Boston-based artist Marilyn Arsem has been creating live events since 1975, from solo gallery performances to large-scale, site-specific works at festivals, conferences, alternative spaces, galleries, museums and universities worldwide. Most recently she has focused on creating site-specific performances that are not planned in advance, but made in response to a location that is selected on arrival. She is a member and founder of Mobius, Inc., a Boston-based collaborative of interdisciplinary artists. She taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for 27 years, establishing one of the most extensive programs internationally in visually based performance art.
Based out of Lethbridge and Edmonton, Alberta, Cindy Baker’s work is informed by a fierce commitment to ethical community engagement and critical social inquiry, drawing from queer, gender, race, disability, fat, and art theories. Baker’s interdisciplinary research-based practice moves fluently between the arts, humanities, and social sciences; she works with diverse materials and techniques from the low-craft to digital fabrication and performance, emphasizing the theoretical, conceptual and ephemeral aspects of her work. Baker’s practice draws from two decades of experience working and participating in art, queer, and fat communities; she has worked in non-profits throughout Western Canada. Currently, she is a sessional instructor at the University of Alberta, an independent facility development consultant, and contract art technician. Baker holds an MFA from the University of Lethbridge where she received a SSHRC grant for her research in performance in the absence of the artist's body. She has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally. Baker is represented by dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton.
Mexico City based visual artist obtaining the degree of Doctor of Arts and Design in the area of performance by the FAD - UNAM, with the thesis “112 Kilograms, the performance as a tool in Mexican Fat activism. Pedagogical proposal and production from 2014 to 2017, obtaining the honorable mention and the stimulus to timely graduation. He had the distinction of the UNAM scholarship for doctoral studies, as well as two UNAM supports of school practices for the realization of projects. Selected at the 2018 Tempting Failure Biennial, London. Representative of Latin America at the performance festival, Buzzcut, Scotland, 2017. Biennial Forma and Substance in Guatemala 2017 and Costa Rica 2019. Selected to represent to Mexico at the Rapid Pulse performance festival, Chicago, 2016 and at the festival of performance and video / performance Perfoartnet Colombia and the festival of performance and live art Bem me cuir, Brazil among others. In Mexico it has been presented in different festivals and spaces such as the Rufino Museum Tamayo, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Mexico City, just for mention some. He has 30 years of experience in the practice of performance. He has collaborated with groups of international prestige such as La Pocha Nostra and SEMEFO. He has participated with various conferences in institutional symposia and symposia. There are several testimonial writings of his artistic production. Has several both electronic and print publications. He has 14 years of teaching experience.
Luka Fisher is a gender queer artist, cultural producer and occasional Russian translator. Their solo work largely explores embodiment and their personal subjectivity as a trans person while their collaborative projects often explore questions of memory, mediation, and voice. They began thinking about performance art and its documentation while working as a producer with artists Kayla tange, Sheree Rose, Tristene Roman, Christopher Zeischegg, and various recording artists courtesy of Records Ad Nauseam to create and promote work that crossed disciplinary boundaries and reveled in performativity. In 2018 they played "Anne" in Director Lyle Kash's majority trans cast/crew feature film, Death and Bowling. They are currently developing new performance works with Daniel Crook/ Isabelle Sjahsam and writing about Sheree Rose's Video Archive. They hold an MFA in Photo/Media and Integrated Media from CalArts.
Mikiki is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Newfoundland, Canada. They attended NSCAD and Concordia before returning to St. John's to work as Programming Coordinator at Eastern Edge Gallery. They later moved to Calgary to work as the Director of TRUCK Gallery. Their work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally in self-produced interventions, artist-run centres and public galleries. Their identity as an artist is informed and intrinsically linked to their history as a sexual health educator, harm reduction worker and activist. Mikiki’s creative themes often address safety and responsibility, disclosure and self-determination, community building and reckoning with trauma and loss. Mikiki has worked as a Sexuality Educator in Calgary's public schools, a Bathhouse Attendant in Saskatoon, Drag Queen Karaoke Hostess in St. John's. Mikiki has worked in various capacities in the Gay Men's Health and HIV response in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto, and recently in Harm Reduction Outreach and HIV testing.
Martin O'Brien is a performance artist whose work and research is concerned with physical endurance, hardship and excess in relation to illness and medicine. Through an engagement with his body in extremis, as one with a severe chronic illness - cystic fibrosis - he explores issues of pain and medicine, discipline, abjection and body politics. As part of the EU project 'Trust Me, I'm an Artist: towards an ethis of Art/Science collaboration', O'Brien will present performance work and discuss the ethical issues with experts drawn from performance art, medicine and bioethics.
Sheree Rose has been thrilling, shocking and exciting audiences around the world, beginning with her collaborative photography and performances with Bob Flanagan in 1981. Their groundbreaking show Visiting Hours opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1994, and traveled to the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. She collaborated with Mike Kelley on the video One Hundred Reasons, as well as music videos with Nine Inch Nails (Happiness in Slavery), Danzig (It’s Coming Down) and Godflesh (Crush My Soul). She co-produced the Sundance award winning documentary, Sick. Since 2011, she has collaborated with British performance artists, Marin O’Brien, in performance in England, New York and Los Angeles, including Dust to Dust at One Institute, The Viewing at DaDa Fest Liverpool, England and The Ascension at Jason Vass Gallery, Los Angeles.
jes sachse is an artist and curator who addresses the negotiations of bodies moving in public/private space and the work of their care. Often found marrying poetry with sculptural forms, their work has been presented and supported by Dancemakers, the Centre de Création et Recherche O Vertigo (Montréal), Harbourfront Centre, among other centres. Their work and writing has appeared in and been profiled by NOW Magazine, The Peak, Canadian Art, C Magazine, CV2 -The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, Mobilizing Metaphor: Art, Culture and Disability Activism in Canada, and the 40th Anniversary Edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Miro Spinelli is a Brazilian artist and researcher based in New York City. He holds a Master’s Degree from the Performing Arts Graduate Program at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and is currently a graduate student at the Performance Studies Program at NYU. Currently, Spinelli is investigating how performance and its radical connection with materiality, writing and dissent can generate forces on the subjects, creating possible counter-ontologies. Since 2014, he has been developing the continuous project and series Gordura Trans (Trans Fat), mixing performance, photographs, texts and installations. More recently he started working on a new installation and performance series named All you touch you change all you change changes you.
Jeffrey Vallance was born in 1955 in Redondo Beach, CA. He lives and works in Los Angeles. His work blurs the lines between object making, installation, performance, curating and writing. Often his projects are site-specific such as burying a frozen chicken at a pet cemetery; having audiences with the king of Tonga, the queen of Palau and the presidents of Iceland; creating a Richard Nixon Museum; installing an exhibit aboard a tugboat in Sweden; curating shows in Las Vegas, such as the Liberace and Clown Museum. In Lapland, Vallance constructed a shamanic “magic drum.” In 2004, Mr. Vallance curated the only art-world exhibition of the Painter of Light ™ entitled “Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth.” In 1983, he was host of MTV’s The Cutting Edge and appeared on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman. In 2004, Vallance received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation award. In addition to exhibiting his artwork, Mr. Vallance has written for Art issues, Artforum, L.A. Weekly, Juxtapoz, Frieze and Fortean Times. He has published several books including: Blinky the Friendly Hen, The World of Jeffrey Vallance, Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth, My Life with Dick, Relics and Reliquaries, and The Vallance.
Through writing, publishing, and visual art exploration, Letch Kinloch uses pluralistic investigations to undermine dominant power structures that support patriarchy and other capitalist offshoots such as the pathologization of the body and the corporatization of the arts. She is the founder and programmer of Also As Well Too Artist Book Library & Press, an organization devoted to critical engagement through the artist book form.