Bio + Experience

Photo credit: Mia O'Connor

I am a newly independent curator, writer, creative producer, and project manager in contemporary art and performance based on Twana and Skokomish lands on the Olympic Peninsula in rural Washington. From 2012-2023, I was a program director, curator, & artistic director with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). I now have a burgeoning freelance practice in curating, writing, and other creative endeavors while supporting artists and organizations with projects, programs, and ideas at every stage of development in visual and performing arts.

Over the years, my work has taken many forms in international, national, and local contexts: exhibitions, performances, festivals, residencies, public programs, publications, public art, teaching, learning, advising, writing, research, symposia, lectures, panels, parties, community engagement, audience development, international consulting, cross-cultural exchange, cultural advocacy, youth initiatives, event coordination, grant making, grant writing, budgets, boards, committees, advocacy, strategic planning, trust-building, change-making.

At PICA, I served as the organization’s first Community Engagement Manager, then as Director of Public Engagement, and from 2017-2023 as Artistic Director & Curator of Public Engagement. In collaboration with two Co-Artistic Directors, I curated visual art exhibitions, experimental performances, and public programs, both year-round and for the annual, globally renowned Time-Based Art Festival (TBA).

In addition to numerous projects and programs as part of the TBA Festival, some highlights of my curatorial work with PICA include a symposium on the historicization and politicization of HIV & AIDS (2017) in collaboration with Sarah Schulman, Visual AIDS, Pacific Northwest College of Art’s MA in Critical Studies Program, and local artists, scholars, and organizers; SUBHARMONIC: A Sonic Arts Symposium (2018, co-curated with local artists), including experimental sound performances, panels, and workshops; Gordon Hall’s solo exhibition, THROUGH AND THROUGH AND THROUGH (co-curated with Kristan Kennedy, 2019) and accompanying publication, OVER-BELIEFS: Gordon Hall Collected Writing, 2011-2018; No Human Involved: The 5th Annual Sex Workers’ Art Show (2019) exhibition and accompanying symposium and publication on contemporary art, activism and publishing in sex work, co-curated with Kat Salas and Matilda Bickers of STROLL PDX (Portland, OR), and in collaboration with Rose Nordin of Rabbits Road Press/OOMK Zine (London, UK) and the Independent Publishing Resource Center (this project is featured in the anthology Curating as Feminist Organizing, Routledge, 2022); We Got Each Other’s Back (co-curated with Kristan Kennedy, 2020-21), an exhibition by Carlos Motta with Heldáy de la Cruz, Julio Salgado, and Edna Vázquez, with accompanying public programs, community engagements, and publications; and Remembering to Remember: Experiments in Sound (2023), co-curated with Felisha Ledesma, a multifaceted program featuring 15+ international, national, and local artists in an exhibition of newly commissioned multichannel sound compositions, film/video works at the intersection of sound and moving image, a series of live performances, and a program of community-based workshops in partnership with Synth Library Portland. My final project with PICA was Make Banana Cry, an international experimental dance performance by Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson, in collaboration with a number of other performers from around the world, that interrogates through conceptual choreography the West’s appropriation, consumption, and colonization of Asian identity and culture in music, fashion, cinema, media, and embodied movement. Make Banana Cry included a secondary program in collaboration with Liminal Bodies, a Portland-based collective of queer and trans Asian and Pacific Islander artists and writers.

In my time with PICA, I grew the organization’s public programs into a robust curatorial platform for critical inquiry, community partnerships, publications, experimental education, and participation. Projects included an expanded TBA Festival Institute with Guest Scholar/Writer tracks; the Field Guide audience engagement program; community-centered and participatory performances; and other initiatives emphasizing artist-audience connections and promoting dialogue and exchange through contemporary art, culture, and politics. Some of these projects have taken the form of curated symposia exploring such intersectional topics as queer embodiments, politics, performance, and the financial recession (Bodies, Identities, & Alternative Economies, 2012); intercultural and interdisciplinary communication and language (How Do You Mean? Culture in Translation, 2013); art, gentrification, and critiques of the historicization and politicization of HIV/AIDS with Sarah Schulman, Visual AIDS, and local artists and scholars (2017); and art, activism, and DIY publishing in sex work (2019). I was the creative and community producer for Holcombe Waller’s LGBT Requiem Mass at PICA (2015) and in its second iteration as Requiem Mass: A Queer Divine Rite at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts/Grace Cathedral (San Francisco, 2018). I helped PICA develop partnerships with local nonprofits, public schools, colleges and universities, and youth groups to broaden access and diversify the organization’s audienceship, leadership, community reach, civic role, and support for local artists, with particular attention to racial equity. I served as co-director of PICA’s Precipice Fund, part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Regranting Program, and helped to steward PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab artist residency program, funded for nearly a decade by the Mellon Foundation. I served as lead liaison in PICA’s partnership with A Black Art Ecology of Portland (BAEP).

While in Portland, I was a founding member of Arts Workers for Equity (AWE), a grassroots advocacy initiative for advancing racial equity in Portland’s cultural sector. From 2014-21, I was an Adjunct Asst. Professor in the Art & Social Practice MFA Program at Portland State University, where I taught Critical Art Theory, Contemporary Art History, Art & Politics, Research & Writing, and Directed Studies. From 2020-2023, I sat on the city’s Public Art Committee.

I have been part of numerous initiatives outside the US. In 2018, I co-organized and -facilitated with UK artist Phoebe Davies a research, work, and dialogue convening for independent artists and arts workers on the political role of art institutions, hosted by Somerset House in London. I was part of the inaugural cohort of GENERATE (2019-20), a joint program of the British Council and Arts Council England promiting exchange between a select group of US and UK performance curators and producers, and was then hired onto a team that conducted research toward the program’s redesign centering equity and access. I am a member of the International Presenting Commons, which works to sustain and advance international cultural exchange in the US.

I have delivered papers and presentations and served as a lecturer, panelist, facilitator, or guest at international, national, and regional conferences, convenings, and festivals, including a Dutch Performing Arts delegation of US performance programmers (Amsterdam/Utrecht); British Council USA; IPC Public Roundtable (New Ythe Directors’ Circle (Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany); Horizon Showcase/Edinburgh Fringe (Edinburgh, UK); Fierce Festival (Birmingham, UK); HowlRound Theatre Commons; Creative Capital Convening; Common Field; Dance/USA; National Performance Network; Artist Communities Alliance; Fusebox Festival; Elevate Chicago Dance; Society of Dance History Scholars/Congress on Research in Dance; UCLA’s Thinking Gender; and University of Oregon’s Art & Equity Summit, among others.

I have served on numerous grant and award selection panels, including for the Doris Duke Foundation; the Herb Alpert Award; United States Artists; Foundation for Contemporary Art; MAP Fund; National Performance Network; ArtPlace America; Abrons Art Center (New York, NY); The Rainin Fellowship (San Francisco, CA); Velocity Fund (Philadelphia, PA); Kindling Fund (Portland, ME); Grit Fund (Baltimore); Platforms Fund (New Orleans); Futures Fund (St Louis); The Idea Fund (Houston); the Brink Award (Pacific NW); NW New Works Festival (Pacific NW); The New Foundation (Seattle); Oregon Arts Commission; Performance Works NW (Portland, OR); and Risk/Reward (Portland, OR). I serve on the Public Art Committee for Portland’s Regional Arts & Culture Council.

In my early career, I worked in galleries and in freelance curatorial capacities in the LA area, San Francisco, and Phoenix, where I also served as Education Program Manager & Funding Specialist for a nonprofit women’s foundation. I earned a B.A. in Contemporary Visual Culture & Gender Studies from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies in California, and a Master’s in Arts Management from the University of Oregon.

CV available upon request.