Artist Biographies


Luiz de Abreu had his first contact with dance within the African originated cult of 'umbanda' in Brazil. He worked with 'Primeiro Ato', among other companies, before he began his solo work based São Paulo, where he is pursuing his studies of the 'black body' in Salvador, Bahia and São Paulo.

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Chumpon Apisuk works as a community agent, as a solo practitioner and as a member of Black Market. He is the co founder of the Tap Root Society, an environmental art space in Chiangmai, the Concrete House, a center for the arts and social action in Bangkok, EMPOWER, a women's collective group working in providing education for sex workers in Bangkok and the Naam Chewit Project working in supporting People with HIV and AIDS. He has recently been conducting creative projects with communities affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

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Oreet Ashery is a London based artist, working in Live Art and digital media. Her work is shown extensively in international contexts, and is located in the slippage between art and life whilst considering the complex relationship between personal narratives and political realities. Ashery's work as her alter ego, the orthodox Jewish man Marcus Fisher, investigated many contested territories through public interventions, one -to-one interactions, videos and photographs. Since 2004, Ashery has created a number of events as part of a project entitled Welcome Home, in which she investigates the subject of Returning. These events have taken place in London, Palestine/Israel, Turin and Norway. She is looking to set up Welcome Home as an artists' collective exploring political, private and performative notions of one's relation to a sense of home. Oreet Ashery also lectures, mentors and organizes public art projects with various communities, particularly with people in and out of prisons .

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David A Bailey is a photographer, writer, curator and lecturer whose work focuses on issues relating to black representations in the area of photography. He was actively involved in setting up Autograph: The Association of Black Photographers and the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA). He has worked on major international exhibitions including ICA's Mirage Season in 1995, Rhapsodies In Black, Art From The Harlem Renaissance in 1997 at the Hayward Gallery, and Back to Black - Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary, Whitechapel 2005.

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Bobby Baker explores issues through art and performance which radically affect our daily lives. Subject matter ranges through health, shopping and motherhood, seemingly mundane subjects which are explored in an idiosyncratic and innovative performance style. The work is performed in a wide range of spaces from theatres to kitchens. Bobby Baker trained as a painter but soon found it hard to express her ideas in paint alone and turned instead to sugar and cake as more expressive media. She found that the best way of presenting these edible works of art to the public was through performance, including works such as Cook Dems and Drawing on a Mother's Experience. In 1991 LIFT commissioned Bobby Baker to create her Daily Life Series: a quintet of performance pieces, each exploring the universal humdrum of everyday life, including Kitchen Show, How To Shop, and Box Story. Her major production How To Live, on issues of mental health has been performed on stage and as a radio play for BBC Radio 4, and was released on DVD in 2006. In 2005 she was awarded an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts with Queen Mary University of London.
www.bobbybakersdailylife.com [new window]

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Andrew Blackwood qualified from Glasgow School of Art with an honours degree and diploma in architecture but after several years grew disillusioned with work finding that it involved designing 'bijoux' (ie. matchbox) residences, abattoirs and 'big sheds'. Shortly thereafter he was fired.

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Song Chang Song is a painter, actor, and director, born in Taiwan and based in London since 1998. He formed Song Theatre in 2000 and works include The Self Unseeing, Hoxton Hall and Irreversible, Camden People's Theatre. He had his first UK painting exhibition, Songs of Yesterday, at CPT gallery in 2005.

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Juan Chin is a shifting islander who loves everything from siting by the water, screaming over the sky, and to studying a PhD degree in London.

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Gustavo Ciríaco is a former a political scientist now working as a solo dancer-choreographer and in collaboration with the Brazilian performance collective Coletivo Improviso and Austrian artist Andrea Sonnberger, amongst many others. He is artist in residence at Centro Coreográfico da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, developing the dance/visual art project with Brazilian and Norwegian artists.

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The Clod Ensemble was formed in 1995 by Suzy Willson and Paul Clark. Their work combines live music and highly visual performance and productions include: Kiss My Echo, Greed, Lady Grey, Silver Swan and it's a small house and we lived in it always (a collaboration with Split Britches). They also create performance events and workshops for the elderly [Extravagant Acts for Mature People], for students, doctors, musicians and performers as well as collaborating on Peoples' Palace Projects Staging Human Rights project in Brazil. Director Suzy Willson has been teaching at Queen Mary since 1998. Between 2002-2005 she was an AHRC Fellow in Creative Arts researching the uses of arts in medicine and medical training. The PERFORMING MEDICINE project is now being developed into a 3 year programme across London Medical Schools.
www.clodensemble.com [new window]

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Rebecca Collins is a graduate of Queen Mary, University of London and is currently based in London. Her work maintains an even balance between performance and facilitation aiding to further her investigations into aspects of the self and sexual and cultural identity. Rebecca's practice centres around the issues of the female subject as sexual being and is often interactive and experimental.

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Curious is an award winning London-based production company, co-directed by the writers, performers and filmmakers Leslie Hill and Helen Paris. Over the last ten years they have created and toured over 30 performance, film and video projects in Europe, North America, Australia, Brazil, China and India. Hill and Paris's publications include Performance and Place (Palgrave Macmillan), 2006 and Guerrilla Performance: How to Make a Living as An Artist, (Continuum), 2004. Leslie Hill is a NESTA Dream Time Fellow. Helen Paris is Director of the MA in Contemporary Performance Making at Brunel University, London, UK.
www.placelessness.com [new window]

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Richard Dedomenici is a one-man subversive think-tank. By approaching the limits of conventionally acceptable behaviour, his poetic acts of low-grade civil disobedience forcibly ask pertinent questions of society, while his subtle anarcho-surrealist interventions create the kind of uncertainty that leads to possibility.
www.dedomenici.co.uk [new window]

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East End Collaborations (EEC) responds to the professional development needs of graduates and emerging artists working with Live Art and based in London by offering information, advice and expertise and the opportunity to showcase work in an annual open submissions platform. East End Collaborations is a collaboration between Queen Mary, University of London and the Live Art Development Agency.

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Yara El-Sherbini lives and works in London. A graduate of Slade School of Fine Art, London, her work is interested in using humour to engage her audience and has been shown nationally and internationally, including the ninth Cairo International Biennale, Egypt and Inbetween Time Festival, Arnolfini. Sheikh 'n' Vac, an artists' book commissioned by Book Works, was published in July 2005.
www.yaraelsherbini.com [new window]

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Kodwo Eshun was born and lives and works in London. He studied English Literature at University College, Oxford University. His published work includes critical analysis, catalogue essays, magazine articles as well as film, video and curatorial projects that coalesce around the notions of the audiovisual archive and archeologies of futurity. He regularly presents papers at international conferences and symposia and has chaired discussions, moderated dialogues and debates. Eshun is author of the acclaimed More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998 Quartet) and is co-founder of the artists collective Otolith Group who will curate the first Retrospective on the Black Audio Film Collective in 2007. Eshun is a regular contributor to Frieze Magazine, The Wire, Sight and Sound and Groove. He is a Trustee of Artangel and The Longplayer Trust. Eshun is Course Leader of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

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Reem Fadda was born in Kuwait. She is now the Director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA) and has curated a number of shows in London and Ramallah. She previously worked at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah as the Programs and Activities Coordinator. Fadda writes proficiently in the field of contemporary art and has valid experience in teaching and translation in the field. She is a board member of Al Kamandjati Association in Ramallah and is an active participant in the cultural sector.

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Karen C Faith was born in Mississippi and raised in a violent and sexually abusive Southern Baptist family, and performed her first works from the pulpit on Sunday mornings. These performances brought her first into her work with identity and ceremony, and later, as a seven year old, to the study of classical music. She studied performance intensively with the guidance of mentors Werner Herterich (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and Lin Hixson (Goat Island Performance Group) among others. Her work can be described as reverent, spiritually-based collages of both sacred and vernacular ritual, ceremony and memorial. She believes in a performance with serves the people who experience it, and is committed to a practice which meets a need for collective nowpresence which is free of religious affiliation and cultural or social exclusivity.

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Karen Finley is a visual and performing artist. Her visceral, transgressive performances and installations have been exhibited internationally. She is also an author of seven books; including Shock Treatment, Enough is Enough, Living It Up, Pooh Unplugged, A Different Kind of Initmacy, Aroused which Finley edited, and most recently George and Martha. Besides the visual arts Finley has recorded dance and techno beat music with her seething lyrics. There are numerous recordings and musical collaborations, theatrical productions to her credit. She has appeared in film and television and has written commentary and articles for leading journals and blogs. Finley has been involved in various American institutions with the 1998 Supreme Court case, NEA VS Finley with three other artist plaintiffs, a pictorial for Playboy, and Ms Woman of the Year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim, and many other fellowships. Finley is an Arts Professor in Art and Public Policy at Tisch School for the Arts at New York University.

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Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer. She has performed, lectured, exhibited and curated around the world since 1988. She is the author of Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (Routledge/inIVA, 2001) and the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (Routledge, 1999) amongst many other books. Fusco's recent projects combine electronic media and performance in a variety of formats, from staged multi-media performances to live performances streamed to the internet. She is currently developing a serious of new performances and videos about the role of female interrogators in the War on Terror.
www.cocofusco.com [new window]

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Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born and raised in Mexico City, and moved to the USA in 1978. His work, which includes performance art, video, audio, installations, poetry, journalism, and cultural theory, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, 'extreme culture' and new technologies to the national radio news magazine all things considered, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US and Mexico, and a contributing editor to the drama review  (MIT). He has been described as "among the most significant of late-twentieth-century performance artists" (Village Voice) and "a peacemaker in the world's culture clash" (Vanity Fair).
www.pochanostra.com [new window]

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Paul Heritage is Professor of Drama and Performance at Queen Mary, University of London. He is one of the founders of the Theatre in Prisons and Probation [TIPP] Centre in Manchester and People's Palace Projects in London and Brazil. He has devised and implemented a series of arts-based human rights programmes in the Brazilian prison systems reaching over 20,000 prisoners and guards. For over a decade he has been working on a range of socially engaged arts projects across Brazil, Love in Time of War project in four of Rio de Janeiro ’s favelas.
www.peoplespalace.org.br [new window]

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Ruth Holdsworth is pursuing an AHRC funded collaborative PhD with University of Bristol and Arnolfini on 'Curating Risk: Dramaturgy around live art, experimental theatre and interdisciplinary Practice'. Her PhD also incorporates her research interests in contemporary interdisciplinary arts practice in Beirut, Lebanon. She has worked as Administrative Producer with LIFT and as trainee Arts Administrator with Artsadmin. She works freelance for Corali, a London-based performance company made up of adults who have learning difficulties.

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Dominic Johnson is Lecturer in Drama at the Department of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, and is currently completing his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Recent publications include an essay in Slava Mogutin's monograph, Lost Boys (PowerHouse, 2006); essays on Manuel Vason and Raimund Hoghe in Dance Theatre Journal; and writings on Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis in LA Art Land (Black Dog, 2005). He is the editor of a forthcoming monograph on Franko B (Pack, 2006). Dominic has performed solo works at festivals and other events around Europe.

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Chris Johnston and Saul Hewish of Rideout specialise in creative arts for rehabilitation working with cognitive, behavioural and participatory drama based programmes with those in custody in the UK, including adult males, young offenders and adult women. Rideout's policy is that personal change and personal development involve the use of the imagination and the creative abilities of the individual, to perceive choices and act upon them in a way which is informed and pro-social. Their processes involve generating alternative realities within which life choices can be represented and discussed and they have led training of prison officers, probation officers and other criminal justice staff both in the UK and abroad.
www.rideout.org.uk [new window]

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John Jordan merges the imagination of art and the social engagement of politics. Co-director of social practice art group Platform (1987-1995) he then went on to be a co-founder of the infamous cultural resistance collective Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000). He is interested in the role of the artists dissolving into social movements, applying creativity directly to activism and social change. He has written and lectured extensively about the space between art and activism, and the global anticapitalist movements of the last decade - including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona and the Tate Modern, London. In 2003 he co-edited the book We Are Everywhere-the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism published by Verso and now being translated in 7 languages. He was senior lecturer in fine art at Sheffield Hallam University from 1994 until 2003, when he gave up academia to go Argentina to work on the film The Take with Naomi Klein. Most recently he co-founded the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) and the Laboratory of Insurectionary Imagination that toured the UK leading up to the G8 summit in Scotland in 2005. He has now gone Awol from CIRCA and is presently searching for ways to build lifeboats that will take us through the coming ecological collapse of civilisation.

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Mikhail Karikis is a London-based sound artist and performer with a background in architecture and visual art. He exhibits and performs in the UK and internationally. His multi-disciplinary practice encompasses composition, music performance, film, drawing and installation and is dedicated to the development and performance of innovative music and the exploration of auditory culture. He is completing his first solo album, to be released in 2007, and is working on a performance collaboration with artist Sonia Boyce and the vocal consort Alamire, in association with the Ruskin School. Mikhail Karikis lectures on sound art and performance at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Middlesex University and other institutions.

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Milan Kohout is originally from The Czech Republic and is now based in the US. He was a signatory member and activist of the dissident human rights organization Charter 77, was forced by Czech security police to leave his country in 1986 due to his political art activism and was granted asylum in the United States. Since 1994 Milan has been a member of the Mobius Artists Group and has created many collaborative and solo performances. His work concentrates mostly on the subject of human rights (recently rights of Roma/ Gypsies) and politics (critique of totalitarian capitalism and fundamentalist religions) As Mobius Artists Group member he has participated on numerous international art exchange programs and festivals around the world and has been the recipient of number of awards and grants. He teaches Performance Art and Politics at Tufts University and video at The New England Institute of Art and Newbury College in Boston.
www.Mobius.org [new window]

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Almir Koldzic was born in former Yugoslavia, and has lived in Britain since 1995. Since his arrival to the UK, he has studied literature and anthropology, translated two books of fiction and a number of essays and articles for various independent art magazines in Serbia. He has written short stories, and initiated a number of exhibitions in London. His long-term interest is to create better links between art and refugee sectors, and hopes that his current role of Refugee Week UK Co-ordinator will allow hit to do exactly that.
www.refugeeweek.org.uk [new window]

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Daniela Labra is a curator, writer and teacher from Brazil who often collaborates with Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo. She is particularly engaged with activist practices within the contemporary political context of Brazil.
www.artesquema.com [new window]

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The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (lab of ii) is an ephemeral network of socially engaged artists and activists whose work falls in between resistance and creativity, culture and politics, art and life, and whose working context is the new anticapitalists movements of the last decade. The Lab's projects have included gathering 100 international artists and activists around a free potlatch breakfast to share tools of creative resistance before going on actions together (Experiment 1: European Social Forum, London 2004); touring to 9 cities in the UK with a caravan run on chip fat infiltrating department stores with 'prayers to products and training several hundred rebel clowns for civil disobedience at the G8 summit (Experiment 2: The Tour, 2005).
www.labofii.net [new window]

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Leibniz is a collaboration between Ernst Fischer and Helen Spackman, and for PSI #12, Fabrizio Manco, Pamela Lanyero, and Charlie Fox amongst many others. Ernst Fischer was born in Germany and relocated to London in 1979. Between 1986 and 1997 Ernst produced over thirteen performances in his flat in South London, - Brixton heArtRoom - and his PhD thesis attempted to map 'the queer space of living-room theatre and domestic performance'. Ernst's performance work has been heavily influenced by Butoh, but more recently the focus of his work has shifted to collaborations with exiled writers and asylum seekers on issues relating to race, diversity and Human Rights. Helen Spackman is a mother, performance artist and senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on body politics, which directly informs her teaching practice, together with an ongoing series of performance projects and critical articles, including articles in TDR: The Drama Review and The Contemporary Theatre Review. Fabrizio Manco is an artist working across the disciplines of video, drawing, physical theatre, improvisation, movement, site-specific performance and installation, sound/acoustic ecology and sci-art. In his performance practice he has explored the concept of framing and boundaries, as well as that of site and 'place'. Pamela Lanyero was born in Uganda, has a degree in Performing Arts from London Metropolitan University and has previously worked with Leibniz on The Book of Dust (2005) and Piet(r)a. Charlie Fox currently works as artistic director for the London based company Counterproductions and is studying for a Phd in The Event of Laughter.
www.leibnizlab.co.uk [new window]

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The Live Art Development Agency is the leading development organisation for Live Art in the UK and works in partnership with practitioners, venues and institutions on artist and programme initiatives; develops strategies for increasing popular and critical awareness; provides practical information and advice; and offers opportunities for dialogue, debate, research and training.
www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk [new window]

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Nayse Lopez is a cultural journalist and dance critic from Rio de Janeiro and co-director of Panorama Rioarte Dance Festival. In 2003 she created the first professional website for contemporary dance in Brazil, www.idanca.net [new window], and continues to be its editor. She also works as a writer and researcher for journalistic programmes for Brazilian, North American and European TV, such as Discovery Channel and National Geographic. She organized the International Dance Conference in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo about networks and strategies of cooperation in 2005.

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Stacy Makishi is an Hawaii-born artist who works in a variety of media including site-specific installations, video, new writing, physical theatre and live art. She is currently working on a new show called Bull: The True Story. She is currently working with Joshua Sofaer on international presentations of the city wide participatory project Scavengers.

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Nela Milic is the coordinator of London's Refugees and the Arts Initiative which was launched in 1999 to support and develop the artistic and cultural activity of refugee artists, and bring them together with organisations and individuals who share an interest in and a commitment to the work of artists in exile. The activities of the Initiative have grown and developed under the coordination of a Steering Group made up of refugee artists, arts organizations and practitioners, funders and refugee agencies. Over the last four years they have worked to develop access for refugee artists to training, employment, resources and creative exhibition and to develop links with mainstream arts bodies. The focus is around the key themes of networking, communication and information, and activities include the Artists' Exchange Days and the quarterly Passages newsletter.
www.artsinitiative.org.uk [new window]

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Aldo Milohnic is a sociologist specialized in cultural theories, a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies (Peace Institute) in Ljubljana, a member of the editorial board of the Maska performing arts journal and editor of the Politike book series. He is the co-author of several books, including the most recent Culture Ltd. Material Conditions of Cultural Production (2005).
www.maska.si [new window]

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Graeme Miller is a theatre maker, composer and artist, whose work reflects a sense of landscape and place. His best known works include the acclaimed theatre work A Girl Skipping, the Artangel/Salisbury Festival commission Listening Ground, Lost Acres with Mary Lemley, and the permanent public sound installation Linked.
www.artsadmin.co.uk [new window]

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Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker, writer and media activist. His documentary Muslims or Heretics looks at the role of image politics in struggles between 'progressive' and 'radical' Muslims. His forthcoming essays include 'Islamic Hip' (Sound Unbound, MIT Press) and 'Invisible Migrants' (Men of the Global South, Zed Books). He is Editor of Shobak and Associate Editor of Alt.Muslim. His research on ethnic cleansing of Buddhist Tribal Minorities in Chittagong Hill Tracts is used by Amnesty International. In the UK Naeem's work has been featured in Channel 4 and New Internationalist.
www.disappearedinamerica.org [new window]

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Rabih Mroué is an actor, director, and playwright from Beirut. Continuously searching for new and contemporary relations among all the different elements and languages of the theatre art forms, Mroué questions the definitions of theatre and the relationship between space and form of the performance and, consequently, questions how the performer relates with the audience. His works deal with the issues that have been swept under the table in the current political climate of Lebanon. He draws attention to the broader political and economic contexts by means of a semi-documentary theatre. From theatre practice to politics, and from the problem of representations to his private life, his search for 'truth' begins via documents, photos, and found objects, fabricating other documents, other 'truths': it is as if the work becomes a dissection table for the dubious processes of Lebanon's war society.

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The Otolith Group was founded by Anjali Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002 to create platforms for production, curation and dialogue that relate to the moving image, aurality, documentation and the archive . The Group is interested in the relationship of the archive to different modes of audiovisual culture; their work emerges from a preoccupation with the condition of futurity and processes of fragmentation. The Group's ongoing engagement with these concerns results in single and multiple channel work and performative lectures. Their work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions and festivals including Fly Utopia, Transmediale International Media Arts Festival Berlin (2004); Luggage - Dai/Nai, Nanjing Arts Institute, Nanjing China (2004); Prologue New Europe, New Feminism, Cornerhouse, Manchester (2005); Our House is a House That Moves, Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2004) and Living Art Museum, Reykjavik (2006); Homeworks III, A Forum on Cultural Practice, Beirut (2005); Videobrasil, State of the Art, Sao Paolo, Brazil (2005);/MIR - Dreams of Space, Stills Gallery Edinburgh (2005); Tate Triennial: New British Art at Tate Britain, London (2006), The Whitstable Biennial, UK (2006) and Ecotopia: The International Centre Of Photography, New York (2006).

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Performance Studies International (PSi) is an international powerhouse of innovation for academics, artists and activists founded in 1997 to promote communication and exchange across the international field of performance studies.
www.psi-web.org [new window]

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People First and Powerhouse are two of London's foremost Learning-Disabled groups. People First is a user-led self-advocacy organisation, based in Newham, East London and running a wide range of activities and training around rights, employment, housing and other issues affecting the lives of Learning-Disabled adults. Powerhouse is a Newham-based organisation dedicated to the empowerment, training and support of Learning-Disabled women. Together, People First and Powerhouse, facilitated by Ali Campbell (Queen Mary, University of London) and Andrea Encinas-Meade (British Gospel Arts) created, in Autumn 2005, a performance-based programme, run by L-D adults themselves, which reached hundreds of staff, carers and other L-D adults across East London and delivered an experiential training in Advocacy Awareness.

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PLATFORM has been working for 21 years, bringing together environmentalists, artists, human rights campaigners, educationalists and community activists to create innovative projects driven by the need for social and ecological justice. This interdisciplinary approach combines the transformatory power of art with the tangible goals of campaigning, the rigor of in-depth research with the vision to promote an alternative future. Remember Saro-Wiwa is a coalition of UK-based organisations and individuals encompassing the arts and literature, human rights and environmental and development issues, led by PLATFORM.
www.platformlondon.org [new window]

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La Pocha Nostra was founded in 1993 by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes and Nola Mariano, and is an ever morphing trans-disciplinary arts organization based in San Francisco with branches and factions in many other cities and countries. With an international performance history that spans more than 500 events, La Pocha Nostra seeks to provide both a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha Nostra is neither an ensemble, nor a troupe, but more of a conceptual laboratory; a loose association of rebel artists thinking together, exchanging ideas, fears and aspirations and jumping into the abyss together.
www.pochanostra.com [new window]

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Queen Mary, University of London, is a campus university in London's East End, only twenty minutes by tube from the city centre. Arts and Humanities research at Queen Mary is regarded as some of the very best in the UK. Drama at Queen Mary has a particular emphasis on live art, contemporary performance and theatre for social change.
www.qmul.ac.uk [new window]

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Sara Raza is writer and curator on contemporary visual art practice and Assistant Curator: Public Programmes at Tate Modern, London. She curated In the Shadow of Fallen Heroes for the 2nd International Contemporary Art Exhibition in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan 2005 (Central Asian Biennale) and is editor for West and Central Asia for Art Asia Pacific Magazine.

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João André da Rocha is a lecturer in performance at the Catholic University of São Paulo and Visiting Lecturer in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. He is also a Director of People's Palace Projects (PPP) in Brazil. He worked regularly in the juvenile justice system in São Paulo which is the basis for a new project with PPP that he will develop in Azerbaijan for the Soros Foundation. He was an Associate Producer on From the Favela to the World at the Barbican Centre, and has recently worked at Theatre Centre and the Lyric Hammersmith in London. In June he begins a new project on Brazilian Popular Culture with the Young Vic.

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Lia Rodrigues graduated in classical ballet at the Escola de Bailado in Sao Paulo. In 1977 she founded the Grupo Andança which, in the following year, received the Arts Critics Association of Sao Paulo award for 'Best New Company'. In the 'eighties she moved to Europe, where she worked and danced with Compagnie Maguy Marin. In 1990 she returned to Brazil, settled in Rio de Janeiro and established the Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças. Her choreographies have been presented in Europe, the US, and Israel and she is considered one of the country's most accomplished avant-garde, innovative choreographers. Lia Rodrigues was also the founder of the Rio international contemporary dance festival Panorama RioArte Danca.

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Monica Ross has been producing collective, solo, and durational artworks since the late 1970's, in addition to works in print, video, text and installation. Recent performance works include Women with Red Umbrellas, a group event for Gropiusstadt, Berlin, 2005, and humanmaterial, with Jorn Ebner, eta project space, Brighton, 2005. humanmaterial is one of a series of works which transcribe a physical process into digital media. Aspects of these works, 2001-2005, can be seen under the title transcription at www.justfornow.net [new window]

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Anjali Sagar was born and lives and works in London. She studied Social Anthropology (BA Hons) at The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and studied for her MFA at Middlesex University. Her work includes curatorial projects, moderation, essays, production and film and video works. She is interested in the relations between sound, text and image, archive and the legacies and potentials of the essay film. Sagar has produced numerous projects including No Arrival No Parking with composer Heiner Goebbels. She is co-founder of the artists collective The Otolith Group who will curate the first Retrospective on the Black Audio Film Collective in 2007, founder of Multitudes, the guerrilla news network established in 2000, and moderator of the Undercurrents listserve.

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Peggy Shaw is a Practicing Doctor Of Performance (PDP). She got her Elder Body-On-The-Line practical training of 32 years on the boards from New York to Taiwan; her 25 years as an individual artist and collaborator with Lois Weaver in The Split Britches Company; her endless awards despite being a bandit; trying to fill the endless void of Lesbian new writing for performance.

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Roberto Sifuentes is an interdisciplinary artist whose work fuses charged cultural and political issues with a cutting edge pop culture aesthetic, often combining live performance with interactive technologies and video as a presentation medium. A founding member of La Pocha Nostra, Sifuentes has collaborated and performed with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. Since 2001, Sifuentes has also been Artistic Director and Lecturer of The Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program in New York.

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Adrien Sina is an artist and curator who lives and works in Paris and London. In 1995, Sina began a long-term series of projects engaged with issues of ethics, human rights and political representation. In particular 'Matrix of a Planetary Ethics' and the 'Planetary Parliament of Peoples and Minorities' used performances, video-installations, online actions and publications to propose a radical rethinking of juridical and institutional structures. In 2003 Adrien Sina was advisor to Tate Liverpool for Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance. As part of the development of PSI: Performing Rights Adrien has worked with the Live Art Development Agency as a Thinker In Residence considering issues of Performance, Politics, Ethics and Human Rights. As part of his residency he has developed a website which provides an historical overview of the development of the question of Human Rights and illustrates the historical and contemporary strategies undertaken by artists.
www.adrien-sina.net/ethics/ [new window]

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Tetine are Bruno Verner and Eliete Mejorado. Since 1995 they have been creating a multitude of sound works from atonal orchestral pieces to electro punk/bailefunk/miamibass-driven tunes. Their latest baby is called L.I.C.K MY FAVELA.

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James Thompson is Professor of Applied and Social Theatre at the University of Manchester and a Director of the Centre for Applied Theatre Research. He is currently the co-director of In Place of War - a major research project exploring performance and war funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has worked on theatre projects in Brazil, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and in prisons and with refugee communities in the UK. He was Guest Editor of the 2004 TDR Social Theatre edition (T183) and is author of Applied Theatre: Bewilderment and Beyond (2003) and Digging Up Stories: Applied Theatre, Performance and War (2005).

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Wan-Jung Wang is a theatre teacher, director, scholar, writer, actor and volunteer worker for the elders who works in community-based applied drama using theatre to effect change. She has published books: The Art of Peter Brook, Stage Vision and I Fly Across Darkness With Wings in Taiwan.

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Lisa Wesley works across the disciplines of performance, video, installation and text. She qualified from Valley Comprehensive School in Worksop with one 'O' level - Grade C in Religious Education. Since then she has tried a bit harder and become more focused.

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David Williams is a performer, technician, director and writer. He was a participant in the hybrid performance laboratories Time_Place_Space 1 & 2, and has worked with Sidetrack, Sydney Theatre Company, Blast Theory, Bonemap, pvi collective, and Platform 27. In 1998 he was awarded the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Acting, with which he pursued training in the USA and Europe. David holds an Honours in Theatre from UWS Nepean, and will complete a PhD at UNSW in 2006. He is a founding member and artistic director of version 1.0, and has co-devised all of the company's work since 1998 including The Wages of Spin, CMI, and The second Last Supper. Most recently he produced and directed version 1.0's From a distance...(2006).
www.versiononepointzero.com [new window]

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Wrights & Sites is a group of four practitioner-researchers committed to producing work that responds to space and place, and the people who live, work and play in various sites and landscapes. Formalised in 1997 and based in Exeter (UK), the four core members are Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner. Wrights & Sites work across a range of media: site-specific performance, published Mis-Guides & Mis-Guided Tours, themed drifts, mythogeographic mapping, and public presentations and articles. The group's published Mis-Guides are created in collaboration with visual artist Tony Weaver.
www.mis-guide.com [new window]

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Ali Zaidi is the Artistic Director of motiroti, which he co-founded with Keith Khan in 1996. Working across diverse art forms, including film, live art, installation and digital technologies, Zaidi creates fresh participatory experiences for new audiences. Zaidi's work is reflected in all motiroti productions. However, he feels particularly close to recent video-triptych cutout; award winning Alladeen; Mix & Match, a live performance presented at Romaeuropa Festival; and Fresh Masaala, an installation that toured world-wide. Most recently he has designed two cinemas for Rich Mix, a new arts centre in East London.
www.motiroti.com new window]

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Al Zaytouna London Dabke Group aims to reflect the cultural journey of Palestinians through dancing Dabke and includes many members from Palestinian villages that no longer exist . Dabke is the national dance of Palestine and is often seen in festivals, celebrations and weddings. Since the British occupation in Palestine in 1917, Dabke became a representation of Palestinian identity and was associated with political and national aspirations, particularly after the disaster of 1948 when the state of Israel was declared and hundred of thousands of Palestinians were deported from their land. group aims to show this cultural journey of Palestinians throughout dancing Dabke. The Al Zaytouna London Dabke group recently performed as part of How Palestine Became Israel show in memory of the Deir Yassin Masacre and will be performing at the WOMAD festival 2006.
www.londondabke.com [new window]

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