Muffy is a writer, community archivist, and movement practitioner based in San Francisco. Her research traces concurrent developments in dance, theater, automation, and scientific management over the course of the 20th century. Her scholarly and artistic pursuits seek to articulate the contours of a nexus of movement which includes infrastructure, mechanization, and the body at work and on stage.
Leenah is a Libyan archivist, radio producer, and open-source investigator. Her research lies at the intersection of subversive radio histories, surveillance, and Islamic dream theory. Leenah’s doctoral project centers on the sonic cultures of the Algerian anti-colonial struggle; here, she traces the routes of smuggled sound through the radio and vinyl record. Her work involves listening for and locating the emergent grammars and vernaculars of resistance that remained largely illegible and opaque to colonial forces. Leenah looks at how the collective’s performance of listening...
M.F.A. in Studio Practice, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; M.A. in Performance Studies, New York University
Zihan is a queer artist from Singapore with a research focus on distended and pragmatic gestures of resistance under illiberal regimes. His work strives to reconcile the tension between the flesh of the body and the bone of the archive, while interrogating the fetish of materiality in our orientation towards a post-human world. He emphasizes the malleability of memory through various representational strategies that includes performance re-enactments and essay films....
AeJay Antonis Marquis (They/Them) is a multi-hyphenate performance artist, scholar, educator, and activist whose work centers the decolonization of the theatrical canon, the black avant-garde, and queer political performance practice. Their current research seeks to explore Queer, Transgender and Non-Binary remixing, reclamation and reconciliation of varied Christian dogmas through performative explorations in theatre, dance, film, and music videos, and how this practice intersects with racial identity and contribute to Queer Futurist Liberation models. Their work has been seen...
B.A. and M.A. in Communication Studies, California State University Northridge
Self-proclaimed L.A. trash, Fernando is a performer and spoken-word artist whose research is centered in areas of Chicano and Central-American issues informed by Racial-Cultural Geographies, Ritual, Spatial Politics, and Abject Performance from L.A. to the Bay Area.
B.A. in Ethnic Studies, minors in African American and Chicano Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Pablo is the son of Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian migrants, a US Navy veteran/war resister, student-parent, spoken word artist and Bombero from the South Bronx, New York. With permission from local Bomba Maestraxs and elders, his research archives and digitally chronicles the identity formation, healing, resistance and solidarity work that Afro-Taino Bomba ceremony performs in the Puerto Rican Diasporic communities of California.
Evan Sakuma (he/they) 'comes out' from the East Asian ethnic enclave of Monterey Park, CA. Their work, hardened further by the 'Queerantine', centers the performance of care within queer communities of color. While a theory head at times, Evan incorporates praxis of 'Gaysian' community building and artistry to actively seek safe spaces for his Asian queer community so head, heart, and home can be found—always.
B.A. in Theater and Performance Studies, M.A. in Art History, Stanford University
Maria Silk is a San Francisco-based artist working in choreography, performance, and video. At Berkeley, her dissertation research takes an ecological approach to the study of San Francisco queer nightlife.
BA(Hons) Applied Theatre, The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts; MPhil Art, Creativity and Education, The University of Cambridge
Oliver Thomas is a first-year PhD student, playwright and musician from England. His work explores the various theatrical landscapes and performance practices which have arisen in response to a so-called refugee crisis across the Mediterranean; from the Syrian revolution through our present moment of heightened European bordering and nativism.
B.S. in Journalism, Asian Languages and Cultures, Northwestern University
Jaclyn's current research focuses on race, tourism and digital technology. Other interests include Asian and Asian American popular cultures, animality studies, science fiction, queer studies, and high strangeness.
