has been in group shows at White Columns, New York; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston; and Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague.
Sara Siestreem: 1 Event; Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, 1976-) is a master artist from the South Coast of Oregon. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators; her training began in the home. Her lifelong mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakima). Her weaving teachers are Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation). Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. She has been represented by Augen Gallery since 2010.
Her studio work is multi-disciplinary and branches into education and institutional reform. These concepts directly influence and are reflected in her artwork and public presence. Siestreem created and runs a weaving program for the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people. She teaches collegiate studio arts and theory at PNCA. Her work in institutional reform relates to curatorial and educational practices regarding Indigenous fine art and critical race theory. She is director of the Present Future Action Lab at the OJMCHE.
Siestreem's work has been widely supported through grants, residencies, and fellowships. It has been shown in museums and institutions regionally, nationally, and internationally. Locally, her work has been on near constant public display for over a decade. Her work figures in public and private collections around the world.
She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon
https://www.augengallery.com/artists/artists/siestreem/
Sasha Wortzel: 2 Events; Sasha Wortzel is a visual artist and filmmaker working between South Florida (Miccosukee and Seminole lands) and New York City (Lenape lands). Blending the archival and the imaginary, Wortzel uses film, video, installation, sculpture, sound, and performance to explore how the past haunts and inextricably shapes contemporary American life. Projects examine queer place-making, geographies of resistance, and the systems that marginalize, extract, and erase communities, peoples, and histories.
Wortzel’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art’s DocFortnight, True/False Film Festival, DOC NYC, BAMcinemaFest, Blackstar, New Orleans Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Berlinale, among others. Their work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and The Kitchen, New York; and SALTS, Birsfelden. Wortzel has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Doc Society, Art Matters, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. Wortzel has participated in residencies including Smack Mellon’s Artist Studio Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Abrons Arts Center, Watermill Center, New York; AIRIE (Artists in Residence in the Everglades) and Oolite Arts, Miami Beach. Wortzel’s film This is an Address (2020) is distributed by Field of Vision. Happy Birthday Marsha! (2018; co-director Tourmaline) won special mention at Outfest and is distributed by Frameline. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Miami Dade County Art in Public Places. She has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and New York Magazine. Wortzel received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College.
Satpreet Kahlon: 1 Event; Satpreet Kahlon (b. 1989) is a Panjabi-born artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a full fellowship to pursue her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2019. In addition to her studio practice, which has been featured in Hyperallergic and Artforum, she co-founded and -ran an Indigenous arts organization that supported 400 artists with over $2 million of opportunities and rematriated 1.5 acres of greenspace that was slated for development during her tenure from 2017-2023. For this work, she was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine in 2019, and was a 2022 Roddenberry Fellow for “new and innovative strategies to safeguard human rights and ensure an equal and just society for all.”
Kahlon's practice has been supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; National Endowment for the Arts; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Critical Minded; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; 4Culture, Seattle, WA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Magnum Foundation, New York, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; and Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA, among others. She is the 2024 recipient of the Foundwork Artist Prize, an annual international juried award “to support outstanding artistic practices,” and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in PICA's 10,000-square-foot warehouse space.
Satya Byock: 1 Event; Satya Byock is a psychotherapist in Portland. Her clinical and academic work is rooted in the scholarship of Carl Jung, which emphasizes the reality of the unconscious and its impact on human experience, identity, and relationships. Through studying the language of dreams, mythology, and history, Satya seeks to better understand what propels us towards acts of creation and destruction. Prior to working as a clinician, Satya studied and worked in a variety of settings internationally including with prisoners in Colombia, with students and Buddhist monks in central Sri Lanka, and with farmers in post-tsunami South Asia. She has also worked with tech start-ups, non-profits, and foundations in Portland and California. She holds a B.A. in History from Lewis & Clark College and a Masters in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She has a private practice in downtown Portland.
Scout Niblett: 1 Event; Scout Niblett is an English singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Niblett debuted in 2001 with her first full-length studio album Sweet Heart Fever, and has gone on to release five more studio albums.
Seba Calfuqueo: 4 Events; Seba Calfuqueo are from Mapuche origin. Their work appeals to their inheritance to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural, and political status of the Mapuche subject in contemporary Chilean society and in Latin America. It includes installations, ceramics, performances, and video art that explore cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes produced from the cross between Indigenous and Western ways of thinking. Their research also has the purpose of making visible feminist and sexual dissidence issues. Seba Calfuqueo is part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, which edits YeneRevista, an online magazine of art, thought, and writing in Wallmapu and AbyaYala language.
https://sebacalfuqueo.com/
S.E.C.R.E.T.S.: 1 Event; Silent Ending Caught in Rapture Emblems Truth and Secrets (S.E.C.R.E.T.S.) is a performance based surrealist musical project from Portland, OR, and is comprised of musician Aaron Chapman (of Nurses), and visual artist/dancers Andrea Glaser and Rose Dickson.
Shaky Hands: 1 Event; The organized sound of Shaky Hands veers off the path right from the start. Their pounding rhythm lives somewhere between folk and crunk with a high energy sensitivity that has become a given at their frenetic live performances. Nick Delffs, Colin Anderson, Mayhaw Hoons and Jeff Lehman live in Portland, Oregon and are currently recording their first full length album.
Shana Moulton: 2 Events; Born in California, Moulton is a Brooklyn-based video, installation, and performance artist. She attended school at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, De Ateliers, LMCC, and Harvestworks. She was also a New Commissions artist at Art in General in 2009. Moulton has presented at venues such as The Wexner Center, MoMA P.S.1, The Kitchen, Performa 09, Electronic Arts Intermix, the Andy Warhol Museum, and Socrates Sculpture Park.
Selected Press
Whispering Pines 10 at the Kitchen, Kareem Estefan, BOMBlog, April 28, 2010.
The Object Whisperer: Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines, Brian Droitcour, Rhizome, April 14, 2010.
Shannon Funchess: 2 Events; Shannon Funchess is an activist and self-taught, interdisciplinary queer performance artist. The founder, vocalist, producer of internationally revered, electronic music project LIGHT ASYLUM founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2007, she has engaged audiences in performance at DIY art spaces, museums, galleries, music festivals and nightclubs in the U.K., North America, Europe, South America, Scandinavia, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Australia and Canada. Her musical journey began in a gospel choir of a southern baptist church in Spokane, Washington at the age of nine. With an ethos rooted in community and a passion for collaboration, she has joined forces with artistic peers and allies globally. From recording studio vocal features, creating sound design and remix productions for performance artists The Knife, LEECH, Yves Tumor, TR/ST, Chris Garneau and Justin Kennedy among others to lending vocals and appearing as an actor in video installation works of Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Michelle Handelman, Gloria Maximo, Wu Tsang, Tony Ousler, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner. She has regularly been invited on stages as a guest performer / musician with artists the likes of The Knife, LCD Sound System, TV on the Radio, electronic music pioneer Laurie Anderson, Coco Rosie and Christeene. Funchess has established herself as a force across her community and is lauded for her cathartic performances as well as a DJ at established art institutions, clubs and underground events. She’s at home in all stages of her creative exploration and continues to produce music and art within her community in Portland, Oregon.
Shantala Shivalingappa: 2 Events; Born in Madras, India, and brought up in Paris, Shivalingappa is the child of East and West. She is a world-renowned practitioner of the classical Indian Kuchipudi technique, and she received an intense and rigorous training from the master teacher Vempati Chinna Satyam. Driven by a deep desire to bring Kuchipudi to Western audiences, she has performed in important festivals and theaters around the world, earning praise and admiration from all.
Acclaimed for her rare talent by artists and connoisseurs in India and Europe, Shantala combines a perfect technique with flowing grace and a very fine sensitivity. Since the age of 13, she has worked with some of the greatest artists of our time: Maurice Bejart, Peter Brook, Bartabas, and Pina Bausch. She began dancing with Pina Bausch in 1999 and was a featured performer in Bausch’s Nefes and Bamboo Blues.
Selected Press
A Dancer rises in the East, and now the West, Julie Bloom, New York Times, December 10, 2008.
Sharita Towne: 1 Event; As an artist, Sharita Towne’s interests lie in unpacking the inherited struggles of past burdens and in affording collective catharsis. Through collaboration, stereo-photography, printmaking, video, and community art projects, she’s worked at memorials in Germany; in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria; Brazil; in gentrifying cities like Portland and New Orleans; in schools, museums, and neighborhoods, and within her own family. She received a BFA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Portland State University. She currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art, works in the DIY printmaking and audiovisual collective URe:AD Press (United Re:Public of the African Diaspora), the post-colonial conceptual karaoke band Weird Allan Kaprow, and is a 2016 Art Matters grant recipient.
Shawna Lipton: 3 Events; Shawna Lipton is Chair of the MA in Critical Studies Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). She received her Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a literary scholar whose work is fundamentally informed by interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies.
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY: 3 Events; SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. SHAWNÉ was a 20-21 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Queer Theatre & Performance Resident and is currently teaching across the New Arts Journalism and the Film Video New Media and Animation departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
www.shawnemichaelainholloway.com
Shayla Lawson: 1 Event; Shayla Lawson is (and / or, at times, has been) an amateur acrobat, an architect, a Dutch housewife, & dog mother to one irascible hound. Her work has appeared in print & online at Tin House, GRAMMA, ESPN, SALON, The Offing, Guernica, Colorado Review, Barrelhouse, & MiPOesias. She is the author of: A Speed Education in Human Being, PANTONE, & the forthcoming I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean (Saturnalia Books, 2018). She is a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellow and resident of Portland, OR.
Shirin Neshat: 2 Events; Iranian-born visual artist Neshat is known for her hauntingly beautiful explorations of Islam and gender relations. Neshat left Iran before the revolution in 1979 and, since 1996, has been unable to return to her country due to the controversial nature of her art. Over the past 15 years, she has created work that draws from her personal experiences in exile and the widening political and ideological rift between the West and the Middle East. Neshat has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery (London), and was the recipient in 1999 of the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial. In 2009, Neshat won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice Film Festival.
Selected Press
Women Without Men: A Conversation with Shirin Neshat, Leila Darabi, PBS Frontline: Tehran Bureau, May 5, 2010.
Women Without Men - In 1953 Iran, Sisterhood Sought During a Coup, Stephen Holden, The New York Times, May 14, 2010.
Shirin Neshat: An Interview, Eleanor Heartney, Art in America, June 16, 2009.
Shirin Neshat: Women Without Men, Tehran Review.
Shirin Neshat, Arthur C. Danto, BOMB, Fall 2000.
Shirin Neshat: A long way from home, Homa Khaleeli, Guardian.co.uk, June 13, 2010.
Iran's Hidden Turmoil: Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men, Sarah Kerr, nybooks.com, May 14, 2010.
Shirotama Hitsujia: 1 Event; Shirotama Hitsujia discovered her passion for cabaret singing and performance art after studying literature at Meiji University in Tokyo. In 1994, she founded Yubiwa Hotel, a key force in Japan’s alternative theatre scene. Yubiwa Hotel has created more than forty works, all written, directed, and performed by women. They are known for a burlesque–like aesthetic that ranges from the delicate to the outrageous, and often use non-traditional spaces like warehouses, galleries, underground dance clubs, rooftop tennis courts and strip clubs. Their work has toured internationally and includes Long Distance Love (2001), Yubiwan Beauty (2001), and It’s Up to You (2003).
sidony o’neal: 5 Events; sidony o’neal is an artist and writer working from interdisciplinary research and pre- to post- machine computing. o’neal’s practice treats conceptual art and mathematics as related forms of industrial culture that have shaped human relationships to objects, labor, and technology over time.

Recent solo exhibitions include Et al. (SOFTMAX HARD HASP), San Francisco, CA; Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, (The Pudding Butcher), Princeton, NJ; Dracula’s Revenge (NOT TALKING UNTIL BAD COMPANY JOINS), New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Enchiridion: Aisle, Spline, Resort), Portland, OR; and Veronica (AuguRing), Seattle, WA. Duo and group exhibitions include Third Born (Continuous Dimensional Thorax), Mexico City, Mexico; ICA at Maine College of Art and Design (ENTER:), Portland, ME; and SculptureCenter (In Practice: Total Disbelief), Long Island City, NY. o’neal has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Banff Centre, Banff, AB, among others. o’neal is the co-founder of INFANT design firm. Performances as a part of DT have been presented with Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, and Performance Space New York. o'neal is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Oregon Arts Commission's Joan Shipley Award and a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. In 2023, o’neal was awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship.
Signe Becker: 2 Events; Signe Becker is a freelance scenographer and artist. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA) in Fredrikstad (2006) and a Master’s Degree in visual culture from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2008). Her artistic projects include theatre and dance productions, as well as personal art projects as installations, pictures and video work. In recent years, she has worked on a number of productions in Norway, and for six years she has been a permanent scenographer at Verk Produksjoner. Their The Eternal Smile won the prize of The performance of the year (2011), and Becker was nominated for best scenography for the performance Stalker, 2013. She also curates and organizes «++», a monthly art event held in the foyer at Black Box Theatre, Oslo.
Silvia Bottiroli: 1 Event; Silvia Bottiroli is a curator, researcher and organizer in the contemporary performing arts field. After completing a Ph.D. in Visual and Performing Arts at Pisa University, she attended the EU training program SPACE / Performing Arts Managers on the Move (2009-2011), and several international seminars and gatherings, such as the conference “Beyond Curating” at Pact in Essen (2011), the marathon “Truth is Concrete” at Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz (2012), the Spring Meeting at PAF / Performing Arts Forum in St Erme (2013), the program Watch and Talk at Basel Festival (2014) and the workshop Empty Stages, Crowdes Flates on Curating the Performing Arts in Cracow (2014).
Silvia is the co-author of two books and numerous papers and essays about the XX Century and contemporary performing arts scene, focusing especially on the dimension of collective creation and collaborative practices. Additionally, she has supervised diverse critical, curatorial and educational projects in collaboration with art organizations and public institutions in Italy and abroad, including with a.o. SNDO School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, Homo Novus Festival in Riga, and Ghent University, Vooruit and Campo in Ghent.
Since 2011, Silvia has served as Adjunct Professor at Bocconi University in Milan, where she teaches Methodology, Critique and Research in the Arts and Theatre, Festivals and Live Performances. From 2008 to 2011 she worked for theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio and has been part of the Critical-organizational Committee of Santarcangelo Festival, directed by Chiara Guidi/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Enrico Casagrande/Motus and Ermanna Montanari/Teatro delle Albe. From 2012 to 2016, she has served as the artistic director of Santarcangelo Festival, one of the most relevant contemporary performing arts festivals in Italy.
Simon Liu: 3 Events; Simon Liu (b. 1987, Hong Kong) is an artist filmmaker working between alternate documentary forms, abstract diary films, 16mm projection performance, and video installation. He has exhibited at film festivals and institutions globally including the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, British Film Institute, The Shed, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Cinéma du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, “Dreamlands: Expanded,” and a solo-presentation at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Mondays series. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s quadruple 16mm projection “Highview” with other recent works for their Permanent Collections. Liu is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art, and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. Liu is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.
https://www.liufilmsliu.com/about
Sir Richard Bishop: 1 Event; Richard Bishop, guitarist and founding member of the band Sun City Girls (1981-2007), released his first solo record (Salvador Kali) in 1998 on John Fahey’s esteemed Revenant label under the moniker Sir Richard Bishop. Since then he has released albums on a variety of labels: Improvika, Elektronika Demonika, and While My Guitar Violently Bleeds (Locust Music); Fingering the Devil (Southern Records, UK); Hypostasis: A Work in Three Parts (VDSQ); Intermezzo (Editions Mego); The Unrock Tapes and Road to Siam (Unrock); and Polytheistic Fragments, The Freak of Araby, Tangier Sessions, and Oneiric Formulary (Drag City).
“Sir Richard Bishop forces one to alter that hoary cliche ‘jack of all trades’, to master of…damn near all. Renowned for his mercurial guitar-playing for 26 years with Seattle ethno-delic legends Sun City Girls, Bishop has wrought a distinguished solo canon as well. He combines soulfulness and advanced technique with a panache that’s nearly unrivaled among today’s guitarists. Bishop strums spiritual with incantatory ragas, free-folk excursions, crystalline flamenco flourishes, ruddy Appalachian folk, Middle Eastern-tinged fantasias and gypsy arabesques. This is eclecticism done with respect and third-eye-dilating filigree; his compositions attain a sepia-toned wistfulness and a psychedelic complexity.” - Dave Segal (OC Weekly)
Sissyboy: 2 Events
S.J Norman: 3 Events; S.J Norman (b. 1984) is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. His career has so far spanned 18 years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between Australia, Germany, the UK, and the United States.

His practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. Working extensively with durational and spatial practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks, Norman's primary medium is the body. Drawing on embodied ancestral lineages of ceremonial praxis, Norman frequently utilises relational and process-based choreographies as a mode of structural critique: reflected in his work is an abiding interest in the space of co- and inter-corporeality, the forces that suffuse it, and how the live act might be utilised as a mean to examine, disrupt and re-inscribe prevailing systems of social power.

Norman has received major commissions from the Biennale of Sydney (AU), Performance Space New York (US), Dark Mofo (AU), The National Gallery of Australia (AU), Venice International Performance Week (IT), Spill Festival of Live Art (UK), Fierce Festival (UK), In Between Time (UK), Arnolfini (UK), Liveworks (AU), Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AU), Unsound Festival (PL), Fusebox Festival (US), Melbourne Festival (AU), Tarnanthi Festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art (AU) and Tate Modern (UK), the Science Gallery London (UK), Die Fabrikanten (AT), and the Festival of Live Art (AU), to name a few. He has received numerous awards for his work including a Sidney Myer Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship, two of Australia's most prestigious honors for art.
Aside from his artistic and curatorial practice, he is also a writer of fiction, essays, and poetry. He has won or placed in numerous literary awards, including: The Peter Blazey Prize, The Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award, The ABR/Elizabeth Jolley Award for Short Story, and the Overland/Judith Wright Prize for Poetry. His award-winning debut short story collection, Permafrost, will be published by the University of Queensland press in 2021.
S Loper: 1 Event; Fresh out of the backwoods of sunny Tampa, Florida, S. Loper was educated in "The Greatest City in America," Baltimore, Maryland at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2010, degree in hand, Sloper stepped into the professional arena, pioneering as a toy expert and acting as a videographer, and sole animator for one of Tampa's finest cinematic enterprises. In result of a high-stakes bet, Sloper made the move to Portland, Oregon where all sorts of charm and adventure seem to follow in tow.
Small Sails: 1 Event; Formerly known as Adelaide, Small Sails is a music and film collective based in Portland. Their music is a gorgeous mix of electronic post-rock anthems, with visuals performed live using original 16-mm film loops on dual projectors. A field of dandelions plowed over, silhouettes of overlapping faces, a flowing river of color, sing-song vocals, and warm spacey melodies, that’s what Small Sails looks and sounds like. Chanting, humming vocals hint at tangibility, while remaining half-submerged; rhythms are a baby-bouncing jumble of eclectic percussion and twittering electronics; and soaring over the top, achingly gorgeous melodies stripped down to the still-gleaming bone.
SNAP!: 2 Events; SNAP! is a monthly party that happens every last Friday of the month at Holocene in Portland, Oregon. This DANCE PARTY is held down by Portland resident DJs: Doc Adam, Colin Jones, Freaky Outty and hosted by Ms Coco B. The vision behind the party is to offer a slice of nostalgia that will deliver booty-shaking, head-nodding, and memories of all those awesome middle school dances. SNAP! is proud to have hosted some of the most talented DJs/Producers touring the world currently.
Soot Uros: 1 Event; Vocalist & songwriter Soot Uros delivers a new sound with a strikingly ancient spirit. The music of Soot Uros introduces a refreshing experience to the magic of chanting & singing, while exploring the darker musical spirits of Hip Hop & Jazz, with a rich & soulful under-world tone.
Sounds et al: 2 Events; Sounds et al is an independent record label exploring sound, product design, collaboration and curation.
Spalding Gray: 1 Event; Recognized worldwide as one of today's most accomplished monologue artists, Spalding Gray is also a celebrated writer, actor, and performer. He has created over 14 monologues which have been performed throughout the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia, including Swimming to Cambodia, which also earned him an OBIE Award. Mr. Gray has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. His work is noted for its eccentric detail, razor wit, and encyclopedic obsessiveness. Regarded as the "high priest of anxiety," his monologues and stories are autobiographical in nature, built through improvisation, and reflect the mastery of years of experience.
Spencer Byrne-Seres: 3 Events; Spencer Byrne-Seres is an artist, preparator and culture-worker based in Portland, ORE. His activities range from woodworking and custom fabrication to administrative and curatorial project management for museums, non-profits, commercial galleries, colleges, small alternative spaces and for himself.
Spencer has been making research based and socially engaged projects that look at the intersection of broad systems with the daily and the personal. Spencer is interested city infrastructure, international time standards, and submarine cables. These often opaque or invisible structures allow us to connect, and inform how we think about and move around to built environment.
He currently co-runs a conceptual art club called Sunday Painters Group in collaboration with Roz Crews, and maintains 2xfourtune, a library of recycled dimensional lumber for recycle and reuse by artists around Portland.
He has recently been experimenting with kite mapping on the Oregon coast, planting signs on college campuses, and cultivating an obscure vlog personality.
Split Britches: 1 Event; Founded in New York in 1980 with Deb Margolin, Split Britches continues with the duo and solo work of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw which spans satirical, gender-bending performance, methods for public engagement, videography, digital and print media, explorations of aging and well-being, and iconic lesbian-feminist theatre.
Stacey Tran: 1 Event; Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR currently based in Providence, RI. She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, family, identity. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and diaCRITICS. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018).
Stephanie DeGooyer: 3 Events; Stephanie DeGooyer (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is Assistant Professor of English at Willamette University. Her work focuses on the intersections of law, politics and aesthetics. She is co-author of The Right to Have Rights (forthcoming from Verso Books) and is completing a manuscript titled The Aesthetics of Democracy. Beyond the academy, DeGooyer writes for the art magazine frieze. She is also co-organizer of Moonlighter Presents, a lecture series that invites scholars to speak on topics outside their field of expertise.
Stephanie Snyder: 14 Events; Stephanie Snyder is the Anne and John Hauberg Director and Curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, a position she has held since 2003. Snyder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College and completed her graduate studies in Art History and Art Education at Columbia University. In 2008, Snyder received a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation, and in 2014 she was a Fellow in the Getty’s Museum Leadership Institute. In 2013 she received an award for her critical writing from the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the CUE Foundation, New York. The author of numerous catalog essays and other writing projects, she is a regular contributor to Artforum.com.
Stephen Slappe: 4 Events; Stephen Slappe is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the South Carolina State Museum; The Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; The Sarai Media Lab in Delhi; Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco; and The Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR. Slappe was the recipient of a Couture award from the New American Art Union in Portland for his 2009 exhibition entitled Shelter in Place.
Stephen Thompson: 2 Events; Stephen Thompson, originally from Calgary, Alberta is an inter-disciplinary artist working between Canada, USA and Europe. Stephen’s introduction to movement and performing was through competitive figure skating. He received a Bachelor of Kinesiology (art and science of movement) and Dance from the University of Calgary. In 2015 at the World “Figure” Championships in Lake Placid, Stephen received the bronze medal. In 2016 he received a Victor Martin-Lynch award from the Canada Council for the Arts. Past choreographic work and collaborations: 2012 Bessie award winning Antigone Sr. (Large), The Ghost of Montpellier and the Samurai (2014) with Trajal Harell, Culture Administration & Trembling (2014), Les Etudes (2017), Chaud (2020); Jennifer Lacey, Antonija Livingstone, Dominique Pétrin, whatwearesaying (2014); Public Recordings (2 Dora Mavor awards Toronto), numerous projects with Benoit Lachambre, Relative Collider (2015); Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard, Service #5: Try to keep kids off naturalism and Kein Paradiso with Adam Linder recipient of the Mohn Prize at the L.A. Bienniale, Stitchomythia with Nadia Lauro and Zeena Parkins, Dramaturge for Such Sweet Thunder (2019) recipient of 8tensions Impulstanz, Compulsory Figures (2019) co-signed with French visual artist Xavier Veilhan.
⁠Steph Littlebird: 1 Event; Steph Littlebird is an artist, curator, writer, and a registered member of Oregon’s Grand Ronde Confederated Tribes. She received national recognition as curator of This IS Kalapuyan Land (2020), an exhibition at the Five Oaks Museum in Portland, which was featured by ArtNews and PBS NewsHour. Other curatorial projects include Untold Parallels, Mata Art Gallery, L.A. (2020), which re-examined colonial histories of the so-called Philippines and Filipinx-American diaspora, and colonized people Indigenous to “North America.'' Most recently, Pʰot-Choch, an exhibition at Anita, Astoria, OR (2021) presented traditional and contemporary art of the original Chinook inhabitants of the North Coast.
Littlebird is the 2020-2021 Fellow of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A widely published writer, she is currently writing a series about Indigenous Resilience for Oregon Arts Watch Magazine with the support of the Oregon Cultural Trust. As an artist, Littlebird’s work combines traditional aesthetics with contemporary materials and subject matter to forge connections between our collective past and imminent future. Her works frequently engage issues related to present-day Indigenous identities, marginalized histories, and responsible land stewardship. Littlebird earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in Portland, she currently lives and works in Las Vegas.
Storm Tharp: 3 Events; Tharp was raised in Ontario, Oregon, and presently resides in Portland. He received his BFA from Cornell University. His work was featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has been acquired by The Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright Knox Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Reed College. He is represented by PDX Contemporary Art (Portland), Nicole Klagsbrun (New York) and Galerie Bertrand & Gruner (Geneva). Selected Press Critic's Pick: Storm Tharp, Stephanie Snyder, Artforum.com, August 3, 2010. Perfect in the Middle, Matt Stangel, Portland Mercury, June 24, 2010. Storm Tharp's eighth show at PDX Contemporary Art features latest work, 'Hercules', John Motley, The Oregonian, July 30, 2010. Storm Tharp, Richard Speer, art ltd., May 2010. Interview with Storm Tharp, Bean Gilsdorf, Daily Serving, January 4, 2010. Virtuoso Vindicated: Storm Tharp at PDX Contemporary, Jeff Jahn, PORT, January 10, 2007. Storm Tharp: Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black, Stephanie Snyder, PLAZM, September, 2008. Selected Video Storm Tharp Artist Talk at the Portland Art Museum. Storm Tharp on OPB Art Beat
Strategy: 2 Events; It’s not enough to call Strategy a producer of electronic music; Portland-based Paul Dickow stretches his skills among ambient and dub, high-spirited techno, house and sound art, all couched in musicianship and a community-minded DIY weird-punk approach. As complex and nuanced as his music can be, it’s not distractingly ornate: Dickow embraces certain low-fi aesthetics, layering dubby tones, crunchy noise and exacting rhythms using high-tech hardware and instruments of varying vintages, mixers, machines of his own making and effects strung strategically together. Recording as Strategy since 1999, Dickow released albums Futurerock and Drumsolo’s Delight on Kranky in the mid-2000s, 12-inches on Toshiya Kawasaki's Endless Flight, and most recently, albums on Peak Oil and Field Hymns, followed by 2014’s Boxology on 100% Silk. He co-runs independent label Community Library and plays electronic noise, keyboards and drums in underground-sound bands Fontanelle, Nudge and several others, an ongoing influence that bleeds into his stage and studio time as Strategy.
Sue Tompkins: 2 Events; Sue Tompkins (b. 1971, Leighton Buzzard) lives and works in Glasgow.
Working with fragments of language gathered from everyday encounters and experiences, Tompkins’ practice incorporates text, sound, installation and performance.
Tompkins graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1994, and has been involved in exhibitions and performances worldwide including solo exhibitions at The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Inverleith House, Edinburgh; Spike Island, Bristol; and Contemporary Art Musuem, St. Louis. She has presented performances and been included in numerous group exhibitions including those at: Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; the 29th São Paolo Biennale, São Paolo; the British Art Show 7 at the Hayward Gallery, London and touring; MACBA, Barcelona; ICA and the Tate Modern, London; and Artists Space, New York.
Tompkins recently produced web-based project, My Kind Book with Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2012, and has a collaborative publication with her twin sister Hayley Tompkins, through and through, published by LemonMelon in 2013.
Tompkins was shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures Prize in 2006, and received the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2011. She was formerly a member of the Glasgow based art collective Elizabeth Go, and the band Life Without Buildings.
Susan Grace Banyas: 1 Event; My art is born from the everyday dance of life—landscapes, encounters, history, politics—and from the soul stories we tell each other—crystalline moments in time that hold a myriad of meanings, summoned through the nature of re-membering and witnessing. Movement & images & sounds & words are all at play in the experiments that form the choreography of a story. The eye of life comes alive through body imagination, in memory places where life and art intersect.
Collaborations with fellow poets of memory and history define the varying SO&SO&SO&SO projects, on-going since 1976. SO&SO dance and theatre works have been performed on stages, in studios, schools, and found spaces in the US and abroad. In collaboration with four other artists, I opened the doors to Dreams Well Studio, 1990-2002, a modest, lively petri dish for performance experiments and body-mind practices. Memorable offerings of dance, theatre, multi-media storytelling, kids’ performances, poetry, music, and community ceremonies came forth from this activated dream space/laboratory.
The creative lab is the bedrock of my teaching methods in universities, classrooms, and studios over the years and of continuing practice as a writer, choreographer, and community activist.
No Strangers Here Today (premier 2008) and The Hillsboro Story (premier 2010) are multi-voiced investigations that illuminate the role my hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio, played in American civil rights history and the journey to encounter that history directly. Both theatre works, with soundtracks and live music scores by David Ornette Cherry, toured nationally and are expanded into a non-fiction book, The Hillsboro Story/A Kaleidoscope History (Spuyten-Duyvil Press, NYC).
Nu History, an educational model designed to empower students to investigate history directly, and Great Serpent, a multimedia performance score, are in development in concert with Mr. Music/theme & thought, featuring the collaborations and vision of jazz/world music composer, the late David Ornette Cherry.
I am deeply grateful to walk this path and give thanks to the great teachers who have led the way and the collaborators with whom I have shared and continue to share this journey. I believe that creative practice is essential to nourishing and understanding oneself in relationship to the natural and social worlds. The intention is to awaken the senses, embody the voice, ignite the action, and enjoy the process.
“We are not condemned to accept the future. We may invent it.”
--Eduardo Galeano
Sutapa Biswas: 4 Events; Sutapa Biswas was born in Santinekethan, India, in 1962. Her poignant films and poetic artworks have been shown in museums and art galleries worldwide. Biswas studied at the University of Leeds from 1981-85, at the Slade School of Art from 1988-1990, and at the Royal College of Art between 1996-1998. She works in a wide range of media including installation, film and video, drawing and painting. Her works are conceptual and since the mid 1990s Biswas has been interested in exploring themes of time and space particularly in relationship to gender, identity and desire.
She has exhibited extensively internationally, and her recent solo shows include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2000), Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (2004), and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon (2006). She has shown at numerous group exhibitions including: From Tarzan To Rambo, Tate Modern, London (2002-2003), Art Through the Eye of A Needle, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2001), The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (1998), and the 6th Havana Biennale, Cuba (1997), Melbourne International Arts Festival (2006). Biswas was a Fellow at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1990 and 1992. She is currently a Reader at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London and lives and works in London. Biswas is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, USA.
Sylvan Oswald: 1 Event; Sylvan Oswald is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Philadelphia who creates text-based projects exploring trans identity, history, and nonviolent dramaturgy. He seeks alternative structures designed to respect all people. He seeks spaces that interrupt consumption and open up new styles of satisfaction.
Current work includes High Winds (Fusebox Festival, X Artists' Books); text for choreographer Meg Foley's Blood Baby; and an essay titled "Towards a Trans Theater." Projects include "Cut Piece," a personal history of play publishing; Play A Journal of Plays (2003-2011); and Outtakes, a lo-fi semi-improvised web series starring Becca Blackwell and Zuzanna Szadkowski, hosted at weareopentv.com. Plays include Trainers: A Theatrical Essay (Gate Theatre, London, Oberon Books); A Kind of Weather (Diversionary Theater, San Diego); Profanity (Undermain Theater, Dallas); Vendetta Chrome (Clubbed Thumb, New York); and Pony (About Face Theater, Chicago). Pony is a seminal work about queer and trans belonging revived summer '22 in a production directed by Jess Barbagallo.
Honors include a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rosati Fellowship from Duke University Libraries, the Thom Thomas award from The Dramatists Guild, a Jerome Fellowship, and residencies at Sundance/Ucross, Macdowell Colony, and Yaddo. Sylvan is an alum of CTG's Writers' Workshop, an affiliated artist at Clubbed Thumb, and an alum of New Dramatists.
sylvanoswald.xyz
Symara Sarai: 2 Events; Symara Sarai, a Portland, OR native currently residing in Brooklyn, NY, has immersed herself globally in interdisciplinary and choreographic studies with deep recognition. Named Dance Magazines’ 2025 “Top 25 to Watch,” a 2023 Bessie Winner for Breakout Choreographer, and a recipient of the Dai Ailian Foundation Scholarship based in Trinidad and Tobago, she is known to be a courageously committed performer and maker. The New York Times stated, “Sarai is a daring solo improviser, and her uninhibited spirit infuses.” Sarai is a 2019 graduate of the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, State University of New York. She was most recently a MoMA PS1 Greater New York Artist and was commissioned in 2025 by Danspace Project and BOFFO. Between 2024 and 2026, they were a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and an Abrons Arts Center Performance AIRspace Resident. She participated in Live Artery Festival 2025, Triple Canopy Symposium 2025, and more. Their work as a performer and maker has been reviewed and featured in prominent publications such as The New York Times and Brooklyn Rail. She has most notably danced with Urban Bush Women, Joanna Kotze, and Ogemdi Ude, among others.
https://symarasarai.com/
Tabitha Nikolai: 1 Event; Tabitha Nikolai is a visual artist and educator who uses video games, installation, and writing to study life under the visceral and disorienting onslaught of mass virtuality. Currently based in New Orleans, she grew up in Utah, and is forever influenced by her experiences there. Her work orbits themes of gender, isolation, futurism, and fantasy, often with a dark and humorous twist. With a long history of running DIY spaces, Nikolai believes deeply in the lifesaving power of community-organized scenes. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including the Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; and apexart, New York, NY. Nikolai’s video games have been covered by The New York Times, VICE, and Art in America, and in academic outlets including the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds.
Tahni Holt: 6 Events; Tahni Holt is a dance artist and somatic practitioner whose work is rooted in collaboration and community. Born and raised in what is now known as Portland, Oregon, she has spent most of her life in the shadow and glow of Mt. Hood. Shaped by wild landscapes and a punk adolescence, dance making for Tahni is a way to imagine, question and reside in the liminal space, where unraveling is not a marker of failure but one of great power and intrigue. Her work has been presented nationally at On the Boards, Seattle, WA; Velocity Dance, Seattle, WA; Fusebox Festival, Austin, TX; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and White Bird, Portland, OR. She is a recipient of an NDP Touring Award, an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship, and was a 2021 USA Artist Fellowship nominee. Internationally, her work has been performed in Bulgaria and supported through residencies in France, Greece, Romania, and Portugal. Holt is the founder and one of four current stewards of FLOCK Dance Center, a hub for embodied practice and critical engagement in the Pacific Northwest.
Takahiro Yamamoto: 6 Events; Takahiro Yamamoto is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer based in Cowlitz, Clackamas, and Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (Portland, Oregon). His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He has received support from New England Foundation for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, MacDowell, National Performance Network, Japan Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium, and others. His performance and visual art works have been presented at Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Diverseworks, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, The Henry Art Gallery, and GoDown Arts Centre Nairobi, among other venues. Yamamoto holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. He is part of the Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.
takahiroyamamoto.com
Takashi Makino: 1 Event; Born in Tokyo, 1978. Lives and works in Yokohama.
Takashi Makino graduated from Cinematography / Sound Recording course at Department of Cinema at Nihon University College of Art, Japan in 2001 and he studied about film, lighting, and music under Quay Brothers at Atelier Koninck QBFZ in London in 2001. Makino gained his skills relating to film and videos while he was undertaking coloration as a Colorist on various filmography, CF, and music videos from 2001 to 2011. He has been started screening his works since 2004. He captures video of ready-made objects including natural phenomena, human, and cities with various formats. And he layers and configures them while in an editing process, his quite organic yet imaginative films, which seem like bursting unlimitedly are highly regarded internationally. Makino is currently based in Japan and presents movies, music, installation, audiovisual performances around the world. Makino awarded the Tiger Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2011 and he also received various awards at several international film festivals including Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Moscow International Film Festival, and he also awarded the Grand Prize at 25FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival. His cinema works were screened in over 125 cities in the world. Recently screened in documenta 14, Athens, Greece (2017); Austrian Film Festival, Vienna, Austria (2017); New York Film Festival, New York, USA (2014, 2017); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); The Korean Film Archive, Seoul, Korea (2016); BFI IMAX Theatre, London, UK (2016); MoMAPS1, New York, USA (2013); San Francisco MoMA, USA (2009); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA (2008).
https://makinotakashi.net/
Tannaz Farsi: 3 Events; Utilizing the language and history of sculpture, installation, and conceptual art practices, Tannaz Farsi’s work highlights and re-presents objects and images that contextually start from a collective experience found in the current news or within the milieu of our cultural archive. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Disjecta (Portland, OR), Pitzer Art Galleries (Claremont, CA), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI), Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, and Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH.) She has been granted residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. She received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2014. Born in Iran, Tannaz Farsi lives and works in Eugene, Oregon where she is faculty at the University of Oregon.
Tanya Tagaq: 6 Events; Calling Tanya Tagaq an Inuit throat singer is like calling Yo-Yo Ma a cello player. Sure, it’s accurate, but it’s not the whole of what he does. Like Ma, Tagaq is the best of what she does – innovative, inspired. —The National Post, Canada
Born in Canada’s high arctic, Tanya Tagaq is a contemporary performance artist who utilizes the ancient traditional Inuit art of throat singing to mesmerize audiences around the world. She is considered a Canadian national treasure whose music defies description. Alternately called primal, orchestral, and free form, her performances are improvised and dialed to a one-of-a-kind frequency. The end result is a staggering array of performances that portray, in full-colour sound, the scope of her life experiences. Tagaq’s commitment to stretching her musical boundaries has led to visionary projects across all mediums and with groundbreaking artists such as the Kronos Quartet. As a solo artist, Tagaq has released two critically acclaimed albums with her band, Sinaa and Auk/Blood, both of which were nominated for Juno Awards (Best Aboriginal Recording) and (Best Instrumental Recording). The albums additionally took first place in several categories at the 2005 and 2008 Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, including Best Female Artist (2005).
For greater context and a more in-depth exploration of Tanya Tagaq and her work, click here to view a PDF of collected reviews, interviews, articles and links. A great resource for those who really want to dive into the Festival!
Tarek Halaby: 3 Events; Hoping to get the unruly Tarek Halaby (performer) out of her hair, his mother signed 12 year old Tarek up for a jazz dance class. He hasn't stopped dancing since. His formal training continued at The University of Iowa, where he received his BFA in Dance Performance. During his three year stint in New York, Tarek worked closely with The Powerful People and the company ChameckiLerner. Other credits include working with Alexandra Beller, Gerald Casel, Doug Elkins, Chris DC Ramos, and behind the scenes with Susan Marshall. In September of 2004, Tarek moved to Brussels, Belgium to live, dance and study at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S.), under the direction of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
Tashi Wada: 2 Events; Tashi Wada is a composer and performer based in San Francisco. His recent work focuses on various aspects of sound perception as a basis for direct processes of listening. Wada’s work has been performed throughout the United States and Europe in a variety of venues, and for several years now he has performed alongside his father, Yoshi Wada.
Taylor Mac: 6 Events; A playwright, actor, and singer-songwriter hailed by Time Out New York as “one of the most exciting theater artists of our time,” Mac has performed his work around the world. Mac’s plays include The Walk Across America For Mother Earth, The Young Ladies Of, Red Tide Blooming, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, and The Lily’s Revenge, a five-hour, 36-cast-member show that was named the best play in 2009 by Time Out New York and Paper Magazine and made the top ten lists of The New Yorker and The New York Post. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, such as a Sundance Theater Lab Residency, a Rockefeller MAP Fund Grant, a Creative Capital Grant, The James Hammerstein Award for playwriting, The Edinburgh Festival’s Herald Angel Award, and three GLAAD Media Award Nominations. Mac’s upcoming projects include touring The Lily’s Revenge across the US and UK, the creation of a two-man theatrical concert with Mandy Patinkin, and a festival of full-length plays inspired by Greek classics.

Selected Press
Taylor Mac at the Soho Theatre London W1, Donald Hutera, June 3, 2010.
Comparison is Violence, Arched, Glasgow, Mary Brennan, Herald Scotland, June 14, 2010.

Gig Review: Taylor Mac, Jay Richardson, The Scotsman, June 13, 2010.
Glamming it Up with Taylor Mac, Caridad Svich, American Theater Magazine, November 2008.
Red Tide Blooming: The Discomforting Spring of Taylor Mac,, Brian Boyles, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2006.
Reminding us of Our Humanity: An Inclusive Interview with Taylor Mac, JT Ross, Minor Progression, March 11, 2011.
tEEth: 3 Events; Choreographer Angelle Hebert and composer Phillip Kraft founded Portland-based dance company tEEth in 2006. Their work is generated through deeply collaborative processes, blending original music and movement through melodic and conceptual mirroring. tEEth approaches the body with a singular eye for life’s beauty and dark absurdity, and combines technical virtuosity with raw impact. tEEth has toured to On the Boards (Seattle), Joyce SoHo (NYC), Fuse Box Festival (Austin), and St. Ferdinand Church and Sidearm (New Orleans), and most recently won the Joyce Theater Foundation’s prestigious A.W.A.R.D. Show! at On the Boards. Their new work, currently in creation and co-commissioned by White Bird (Portland) and On the Boards (Seattle), will premiere in January 2012 at Lincoln Hall at Portland State University, and will tour nationally to pending locations. Selected Press A cracked smile and a silent shout: tEEth's Home Made, Robert Tyree, ultrapdx, November 7, 2010. LIVE REVIEW: tEEth's Home Made, Matthew Korfhage, Willamette Week, November 5, 2010. Dance review: Innovative choreography, intimate performance carry Home Made, Catherine Thomas, The Oregonian, November 6, 2010. Selected Video
Tender Forever: 2 Events; Melanie Valera (Tender Forever) was born in Southwestern France in 1977. 3 albums (on K Records) and 800 shows later, she’s now pursuing multimedia projects for venues including La Cité Internationale (Paris) and the Whitney Museum (New York). Though she lives today in Portland, OR, her pop project leaps towards a world where we can close the gaps between countries, ideologies and, ultimately, hearts.
Ten Tiny Dances: 6 Events; An experiment in confined space, Ten Tiny Dances is dedicated to fostering inventive dance and theater on a tiny stage, providing an accessible and exciting performance experience for a diverse audience. Produced by Portland choreographer Mike Barber, the series challenges artists to collapse known vocabulary as well as to make new material that responds to the constraints of the space. It interrupts the usual expectations for dance vocabulary, performance, and viewing, and affects the way people move and are perceived in space. What began with a simple idea has grown into one of the Northwest’s most popular performance series. Since 2002, the platform has inspired an ever-expanding roster of creations and performances: close to 200 emerging and established artists, dozens of engaging venues, and five cities have taken part in Ten Tiny Dances.
Tesar Freeman: 2 Events; Tesar Freeman is an artist and amateur historian whose work is concerned with the revision of history and the physical vessels of ideologies. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Peripheries
http://www.gadsden.info/
Gadsden Flag History on FoundingFathers.info
Tetsuya Umeda: 1 Event; From capturing environments, architectural structures, sound, light and human behavior, the source of Umeda’s work ranges widely. Working actively both in and outside of Japan, the artist remodels installations out of daily products, engages viewers with his interactive performance pieces, and collaborates with musicians using his own originally-produced implements. He has held a number of significant solo exhibitions including “Criterium 73: Tetsuya Umeda”, Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito (2008), “Hotel New Osorezan”, Ota Fine Arts Singapore, Singapore (2013), “Age0”, Breaker Project, Osaka (2014), and “Science of Superstition”, SonicProtest Festival, Montreuil (2015). Umeda has also participated in the “1st Aichi Triennale 2010: Arts and Cities”, Nagoya (2010); “Double Vision: Contemporary Art From Japan”, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow / Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa (2012); “Simple Interactions. Sound Art from Japan”, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Roskilde (2011); and is recently featured at “RhythmScape”, Gyoenggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyoenggi (2015) and “Sounds of Us”, Trafó Gallery, Budapest (2015-2016).
The Blow: 3 Events; MELISSA DYNE is a conceptual, installation and performance artist, with a focus on the physics of sound and light. Her large scale installations have shown at The Museum of The City, in Mexico City, and Para/Site, in Hong Kong. Her installation, Glass, in which a window from a skyscraper balanced for three months on a gallery wall, was exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Craft in 2008. She studied optics at UNAM in Mexico City, art at College of Santa Fe, NM and completed a degree in accoustics at SAE Institute in New York. Dyne has been peforming and collaborating with The Blow since 2009, and recently officially joined the band, expanding her investigations of sound waves into the field of popular music. melissadyne.com
KHAELA MARICICH is a performance artist, writer and pop musician. Under the name, The Blow, she has made albums and narrative performance works, interweaving the elements of one within the framework of the other. At TBA 2004 she performed the pop opera Blue Sky vs. Night Sky, as well as a fictional corporate presentation about a mental health maintenance system called Remosch. She has presented her work nationally and internationally in a broad range of venues, from art centers to house parties to concert halls, including such venues as The Kitchen, On The Boards, Henry Fonda Theater, and Great American Music Hall. She lives and works in New York City. khaelamaricich.com
Since coming together in collaboration on The Blow in 2009, Dyne and Maricich have performed at The Wexner Center, Joe's Pub, and The Warhol Museum. They have lectured on their collaboration at PICA, The Henry Gallery, Seattle, and Residency Unlimited, in Brooklyn, NY. Their new album, The Blow, is being released on Kanine Records in October 2013.They first met at the TBA festival in 2004. theblow.org
The Delicate Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Khaela Maricich, The Stranger, June 26, 2013.

Artists Archive

robbinschilds

Robert Boyd

Robert Quillen Camp

Rob Halverson

Robin Deacon

Robin Lane

Roland Dahwen Wu

Ronaldo V. Wilson

Ronnie Bass

Selected Press

Rose Bond

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble

Roy Pérez

Roza Moshtaghi

rubén garcía marrufo

Ruby Sky Stiler

Selected Press

Rude Mechs

Selected Press

Rufus Wainwright

Selected Press

Rush-N-Disco

Sable Elyse Smith

Sacha Yanow

Sahar al-Sawaf

Salimatu Amabebe

Sam Gould

Sam Green

Selected Press

Sam Hamilton

Samita Sinha

Samiya Bashir

Sampada Aranke

San Cha

Sanchel Brown

Sara Greenberger Rafferty

Sarah AbuAbdallah

Sarah Dougher

Sarah Farahat

Sarah Gilbert

Sarah Hennies

Sara Jaffe

Sara Krajewski

Sara Ludy

Sara Magenheimer

Sara Siestreem

Sasha Wortzel

Satpreet Kahlon

Satya Byock

Scout Niblett

Seba Calfuqueo

S.E.C.R.E.T.S.

Shaky Hands

Shana Moulton

Selected Press

Shannon Funchess

Shantala Shivalingappa

Selected Press

Sharita Towne

Shawna Lipton

SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY

Shayla Lawson

Shirin Neshat

Selected Press

Shirotama Hitsujia

sidony o’neal

Signe Becker

Silvia Bottiroli

Simon Liu

Sir Richard Bishop

Sissyboy

S.J Norman

S Loper

Small Sails

SNAP!

Soot Uros

Sounds et al

Spalding Gray

Spencer Byrne-Seres