Anike Bello is a London raised Yoruba woman with a keen interest in education, heritage, mobility and people. She is a creative educator that curates spaces online and offline to teach about ancestry and culture linked to pre-colonial African societies through writing, interviews, videos and workshops. Anike is also author of the book, Connecting to Self Through Ancestry, a collection of essays exploring engagements between heritage and wellbeing. oronanike.com
Ashokkumar Mistry is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator working in the UK and internationally. His writing encompasses direct research and personal experiences relating to neurodiversity with a view to sharing experiences and changing attitudes. He is currently Associate Artist with Disability Arts Online and a Development Artist with The Spark Arts. Ashokkumar has been commissioned by the BBC and a number of galleries such as the Lowry and Southbank Centre to create artworks and exhibitions. As a curator, he has worked with AIS for a number of years developing innovative and thought provoking exhibitions. Ashokkumar has also developed a number of exhibitions in Taiwan for National Cheng Kung University and A-Glow space. ashokdmistry.com
Burong (曾不容) is a Beijing/Brighton based Live Art practitioner-researcher whose work deals with the politics of intimacy, gut feelings and posthuman ethics. Burong’s co-authored book The Happening of the Contemporary Performance Art (2016) and a series of interviews with performance artists and curators have been published in China. Her monography consisting of four theatre plays is coming soon (2021). She also writes books for children. Currently, Burong is undertaking doctoral research on feminist new materialism in contemporary art at The University of Sussex.
Bojana Janković is an Eastern European artist making work about immigration: national and displaced identities, migrant labour, cultural, economic and social practices, and structural discrimination of immigrants. Her performances, installations, texts, and non-denominational works have appeared in physical and digital spaces in the UK, Serbia, and internationally, including at Tate Modern (London), Center for Art on Migration Politics (Copenhagen), ODD (Bucharest), and in collaboration with Performing Arts Hub (Norway) and Home Live Art (Hastings). Bojana’s practice is rooted in engagement with marginalised audiences and disruptive of canonical aesthetics and modes of participation. bojanajankovic.com
With a background in theatre arts, Annie Jael Kwan is a curator, researcher and facilitator working at the intersection of contemporary art and activism, with a focus on South/East Asian and diaspora practices in the UK and internationally. Her work explores migration and boundaries, movement and performance, archives, alternate histories, radical curating in collectivity and organising, and how to attend to embodied subjectivities (especially her own) in an age of global crises and eco-anxiety. anniejaelkwan.com
Camille Barton (they/them) is a non binary artist, writer and somatic educator, working on the intersections of wellness, drug policy and transformative justice. Their art practice uses dance, improvisation, ritual, bass healing and Afrofuturism to weave new realities fusing pleasure and social change. Camille facilitates Embodied Social Change – movement sessions that fuse somatics and partner work to explore how oppression, such as racism and ableism, is rooted in the body; and how we can re-pattern it using mindful attention and movement. Camille serves ritual bass as DJ AfroOankali and is interested in the healing power of low end frequencies and polyrhythms. They are currently researching grief on behalf of the Global Environments Network, creating a tool kit of embodied grief practices to support efforts for intersectional, ecological justice.
Carolyn Defrin is a theatre and installation artist. Her recent work examines how vulnerability can be reframed so policy makers can listen better to the needs of marginalised communities. carolyndefrin.com
Critical Interruptions is a Serbo-Romanian critical cooperative exploring Live Art and performance criticism. With little regard for review, we search for critical forms and strategies in dialogue with Live Art and performance, wonder how to develop rigorous and relevant critical writing, and lure new writers into thinking about radical and experimental work. Critical Interruptions is a project by Bojana Janković and Diana Damian Martin. criticalinterruptions.com
Chandra Frank is a feminist researcher and independent curator who works on the intersections of archives, waterways, gender, sexuality and race. Her curatorial practice explores the politics of care, experimental forms of narration, and the colonial grammar embedded within display and exhibition arrangements. Chandra earned a PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and exhibition catalogues, including Feminist Review, the Small Axe VLOSA catalogue, The Place is Here publication and the collection Tongues. She recently co-edited a special issue on Archives for Feminist Review. Her curated exhibitions include Re(as)sistingNarratives(Amsterdam/Cape Town), Fugitive Desires(London), and Proclamation 73 (Durban) (co-curated with Zara Julius). Chandra curated the 2016 Archives Matter Conference at the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths. Currently, Chandra is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Charles Phelps Taft Research Centre at the University of Cincinnati. chandrafrank.com
Caitlin and Andrew Webb-Ellis are British/Canadian artist filmmakers. They use film, dance, music and installation to create work which offers ways to imaginatively access the sensual, primal and interior. Through an extended process of gathering and sifting, they bring diverse materials and concepts into dialogue to create new meaning. Coincidence and fiction play a significant role, and the subject matter is never fixed. Webb-Ellis have ongoing collaborations with artists, scientists, philosophers, family, friends and strangers. Addressing the political through the lens of the subconscious and the body, they explore human loneliness and how we live together. Webb-Ellis are facilitators of Philosophy for Children and recipients of the Jerwood Film and Video Umbrella Award 2019. They are currently working with Cement Fields on an extended educational project and new film funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation. They live and work from a converted removal truck, continually moving from place to place. webb-ellis.org
Diana Damian Martin is a writer, researcher and educator. Her work sits at the intersection between performance, writing, political theory and migration. In her work, she explores alternative critical practices, feminist modes of exchange, and ecological and representational poetics of migration, with a focus on Eastern Europe. Diana is editor of (states of) wake: Dedicating Performance (2018) and On Time: A SPILL Reader (2018), and co-hosts Something Other, a platform for experiments at the border between writing and performance, and The Department of Feminist Conversations, an open collective exploring feminist modes of gathering and exchange.
Daniella Valz Gen is an artist and a poet born in Lima and living in London. Valz Gen is the author of the poetry collection Subversive Economies (PSS, 2018), has published in various journals, and teaches creative writing workshops. Their work is focused on embodiment and liminality through an ongoing practice of tarot and ritual within the container of Sacred Song Tarot. Valz Gen is currently developing the next stages of (Be)longing, a series of landscape interventions and poetry reflecting on the relationship between body and elemental forces. cargocollective.com/daniellavalzgen
Elena Marchevska is a researcher, writing extensively on the issues of belonging, the border and intergenerational trauma. Her artistic work explores borders and stories that emerge from living in transition. elenamarcevska.com
Harriet Hawkins’ research is focused on the advancement of the geohumanities, a field that sits at the intersection of geographical scholarship with arts and humanities scholarship and practice. Empirically she explores the geographies of art works and art worlds, theoretically she is interested in the elaboration of core humanities concepts of aesthetics, creativity and the imagination from a geographical perspective. Her current research focuses on the underground as a site of /for the formation of much needed new environmental imaginations. Collaboration underpins her research practice and alongside written research she has produced artist’s books, participatory art projects and exhibitions with individual artists and range of international arts organizations including Tate, Arts Catalyst, Iniva, Furtherfield and Swiss Artists in Labs. pure.royalholloway.ac.uk
Istanbul Queer Art Collective was founded in 2012 to engage in live art, with a view that the documentation of performance is an art form in itself. The collective is currently based in London and is comprised of its two founding members Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul, who are firm believers in what Jack Halberstam calls the “queer art of failure” and what Renate Lorenz calls “radical drag”. Their performances range from the durational to the intimate and can morph towards other forms like sound art or instalation. IQAC has performed at various art events around the world among which are: House of Wisdom Exhibition in Amsterdam and Nottingham; If Independent Film Festival and Mamut Art Fair in Istanbul, Athens Sound Acts Festival in Greece, Zürcher Theatre Spektakel and Les Belles de Nuit in Zurich and Deep Trash, Queer Migrant Takeover and NSA: Queer Salon in London. istanbulqueerartcollective.co.uk
Jade Foster (b. 1996), is an Artist, Curator and Creative Producer of Caribbean heritage based in Nottingham, UK. Current research interests include contemporary art practices exploring institutional critique, queerness, sound and performance art. Foster is concerned with speaking, curating and making art in the public sphere. Previously they were a speaker, guest and panellist in public programming in the UK including Artist In Conversation: Jennifer Martin & Jade Foster, Primary; Concrete Jungle, In conversation with d’bi.young anitafrika, Nottingham Contemporary; BACKCRIT Crit Session, guest artist, Backlit Gallery; Contemporary Melanin Narratives in Sound and Music, The Tetley – an event organised by Marlo de Lara and supported by The Centre for Practice-Led Research in the Arts (CePRA), University of Leeds and Ladyz in Noyz. Alongside working independently, they currently hold positions as Assistant Curator at Primary and Creative Programme Coordinator at New Art Exchange (NAE) in Nottingham. jadefoster.co.uk
June Lam (b. 1990) is an Australian artist of Chinese and Vietnamese ancestry, living in London and working across sculpture, performance and dance. As a performer of live art, he has worked with modes of somatic learning and movement as a form of gender exploration. In his practice he wishes to challenge the Eurocentric gaze and find new ways of articulating desire as a queer Asian trans body in the world. He also frequently performs work by other visual artists, which has included the UK debut staging of A Life (Black & White) by Nedko Solakov (2020), at Tate Modern; the UK premiere of we shall run by Yvonne Rainer (2018) at London Contemporary Music Festival, Ambika P3 (2018); Tape Piece by Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells (2018) for Body as Archive, Slade Research Centre. junelam.net
Jade Montserrat is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, (Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project) and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She was also awarded one of two Jerwood Student Drawing Prizes in 2017 for No Need for Clothing, a documentary photograph of a drawing installation at Cooper Gallery DJCAD by Jacquetta Clark. Jade’s Rainbow Tribe project – a combination of historical and contemporary manifestations of Black Culture from the perspective of the Black Diaspora is central to the ways she is producing a body of work, including No Need For Clothing and its iterations, as well as her performance work Revue. Jade was commissioned to present Revue as a 24 hour live performance at SPILL Festival of Performance, October 2018, a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, (Nov – 10 Mar 2019) which toured to Humber Street Gallery ( July-sept 2019) and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover. jademontserrat.com
Dr Kai Syng Tan FRSA SFHEA is an artist, curator, consultant and academic. Marked by an ‘eclectic style and cheeky attitude’ (Sydney Morning Herald), ‘radical interdisciplinarity’ (Dr Alan Latham, UCL) and ‘positive atmosphere’ (Guardian), Kai’s work has been widely shared. She is Senior Lecturer at Manchester School of Art and Visiting Artist at King’s College London. Networks she has founded include: RUN! RUN! RUN!, Neurodiversity In/And Creative Research, Running Cultures Research Group and Co-Founder and Member of Arts and Mobilities Network. She is also UK Adult ADHD Network Creative and Cultural Consultant, PsychART Advisor and Music In Detention trustee kaisyngtan.com
Lasse Lau (born 1974, Denmark) is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist who looks into the spatial dimension of power to better understand society’s social struggles. His films have won Grand prix Nanook-Jean Rouch in France, the Golden Raven in Russia, World Cinema Doc at Kansas Filmfest, Nordic:Dox Award at CPH:DOX and 1st prize at Fokus Videokunst Festival. His work have shown at Beirut Art Center, Brandts Klædefabrik, British Museum, BOZAR, Cimatheque Cairo, Edith-Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, Fotografisk Center, Green Lantern, Hamburger Bahnhof, Lumiar Cité, Malmö konsthall, Medrar for Contemporary Art, MOMA PS1, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea Lisboa, Museum of Resistance Torino, OCAT, Smart Project Space, Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art and Westfälische Kunstverein. Lasse Lau was a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art ISP. lasselau.net
Mohamad Ali “Dali” Agrebi is a Tunisian theatre artist and LGBTQI+ activist living in Malta. He collaborated with various international artists as a performer and co-creator. His latest creation Would You Like to Dance With Me? was an interactive street performance with a group of asylum seekers. Dali worked on different campaigns with minority rights organisations in Tunisia and Malta. He currently acts as a committee member of Malta LGBTIQ Rights Movement.
Pankaj Tiwari (1990) is a theatre-maker and curator from Balrampur, India. He is currently a participant at DAS Theatre, Amsterdam. Between 2011 and 2018, he worked as creative director for ‘The Fotons’, a performance-based group from India. He is also part of a collective called ’The Inquilaab’, which consists of Amsterdam based India artist, Sarah Naqvi and Abhishek Thapar. Pankaj has been the founder of several community spaces. Sabarmati Cafe & Theatre (2017) and Meraki’s Kitchen & Theatre (2015) have been a few of his initiatives around culture and community building in India. On January 25th 2020, he initiated Current: a space, Amsterdam, which curates performances and works to build a new audience and a culture of Intersectionality. Pankaj uses theatre, food and farming as a medium for community building. He has worked as a theatre facilitator, consultant and educator with institutes and organisations like Ambedkar University, IIT Gandhinagar, Pearl Academy Delhi, Kranti Mumbai, Breakthrough India, Disha India etc. He was invited to be part of 4TH IETM Croatia (2018), Theatre Spektakel (2019), Bread and Puppet Theatre (2018), Imaginary School for the future of Performing Arts, Giessen (2019). He has been part of jury members and the advisory board for several national and international art residencies and festivals. Few of them include Belluard Theatre Festival Switzerland (2020), First playback Gathering Mumbai India (2019), Theatre of the Oppressed Residency Tejgadh (2016,17). Pankaj is invited to curate a space at theatre Spektakel Zurich (2020) and also performing with his collective Inquilaab, their new work Cow is a Cow is a Cow at the Spring Festival, Utrecht (2020). Pankaj is invited to work as co-curator for Zurich Gessnerallee from October 2020. He will be curating one season for Gessnerallee each year till 2024. He is also curating a festival around Object, Memory and Migration for University of Minnesota 2020-21. His selected directorial works are Carnival: the fest of Bodies (2013-17), 30 days in September (2011-16), Laal Batti Express (2014-18), The 7Inch State (2016), They do not move (2017), The souvenir (2018).
Queer Art Projects is a London based independent production company, specialising in organising art events like exhibitions, performances, screenings, conferences, workshops, talks and parties. Queer Art Projects was founded by Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul, who have been partners for more than a decade. Some of the recent projects they have produced are: House of Wisdom Nottingham, an Arts Council England founded month long exhibition that brought 44 artworks from 40 artists to 4 different locations in Nottingham in 2018; Staying Out an archive exhibition for the LGBT history month at the University of Kent in 2019 and the Arts Council England founded 5 day queer festival Turkish Delight consisting of screenings, workshops and an art party with live performances and an exhibition, happening in five different venues around East London in March 2020. queerartprojects.co.uk
Sebastian Aguirre is a queer human rights activist and theatre practitioner from the Chilean refugee diaspora living in the UK. Sebastian runs the Actors For Human Rights (AFHR) Project, an outreach programme that uses documentary and verbatim theatre to engage a variety of audiences across the UK on human rights issues. He trained in acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. As well as running AFHR, he is a long standing member of Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants. iceandfire.co.uk
Syowia Kyambi is a mixed media artist, who enacts characters within her performance installations to tell stories, which are alternative layered narratives that disrupt the mono-cultural violence of colonial histories and their shaping of our societies. The connection between the psyche, history and the entanglement that exists within active and transmuting identities is ever-present in her creative process. Her practice probes issues of race, perception, hierarchical systems, gender studies and body memory. Syowia examines how the past is affecting our present, influencing our future possibilities. syowiakyambi.com
Tania El Khoury is a live artist creating installations and performances focused on audience interactivity and its politics. Her work has been translated and presented in multiple languages across six continents. Tania holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a Lebanon-based research and performance collective aiming at questioning our relationship to the city, and redefining its public space. Tania is a 2019 Soros Art Fellow and the recipient of the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. taniaelkhoury.com
The White Pube is the collaborative practice of artists Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad under which they write criticism, exhibit, and curate. It is based at thewhitepube.com and on Instagram and Twitter at @thewhitepube. Since its launch in October 2015, The White Pube have gained an international readership and an involved social media following due to their success in diversifying the identity of the art critic and empowering two writers as working class and a woman of colour. TWP write to demand artistic quality from practitioners and institutions, decolonise and democratise gallery audiences, and encourage subjective criticism as an accessible and relevant form of art writing.
Whiskey Chow. London-based performance artist and Chinese drag king. Whiskey’s art practice engages with broadly defined political issues, covering a range of related topics: from female and queer masculinity, problematizing the nation-state across geographic boundaries, to stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity. Her performance is interdisciplinary, combining embodied performance with moving image and experimental sound pieces. Whiskey currently works as Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, Guest Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Chelsea College of Arts. Whiskey has been involved in feminist and LGBTQ activism in China since 2011. She contributed to and performed in ‘For Vaginas’ Sake (2013)’ (original Chinese version of The Vagina Monologues), and curated the first Chinese LGBTQ music festival, Lover Comrades Concert (2013), Guangzhou. Whiskey’s recent performances include: The Moon is Warmer than the Sun, Queering Now, Rich Mix, London (2020); Unhomeliness, Tate Modern, London; Whiskey the Conqueror, Tate Britain, London (2018); Purely Beautiful New Era (ft. Haocheng Wu), Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Great Conversation, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (2017). WhiskeyChow.com