Artists Archive
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Founded in 2015, Deep Under Ground (DUG) is a community-based arts platform that curates intentional gatherings in support of local artistry striving to encourage young, diverse talent to change the landscape of the Portland arts community. Through organizing and making art, DUG’s intention is to uplift individuals and synchronize different avenues of expression; emphasizing artistic cultivation as an essential outlet to every individual and community.
Learn moreHailed by Ms. Magazine’s end of the century issue as “a choreographer making great leaps forward into the 21st century,” Donna Uchizono is the Artistic Director of Donna Uchizono Company, a New York-based company established in 1990. Since her choreographic debut in 1990, Uchizono rapidly emerged from the “downtown scene” as a choreographer known for her spicy movement, wit, and rich invention. Donna Uchizono Company has toured throughout the United States, Europe, South America, Asia and Australia and has created work for notables Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright, Paula Vogel, MacArthur Fellow, David Hammons, and neurologist/writer Oliver Sacks.
In 2011, after decades of critically-acclaimed dance works that toured nationally and internationally, Donna Uchizono was identified by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and Dance Heritage Coalition as a master choreographer whose works require preservation. Donna Uchizono Company received a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts award for Phase 1 of the archival and preservation of her work.
In addition to being a Unites States Artist, Guggenheim Fellow and a “Bessie” award winner, Uchizono has been recognized by many awards including United States Artist Award in dance, an Alpert Award in Dance, Rockefeller, the National Dance Project, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Capital Foundation, Altria Group, Inc., the Jerome Foundation, Dance Magazine Seed Grant, the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, Arts International, Foundation for Contemporary Performance, Metropolitan Life Foundation/ADF Commission, the National Performance Network, the Suitcase Fund, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Greenwall Foundation, Meet the Composer, and the Bossak Heilbron Charitable Foundation. Uchizono has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and five New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
Learn moreMobile Projection Unit (MPU) is a roving studio that presents new, experimental, site-specific outdoor video projections throughout Portland, Oregon. Our work focusses on spatializing video through projection mapping, and live interactive video performance through creative coding. Founded and directed by Sarah Turner and Fernanda D’Agostino in 2018, MPU is also a curatorial project, putting the tools of production into the hands of artists. MPU has worked with media artists Sharita Towne, Sabina Haque, Ruben Garcia Marrufo, Jaleesa Johnston, Craig Winslow, Megan McKissack, Victoria Wells, and Hasan Mahmood. MPU received a 2020 Northwest Film Center commission to create “Phases of the Moon” for the Portland International Film Festival. Recent projects include “been there,” a series of experimental works by Black filmmakers curated by Ariella Tai and presented as a drive-in movie, and screenings with Snack Bloc in support of BLM. MPU is funded in part by the Precipice Fund through The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Calligram Foundation, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Sarah Turner is an artist, new media curator, creative producer, and art director. Fernanda D’Agostino is an interactive video installation artist, public artist, and creative coder.
Learn moreVocalist & 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.
Learn moreFrom 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).
Learn moreUakti is a Brazilian ensemble made up of three classically trained musicians: Paulo Sergio Santos, Artur Andres, and Decio de Souza Ramos. Thegroup's name is taken from a traditional Amazon Tucano Indian story about a monster with several holes in his body. When he ran across the forest, the wind passing through his body made wonderful and unusual sounds. Uakti the musical group is also known for their unusual and wonderful sounds. They play primarily rare, one of a kind instruments the members have made themselves, combined with more traditional woodwinds and flutes. The results of the trio's musical compositions are unlike anything else recorded—Brazilian and jazz traditions fused together in looping layering sounds with a constant percussive undercurrent.
Uakti was signed to Point Music by Philip Glass after he heard them on Paul Simon's Rhythm of the Saints album. Glass produced their first recording, Mapa, in 1993. Their second album, I Ching, based on the eastern philosophy of the same name, was built on the eight trigrams and their related harmonic and rhythmic structures. I Ching debuted in the Billboard World Music Chart at the #8 position in February 1994. Since then, the group has gained increased recognition worldwide for their successful combination of experimental techniques combined with authentic Brazilian sounds.
Learn moreUNIVERSES is a national Ensemble Theater Company, of multi-disciplined writers and performers of color, who fuse theater, poetry, dance, jazz, hip hop, politics, down home blues and Spanish boleros to create moving, challenging and entertaining works for the stage. The group breaks the traditional theatrical bounds to create its own brand of theater. Founded in The Bronx, New York in 1995, the members of UNIVERSES came together in the urban poetry and music scene of the late 1990s; quickly moving through the “down town” performance scene to built a home for themselves in American Theatre. In their 24 years, UNIVERSES has performed at venues throughout the United States and toured extensively worldwide.
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 moreRyan Bunao, Bianca AE Mack, Haevyn, Cay Horiuchi, Adam Lucero, Jack Malstrom, Jen Tam, Samantha Pollock
UwU Collective is a Portland-based artist collective organizing underground events with an aim to uplift our Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPOC) and Trans/Gender non-conforming (T/GNC) community. We are a collective of 8 members and over 30 collaborators. We are multidisciplinary artists whose practices include DJing, performance, sound, digital, video, and installation art. Together, we share values and visions imagining and exercising an empathetic world in which we can thrive and celebrate one another through underground music and multidisciplinary art practices.
UwU honors and contributes to the legacy of our queer BIPOC ancerstors who have paved the way for one another and those to come next against all odds. We are here today to imagine our version of the future—creating intentional space for joy, healing, and hope through music, collaboration, experimentation, empathy for one another, and the drive to create a better world.
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