I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
Joy Christiansen Erb is a contemporary photographer and artist whose creative research explores themes such as memory, identity, and storytelling. Her most recent body of work explores the subjects of motherhood and family. This body of work is an autobiographical journey examining the lives of her family and her domestic space. The images included in the series document both the struggles and triumphs of everyday life.
Her photography has gained recognition through regional and national exhibitions and lectures as well as a 2015 Ohio Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Recent and upcoming solo exhibition venues include the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Center for the Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, Peoria Arts Guild and the Galveston Arts Center. Recent group exhibitions include Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, OR, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, Center for Photography at Woodstock and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Her artwork has also been highlighted in a variety of publications including two notable textbooks. A portfolio of her most recent work is housed at the Museum of Contemporary Photography as a part of the Midwest Photographers Project in Chicago, IL.
She currently resides in Youngstown, Ohio, where she is an Associate Professor of Photography at Youngstown State University. She received her B.F.A. from Miami University, Oxford, OH and her M.F.A. from Texas Woman’s University.
Zoo Indigo is an Anglo-German contemporary performance company based in Nottingham, founded by Rosie Garton and Ildiko Rippel. They have created performance work since 2002, touring regionally, nationally and internationally. The Company have devised many multidisciplinary performance works in collaboration with artists from a variety of disciplines, and produced a range of forms of work, including theatre-based performances, street interventions and interactive site-specific projects.
The performance work tends to stem from exploration with autobiography from performers and audience, with a focus on the innovative integration of digital technologies. With the use of humour, popular music and the reprocessing of cultural texts, (often iconic film images), the company juxtaposes the banalities of the everyday with the extraordinary.