Performance Space New York to Present I WANNA BE WITH YOU EVERYWHERE, Envisioned by and for Disability Communities

The organizers of I wanna be with you everywhere are presenting a gathering on June 21, 2023: 

I wanna be with you everywhere is an everywhere gathering envisioned for and by disability communities and anyone who wants to get with us. Organized by desire and need, and nurtured by Arika, Amalle Dublon, Jerron Herman, Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Alice Sheppard and Constantina Zavitsanos—IWBWYE returns to Performance Space and any space on June 21 for an outdoor pop-up and hybridized event. This summer solstice gathering will be held in Performance Space’s courtyard as well as on Zoom so you can join from home, the beach, in bed, amid your local bbq, in transit, in the hospital, and anywhere elsewhere. Watch parties welcome. Zoom is open boxes not webinar with breakout rooms for chat and quiet space; courtyard events will be livestreamed to the Zoom and Zoom events will be livestreamed into the courtyard too. I wanna be with you everywhere is an ongoing and accessible celebration of nonlocality.

Our purpose is specifically social and our only goal is getting together, conjuring, celebrating, resting, and reveling in our means beyond ends. We’re only here to celebrate that we’re still here and to hold space for those of us that now join from other forms. We come from traditions of healing and need in and beyond any need to be healed, made whole, or cured; we come incomplete and holographic, welcoming wounds, healers, wisdom, and fools anywhere on the bodymind-spirit soul continuum in k/crip, chronic, incurable, incalculable, and quarantined, mad love.

As part of the Healing Series, I wanna be with you everywhere draws on a multitude of personal practices and associations with healing while underscoring a rejection of classist Western colonial mandates of health and wellness that assume an originary state of health to which people should return or move toward—and that delineate who is and isn’t already here, who can and can’t come in, and what we can do together. Crucially, I wanna be with you everywhere puts into practice a belief in care as love rather than control.

I wanna be with you everywhere first emerged through collaborations rooted in access intimacy, hospitality, and conviviality in 2019 at Performance Space New York, as a festival organized and unfolding in “crip time.” While that festival centered physical togetherness as rare and important, the 2023 edition commences at a time when considerations of crip nonlocality, deepened by the pandemic, have necessarily opened new, more accessible visions of what togetherness can be. We must make this. Together. People not policy. No one left behind. 

There won’t really be an end as this is actually just the beginning again, second round around, encore before—in continual rehearsal. 

I wanna be with you everywhere Schedule 

June 21, 2023 | 2 - 10pm (Schedule subject to change)

2:00: Doors open/Zoom starts/Access teams begin/Break/Open Meetup time*

On Zoom, a shifting cycle of online Hosts begins:

JOHANNA HEDVA, NEVE, AMBER HAWK SWANSON, AKEMI NISHIDA, RISA PULEO, TARANEH FAZELI

3:00: Land acknowledgement and welcome 

3:30: JJJJJJEROME ELLIS: Performance in the spirit and celebration of Aster of Ceremonies

4:00: Break/Open Meetup time*

5:00: AMELIA BANDE: Meditations in a Chronic Emergency

5:30: OPEN STAGE/SCREEN/MIC for visitor participation IRL and URL 

7:30: CYRÉE JARELLE JOHNSON: Performance after the telethon

8:00: PANTEHA ABARESHI: Performance 

8:30: YO-YO LIN 林友友: Collective writing (Open throughout the day)

9:00: LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA: Intention setting, ceremonial fire, with ASL Centered Hang as quiet hours begin for voicing/Break/Open Meetup time 

10:00: Doors close/Zoom ends/Access teams finish

*These are scheduled breaks, but breaks are also in between events and unscheduled self-determined,  breaks are welcome at all times; there are Quiet, Low Stim, and Chat rooms available both on site, inside PSNY, and on Zoom in Breakout rooms. 
 

Programming Descriptions

Panteha Abareshi

Performance

Amid the blur of erotics, the jangle of poetics, and the fetishizing of sickness and disability, the heat of Panteha’s performance and sculpture freezes all. Just try and take their temperature; it’s immeasurable. As they do elsewhere, Panteha’s presence at this solstice gathering will intervene in the black k/cripness of sex, showing us how sometimes the body is an object and a thing and sometimes the body is a spur–a fragmented piece of verse redacted, shredded, underlined, and written over and over and over again. 

Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART.

If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org

Amelia Bande

Meditations in a Chronic Emergency

With lo-fi dreams and high-def humor, Bande brings MC vibes to the day. Interluding music with spoken performance, the live extimacy of Bande’s presence reaches out via emo-techno-bridges. Her humor is a vessel that holds deep feelings sprinkled with softly misted relief. Her languages speak of collective anger and desperation, of laughter, of tears, of love, and of how we care (and don’t) for one another. This is illness talk, COVID forever talk, talk of disappearance, disposability, denial, but also talk of kinship, of gentle brushes of truth, and of mutual connection and disconnection. Bande will bring songs and meditations: welcome.

Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART, Spanish, large-font written script available online and in print.

If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org. 

JJJJJerome Ellis

Performance in the spirit and celebration of Aster of Ceremonies

Ellis’s processional, precessional cessation and continuation of movement and music comes to us via his forthcoming release Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed Editions, 2023). At Performance Space JJJJJerome brings his sax, his laptop, his incomparable style to the stage, to the aisles, and to the surround: carrying forward the memory of his grandfather’s sermons and spirit. This sonic ionic offering will undo lineage while keeping us family–family with flowers, with humans, with bells, and, always, with the wind.

Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART.

If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

Performance after the telethon

What to do about a telethon other than fuck it up? Poet, tarotist, artist, and librarian Cyrée Jarelle Johnson returns to IWBWYE to read the 1980s and ’90s for what those decades were: practice for now. As our host and guide, he joins us in pissing on pity as Jerry’s Orphans did, while celebrating the wealth of nothing about us without us. From Performance Space’s courtyard his primary relationship will be with the camera and all of us beyond its lens. Some of this is technological, some of this is a means of direct address and embrace, some of this is a series of observations Cyrée has stored up for some time–and today you’ll be lucky enough to receive them all. 

Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART.

If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.

Yo-Yo Lin 林友友

Collective writing

Coming to us from Taipei, Yo-Yo sends us elsewhere while bringing us back with her to the timezone of tomorrow. A dancer, media artist, and choreographer who makes multi-dimensions and realms, Lin’s amplification of energies and connections across bodies devolves the separations we are taught to abide. Inviting us into the online platform your world of text, Lin offers us a space to write, feel, and enunciate collectively, simultaneously, asynchronously, and anonymously throughout the day. A little bit like a bathroom stall, school desk, game of telephone, or cut up poem remix: Lin’s open text field will informally archive our gathering, stretching time and space into the disabled decolonial futures we all need.

Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART.

If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.

Open Stage/Screen/Mic (5:30–7:30 p.m. 2 hours)

Performances, offerings, artworks shared by, for us

Our Zooms are unmuted, our mics are open, and our hearts and bodyminds are receptive. We give the floor online and in person to you–to those of us who wish to share, those of us who have been dying to say something, those of us who are dying because we said something–those of us who have been living moment to moment without the audiences and responses and applause and vibes we know are out there. We give the floor to those of us whose community is, at present, a future dream and a past memory. We ask that your offerings be in the spirit of community even as we might be figuring out what that word even means. We know that there is beauty and vulnerability and care in trying something out for the first time–even when you’ve done it before–and we hope that you’ll feel our intentions (and our shared vulnerability!) in trying this whole thing out for the first time with you. 

Interested in sharing? Show up online or in person and we will do our best to give you the stage, moving between offerings URL and IRL. Depending upon the number of people wanting to share, time limits may be implemented. Our MC/hosts will help field interest from IRL and URL audiences. Access workers will provide audio and image description, and any description provided by artists is welcome. 

Advance open stage/screen/mic submissions are appreciated but not required. Works in by June 16th @5 PM EST will help our Access Teams prepare. So far we have a gorgeous line up featuring short works by Agustine Zegers, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Alx Velozo, and Geelia Ronkina. We’re so excited for more! To add your work to the queue please send audio, visual, textual, or other material with your name and the subject line JUNE 21 OPEN MIC to boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org. Or sign up the day of.

Access: Audio and image description (AD + ID), ASL, CART. 

If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Altar: Odes to the Lost/ never lost

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha offers us a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A portal for our salt water honey rose bitter tears, wails and loss. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost- and for ourselves.  As guide and gift to this solstice convening, Leah joins us again in the wake of when we last gathered in 2019. Their altar will open up space for asynchronous emotions and intimate practices of mourning, space to not be alone anymore with our loss, space to get curious about our grief. Leah will be with us throughout the day, reeling in prophetic poems and prose beyond the isolation visited upon us, against all odds and healing into the evening, finding our loves never lost. Later there will be fire and a little bit of smoke. Maybe a mirror, most definitely magic. Somewhere in the blur of grief and celebration, joy and pain, this poet will wade with us in the non-opposition of life and death. The sun will set and quiet hours will commence. Come find each other forever round the fire. 

Access: Image description (ID), ASL, CART.

Those with RSVPs are welcome to bring small offerings including pictures of beloveds for placing on the altar. If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.

ASL Hang / Quiet Hour

As the event comes to a close, we will be invited to sit with our intentions, offerings, and remembrances. After the sun sets on the longest day, Performance Space’s courtyard will center D/deaf social space, with conversational interpreters available for those who do not speak ASL. We ask that the sound volume in the courtyard be kept low during this time. This quiet hour concludes the entire event, ending at 10:00 pm.

Access: ASL, CART.

If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.

Access – Gathering Intention

This occasion is first and foremost a space for gathering across multiple realms–virtual and in person. None of it is possible without IWBWYE’s Access Coordinator Madison Zalopany and the care, commitment, and imagination of all of the access workers, consultants, and friends in bringing this occasion into being. Thank you. We’d also like to deeply thank Dickie Hearts for Access Consultation. Special shout out to Alexis Fagan for elaborating the Low Stim room with artworks and more. Shout out to Finnegan Shannon and Carolyn Lazard for providing seating that are both artworks and access. Thank you Constantine for the haptic touches on the already extant seating too. And thank you Chancey Fleet and the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library staff for assisting with Braille program printing. 

Performances and moments orchestrated through aesthetic encounters will occur throughout the day. That said, the time in between, alongside, before, and after the artworks, poems, and music shared are the true spirit and intent of this day. As much as we love everyone who is performing, we love the fact that everyone will also, hopefully, be hanging out, too. Throughout the day people will be arriving and leaving, coming and going, and moving between the courtyard and Performance Space’s interior. We hope that the access infrastructure we have planned will be able to hold the different comings and goings we know of, as well as those we have no way of knowing will occur. We don’t separate access from life, life from access or access from fun. We know it won’t all go perfectly and that access interference may occur. When it does, we hope we’ll move through this together. We know that human is tech and tech is human and that both experience interruptions. We know that improvisation is our condition. With all of these realities as our intentions we’ve organized the following access presences and infrastructures: 

Access URL

Livestream connectivity between in person and online attendance via Zoom. Zoom breakout rooms, including a quiet-only breakout room. Live CART captioning. Online ASL interpretation for performances and breakout rooms. Access doulas providing audio and image description.

Access IRL

Livestream connectivity between in person and online attendance via Zoom. In person ASL interpretation for performances as well as informal conversation among attendees. Access doulas providing audio and image description. Quiet rooms and quiet-er rooms will be open both inside Performance Space as well as outdoors in an area adjoining the courtyard. Wayfinding signage provided onsite. A large canopy will provide shade and cover in the event of rain with multiple seating spaces and seating options available, including seating with vibrational transducer frequency tactile input.

Covid Protocol

This is a primarily outdoor and online event, with an outdoor stage and projection screen and indoor spaces including bathrooms and a low-stim room. Many people will be wearing masks. Some of us can’t wear masks, and for others of us masks make communicating impossible. If you can maintain distance while communicating and hanging out, please do. If you can wear a mask please do. “Smile” see-through masks will be available onsite. Please stay home and rest if you’re experiencing Covid-related symptoms. Please attend online with us.

Food

Food will be onsite at Performance Space with gluten free and vegetarian options. 

Bathrooms

ADA all gender bathrooms are located inside Performance Space on the 4th and 5th floors. These uncaptioned videos show the 4th floor and the 5th floor bathrooms.

RSVP

Both in person and online attendance is free with RSVP. Please RSVP here: https://performancespacenewyork.org/shows/i-wanna-be-with-you-everywhere-2023/

Getting in touch

If you or a friend require a particular form of support or translation not listed here or in the event descriptions, we would love to connect. Email us at boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org. Advance notice is appreciated and requests made by June 9 will have the best chance of being met.

Venue

Performance Space New York is located at 150 First Avenue at the corner of 9th Street in Manhattan. The courtyard is step-free with a gridded flooring overlaying gravel. A large canopy will provide shade and cover in the event of rain, with multiple seating options available. Animals are welcome.

Audience Travel Fund

Getting around New York City is expensive. For local accessible transport in the form of a Lyft/Uber voucher or reimbursement please fill out this form.

Getting to Performance Space

Subway

Click each train stop to view a video route to Performance Space New York.

L train to 1st Avenue

6 train to Astor Place

F train to 2nd Avenue

R/W trains to 8 Street Station

4/5/6/N/Q/R trains to Union Square  – wheelchair accessible

6/B/D/F/M trains to Bleeker/Broadway-Lafayette Street – wheelchair accessible

Bus Stops

M8– St Marks Place/ 1st Avenue, East 9th Street/1st Avenue

M14a– Avenue A/ East 9th Street

M15– 1st Avenue/ St. Marks Place

Access-A-Ride

Note: If you are new to Access-A-Ride, it may take up to 21 days to process your application.

Please plan accordingly.

Parking

Limited street parking is available close to Performance Space New York. Please read street signs carefully. Meter rates are posted on each parking meter, typically $4 for the first hour, and $10.75 for 2-hour increments.

The closest parking garage to Performance Space New York can be found at 310 East 11th Street between First and Second Avenues, 0.2 miles from PSNY. Please call (212) 475-5262 to inquire about their rates if you are interested.

Weather Contingency

In the event of rain, no ceremonial fire will take place.

Air Quality Contingency

In the event of outdoor Air Quality Index (AQI) numbers projected to reach or exceed 100, this event will be rescheduled or moved to an improvised Zoom room. This event is planned as a hybridized event where our camera crews send multiple angles to Zoom from the Courtyard and our Access Teams are coordinated in and across both spaces. We cannot simply move it all to Zoom in the same ways nor will we move it all inside. No one left behind. We will update all ticket holders on or before June 20th. 

About the Artists

Panteha Abareshi‘s work is rooted in the existence as a chronically ill/disabled body existing with multiple medical illnesses, at the root of which is sickle cell zero beta thalassemia - a genetic blood disorder that causes debilitating pain, and bodily deterioration that both increase with age. Their work explores the complexities of living within a body that is highly monitored, constantly examined, and made to feel like a specimen. Taking images that are recognizable as “human” forms, and reducing them to the gestural is a juxtaposition of Abareshi's own body's objectification, and dissection. Through performance work, they push their body to, and often beyond, the limits of its ability. In their video work and sculptural installations, Abareshi confronts the able-bodied gaze, and questions notions of consent within the dynamics of power, control and objectification between viewer and disabled body as subject. The radicalized abjectification of the normative corporeal form allows for a rigorous examination of the complexities and hierarchies within loss of ability, and its connection to a larger context of universal fragility, fear, pain and mortality. Currently, Abareshi is focusing on the disabled body as fetish object, and conducting research into disabled sexuality, and its representations within pornography and fetish materials.

Amelia Bande is an artist from Chile based in California and New York. Her play Chueca won the 2006 Chilean National Playwright Award and was later published by Sangría Editora. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown at Artists Space, The Poetry Project, Storm King Arts Center, and Participant Inc. (New York) NgBK and HAU2 (Berlin), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and Teatro Sidarte (Santiago). She was co-editor of Critical Correspondence, an online journal of Movement Research. A sound archive of her early performances with Canción de Amor Desea Verle was released by Infinito Audio, Chile in 2017. She's currently a Writer in Residence at NYU's Spanish and Portuguese Department.

JJJJJerome Ellis is an animal, artist, and proud stutterer. Through music, literature, performance, and video, he researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. He was born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants. He grew up in Tidewater, Virginia, where he lives with his wife, ecologist-poet Luísa Black Ellis. 

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a writer, poet, and librarian living in New York City. He’s had words in The New York Times, Boston Review, and Vice. Cyrée Jarelle has received fellowships and grants from Culture/Strike, Astraea Foundation, Rewire.News/Disabled Writers, and the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund. He has delivered lectures and readings at The White House, TEDxColumbia University, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brown University among other venues.

Yo-Yo Lin 林友友 is a Taiwanese-American, interdisciplinary artist who uses animation, performance, and sound to create meditative ‘memoryscapes.’ Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with invisibilized chronic illness, investigating ideologies of healing, resilience, and care. Her practice often facilitates sites for community-centered abundance, developing into physical and virtual installations, workshops, accessible nightlife parties, and artist collectives. In 2022 she debuted her multimedia performance “channels” at The Shed to a sold-out house. She taught her self-developed course “Media-making as a Healing Practice” at NYU ITP and was recently selected for the 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship and 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for technology-centered arts. After living in Brooklyn, NY for 7 years, Yo-Yo is currently residing in Taipei, Taiwan.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Worcester femme, their grandma's grandfemme, almost an illder, a couch witch and a traveller. A nonbinary femme disabled writer and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician/Roma ascent, they are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon) Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement, Tonguebreaker, and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A 2020-2021 Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda Award winner and longtime disabled BIPOC space maker, they are currently building The Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Arts  Center, an accessible residency space for disabled 2QTBIPOC writers. They still believe in the disabled future.

About the Online Hosts

Taraneh Fazeli is a chronically ill Iranian-American curator living between Waawiiyaatanong/Detroit and Lenapehoking/New York. Her current approach to curating is rooted at the intersection of the disability, diasporic, queer, and creative communities that she calls home. Before becoming an independent curator, she worked at Artforum, e-flux, Triple Canopy, and The New Museum.

The peripatetic exhibition and community program series she curated “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” (2016-20) addressed the politics and practices of disability, race, accessibility, healing, and care. She is working on a homonymous field guide for co-creating accessible worlds through art, culture, and organizing with contributions by many of the participants of I wanna be with you everywhere. These friendships have been life-giving. The book will broadly share an array of resources from these relations that address the overlapping issues that occur when ableist modern-colonial institutions attempt to include disabled, racialized, and/or Indigenous bodyminds without fundamentally addressing their existing structures, while also exploring practices already in use that create accessible worlds without focusing on institutions.

Taraneh also makes delicious Kuku-sabzi, gives epic studio visits, has Virgo organizing skills, takes most of her Zooms from bed while sick or on very long walks when not, and has a mean right hook when needed.

As a performance artist, Amber Hawk Swanson has explored care, animacy, and desire in the context of queerness and disability. Her complementary scholarly interests focus on investigations of enabling objects and actions; technologized, roboticized, and transpeciated bodies and selves; animacy and animal intimacy; and worldmaking in the online forums and livestream channels that have served as the primary platforms for her work. Hawk Swanson’s practice has embodied these concerns through a material and conceptual engagement with captive marine mammals, silicone Dolls, and networks of care among the community of silicone Doll-loving men known as iDollators. Recently, she has explored sites of belonging and protection that simultaneously function as spaces of violent exclusion, and, along with her collaborators, Synthetiks advocate Davecat and his robotocized silicone spouse Sidore, how sexual racism functions in the Doll community. Hawk Swanson has exhibited nationally and internationally for the span of her nineteen-year career. Scholarly writing on her work, including Amber Jamilla Musser’s chapter on her collaboration with artist Xandra Ibarra in Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissanceand Jillian Hernandez’s discussion of Hawk Swanson’s early Doll work in “Meditations on the Multiple'' can be found here.

Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell, as well as Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; the LA Architecture and Design Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, and Rewire Festivals. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Spike, Mousse, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages.

NEVE (they/(s)he) is a multigender, multiracial, multiply Disabled, multidimensional, multidisciplinary terpsichorean artist of the stage, street, field, stream, and screen. They are a mixed Sudanese Nubian who grew up in Lenni Lenape country and is now living in Duwamish and Coast Salish lands and traveling wherever they have access and an invitation. (S)He is a 2020 Pina Bausch Fellow, a 2022 Arc Artist Fellow, and a 2022 Disability Futures Fellow! NEVE loves life, the delights and pains of embodiment and love, the sparkle-ache and promise of growth, the higher power inside all of us, the earth's lullabies and war cries, drinking color, and kissing/thinking/dreaming/learning/winning with their local and international queer family (especially their cat child Caravaggio). NEVE believes in God(exxes), Collective Access and Liberation, Transformative Justice, Land Back, Right of Return, Reparations, Anarchism (in relationships and governance), the Loch Ness Monster, the Multiverse, the concept that all living beings are people, and You. They are currently a contributing writer for the South Seattle Emerald and collaborate with their confidante in arms, fellow Seattle multidisciplinary artist Saira Barbaric as themselves, and as Mouthwater. Visit them online at nevebebad.com, and on IG at @nevethoh, @mouthwaterdance, and @nevedeguelderrose. This will be their second appearance at I wanna be with you everywhere and she couldn’t be more thrilled.

Akemi Nishida uses research, education, and activism to investigate how ableism and sanism are exercised in relation to other forms of social injustices. She also uses such methods to contribute to disability justice activism. She is the author of Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire (Temple University Press, 2022) in which she examines public healthcare programs as well as grassroots interdependent care collectives and bed-space activism. She teaches at University of Illinois Chicago, while also engages in disability justice locally and nationally. 

Risa Puleo is an independent curator and one of a team of curators organizing the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Her exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System was curated for The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2018 and traveled to Tufts University Art Gallery in 2020. Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly was curated for Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as curator-in-residence, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Blue Star Art Space, and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, The Nerman Art Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. Other exhibitions have been hosted by ArtPace, San Antonio, the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City, Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT, Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, and more. Puleo has Master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College and is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s art history program. She has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, Asia Art Pacific, Hyperallergic.com, Modern Painters, and other art publications. 

About the Organizers

Arika are a political arts organization led by Bryony McIntyre and Barry Esson, based in Scotland, UK, who organize live spaces that seek to explore the inseparable, intertwined nature of aesthetics and social life. They see their role in this unfolding relationship as celebrating and supporting connections between art and social change. When they say art, they mean the ways we sing and dance together, the ways we listen and want to be heard, how we look and hope to be seen, how we think of our bodies and how we move through space, how we feel and want to be felt. Since 2001, Arika has staged over 40 major projects with some of the leading arts institutions in the UK. Internationally, Arika participated in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and has since collaborated regularly on projects in New York with members of the Arbert Santana Freedom and Free School from within the House|Ballroom community, and sex worker-led groups in the city, with partners including: MoMA PS1, Performance Space New York, The New School, Artists Space and Union Theological Seminary amongst others. In 2020, Arika were awarded a Turner Prize Bursary, that year’s pandemic-affected version of the Turner Prize, one of the most prestigious art prizes globally.

Amalle Dublon’s writing has appeared in Art in America, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Artpapers, and TDR: The Drama Review, among other publications. Their artwork, made collaboratively with friends and loved ones, has been exhibited at Artists Space (New York), Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), ARGOS Arts (Brussels), and Dazibao (Montreal). Amalle has a PhD in Literature from Duke University, and teaches at the New School.

Jerron Herman is a dancer and writer who is compelled to create images of freedom. Premiere venues include The Whitney Museum, Abrons Arts Center, Performance Space New York, Creative Time, and The Kennedy Center/REACH. Jerron has served on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA since 2017, most recently as Vice Chair. As a curator, Jerron facilitated the series Access Check 2.0: Mapping Accessibility for the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. In 2021 he developed a speaking series for The Joyce Theater called Discourse: Disabled Artists at the Joyce, bringing together NYC-based disabled artists to showcase their work across three distinct conversations. Jerron has been published in the US and internationally and his play, 3 Bodies, appears in Theater Magazine’s May/June 2022 issue. Jerron has modeled for Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, Chromat, and FFORA campaigns. Awards include a 2020 Grants to Artist Award from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, a 2020 Disability Futures Fellowship, and the Jerome Hill Artist Award in 2021. Jerron was the Artist/Scholar in Residence at Georgetown and holds a degree from The King’s College (NYC)

Carolyn Lazard is an artist and writer based in New York and Philadelphia. Recent solo exhibitions include The Walker Art Center and Kunstverein Braunschweig. Their work was included in the 2022 Venice Biennale and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Lazard holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Park McArthur experiments with personal and social meanings of debility, delay, and dependency under the guidance and instruction of disability. McArthur teaches at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. Most recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bern and Essex Street, both 2020.
 

Alice Sheppard is an internationally recognized dancer, choreographer, and founder of the disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light. She studied ballet and modern dance with Kitty Lunn and started her career performing with Infinity Dance Theater and AXIS Dance Company. In 2016, Alice founded Kinetic Light, a disability arts ensemble featuring herself, Jerron Herman, Laurel Lawson and Michael Maag. Working in the disciplines of art, technology, design, and dance, Kinetic Light creates, performs, and teaches at the nexus of access, queerness, disability, dance, and race. In the company’s work, intersectional disability is an aesthetic, a culture, and an essential element of artistry. In addition to solo performance and commissioned choreography, Sheppard is a consultant and speaker who has lectured on topics related to disability arts, race, design, and dance. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, academic journals, and the anthology Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong.  She is delighted to have been recognized with a Bessie and as United States Artists, Creative Capital grantee, AXIS Choreo Lab, and Disability Futures Fellow.

Constantina Zavitsanos works in medium based time. 

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