Native Strategies/Queer Biennial II -- Lectures and Dialogues
June 5th, 18th, 19th and 26th 12-6pm
ACE Hotel, Los Angeles, 929 S. Broadway
How did the apex of the AIDS crisis in Los Angeles shape the history and ontology of performance art?
On June 5th, 18th,19th and 26th, Native Strategies (NS), the performance art journal of LA, will facilitate dialogues between artists, writers, activists, and scholars to reflect on the impact of the AIDS crisis on their individual practices and their sense of belonging to LGBTQ lineage and community. Our free public program, to be held in Segovia Hall at Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, will be a series of exchanges between these critical thinkers whose perspectives will shape the forthcoming NS issue LGBTQP designed by co-director Tanya Rubbak.
Please note that we will be recording these conversations as well as questions and input from the audience.
This series was curated by Brian Getnick and Marc Streit with support from Ruben Esparza, Mark Cramer, Mary Ellyn Johnson and swissnex San Francisco.Participating speakers:
Marcel Alcala,
Ron Athey,
Simone Aughterlony,
Nao Bustamante,
Mark Cramer,
Travis Reed Davidson,
Zackary Drucker
Dino Dinco,
Jennifer Doyle,
Eric Eich,
Ruben Esparza,
Rafa Esparza,
Brian Getnick,
Raquel Gutierrez,
Jack Halberstam,
Daniel Hellman,
Robert Hernandez,
Sebastian Hernandez,
Brandon Drew Holmes,
Jamillah James,
Alexander Juhasz,
Liss Lafleur,
Issac Ledesma,
Philip Littell,
Obidio Martinez,
Marcus Kuiland Nazario,
PIg Pen,
Dont Rhine,
Sheree Rose,
Andy Sacher,
Stuart Sandford,
Nathan Schocher,
Mica Sigourney,
Marc Streit,
Julie Tolentino,
More TBA
Sunday June 5, 2016:
12:00 Jamillah James
1:00 Nao Bustamante and Jennifer Doyle
2:00 Marcel Alcala and Mica Sigourney
3:00 break
3:30 Liss Lafleur and Daniel Hellman
4:30 Alexander Juhasz and Dont Rhine
Saturday June 18, 2016:
12:00 Chris Freeman
1:00 Jack Halberstam
2:00 Simone Aughterlony and Travis Davidson
3:00 break
3:30 Brandon Drew Holmes and Raquel Gutierrez
4:30 Andy Sacher and Robb Hernandez
5:00 Rafa Esparza and Sebastian Hernandez
Sunday June 19, 2016:
12:00 Kenyon Farrow
12:30 Nathan Schocher
1:00 Tony Mills
2:00 Keith Hennessy
3:00 break
3:30 Philip Littell and Eric Eich
4:30 Marcus Kuiland Nazario and Obidio Martinez
5:30 Curators Round Table #1: Marc Streit and Mark Cramer / Ruben Esparza and Stuart Sandford
Sunday June 26, 2016:
12:00 DINO DINCO
1:00 Ron Athey and Zackary Drucker
3:00 break
3:30 Sheree Rose and Isaac Ledesma
4:30 NS co-directors Tanya Rubbak and Brian Getnick in conversation.
Marcel Alcala
Marcel Alcala (b1990 in Santa Ana, CA) creates events, and encounters that upend the expectation of art as a discrete work exhibited for a specific period of time. Often collaborating with artists and specialists in fields such as science, literature, film, music, and architecture, Alcala ventures outside of institutional structures to contextualize his work in public space. Alcala’s diverse practice includes performance, live situations, installations, objects, and drawings. He graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Here, he organizes performance/poetry exhibitions at the McDonalds on Sunset in Silverlake, researches and enacts "Clown" performances around the country, does Improv in real time called CNX2 (Creating New Content Now), and writes poetry on identity politics and the future/status of the "brown" body. Like the socially necessary figure of the clown that fascinates him, Alcala uses humor, play, and the absurd to critique the extremes and everyday banalities of societal power.
Ron Athey
Ron Athey (b. 1961) is a Los Angeles based artist whose performance works use the physical body (glamour manipulation/mortification of the flesh) martyrology, apocalypse and the messianic body. He performed with Rozz Williams under the name Premature Ejaculation (PE) in 1980-1982, and launched a trilogy of company works in the 90s, devising philosophical works addressing the AIDS pandemic. Athey tested HIV+ positive in 1986 and was involved in both queer and IV drug user communities. His live work has been shown locally at HR, Hammer Museum, LACE, Highways, etc. He has premiered commissioned works at the MADRE museum Naples, Kampnagel Hamburg, ICA London. Additionally he has been programed into the Thessaloniki Biennial (2013), El Arte es Accion Madrid, X’teresa Mexico City, Festival Entre_Lugares Rio. He has been visiting staff at CalArts and is producing a series of live works, Xenolalia.
Simone Aughterlony
Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based and supported in Zurich and Berlin, working predominantly in dance and performance contexts. Her practice is committed to qualities that affirm the transformative potential of bodies and all things engaged in choreographic thought. Over more than a decade, Simone she has been devising and making choreographic works that have been presented in diverse venues and festivals such as HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Gessnerallee Zurich, Kunsten festival des Arts, American Realness, ImpulsTanz Wien amongst many others. She is currently touring «Supernatural» the third work of her «Biofiction Trilogy» which is a collaboration with artists, Antonija Livingstone and Hahn Rowe. Together with filmmaker Jorge León, Simone devised the project «Uni * Form» which through the guise of police uniforms, playfully composes with the dominance of desire, the unbiquity of power and the nature of being bound. «Uni * Form premiered at Zuercher Theater Spektakel and is currently touring. Simone has collaborated with artists such as Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Forced Entertainment and Jorge León, Jen Rosenblit and Phil Hayes amongst others. www.aughterlony.com
Nao Bustamante
Nao Bustamante is an internationally known artist, residing in Los Angeles, California. Bustamante's precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. The New York Times says, "She has a knack for using her body." Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sundance International Film Festival/New Frontier, Outfest International Film Festival, El Museo del Barrio Museum of Contemporary Art, First International Performance Biennial, Deformes in Santiago, Chile and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. She was also an unlikely contestant on TV network, Bravo's "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist." In 2001 she received the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. In 2008 She received the Chase Legacy award in Film (In conjunction with Kodak and HBO). And was the Artist in Residence of the American Studies Association in 2012. In 2013, Bustamante was awarded the (Short-term) CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research Fellowship and also a Makers Muse Award from the Kindle Foundation. In 2014/15 Bustamante was Artist in Residence at UC Riverside and in 2015 she was a UC MEXUS Scholar in Residence in preparation for a solo exhibit at Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s video work is in the Kadist Collection.
Bustamante is alum of the San Francisco Art Institute, New Genres program and the Skowhegen School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently she holds the position of Associate Professor and Vice Dean of Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.
Mark Cramer *curator
Mark Cramer joined the Queer Biennial family in 2014, producing the inaugural QB pop-up at LA Pride's first-ever, curated art and heritage exhibition, Momentum. Mark now serves as co-curator of Queer Biennial II, leading domestic performance art and collaborating with PAMM Residencies in QBII's academic and discursive programming. Mark has been working as a Creative Producer in Los Angeles since 2008. He currently serves as the Executive Producer for Digital Twigs, a creative studio that specializes in animation with a practical approach. Mark is also the Creator/Owner of INSTALL, a public art consulting group that develops and manages unique art programming for emerging LGBTQ artists in the LA area. In all of his pursuits, Mark views himself primarily as an advocate for artists and a facilitator of discourse between communities, identifications and generations. Past work includes: Art Programmer for LA Pride (2013-2015), Associate Creative Director for the Miley Cyrus Bangerz Tour (2013) and, most recently, the EP/Curator of the Savage Family, an international creative community lead by Love Bailey.
Travis Davidson
Travis D is a multi-media artist based in Los Angeles; their work delves into gender, post-humanism, creation of identity and the simulacra. Travis has gained a reputation for pushing the limits of performance with unsettling transformations of identity and engagement of space, often incorporating new media and live music. They have shocked and wooed audiences at The Whitney Museum and The Hammer Museum, as well as galleries, nightclubs and public spaces through-out Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Amsterdam and London.
DINO DINCO
DINO DINCO is a performance art curator and maker, film and theater director, arts educator and writer. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as in shows in London, Paris, Los Angeles, Santiago de Compostela, Antwerp, Guadalajara, Mexicali, Hamburg, New York, and Chihuahua. Dinco’s first feature length documentary film, Homeboy, explores gay Latino men who were in gangs. He is writing a book manuscript on contemporary performance art in the major cities of the west coast of North America. Dinco’s award-winning short film, El Abuelo, with San Antonio poet Joe Jiménez, premiered at the Tate Modern, has screened internationally, and is included in the online LGBTQ film platform, Frameline Voices. He is a teaching artist with artworxLA and in 2017, joins the faculty of the Visual Arts Department of UC San Diego. www.dinodinco.com
Jennifer Doyle
Jennifer Doyle is a professor of English at UC Riverside. She is a queer theorist, performance studies scholar, art critic and sports writer. She is the author of Campus Sex/Campus Security, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. She is on the Board of Directors for Human Resources Los Angeles, and is currently programming a feminist performance series for The Broad Museum. She curated Nao Bustamante: Soldadera for the Vincent Price Art Museum in 2015.
Zackary Drucker
Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series This Is Me,as well as a Co-Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent.
Eric Eich
Eric Eich (aka Silk Worm) is a drag queen, new media artist, nightlife performer, and Sagittarius based in San Francisco. Her current project is a monthly drag show and dance party called Anal Flora, which she runs with her partner-in-crime and almost constant collaborator Brittany Newell (aka Britney Smearz). Together, they have been invited to perform and embarrass themselves in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, and all over the Bay. She graduated this year from Stanford with a degree in Theatre and Performance Studies and a full-body tan. In the fall she will start a Masters in Art History, also at Stanford. She is known as a very good sport. More at www.ericeich.com.
Rafa Esparza
Rafa Esparza was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Esparza is a multidisciplinary artist. His work ranges in medium from installation, sculpture to drawing, painting; and predominantly live performance. Woven into Esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narrative, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result of. Esparza is persistent in staging situations where he attempts to experience a time and space inaccessible to him. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry; site specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation are primary tools in interrogating, critiquing and examining ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the present environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize. Esparza has performed in a variety of spaces ranging from community engaged places such as AIDS Project Los Angeles, to galleries and museums including The Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources, SOMArts and a variety of public sites through out the city of L.A. He is a recipient of an Emerging Artist 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, a 2014 Art Matters grantee, and a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.
Rubén Esparza *curator
Artist. Curator. Bon Vivant. Serial Killer. Rubén Esparza is an artist and independent curator based in Los Angeles. His work evaluates complexities by decocting his Warholian world view and mixing it with elements of, Conceptualism, Ethnicity and Queer Culture. He is known for curating “Happenings” alongside art installations. He champions and invites artists to temporarily step away from the white box systems and explore new spaces in an unfiltered and organic fashion. Every exhibition or event is carefully researched, and invites participants to follow a conceptual thread or idea(s). Rubén is the founder and lead curator of the Queer Biennial, an international survey focusing on current moments in out/queer/LGBT art and culture. Created in 2014, with events anchored in Los Angeles, New York, Mexico, Miami, Paris, and Zurich. His work is included as part of the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Santa Barbara Museum, National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Illinois, among others.
Kenyon Farrow
Kenyon Farrow is the US & Global Health Policy Director for Treatment Action Group, an independent AIDS research and policy think tank fighting for better treatment, a vaccine, and a cure for AIDS, TB and Hep C. In addition At TAG, Kenyon is working on a qualitative research project exploring the role of community mobilization in the US HIV response in 10 US cities. Kenyon is also the former executive director of Queers for Economic Justice, and has a long track record of community organizing work on criminalization, mass imprisonment, homelessness and HIV issues. He currently services on the Community Health Working Group of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Roundtable.
In addition to his political work, Kenyon is a prolific essayist and author. He is the co-editor of the book Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out. His work has also appeared in the anthologies Spirited: Affirming the Soul of Black Lesbian and Gay Identity, Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Same-Sex Marriage, For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Still Not Enough, We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America, and Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam's Call. His work has also appeared in publications such as the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, TheGrio, Colorlines, RH Reality Check, the American Prospect, and AlterNet.
Kenyon was named one of Out magazine’s Out 100 for 2008, the Advocate magazine’s “40 Under 40” LGBT Leaders in the United States for 2010, one of Black Entertainment Television’s “Modern Black History Heroes” for 2011, received the Community Activist award at Chicago Black Pride's Esteem Awards in 2013, and given the 2016 Sexual Freedom Award by the Woodhull Institute.
Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. He has co-edited three books on Christopher Isherwood including the Lambda Award winning THE ISHERWOOD CENTURY and most recently THE AMERICAN ISHERWOOD. He is working on a book about Paul Monette and his legacy. He lives in West Hollywood and is a member of the board of the ONE Archives Foundation.
Raquel Gutiérrez
Raquel Gutiérrez has long been a writer and live performer. She is a film actor, curator, publisher (Econo Textual Objects, established 2014), playwright, arts administrator, and community organizer. She writes about art, culture, music, film, performance and community building and creates original solo and ensemble performance compositions.
Running In Place: poems about INSTITUTIONALITY is Raquel's third chapbook released in March 2015, following #WhiteBoo and Breaking Up With Los Angeles (Econo Textual Objects, 2014). She's performed her poetry, prose and essay works locally, nationally and internationally as a solo artist (including the mountainsides of Arcatao, Chalatenango, El Salvador, Visual AIDS, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, El Museo del Chopo (Mexico City), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, MOCA (Los Angeles), Beyond Baroque and a bunch of colleges, but only one youth authority center). Gutiérrez earned her MA in Performance Studies from New York University in 2004. A co-founding member of the now retired performance ensemble, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP), a community-based and activist-minded group aimed at creating a visual vernacular around queer Latinidad in Los Angeles. Her work has been published in Los Angeles Weekly, Artbound, The Portland Review, GLQ, Raspa Magazine, RECAPS, Make/Shift, SUR Biennial 2013, and Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (edited by Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano). She has poems in Huizache (Fall 2014). She has written catalog essays for visual artists Hector Silva, Shizu Saldamando, Wu Tsang and upcoming Rafa Esparza for Made In L.A. 2016.
Jack Halberstam
Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California and in 2016-17 Visiting Professor of English and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and has written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam has co-edited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston (Indiana University Press, 1995) and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures around the country and internationally every year. Lecture topics include: queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film, animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled WILD THING on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, the visual representation of anarchy and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment.
Daniel Hellmann
Daniel Hellmann (born 1985) is a dance- and theater maker, singer and performer. He is based in his hometown Zurich as well as in Berlin and studied philosophy, classical singing and theatre / performance. Since 2012 he realizes work that unites music, dance, performance and theater. For his first project „K.“ – a collaboration with the choreographer Quan Bui Ngoc – he won a prize from the Swiss Author Society and received a Cultural Award from the City of Zurich.
Since 2014 he created „Untold“, the music-theatre piece „Nach Lampedusa – Wandererfantasien“ about the Swiss asylum system and the interactive performances „Full Service“ and „THE_SPACE_BETWEEN“. Hellmann’s solo performance Traumboy about male sex work premiered in 2015 as a co-production with Gessnerallee Zürich and Festspiele Zürich and was invited to Swiss Selection in Avignon 2016.
Daniel Hellmann's work has been shown at several festivals and theaters, among them Tanzhaus Zürich, Gessnerallee Zürich, Dampfzentrale and Auawirleben in Bern, Theater Chur, Festival Antigel in Geneva, Beursschouwburg and Les Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels, Sophiensaele Berlin and Studiobühne Cologne. At the moment, Hellmann is preparing his new project “Requiem for a piece of meat”, for which he received the June Johnson Dance Prize 2015.
Keith Hennessy
Keith Hennessy is a performer, choreographer, teacher, writer and activist. Born in Sudbury Canada, he lives in San Francisco and tours internationally. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, ritual and public action as tools for investigating political realities. Ideas and practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, punk, and queer-feminism motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s creative and activist projects. Hennessy directs Circo Zero, and was a member of the collaborative performance companies: Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann, CORE, and Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard. Awards, commissions, residencies? Yes, several. Rejections, unemployment, failures?
Yes, plenty.
Current projects include Turbulence (a dance about the economy); Bear/Skin a solo folk dance; Sara (the smuggler) a solo for Sara Shelton Mann; and future friend/ships a duet with Jassem Hindi responding to the war and refugee crisis in Syria. Additionally, Hennessy is the instigator and producer of the all-Black performance collective Blank Map. Recent venues include mumok and ImpulsTanz (Vienna), Ponderosa (Germany), TBA Festival (Portland), HAU & HZT (Berlin), Black Box & CODA Festival (Oslo), American Realness (NY), Velocity (Seattle), Theater der Welt (Mannheim), Velocity Festival (Varna Bulgaria), AEx-Corps (Dakar), Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam), Omni Commons (Oakland). Hennessy has an MFA in Choreography and an unfinished PhD (ABD) in Performance Studies from UC Davis. www.circozero.org
Robb Hernández, Ph.D.
Robb Hernández is Assistant Professor of Latina/o literature at the University of California, Riverside. His book project, Finding AIDS: Archival Body/Archival Space and the Chicano Avant-garde examines alternative archive formations, curations, and collecting practices generated through the AIDS crisis in Latino artist communities in Southern California. His books, VIVA Records 1970-2000: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles (2013) and The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta—Cyclona Collection, 1962-2002 (2009), based on the East L.A. experimental performance artist, Cyclona, were published by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press. His articles have appeared in Aztlán, Collections, Museum and Curatorial Studies Review, MELUS and Radical History Review among anthologies and exhibition catalogues like Art AIDS America (2015). He is currently co-curating, Mundos Alternos: The Art of Science Fiction in the Americas with the University of California, Riverside ARTSblock for the Getty Foundations’s Pacific Standard Time II: LA/LA in 2017.
Sebastian Hernandez
Sebastian Hernandez is an LA native and multi-disciplinary artist double majoring in Art Practice and Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. He makes art that ranges from drawings to paintings and performance art. Hernandez employs feminist theoretical analysis, queer theory, browness and collectivity as modes of thinking and generating works that shift and complicate Mexican and Chicano narratives. His art making is influenced by an embedded connection to his Aztec heritage and the history of the brown body in relation to the U.S. and Mexico borderland. Sebastian's movement based practice is informed by his long standing practice of danza Azteca, vogue and the more recent wide range of modern dance techniques he's learned at Cal. He will be finishing his studies at UC Berkeley in the Fall of 2016 and is currently working on a written performance piece titled "Brown Zero: The Queer Brown Commons", which will be published in the summer.
Brandon Drew Holmes
BDH is the only son of Mia Vaughn and Baskerville Holmes. He makes work for Black people.
Jamillah James
Jamillah James is assistant curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and organizes exhibitions and programs on behalf of the museum for Art + Practice in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include the group exhibition A Shape That Stands Up (on view through June 18, 2016), John Outterbridge: Rag Man (co-organized with Anne Ellegood), Njideka Akunyili Crosby:The Beautyful Ones, Two Films by Akosua Adoma Owusu, Selections from the Brockman Gallery Archives, and Charles Gaines: Librettos: Manuel de Falla/Stokely Carmichael (with Ellegood). At the Hammer, she organized Hammer Projects: Njideka Akunyili Crosby; Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 (with Ellegood; curated by The Studio Museum in Harlem);and assisted Connie Butler on the exhibition and publication Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth. She is currently working on projects with the New York-based multidisciplinary artist Simone Leigh and Alex Da Corte, the Philadelphia artist’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles.
Previously, she held curatorial positions at The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Queens Museum, New York; and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Her writing has been featured in publications by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), The Studio Museum in Harlem, and in the International Review of African American Art, among others. Since 2009, she has maintained the visual arts tumblr FRONTIERS, an index of ongoing research. She has been a visiting lecturer and critic at numerous art schools and other institutions throughout the country, and taught seminars on curatorial practice and contemporary art at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Alexandra Juhasz
Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is the chair of the Film Department at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995); Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005); Learning from YouTube (MIT Press, 2011: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/learning-youtube); co-edited with Alisa Lebow, The Blackwell Companion on Contemporary Documentary (2015) and with Yvonne Welbon, Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of African-American Lesbian Filmmaking (Duke University Press, 2016). Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy as well as the feature films The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about feminist Internet culture including YouTube (aljean.wordpress.com) and feminist pedagogy and community (feministonlinespaces.com and ev-ent-anglement.com). With Anne Balsamo, she was co-facilitator of the network, FemTechNet, which debuted its feminist rethinking of a MOOC, a Distributed Online Open Course “Dialogues in Feminist Technology” in Fall 2013: femtechnet.org.
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario
Los Angeles native Marcus Kuiland-Nazario is an artist, curator and producer who is a 25 year+ veteran of the LA art and performance scenes. He is a founding artist and or co founder of: Viva! the nation's first Latino Gay and Lesbian Arts Organization, The 18th Street Arts Center, Highways Performance Space, Clean Needles Now, Max 10 Performance Lab and Oficina de Proyectos Culturales, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Kuiland-Nazario was also a co director of Crazyspace. His performance works have been included in national and international festivals, including the Rapture Festival at the ICA London, and the Rompeforma Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In Los Angeles, Kuiland-Nazario has performed at L.A.C.E., The Mark Taper Forum, USC, UCLA, Track 16, REDCAT, Highways Performance Space, and many underground/night club/alternative sites including the streets. He has also been a contributing writer at the LA WEEKLY. Marcus curated and produced Pop Tarts, a performance series that ran for 14 years at Highways Performance Space. Kuiland-Nazario was an active member of ACT UP Los Angeles and co produced their notorious warehouse party fund raisers. He also hosted an iteration of NYC’s legendary, Clit Club in his apartment, and was a member of the collective Powers of Desire. In the early 90’s Kuiland-Nazario worked as a Street Outreach Worker and HIV Pre and Post test Counselor with the Division of Adolescent Medicine at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the JWCH Institute. Currently he is a member of Asher Hartman’s Gawdafful National Theater, and Project Director of Nao Bustamante’s Soldadera. His current work, a series of album interventions/performances titled Maxi Kitsch, are part of the exhibition Lavender Exchange: Lavender Diaspora in New York City.
Kuiland-Nazario has taught community arts and performance art at numerous institutions, including Otis College of Art and Design, Highways Performance Space, Beyond Baroque Literary Foundation and Cal State University, Northridge. He has also served on the LACE performance selection committee and on the City of Santa Monica's Performing Arts Committee. As an arts educator, Kuiland-Nazario was an artist in residence at the Santa Monica Alternative Schoolhouse where he also helped develop their arts program. He has led workshops at venues including the Santa Monica Museum, The Getty Villa, Noah's Ark at the Skirball Cultural Center, The Heart Project, The Getty Center, The 18th Street Arts Center, MCH Access and Virginia Avenue Park. He also developed art activities that are a permanent part of the Noah's Ark experience at The Skirball. Kuiland-Nazario Also programmed Pop Up Broadway (through Community Arts Resources) where he was responsible for multi media cultural programming that included pop up shops and theater marquees, from Broadway and 7th - Broadway and Olympic, commissioning over a dozen Los Angeles based artists.
Liss LaFleur
Liss LaFleur is a performance artist, media maker, and scholar currently based in Texas. Incorporating feminism, body art, and archives, she produces objects as extensions of her own body to queer inherited roles tied to female ideologies. Working with a range of materials including digitally fabricated acrylic nails and teeth, traditional neon, embroidery, and video, she challenges a sense of self which is transformative, fluid, and often self-deprecating of her southern roots.
Named one of "10 to Watch" in 2014 by Independent Magazine, LaFleur’s work has been featured internationally in solo and juried exhibitions, film festivals, and on the web, including: the TATE Modern; Cannes Court Métrage; online with PBS and POV Digital; the Boston LGBT Film Festival; the Reykjavik Art Museum; CICA Gallery in South Korea, and at many colleges and universities nationwide. LaFleur is currently an Assistant Professor of New Media Art at the University of North Texas. www.LissLaFleur.com
Isaac Ledesma
Isaac is a performance artist born and raised in Echo Park, Los Angeles. More commonly recognized for his foray as creative director of the seminal performance art and music showcase "Mustache Mondays" under the pseudonyms: God Doll and Ijlal. They work under the discipline of drag to achieve characters who are subversive to the institutions holding back progress and acceptance of gender nonconformity and nonbinarism. Isaac works mainly through movement, restraint and physical expression. They paint emotions and impressions on mental canvases. As a performance artist in the internet age, they prefer to take stage within the digital world using instagram culture, selfies, video, and social media in an attempt to instill change on our collective consciousness. Coming from an extensive background in visual and performing arts in their youth, they culled their experiences on the streets and nightclubs of Hollywood and Downtown L.A. to serve them in perfecting their artistic voice, all the while employing elements of digital technology, psychic phenomena, and psychedelia; using gender and sexuality as their costume and as a platform to perform a play on the fragility that is man.
Philip Alexis Littell
Littell first made his mark with The Weba Show for what became a two year residency at the Lhasa Club, started performing his own songs, bands followed, then musical plays: No Miracle: A Consolation, Kiss the Glass, The Wandering Whore. He debuted as a librettist with the SFO’s The Dangerous Liaisons for Conrad Susa, continuing with them for Andre Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Numerous works followed with a veritable roll-call of modern American composers: Michael Torke, Stephen Hartke and Aaron Kernis head the list. He has continued to create his own work to different scales in Los Angeles, solo and for a roster of close collaborators. These pieces include I Asked My Body What It Remembered: A Disco Memoir, Broad Daylight, Billy The Kid And What He Did, unREAL eSTATE. Dark Carols with composer Peter Golub, a cycle of Christmas Songs, premiered for ALOUD at the Central Library, and repeated at the Bootleg in 2012. He is a member in good standing with Asher Hartman’s Gaddawful Theater Company (last year’s Purple Electric Play at the Machine Project and this year in the LACMA-commissioned The Silver the Black The Wicked Dance).
Obidio Martinez
Born and raised in High Land Park CA, Obidio Martinez is the founder and creative director of EXPOSURE. EXPOSURE is a weekly drag night held every monday at The Offbeat Bar in Highland Park. Obidio or “OB” as he’s known to his friends, wanted to bring and share the exciting world of drag with the North East Los Angeles community. Not only did he strive to expose the community to a new art form but he also wanted to create a space where up and coming drag queens could flex their creative muscle. Exposure ironically set its home in a former biker bar that now uproariously entertains all of the NELA community gay or straight.
Dont Rhine
Dont Rhine is a sound artist and popular educator. He co-founded the international sound art collective Ultra-red in 1994. For over twenty years Rhine has contributed to the collective’s many sound-based investigations, using sound as both medium and site of inquiry in relation to social justice organizing and political education. He is a volunteer community health educator with the needle-exchange program, L.A. Community Health Project (formerly Clean Needles Now), which he co-founded in 1992 while a member of the Los Angeles chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Dont attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1994-95 and in 2006 received his MFA from UCLA in Interdisciplinary Studio with artist, Mary Kelly. He is faculty co-chair of the low-residency visual art program at Vermont College of Fine Arts where he has taught part-time since 2007. Dont co-facilitates the Los Angeles branch of Ultra-red’s mentorship program, School of Echoes, and is co-founder and organizer in the L.A. Tenants Union. He lives in Hollywood.
Sheree Rose
The performance, photography and video work of Los Angeles based artists, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose shook, rattled and rolled across the United States in the late 1980’s beginning with “Nailed” a performance at Olio, a small space in Silverlake, Los Angeles, that was notorious for Flanagan nailing his scrotum to a board, Rose cutting into the breasts of a woman strapped to a cross, which caused grown men to faint, and drew the attention of Jesse Helms, a United States senator, which ended much funding of the National Endowment of the Arts, and rallied artists to declare “Art is not a Crime!” In 1992-1994. Flanagan and Rose exhibited their extreme show, “Visiting Hours” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. After Flanagan’s death in 1996, the documentary, “Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist” won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Rose was commissioned by Japan to produce “Boballoon” a 20-foot inflatable statue, complete with leather straightjacket and 4- foot erect penis, which was exhibited at Big Space in Tokyo.
Rose has continued to show her photography at international galleries, including the Tate Modern in Liverpool, Country Club and Coagula Galleries in Los Angeles. She has done a number of cutting-edge performances, including “Corpse Pose” at various venues, and “Breaking Borders” at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California. Rose has collaborated with English performance artist, Martin O’Brien, both in London and in Los Angeles, including “Do with Me As You Will”, “Dust to Dust”, and “If It Were the Apocalypse (I’d eat you to stay alive). Upcoming in November 2016, they will do a major installation, “The Viewing”, a posthumous concept by Flanagan at the DaDaFest in Liverpool, England.
More recently, November 2015, she participated with Rocio Bolivar in “Between Menopause and Old Age, Alternative Beauty”, presented by Live Art Development Agency at the Chelsea Theater in London. She has recently returned from India, where she collaborated with Bolivar at the Morni Hills Performance Art Biennale; as well as at Performance Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, New York.
Brian Getnick *curator /NS co-director
Brian Getnick is an artist, curator and writer about contemporary performance in Los Angeles. He is the director of PAM residencies, a showcase and residency program for performers making long form work (30+minutes). He is the founder and co-director with Tanya Rubbak of Native Strategies, a journal documenting performance art in LA since 2011. Getnick is currently researching the disrupted lineage and history of queer performance in Los Angeles and is the solo performer for Sorrow Swag, directed and conceived by Ligia Lewis with a sound score by George Lewis Jr (aka Twin Shadow).
Tanya Rubbak *NS co-director
Tanya Rubbak is a designer and educator working with graphic design and language as a site for engagement with hidden worlds, visual culture, belief systems and the fine line between reality and fiction. She makes publications, installations, and identity systems. She has worked with leading cultural institutions, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Pomona College Museum of Art. Recent projects include co-designing the exhibition catalogue for Made in L.A. 2014 and co-directing the cross-disciplinary publication/performance project Native Strategies with Brian Getnick. She holds an M.F.A. in Graphic Design from CalArts and a B.A. in English Literature from University of Pennsylvania, and is currently the Assistant Chair for Communication Arts and Graduate Graphic Design programs at Otis College of Art and Design.
Andy Sacher
Andy Sacher has been creating enriching public experiences for over 25 years. In the early 1990s he was employed at Walt Disney Imagineering as a Concept Architect and Exhibit Designer. Projects that followed include educational exhibits for Port Discovery – Baltimore Children’s Museum and themed entertainment centers for Steven Spielberg’s GameWorks franchise. Andy designed and produced numerous transmedia projects including interactive content, websites, behind the scenes video for Idealab, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, HBO, and FOX Home Video. He also conceived and produced educational games for California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and USC Creative Media and Behavioral Health Center.
Responding to Proposition 8 in 2008, Andy joined and mentored the LGBTQ activist organization Roots of Equality, which designed, produced, and installed an award-winning exhibit on LA’s Gay and Lesbian history. In 2012 he founded THE LAVENDER EFFECT, a nonprofit project of Community Partners Advancing the Future of LGBTQ Heritage & Culture. "Our Shoah-Inspired Oral History Project, Queer Video Project, and Queer Games Collaborative serve our mission to empower future generations." www.thelavendereffect.org
Andy received his Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, and Master of Fine Arts in Interactive Media from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. He continues to consult with museums, cultural organizations and educational institutions to develop innovative public venues and educational interactives that enhance and inspire peoples lives. Go to www.linkedin.com/in/sachercreative for more information.
Stuart Sandford
Stuart Sandford received his BA Fine Art, with Honours, in 2006. He has exhibited his photographic, video, sculpture, and installation work in New York, London, Los Angeles, Berlin, Basel, Rotterdam, Rome, Madrid, Cape Town, and Vienna, amongst others. In 2010 he curated the group show HUNG and co-curated Boy BANG Boy, both of which took place in London. His work has been extensively featured in magazines internationally, including i-D, Dazed & Confused, BUTT, GT, Maenner, Kaiserin, attitude and Objektiv, the Norwegian journal of contemporary photography. Currently based in Los Angeles, by way of London, Berlin, and New York, Stuart is represented by Edward Cella Gallery and is a published and produced writer and screenwriter currently developing his first feature film as writer and director.
Nathan Schocher
Nathan Schocher is a lecturer at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Basel. He is the Program Manager for People with HIV at Aids-Hilfe Schweiz and is currently completing his Phd at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Zurich.
Mica Sigourney
Mica Sigourney is a performance artist, drag queen, curator, gogo dancer, instigator, emcee, and nightlife enthusiast. Utilizing 15 years of performance training Sigourney creates drag numbers, performance installations, gogo happenings, and theater pieces that ride the tension between artifice/construct and vulnerability/authenticity. Sigourney took part in the danceWEB scholarship in 2014 and has a degree in art from Antioch University. He founded OX in 2008, and has curated, produced works and collaborations with the organization since that time.
For 8 years VivvyAnne ForverMORE! (once described by the New York Times as "and one drag queen), has hosted and co-produced Club SOME THING at the historic Stud Bar in San Francisco. Vivvy, a tornado in a dress, has fucked up stages in LA, NY, Vancouver, Vienna, Berlin, Palm Springs, blah blah blah blah.
Mica is regularly funded by the San Francisco Arts Council and most recently has premiered I'm a Very Understanding Woman at MDT in Stockholm with Amanda Apetrea, and Work MORE 7: Daughters of a Riot in San Francisco in collaboration with Dulce De Leche, Honey Mahogany, LOL McFiercen, Kitty Von Quim, Bobby Barnaby, Laundra Tyme, Qween, Trixxie Carr, Phatima Rude and Aron Kantor.
Marc Streit *curator
Zurich - Switzerland, Curator/Artistic Organization
Marc Streit was born and raised in Bern, Switzerland. He earned his MA in Curatorial Studies at the University of the Arts in Zurich. Marc has been working as a freelance curator for contemporary dance and performance for several institutions and organizations in research and realization of artistic projects.
Collaborations include Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich, Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, Tanzhaus Zürich, Kunstverein Zürich, Kunstraum Walcheturm, Riffraff Cinema, Dance Festival Steps by Migros Culture Percentage, The Horse Hospital London, Commonwealth and Council Los Angeles, Tom of Finland Foundation Los Angeles, Counter Pulse San Francisco, swissnex San Francisco, The Spectrum New York, Queer Biennial Los Angeles and Susanne Bartsch.
He initiated zürich moves! festival for contemporary arts practice in performing arts –www.zurichmoves.com. zürich moves! is a early, international festival that breaks boundaries between different art forms. Creates a new audience outside of an avant-garde community and focuses on identity and interpersonal perspectives beyond national borders.