Artists Archive
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Jenn Freeman (also known as Po'Chop) is Chicago-based performance artist who uses elements of dance, storytelling, and striptease to create performances and inspire students and collaborators across the country. Po’Chop is the co-founder of House of the Lorde and creator and author of the blogzine The Brown Pages. She has performed at the Brooklyn Museum in Brown Girls Burlesque’s Bodyspeak, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance for TedxChicago 2022, and headlined shows in New Orleans, Minneapolis, Denver, St. Louis, and New York. Po’Chop is a board member and cast member for Jeezy’s Juke Joint, an all-Black burlesque revue. Po’Chop performs in season two of Netflix’s Easy, appears in music videos for songs by Jamila Woods and Mykele Deville, and creates and performs in experimental dance films such as LITANY. Jenn Freeman has been recognized as a 2022 United States Artist Fellow, a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow, a 2021 Foundation of Contemporary Art Grants to Artists recipient, a 2019-20 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Fellow, and as a 2018 Chicago Dancemakers Lab Artist. Po’Chop was voted among the top 50 Most Influential Burlesque Artists by 21st Century Magazine in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and was a dancer in residence at Rebuild Foundation in 2020.
Learn moreJibz Cameron is a performer, visual artist, and writer living in Los Angeles, most well known for her multimedia work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag. Over the last 20 years, Cameron has combined tragedy and comedy at such institutions as MOCA, PS1, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, The Hammer Museum, and the New Museum, among others. The New York Times has heralded her as “the funniest and most pitch-perfect performance seen in years,” and New York Magazine has called her “outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative.” Cameron has written and produced seven evening-length performance pieces and countless short works that have been performed in clubs and venues internationally. She has also produced multiple video works and three albums of original music. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2020 Creative Capital Awardee, and a 2021 United States Artist. Her film, Weirdo Night, made with director Mariah Garnett, is an official Sundance Film Festival 2021 submission. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night!, a monthly experimental comedy and performance event in Los Angeles + New York. Jibz is honored to be included in 2023’s Made In LA Biennale “Acts Of Living” at the Hammer Museum. Cameron's memoir, Hell In A Handbag, is being released by DOPAMINE Books in 2026.
Learn moreJasperse is Artistic Director/Choreographer of the New York-based John Jasperse Company/Thin Man Dance. He has created several short works and thirteen evening-length pieces for the company, as well as various projects in collaboration with other artists. His work has been presented by festivals and presenting organizations throughout the United States and Europe and in Brazil, Chile, Israel, and Japan. Jasperse and company have received numerous prizes, grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and a “Bessie” Award in recognition of their body of work. Jasperse has created works for several companies including Baryshnikov's White Oak Project, Batsheva Dance Company, and The Lyon Opera Ballet.
Selected Press
Hamming It Up, With Pink Light, Flashes of Murakami and Flowered Bikinis, Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, June 18, 2010.
John Jasperse Company, Joyce Theatre, New York, Apollinaire Scherr, Financial Times, June 18, 2010
Dance review: John Jasperse's flirty West Coast premiere at REDCAT, Victoria Looseleaf, LA Times, April 15, 2010.
True Lies: John Jasperse collaborates in search of beauty, Valerie Jean Johnson, NewCity Stage, April 5, 2010.
Of Men Who Go Naked With Women Who Aren't, Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, June 3, 2000
Learn moreJustine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation, and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Chambers meets this question in her work by attending to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography/dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Chambers’ work has been hosted at galleries, festivals, and theaters nationally and internationally including Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy, NY; Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, ON; Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal, QC; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Sophiensaele, Berlin, Germany; National Arts Centre, Ottawa, ON; Agora de la Danse, Montreal, QC; Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford, PA; Artspeak, Vancouver, BC; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Western Front, Vancouver, BC; The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC; Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, BC; and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Chambers holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and is currently Assistant Professor in Dance at the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, and Associate Artist to The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Learn moreKara-Lis Coverdale works in both acoustic and electronic media to create works that transcend reality. Driven by a patient devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Coverdale’s world-building work occupies new planes built upon a borderless understanding of electronic music rooted in the interlocking pathways of musical systems and languages. Named a unique navigator of the digital frontier with an ease and emotive sensitivity “we cannot yet comprehend” (FADER) and heralded as “one of the most exciting composers in North America” (The Guardian), Coverdale’s work has been met with consistent critical acclaim. Her most recent recorded release, Grafts (Boomkat, 2017), whilst rooted in a modal sensibility, explores the impermanence of identity signature to exhibit a highly idiosyncratic approach to ratio-based microtonality and overtone, grief, love, and the passing of time. Grafts has been described as an “arresting,” “masterful work” of “uncompromisingly distinct,” “indescribable beauty.” Coverdale’s recordings are architecturally considered and often understated, but her dynamic live shows can be unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, confrontational—symptoms that the artist is emotionally present— for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite as a highly dynamic and explorative artist; unpredictable and resistant to categorization and stasis.
Previous releases include Aftertouches (2015, Sacred Phrases), a distinct exploration of holographic sonics, container technologies, and digital ether, that explores music’s sacred histories while forging its mediated and culturally saturated frontiers. Extended harmonic resolutions of seventeenth century chromatic keyboard music are redolent of her approach to this part writing, voiced with hybrid keyboards, fractured samples, algorithmically rendered vocals, and VST miragery. Aftertouches was named a top album of the year by The Wire, NPR, and others. A 480 (2014, Constellation Tatsu), is a set of studies accompanied by .nfo scores sourced from the data-sourced voice to explore the sonic impermanence of identity signatures. Coverdale has collaborated with Philadelphia noise artist David Sutton (LXV) on their collaborative album Sirens (2015, Umor Rex), to explore disembodiment and fantasy in the digital age, Tim Hecker (Love Streams, Virgins), and her production credits include Marilyn Manson, How To Dress Well, Lee Bannon, and others. She has also presented an A/V collaboration with MFO (Marcel Weber). Coverdale has written scores with artist and writer Kara Crabb on several projects, including the writing of the score for Royal Jelly (a modern reworking of the Greek Tragedy Medea), and The Reproductive Life Cycle of a Flower. In 2016 and 2017, Coverdale performed over eighty shows in Europe, North America, and Australia, including performances that were “festival favourites” for Unsound, Semibreve, and Mutek. More recently, she presented new large scale works Marjamaa Laulud, a unique commission for Dance with the Estonian Vanemuine Theatre and choreographer Ruslan Stepanov, and VoxU, a pipe organ commission for Mutek Montreal (CALQ) that is centred around the collection and arrangement of the unique sonics of the Vox Humana stop in particular, the first record and instrument of vocal synthesis dating back to the fifthteenth century. The work weaves a narrative characteristic of this period, intersecting motives of emulation, the body, and transcendence.
Kara-Lis was born in Burlington, Canada, and began studying with the Royal Conservatory of Music from age 5. Her grandparents were immigrants from Estonia. She later went on to complete with degrees in musicology and composition, for which she wrote a Masters thesis “Sound Rhetoric, and the Fallacy of Fidelity,” a seed to Coverdale’s infatuation with the mutability of the real. Coverdale has worked as organist and music director at several churches across Canada since age 13, where she has also served as choir conductor. She is recipient of a “remising young artist” award by Canadian new music composer Ann Southam, has held residencies with GRM Paris, EMS Stockholm, FUGA Zaragoza and others, and presents original performances, commissions, collaborations, and installations all over the world including The Barbican, Theatre du Chatelet, AGO, MAC Montreal, Filharmonia Krakowska, Teatro Circo, Kraftwerk, and Elbphilharmonie.
Learn moreWith the publication of her debut book, The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio became the first undocumented finalist for a National Book Award. Her book was also named by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020 and was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Time, NPR, The New York Public Library, Book Riot, Vulture, and the Library Journal. Karla has written about immigration, music, beauty, and mental illness for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, n+1, and The New Inquiry, among others. She lives in New Haven with her partner and their dog. She is a graduate of Harvard University and a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at Yale.
Learn moreHennessy is a San Francisco-based performer, choreographer, teacher, organizer, and PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis. He directs Circo Zero and co-founded 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE in San Francisco. Hennessy tours extensively including Queer Zagreb, New York Live Arts and American Realness Festival in New York, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, and YBCA in San Francisco, among others. He has received multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie), and the United States Artist Kjenner Fellowship.
Learn moreKim Smith Claudel is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR, whose work intersects painting, sculpture, installation, and performance through a wide range of media. Smith Claudel's work has been exhibited internationally, including shows in Japan and Sweden, as well as throughout the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include the Painting Center, New York, NY; Mt. Hood Community College, Portland, OR; and Carnation Contemporary, Portland, OR. She is an active member of the artit collective WAVE Contemporary and Carnation Contemporary in Portland. She is the recipient of the 2025 Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and Ford Family Foundation, and was recently awarded an artist in residency at Building 5. She holds an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, as well as an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY.
Learn moreEstablished in Israel in 2000 by the actor/writer Lee Sher and dancer/choreographer Saar Harari, LeeSaar The Company uses the different disciplines and training of theater and dance to create original performances. In 2004, after residency in Sydney, Australia, and two seasons in Tel Aviv, the company moved to New York. Lee and Saar received American green cards awarded for excellence in the performing arts in 2005, a Six Points Fellowship for 2007-2008, and were nominated for the 2008 Alpert Award in Dance. The duo is the recent recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and a NYFA Fellowship in choreography.
Learn moreLili Chopra, Executive Vice President and Artistic Director of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in New York City, is founder and curator of its trans-disciplinary fall festival Crossing the Line. She has extensive experience in programming, producing, and marketing international events and performance works in both France and New York. In addition to working with various festivals and independent artists as an administrator and producer, she spent four years at New York Live Arts (formerly known as Dance Theater Workshop) working closely with David White as Associate Producer and as Curator of its Gallery. She received her Masters in Theater and Performing Arts History at Paris X University, and her M.A. in Arts Administration from Columbia University in New York.
Learn moreLucy Cotter is an independent writer, curator and trained artist, holding a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. A regular contributor to journals such as Mousse, Flash Art, Frieze and Third Text, her edited book Reclaiming Artistic Research was published in 2019. She was curator of the Dutch pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale 2017, presenting artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Cotter was formerly director of the Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She is currently based in Portland, Oregon and working on new projects that experiment with the boundaries of the artistic, the curatorial and the theoretical.
Learn moreMarcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of the collection Cenzontle (2018), which won the 2017 A. Poulin Jr. prize, and the chapbook Dulce (2018). His memoir, Children of the Land (2020), is his most recent publication. His work has appeared or been featured in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, People Magazine en Español, The Paris Review, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. He currently teaches in the Low-Res MFA program at Ashland University
Learn moreMarginal Consort is a Japanese collective improvisation group founded by members of East Bionic Symphonia, an outfit assembled from students of Fluxus artist Takehisa Kosugi’s class at the radical Bigaku School of Aesthetics in Tokyo in the 1970s. Current participants are former Taj-Mahal Traveller Kazuo Imai, engineer Kei Shii, artist and Gap member Masami Tada, and musician Tomonao Koshikawa. Their records together have been released by P.S.F. and PAN.
This performance has been organized in collaboration with PuSh Festival in Vancouver, B.C. and On the Boards in Seattle, Washington. Support for this project is provided by the Oregon Arts Commission, Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), National Endowment for the Arts, and the Japan Foundation.
Learn moreMatt Connors is an abstract artist interested in post-painterly concerns of the painting as an object. Connors was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1973, and received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2006. He has been featured in several recent solo exhibitions including: Cherry and Martin, Los Angles (2010); CANADA, New York (2008); Luttgenmeijer, Berlin (2008); The Breeder, Athens (2007); Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York (2005). Recent Group shows include: Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2010); and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2008). He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Learn moreMatthew Cowan is the Archivist for Moving Images and Photography at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland. He worked previously at Anthology Film Archives in New York. You can reach him at matthew.cowan@ohs.org.
Learn moreMic Capes is a hip hop artist from Portland, OR that represents the North Portland neighborhood, St.Johns. Capes is known for having vivid story telling ability, raw lyricism, and thought provoking social commentary as key components of his music. He released his debut solo album "Rise & Grind" and made a huge impact on the local hip hop scene and now gearing up for his highly anticipated sophomore offering "Concrete Dreams", slated to drop in 2015. He is a member of the Portland hip hop supergroup The Resistance of FRSH TRB.
Learn moreMichael Crowe is a writer and an artist. His diverse work has been featured in press internationally including Associated Press, BBC, the New Yorker, The Smithsonian and Financial Times Deutschland. He has exhibited in galleries including FRAC Paris, Simultanhalle in Cologne, Nottingham Contemporary and Kunsthalle St. Gallen in Switzerland. He's given talks at the New Museum New York, BFI London and taught at Tate Britain and the Camden Arts Centre. Michael's most frequent collaborator is Lenka Clayton, with whom he writes Mysterious Letters, an attempt to write a handwritten letter to everyone in the world.
Learn moreThe Miracles Club is a performance art and music group from Portland Oregon. Members Rafael Fauria, Honey Owens and Ryan Boyle explore the relationship between sound, movement, audience and artist.
Selected Press
Miracles Club, “A New Love”, Michael Manheimer, wweek.com, January 11, 2010.
Learn moreMuffie Delgado Connelly (she/her) is a dance artist, movement researcher, teacher, and somatic practitioner in Portland, Oregon. Her work as a performer and choreographer has been presented across the United States at Links Hall (Chicago), Packer Schopf Gallery (Chicago), The Art Institute of Chicago, Movement Research Festival (New York), The Gibney Dance Center (New York), and in Portland at White Bird, Performance Works Northwest, and the Newmark Theater. She is the recipient of awards from the Ford Foundation (New York), Illinois Arts Council’s Community Arts Assistance Program, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council (Portland). She has previously choreographed for Portland Center Stage in Earth Without Borders/Tierra Sin Fronteras as well as tick, tick..BOOM! She is the recipient of awards from the Ford Foundation (New York), Illinois Arts Council and the Regional Arts and Culture Council (Portland). Currently, Muffie teaches at Bodyvox and is a yearly guest teacher at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is one of five artistic leaders of the FLOCK Dance Center. IG: @muffiedelgadoconnelly
Learn moreMyles de Bastion develops technology and art installations that enable sound to be experienced as light and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum, and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. He has built large format installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding.
Myles is the founder of CymaSpace, a non-profit that facilitates cultural events inclusive of the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing; and Audiolux Devices, which produces products featuring light and sound synergy. 2018 Director of the first Northwest Deaf Arts Festival. Myles mentors Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing youth, has developed curriculum, and taught workshops in music and sound for Deaf schools, camps, and communities.
A current project, The Ikigai Machine, is a multimedia visual narrative with interactive installations and live performances that he is developing into a feature-length, touring production for disability hubs and art institutions. Myles has received support from Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Cultural Trust, Oregon Cultural Foundation and Randall Charitable Trust.
Learn moreUsing Bauhaus theater, Ikebana and Arte Povera as variant points of departure in his work, Ned Colclough’s sculptural assemblages encompass a visual style where formalism, minimalism, and neo-modernism are repositioned into abstract mediations. Balancing his sculptural elements--a vocabulary that includes found wood, stone, rope, and plaster--into orchestrated compositions, Colclough lends a lyrical and poetic relationship to both material and object. Colclough received his BFA from the NYSCC School of Art and Design in Alfred, NY. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York and group shows at Halsey Mckay Gallery, East Hampton, NY; Zieher Smith, New York; Sara Meltzer Gallery, NY; and in curated exhibitions by Apartment Show. He is a recent recipient of the 140 Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Colclough lives and works in Brooklyn, and is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.
Learn moreDJ Mami Miami is the alias of Emilly Prado, a Chicana writer and DJ based in Portland, Oregon. As the former co-host of Is Butter a Carb? on XRAY FM, Emilly played a wide range of genres from cumbias and spanish punk rock to hip hop, neo-soul, and oldies. She plays songs of her childhood and music that she’s stumbled upon later in life. Her live sets are always mood-driven but she specializes in playing jams for perreando. In 2017, she co-founded Noche Libre DJ collective. Learn more about her at www.emillyprado.com and on Instagram at @emillyp.
Inés Paulina Ramírez- aka Lapaushi- was born in Cuenca, Ecuador. She grew up dancing to classical cumbias on cassette at her family’s parties in the Andes mountains. Her work as a DJ and visual artist engages and celebrates cultural identity. Lapaushi mixes urban rhythms that include feminist hip-hop, reggaeton, electrocumbia, a wide variety of cumbia, descarga, sonidero and chicha psicodélica. - “Pura sabrosura”.
Her selections come from years of traveling, collecting and sharing music from various regions of Latin America that explore Indigenous memory and African roots while incorporating contemporary electronic beats. Soundcloud:lapaushi IG:lapaushi
Dez Ramirez aka DJ La Cósmica is a writer, artist and DJ that’s been in and out of the Los Angeles and Portland music scene for the last decade. Influenced by the Southern California Chicanx culture she grew up in, her eclectic sets are shaped by the sounds of lowrider oldies, disco, electronic, funk, new wave, post punk, rock en espanol, reggae, hip hop, and rock & roll. The daughter L.A. disco dancers, La Cosmica’s sets often pay homage to her parents, Latin discotecas, and the eccentric, glam club scene of the 1970s and 80s. Find her on IG @silver_mother or dezramirez.com
Learn moreFor the past ten years, Zimbabwe-born and New York-based Chipaumire has investigated Africa and her own personal iconography. Her performances complicate, implicate, and destroy the concept of the African female body as a subjugated, colonial, and tribal unknowable. Chipaumire is a recipient of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and two New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards.
Selected Press
Nora Chipaumire: Body and Soul Podcast, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Infinite Body Podcast, April 25, 2008.
Platform 2012: Parallels, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine, April, 2012.
Learn moreOlivia Camfield is a multimedia movement artist of the Muscogee Nation, born and raised in Texas Hill Country. Their work finds connection to dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism. They have performed and choreographed dance for much of their career, and their film work includes themes of the Alien as kin, time traveling relatives, and Mvskoke lifeways in experimental forms. They are a tattoo artist whose hand poke practice is based in Southeastern and Mississippian Indigenous tattoo traditions, creating designs for Southeastern people that imagine the possibilities of those tattoos in the future and the new shapes they may take. Olivia's films have screened internationally at Camden International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and have appeared in print and online publications such as Artforum and Variety. Olivia is a 2018-19 Alembic Artist In Residence, a CYCLE I featured artist of COUSIN Collective, a 2022 Sundance Institute Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive participant, and a 2022 recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s LIFT–Early Career Support for Native Artists award.
Learn morePamela Council is a New York based interdisciplinary artist creating fountains for Black joy. Guided by material, cultural, and metaphysical quests, Council’s practice embodies a darkly humorous and inventive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. Through this lens, Council uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to shed light on under-examined and under-valued narratives.
Council has created commissions, exhibitions, performances or presentations for: New Museum for Contemporary Art, United States Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoCADA. Council has been Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell, Red Bull Arts, Bemis, Rush Arts, MANA, Signal Culture, Mass MoCA, and Wassaic Project. A recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Grant, Council holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University and is currently artist in residence at ISCP.
Social Media handles
twitter / pamelacouncil
instagram / pamelacouncil
Patreon / BLAXIDERMY
venmo / pamelacouncil
cash app / $pammypammy
Learn morePaul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance.
Learn morePeter Coffin was born in Berkeley, California in 1972. He has had solo exhibitions at Herald St, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery (NY); The Wrong Gallery (NY); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (CA); Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami (FL); The Horticultural Society of New York (NY); and le Confort Moderne, Poitier, France; as well as recent group exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NY. He is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Learn moreRachel Carrico is a scholar and practitioner of dance and performance. She holds a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California–Riverside and an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU. She has published her research on second lining, an improvisational dance form rooted in New Orleans's African diaspora parading traditions, in TDR: The Drama Review, TBS: The Black Scholar, and several anthologies. Fellowships and awards include the Society of Dance History Scholars' Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for excellence in dance scholarship, the UC Center for New Racial Studies Research Grant, and the Center for Gulf South Research Global South Fellowship at Tulane University. Also a practitioner, Carrico completed the Limón Institute's dance teacher training. In 2008, she co-founded Goat in the Road Productions in New Orleans, with whom she has directed two international artist residencies and launched Play/Write, a youth playwriting festival, in New Orleans schools.
Learn moreRahila Naomi Stadem Coats is an improviser, choreographer, and dancer based in Chicago. Her works have been shown through the support of Twenty Percent Productions, the 2018 Jerusalem Jazz Festival, Minnesota Fringe Festival, Company Projects, Synapse Arts, Thodos Dance Chicago, DanceWorks Chicago, and the University of Ghana at Legon. Currently, she dances for Red Clay Dance and is a vocalist with music group Family Junket. She is excited to continue this journey with FORCE! and its loving constellation.
Learn moreRap Class is an eclectic DJ and producer who has been operating out of the Pacific Northwest for the better part of the last decade. His styles are routed in a heavy sample-based audio collage and disco mix champion influence. He can deliver anything; changing the ins and outs of his routine is his specialty. Every time you see him it’s like drawing a prize out from a bag. His one goal: to keep his audience guessing. Seeing him live, audiences may just learn that forward thinking electronic music doesn’t merely exist in the present, but lives as a culmination of all music history, a fact to be presented by the right DJ at the right place & time: Rap Class.
Selected Press
"Rap Class: Brothers Superhero," Christian Santana, XLR8R, August 10, 2012.
"Rap Class," Reed Jackson, Willamette Week, October 31, 2012.
Learn moreRaven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of a United States Artists fellowship in music, a Creative Capital award in visual arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
Learn moreRobert Alexander Clarke is a designer, educator, and theorist practicing at the intersection of culture, identity, and architecture. His work aims to develop and canonize black aesthetics, thus authenticating it as a lens through which to practice architecture. His design office, BAS ( Black Aesthetic Studio ) was founded by Clarke, Cleo Davis and Kimberly Morland; their studio explores how to unearth new aesthetics that are immensely specific to African American culture, experience, and identity.
Before joining as Activist in Residence at UCLA’s City Lab, Clarke held posts as a Wilson Smith III Design in Spatial Justice Fellow at the University of Oregon’s College of Design. As well as Research Fellow at Newlab under the supervision of architect and New York University Associate Professor of Practice Mitchell Joachim. Before opening his practice, Clarke worked for many years at architectural firms across the globe, including HOK, Terreform ONE, Gensler, and Archi-Union.
Learn moreRobert 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.
Learn moreRoz Crews creates site-specific projects that require participation from an audience and involve social engagement as a method of research. Her current work interrogates notions of community and encourages critical reflection on how “we” define the word in support of, or to deny, assumptions. She experiments with inventing communities as alternative ways of living and relating while asking us to consider our daily interactions within our communities. She is currently supported as the Artist in Residence at Portland State’s University Housing and Residence Life Department.
Learn moreSan 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.
Learn moresean chamberlain is a queer artist currently living in Portland, OR.
Their practice largely focuses on identity production, the ethics of the second self, and the construction of our IRL/URL worlds. This work predominantly manifests through video, installation, publication, and performance, as well as being engaged through curatorial work, event production, and writing. chamberlain has exhibited at b10, Composition, GAK Space, First Brick, One Grand Gallery, and has performed in various nightclubs, both above and below ground.
@seanchamberlain
Learn moreSeba 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.
Learn moreSterling Cunio, is an award winning author, playwright and poet. An Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Pen America Arts for Social justice Fellow, and a World Yes Jammer whose work has been published in The Marshall Project, L.A. Book review and performed by various artist including Grammy award winning musician Antino Sanchez. Sterling sits on the board of Directors of Oregon's Transformative Justice Community and acts as lead facilitator for Regroup, a support and empowerment network of Returning Citizens that played an instrumental role in abolishing the authorization of slavery from Oregon's constitution. Along with currently working for Church at The Park in Salem serving its houseless community, Sterling also works as a lead consultant on the Ubuntu Climate Initiative, a global climate resilience movement focusing on Reuniting people and planet through joy, art and sustainability.
Learn moreTai Carpenter (she/her) is a writer, gallerist and community archivist with a passion for social impact in the realms of art and civil rights. She is also the founder of Compose Yourself Magazine, an independent online publication spotlighting music, culture and social justice. She has curated political art installations, facilitated panel discussions and organized artmaking workshops centered on civic action with Portland Art Museum, University of Oregon’s Special Collections and University Archives, Society of American Archivists, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Shift Collective and Documenting the Now, among others.
Her work allows her to intersect two passions, art and civil rights, to create a more equitable and creative world by utilizing critical research to facilitate dialogues around art in relation to current social movements.
Tai is currently the Board President of Don’t Shoot Portland, a community-based advocacy nonprofit and Director of The Black Gallery. Most recently she was Gallery Coordinator for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, Gallery Manager at HOLDING Contemporary and an Archives & Records Management Coordinator at the City of Portland Archives.
Learn moreThe Javaad Alipoor Company (TJAC) is a contemporary theater company that makes work for a changing world and a global audience. Rooted in experimental and multiplatform practice, their work asks the most pressing questions we all face. With a commitment to internationalism, complexity, diversity, and fun, they make work for the twenty-first century, transforming what people think theater can be and what it can do.
Learn moreIn his critically received works, Tim Crouch interrogates the role of the audience in the generation of theatre, theatre as a conceptual form, and the creative act of playwrighting. The BBC Radio 3 production of My Arm won a coveted Prix Italia for Best Adaptation in the Radio Drama category. Crouch won best male actor for his performance in An Oak Tree at the Brighton Festival in 2006, and the piece also received a prestigious Obie Special Citation following its New York run. ENGLAND enjoyed a sold-out run as part of the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and has gone on to receive three major awards: a Fringe First, a Herald Archangel, and a Total Theatre Award.
Learn morePolymath Tony Conrad is known by many names: composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist, writer, and educator. Associated with the founding of minimal music and underground film, he is well known for his pivotal role in the formation of the Velvet Underground and as a co-founder The Dream Syndicate— who utilized intonation and sustained sound to produce what the group called "dream music", what we know now as drone. Conrad has composed more than a dozen audio works with special scales and tuning for solo amplified violin with amplified strings. Conrad has played and collaborated with Rhys Chatham, Charlemagne Palestine, Jennifer Walshe, Tony Oursler, Eli Keszler, and many others. In the early 1970s Conrad produced several series of works that severely stretched the limits of “film,” including his cooked and electrocuted films, and the “Yellow Movie” series, and "The Flicker" (1966), which is considered a key early work of the structural film movement. Conrad’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta, Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, LA Museum of Contemporary Art, and many others. He exhibits at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York and Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne. Conrad’s early career is the subject of a study by Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone, 2008). Conrad is a founding member of the ISSUE Project Room Board.
Learn moreSantiago Leyba is an artist and musician living in New Mexico. Using a minimal hardware set-up, Leyba assembles his particular form of concrete body music out of improvisations and experiments against the backdrop of the southwestern U.S. Working to break down the rules of organization and surplus frequently present in house and techno, Leyba evolves his minimal but dynamic productions into live performances that force bodies to move through driving beats. U.S. hard / contemporary is concerned with the present, the experiential, and the irreducibility of giving oneself over to impulse.
Learn moreFor several years, Wally Cardona created group works that demanded highly controlled working conditions in order to be made. His current cycle of work cultivates a practice of undoing, creating intimate yet crowded collaborative conditions.
Honors: Bessie award, Guggenheim Fellowship, NYFA Fellowship, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship and Doris Duke Artist Award. Works: The Set Up, an 8-part series with Jennifer Lacey and 8 masters of traditional dance forms; Ponder Nothing, with composer Ned Rothenberg and an existent score by Ben Johnston; TOOL IS LOOT, with Lacey and composer Jonathan Bepler, resulting from games of aesthetic disorientation with “non-dance experts,” including a sommelier, astrophysicist, architect, social activist; Movements within Stream, an outdoor mini-myth made for a hillside sculpture; Really Real, a people piece for 100 individuals, including the Brooklyn Youth Chorus with music by Phil Kline; and A Light Conversation, a physical dialogue on aesthetics vs. ethics, love, commitment and sacrifice, with Swiss choreographer Rahel Vonmoos.
Learn moreWoolly is an aesthetically-inclined, trans-pop-culture, dance-therapy performance group formed in Portland, OR in 2006. They have performed in venues ranging between burned-out buildings, black box theaters, Mexican bars, fields of llamas, cowboy dance halls, and downtown alleyways. Traversing between hilarious absurdity and a dark intensity, they bring audiences to the precipice of tantalizing confusion.
Selected Press
Ultra Q: Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner, Lisa Radon, ultrapdx.com, January 14, 2008. (PDF)
Learn moreYOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is yhchang.com. It is also Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge. They have made work in 17 languages and presented much of it in major art institutions, including Tate London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the New Museum, New York. Selected Press "DISTANCE, HOMELESSNESS, ANONYMITY, AND INSIGNIFICANCE": AN INTERVIEW WITH YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES", Thom Swiss, The Iowa Review, December 15, 2002. Interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Hyun-Joo Yoo, dichtung-digital, February, 2005. Selected Video
Learn moreYOUNG JEAN LEE (Artistic Director) is an OBIE award-winning playwright and director who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays, The Shipment and Lear) and by Samuel French (Three Plays by Young Jean Lee). She is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, NYFA, NEA, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Rockefeller MAP Foundation. She is also the recipient of two OBIE awards, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award.
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