involved:
This year we have interactive pieces that request your participation!
First, we have Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez's Benediciones, where the artist and participants interact through WhatsApp: And don't forget to stop by GAPP Park to add your voice to Croatian artist Vesna Mačković's international activist piece, Public Performance Periscope:
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Miss Silk Worm (CA)
Silk Worm is a San Francisco-based artist working in drag, dance, and performance. Her work within the terrain of the embarrassing creates and explores intimacy.
Piece: Bottom Bride
Quinn Hunter (NC)
Quinn’s primary concern is the place and continued status of African-Americans in society. Her intent is to convey the monochromatic and dimensional human experiences of the 21st African-Americans in what she calls the “New” Antebellum South.
Piece: Untitled
Esther Neff (MO)
Esther Neff is the founder of PPL, a flexible collective, thinktank, and performance-making entity. Neff's solo work has been realized across the USA and around the world. In addition to working as a performance artist, Neff is an independent theorist/writer and organizer.
Piece: Affaction Research Center (ARC)
Whitney Vangrin (CA)
Whitney Vangrin’s work sees performance, film and sculpture working in unison with one another, incorporating live feed technology, set design, and sculptural tableau. Equal parts physical and psychological, her performances question perceptions of authenticity.
Piece: This performance seeks to reinvestigate my connection to the city of Pittsburgh and the heritage of Whitney’s family who have residents of the region for multi-generations as coal miners, steelworkers, and artisans. The piece will seek reconciliation through traditions and aesthetics, addressing the intangible trauma and silence of previous generations.
Sean Kennedy (NM)
Dr. Sean Kennedy is a tuba player, performance artist, and composer who focusses on collaborative efforts, performance art, improvisation, and new works for tuba. Currently Sean is playing at Meow Wolf, teaching at the New Mexico School for the Arts, and freelancing in New Mexico.
Piece: This work centers around the ideas of gender fuck and blurring the lines of performer/composer relationships. With the use of highly feminine makeup, silhouette, and clothing, paired with the use of body hair and a masculine instrument: the tuba, I show that there is more to gender then the common binary.
Zadig Cartwheel (PA)
Zadig Cartwheel is an interdisciplinary, intimacy artist. Zadig investigates intimacy and liminal spaces through the digitization and ritualistic destruction of analog archives. The ritualistic destruction of personal analog documents as part of his performance process draws attention to the paradox of anonymous intimacy in the digital age.
Piece: SCAN AND DESTROY.
Nicole Goodwin (NY)
Nicole Goodwin is a veteran, author, performance artist, and award-winning poet. Her book Warcries is a collection of poems inspired by her experiences in combat theatre. She is a 2013-2014 Queer Art Mentorship Queer Art Literary Fellow, and the winner of The Fresh Fruit Festival’s 2013 Award for Performance Poetry. Additionally, her work '"Desert Flowers" was shortlisted and selected for performance by the Women's Playwriting International Conference in Cape Town, South Africa.
Piece: “Ain’t I a Woman (?/!)”
Joy Harris and Julia Wallace (TX)
Joy Harris is a Houston-based artist, writer, curator and speaker. Joy regularly speaks about performance art at universities and scholarly and community organizations. She writes a column on art and politics for Political Animal Magazine and is on the management committee of Experimental Action Performance Art Festival.
Julia Wallace is a Houston-based artist, curator, community facilitator, and director of Experimental Action, Houston’s performance art biennial. She is the creator and curator of Houston’s Performance Art Night and a founder and former facilitator of the social sculpture Continuum. Most recently, she directed Houston’s Experimental Action 2019.
Piece: “Women of a Certain Age.”
Vatic Kuumba (FL)
Since relocating to Providence, Rhode Island from Florida in 2012, Vatic Kuumba has represented Providence at the National Poetry Slam from 2014-2016, and served as coach for the 2017 team. In May 2015, Vatic gave a TEDx talk explaining his original show, Rap Slam, a hybrid of performance poetry and competitive rap.
Adrian Jevicki (NY)
Adrian Jevicki is a resident of Brooklyn with a variety of performance based interests including dance, theater, spoken word and video. He is also an educator curious about the intersection of creative processes and narrative and the construction of knowledge. He lives with his wife and two children.
Piece: LAG
Julia Vering (KS)
Julia Vering is a Kansas City-based performance artist, musician, animator and licensed social worker. Vering’s projects include collaborations with residents of nursing homes, facilitating music recording workshops for incarcerated youth, and many other experimental multi-media works.
Piece: Unicorns in the Snow
Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez (RI)
Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sanchez is a Colombian performance artist, visual artist, and educator. He creates collaborative collisions between public and performer, inviting immersion and participation by creating spaces that script the way audiences engage. His recent work activates his body and archives as unmoored travelers: passing through sites of the national, medical, theological, and familial — leaving remnants in their wake.
Piece: 1.Saturday: Bendiciones para Pittsburgh
2. Friday: Ancestors/Ancestrxs
Shey Rivera (PR)
Shey Rivera Ríos (pronouns: they/them) is a multi-genre artist active in the mediums of performance, digital media, installation, and poetry/narrative. Rivera is Director of Inclusive Regional Development at MIT Community Innovators Lab, in the Urban Studies and Planning Dept at MIT.
Piece: “Brujas + Mermaids"
Jessica Flax and Maria Cecilia Azar (CA/Argentina)
Jessica Flax is an artist and educator based in Tucson, Arizona. Cecilia Azar is an artist and writer from Argentina who has set roots in California. Cecilia's current work grapples with affect, and gender and racial passing.
Piece: “Emotional weight”
Xu Han (China)
Xu is a new media and conceptual artist interested in explorations of the imagery and implications of the signs of language. She finds different perspectives of language in communication methods for human, human and natural, also human and AI. Her projects involved performance art, experimental generative fonts, data visualizations, artist books, generative art, art installations.
Piece: "Cocooned"
Vesna Mačković (Croatia)
Vesna Mačković is an artist, author, and producer working in areas of live and video performance, contemporary dance and multimedia experimental theatre. Mačković co-founded the educational program PAP (Performing Arts Program) in Zagreb, Croatia, and often collaborates with other international artists.
Piece: In the Public Performance Periscope, the artist provides her content, hidden from sight while remaining accessible through the various openings and headphones in the installation. This periscopal form of installation is associated with the ‘pervasive hesitation’ to speak out for change in society.
Vivian Chinasa Ezugha (Nigeria)
Vivian Chinasa Ezugha is a Nigerian interdisciplinary artist working and living in the UK. Ezugha’s work has been presented at venues across Europe, America and the UK; to include In Between Time Festival as part of the New Bloods Commission, SPILL festival and Rapid Pulse International Performance Art festival. She is currently on board as a trustee for two prestigious theatre companies in the UK.
Piece: Uro- (clay)
Marie Segolene (Canada)
Marie has exhibited work in the US, Canada and Europe. Her fifth artist publication entitled Dehiscence (2018) has recently been published through the support of Anteism. Most recently, Marie co-produced a performance tour entitled Fleur de Sel, that took place in Canada and the US.
Piece: "Whats in the throat of Apple Boy?"
Gia Fagnelli (PGH)
Gia Fagnelli is an extra•terrestrial gender experiment bridging galaxies of drag, pole, prose, video art, soundscapes, installation art, + movement and transmitting the amalgam throughout the universe for a uniquely augmented reality.
Hudson Rush (PGH)
Pittsburgh-based multidisciplinary artist Hudson Rush finds her most peaceful moments helping youth create art as Mattress Factory's Education Outreach Coordinator. When left to her own devices, she continues the search for a way to remain present in a hectic mind and an even more hectic world.
Piece: 'Bitter Suite Manifesto'
Dave English (PGH)
Dave English performs with puppets around the country, and works to promote puppetry as an accessible and relevant art form. He has established puppet organizations The Charleston Guild of Puppeteers, the Puppetry Guild of Pittsburgh, and The Schmutz Company.
Piece: The Beggars
Samir Gangwani (PGH)
Samir Gangwani is a composer, performer, and curator interested in igniting conversations on disenfranchised communities through collaboration.
Piece: To Build A Wall.
Tara Fay Coleman (PGH)
Tara Fay Coleman is a Pittsburgh based curator and activist.
Piece: “How Many Drops?”
Tara explores the ideology behind the one-drop rule, which was the basis of race classification at one point in America. This rule was more or less an assertion that if you had any degree of African American ancestry, you classified as Black. It was implemented during a time when whites were looking to more precisely define degrees of racial intermixing, and can be traced back to slavery as a way to maintain racial purity, and withold rights from any person of African American lineage.
Anna Azizzy (PGH)
Anna Azizzy processes their identity by performing absurd and hilarious exaggerations of their life and wishes. Their practice spans many mediums, including performance art, video art, experimental music, and gymnastics, most often working with wonky green screen animation, flamboyant characters, and soft sculpture.
Piece: “For Retired Gymnast”
Nick M. Daniels (PGH)
Considered a pioneer in the Pittsburgh dance scene, Nick M. Daniels is the founding Artistic Director of the D.A.N.A. Movement Ensemble (Dancers Against Normal Actions). His style is based on butoh, African, modern and contemporary styles based on pure raw emotion. His creativity often entices the use of soundscapes and video imagery.
Piece: Folkdances of a Nucleic Village
BOOM Concepts video reel (PGH)
BOOM Concepts is dedicated to the development of artists and creative entrepreneurs representing marginalized voices. Boom Concepts hosts monthly art exhibitions as apart of #Unblurred First Friday gallery crawl, as well as film screenings, community meetings, music performances, dance parties, fundraisers, and more.
Piece: Screening: Performance Documentation of the series - If I Die: Renew Recycle Release.
Bebe Beretta (PGH)
Bebe Beretta uses the art of drag to adapt underground queer nightclub entertainment for the art gallery.
Piece: "A few minutes in my head is longer than a few minutes in my bed; and other clever rhymes from a bar clown"
Ryan McKelvey (PGH)
Formative years in poetry and theatre brought Ryan McKelvey to collaboration, drag, and live art. Performances are usually one-to-one encounters or other, more public, explorations of intimacy. Alter egos occasionally get slipped on, too.
Piece: QRS: Queer failure, Radical emotionality, Social Ra/upture.
Trevor C. Miles (PGH)
Trevor C. Miles is a movement artist, creative director, entrepreneur, coach, and passionate human spearheading community renaissance.
Piece: ::XYLO:: (XYLO 3)
Silk Worm is a San Francisco-based artist working in drag, dance, and performance. Her work within the terrain of the embarrassing creates and explores intimacy.
Piece: Bottom Bride
Quinn Hunter (NC)
Quinn’s primary concern is the place and continued status of African-Americans in society. Her intent is to convey the monochromatic and dimensional human experiences of the 21st African-Americans in what she calls the “New” Antebellum South.
Piece: Untitled
Esther Neff (MO)
Esther Neff is the founder of PPL, a flexible collective, thinktank, and performance-making entity. Neff's solo work has been realized across the USA and around the world. In addition to working as a performance artist, Neff is an independent theorist/writer and organizer.
Piece: Affaction Research Center (ARC)
Whitney Vangrin (CA)
Whitney Vangrin’s work sees performance, film and sculpture working in unison with one another, incorporating live feed technology, set design, and sculptural tableau. Equal parts physical and psychological, her performances question perceptions of authenticity.
Piece: This performance seeks to reinvestigate my connection to the city of Pittsburgh and the heritage of Whitney’s family who have residents of the region for multi-generations as coal miners, steelworkers, and artisans. The piece will seek reconciliation through traditions and aesthetics, addressing the intangible trauma and silence of previous generations.
Sean Kennedy (NM)
Dr. Sean Kennedy is a tuba player, performance artist, and composer who focusses on collaborative efforts, performance art, improvisation, and new works for tuba. Currently Sean is playing at Meow Wolf, teaching at the New Mexico School for the Arts, and freelancing in New Mexico.
Piece: This work centers around the ideas of gender fuck and blurring the lines of performer/composer relationships. With the use of highly feminine makeup, silhouette, and clothing, paired with the use of body hair and a masculine instrument: the tuba, I show that there is more to gender then the common binary.
Zadig Cartwheel (PA)
Zadig Cartwheel is an interdisciplinary, intimacy artist. Zadig investigates intimacy and liminal spaces through the digitization and ritualistic destruction of analog archives. The ritualistic destruction of personal analog documents as part of his performance process draws attention to the paradox of anonymous intimacy in the digital age.
Piece: SCAN AND DESTROY.
Nicole Goodwin (NY)
Nicole Goodwin is a veteran, author, performance artist, and award-winning poet. Her book Warcries is a collection of poems inspired by her experiences in combat theatre. She is a 2013-2014 Queer Art Mentorship Queer Art Literary Fellow, and the winner of The Fresh Fruit Festival’s 2013 Award for Performance Poetry. Additionally, her work '"Desert Flowers" was shortlisted and selected for performance by the Women's Playwriting International Conference in Cape Town, South Africa.
Piece: “Ain’t I a Woman (?/!)”
Joy Harris and Julia Wallace (TX)
Joy Harris is a Houston-based artist, writer, curator and speaker. Joy regularly speaks about performance art at universities and scholarly and community organizations. She writes a column on art and politics for Political Animal Magazine and is on the management committee of Experimental Action Performance Art Festival.
Julia Wallace is a Houston-based artist, curator, community facilitator, and director of Experimental Action, Houston’s performance art biennial. She is the creator and curator of Houston’s Performance Art Night and a founder and former facilitator of the social sculpture Continuum. Most recently, she directed Houston’s Experimental Action 2019.
Piece: “Women of a Certain Age.”
Vatic Kuumba (FL)
Since relocating to Providence, Rhode Island from Florida in 2012, Vatic Kuumba has represented Providence at the National Poetry Slam from 2014-2016, and served as coach for the 2017 team. In May 2015, Vatic gave a TEDx talk explaining his original show, Rap Slam, a hybrid of performance poetry and competitive rap.
Adrian Jevicki (NY)
Adrian Jevicki is a resident of Brooklyn with a variety of performance based interests including dance, theater, spoken word and video. He is also an educator curious about the intersection of creative processes and narrative and the construction of knowledge. He lives with his wife and two children.
Piece: LAG
Julia Vering (KS)
Julia Vering is a Kansas City-based performance artist, musician, animator and licensed social worker. Vering’s projects include collaborations with residents of nursing homes, facilitating music recording workshops for incarcerated youth, and many other experimental multi-media works.
Piece: Unicorns in the Snow
Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez (RI)
Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sanchez is a Colombian performance artist, visual artist, and educator. He creates collaborative collisions between public and performer, inviting immersion and participation by creating spaces that script the way audiences engage. His recent work activates his body and archives as unmoored travelers: passing through sites of the national, medical, theological, and familial — leaving remnants in their wake.
Piece: 1.Saturday: Bendiciones para Pittsburgh
2. Friday: Ancestors/Ancestrxs
Shey Rivera (PR)
Shey Rivera Ríos (pronouns: they/them) is a multi-genre artist active in the mediums of performance, digital media, installation, and poetry/narrative. Rivera is Director of Inclusive Regional Development at MIT Community Innovators Lab, in the Urban Studies and Planning Dept at MIT.
Piece: “Brujas + Mermaids"
Jessica Flax and Maria Cecilia Azar (CA/Argentina)
Jessica Flax is an artist and educator based in Tucson, Arizona. Cecilia Azar is an artist and writer from Argentina who has set roots in California. Cecilia's current work grapples with affect, and gender and racial passing.
Piece: “Emotional weight”
Xu Han (China)
Xu is a new media and conceptual artist interested in explorations of the imagery and implications of the signs of language. She finds different perspectives of language in communication methods for human, human and natural, also human and AI. Her projects involved performance art, experimental generative fonts, data visualizations, artist books, generative art, art installations.
Piece: "Cocooned"
Vesna Mačković (Croatia)
Vesna Mačković is an artist, author, and producer working in areas of live and video performance, contemporary dance and multimedia experimental theatre. Mačković co-founded the educational program PAP (Performing Arts Program) in Zagreb, Croatia, and often collaborates with other international artists.
Piece: In the Public Performance Periscope, the artist provides her content, hidden from sight while remaining accessible through the various openings and headphones in the installation. This periscopal form of installation is associated with the ‘pervasive hesitation’ to speak out for change in society.
Vivian Chinasa Ezugha (Nigeria)
Vivian Chinasa Ezugha is a Nigerian interdisciplinary artist working and living in the UK. Ezugha’s work has been presented at venues across Europe, America and the UK; to include In Between Time Festival as part of the New Bloods Commission, SPILL festival and Rapid Pulse International Performance Art festival. She is currently on board as a trustee for two prestigious theatre companies in the UK.
Piece: Uro- (clay)
Marie Segolene (Canada)
Marie has exhibited work in the US, Canada and Europe. Her fifth artist publication entitled Dehiscence (2018) has recently been published through the support of Anteism. Most recently, Marie co-produced a performance tour entitled Fleur de Sel, that took place in Canada and the US.
Piece: "Whats in the throat of Apple Boy?"
Gia Fagnelli (PGH)
Gia Fagnelli is an extra•terrestrial gender experiment bridging galaxies of drag, pole, prose, video art, soundscapes, installation art, + movement and transmitting the amalgam throughout the universe for a uniquely augmented reality.
Hudson Rush (PGH)
Pittsburgh-based multidisciplinary artist Hudson Rush finds her most peaceful moments helping youth create art as Mattress Factory's Education Outreach Coordinator. When left to her own devices, she continues the search for a way to remain present in a hectic mind and an even more hectic world.
Piece: 'Bitter Suite Manifesto'
Dave English (PGH)
Dave English performs with puppets around the country, and works to promote puppetry as an accessible and relevant art form. He has established puppet organizations The Charleston Guild of Puppeteers, the Puppetry Guild of Pittsburgh, and The Schmutz Company.
Piece: The Beggars
Samir Gangwani (PGH)
Samir Gangwani is a composer, performer, and curator interested in igniting conversations on disenfranchised communities through collaboration.
Piece: To Build A Wall.
Tara Fay Coleman (PGH)
Tara Fay Coleman is a Pittsburgh based curator and activist.
Piece: “How Many Drops?”
Tara explores the ideology behind the one-drop rule, which was the basis of race classification at one point in America. This rule was more or less an assertion that if you had any degree of African American ancestry, you classified as Black. It was implemented during a time when whites were looking to more precisely define degrees of racial intermixing, and can be traced back to slavery as a way to maintain racial purity, and withold rights from any person of African American lineage.
Anna Azizzy (PGH)
Anna Azizzy processes their identity by performing absurd and hilarious exaggerations of their life and wishes. Their practice spans many mediums, including performance art, video art, experimental music, and gymnastics, most often working with wonky green screen animation, flamboyant characters, and soft sculpture.
Piece: “For Retired Gymnast”
Nick M. Daniels (PGH)
Considered a pioneer in the Pittsburgh dance scene, Nick M. Daniels is the founding Artistic Director of the D.A.N.A. Movement Ensemble (Dancers Against Normal Actions). His style is based on butoh, African, modern and contemporary styles based on pure raw emotion. His creativity often entices the use of soundscapes and video imagery.
Piece: Folkdances of a Nucleic Village
BOOM Concepts video reel (PGH)
BOOM Concepts is dedicated to the development of artists and creative entrepreneurs representing marginalized voices. Boom Concepts hosts monthly art exhibitions as apart of #Unblurred First Friday gallery crawl, as well as film screenings, community meetings, music performances, dance parties, fundraisers, and more.
Piece: Screening: Performance Documentation of the series - If I Die: Renew Recycle Release.
Bebe Beretta (PGH)
Bebe Beretta uses the art of drag to adapt underground queer nightclub entertainment for the art gallery.
Piece: "A few minutes in my head is longer than a few minutes in my bed; and other clever rhymes from a bar clown"
Ryan McKelvey (PGH)
Formative years in poetry and theatre brought Ryan McKelvey to collaboration, drag, and live art. Performances are usually one-to-one encounters or other, more public, explorations of intimacy. Alter egos occasionally get slipped on, too.
Piece: QRS: Queer failure, Radical emotionality, Social Ra/upture.
Trevor C. Miles (PGH)
Trevor C. Miles is a movement artist, creative director, entrepreneur, coach, and passionate human spearheading community renaissance.
Piece: ::XYLO:: (XYLO 3)