FROM THE GROUND UP Marks 10th Anniversary With Expanded Portland Festival
The feminist arts incubator will present its largest festival yet at CoHo Productions, featuring the new Liminal Series
From the Ground Up, the Portland-based generative feminist arts incubator founded by Katherine Murphy Lewis, marks its tenth anniversary this July with 10 Years of Belonging and Becoming, a festival of new work running July 9–19 at CoHo Productions. The festival brings together twelve artists across performance, dance, theater, clowning, and photography in a kaleidoscopic celebration of a decade spent making space for stories the cultural mainstream tends to leave out.
Over ten years, From the Ground Up has worked with 87 artists in residence, trained more than 5,000 artists through workshops and intensives, produced over 100 new works, and toured nationally. What began as a single cohort in 2017 — founded on the premise that women and femme artists deserve a process built around their lives — has grown into one of the region's most distinctive incubators of original performance.
"There is something collective that happens in our rooms — a coming together, a realizing of self, a conjuring of voice, a growing confidence that is born of learning to trust yourself, knowing that your story matters and only you can tell it. This, I have seen time and time again, is transformational." — Katherine Murphy Lewis, Founder & Artistic Director
Year ten marks a deliberate evolution. 10 Years of Belonging and Becoming expands across eight days at a single home — CoHo Productions — and brings together three distinct artistic containers under one festival umbrella for the first time: a Featured Artist with a finished new work; the annual Artist Residency cohort offering brand new works clocking in at 20-30 minutes, and in its inaugural season, the Liminal Series, featuring four, 45 minute works in the second year of development. Also new this year, a debut visual art installation in the lobby rounds out a festival that has grown bigger, more inclusive, and more multidisciplinary with each iteration. Lewis shares:
Featured Artist: Emily June Newton, BIG BABY
Year ten introduces a new festival tradition: a Featured Artist bringing a fully-realized work into conversation with the new pieces being born inside the building. In this first iteration, Australian-born, Portland-based comedic performer Emily June Newton stars in BIG BABY, a solo clown performance about caregiving, growing up, and the impossible questions adulthood asks. Newton arrives onstage in a wicker basket — bibbed, toothy, and dressed for the occasion — and must figure out how to communicate with the world entirely without words. Expect audience inclusion, physical comedy, and a gentle, irresistible invitation into the role of caregiver. Deemed a "standout clown" by the Portland Mercury, Newton holds an MFA in Ensemble-Based Physical Theater from Dell'Arte International and is co-artistic director of the CoHo Clown Cohort. She also serves as one of From the Ground Up's associate artists this season, working alongside the residency cohort throughout their development process.
The 2026 Artist Residency: Six New 20-30-minute Works
This year's residency cohort presents six new works exploring grief, identity, religious trauma, dualities, motherhood, and the question of who we become when no one is looking:
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Rachel Slater — Before the After A dance-text-media work wrestling with what's been left behind. Slater is an interdisciplinary artist whose dance films have screened in 25 countries.
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Joe McLaughlin — In-Between An eighteen-year Butoh practitioner's exploration of dualities — light and dark, creation and destruction — meeting spoken word.
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Kate Sanderson Holly — Echoes A theatrical investigation of a 1974 family tragedy, drawn from a manuscript hidden in a closet for forty-five years before reaching the artist's hands.
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Monique Barbee — If I Loved You A return to the stage on her own terms, ten years after walking away from the entertainment industry. Barbee holds an MFA from Yale and a BFA from Southern Oregon University.
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Rob Aley — Grief and All the Things A deconstruction of the five stages of grief with love, laughter, and a generous helping of obscenities. Rated G for relatability and R for empathetic profanity.
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Maia McCarthy — Bounce A memoir told through the language of the bounce — wet rubber balls on muddy grass, crisp tennis balls on a swept court, an apple on vinyl.
The Liminal Series: Four 45-minute Works
The Liminal Series is From the Ground Up's development track for full-length pieces — work that began in residency and is ready to expand, or work commissioned specifically for the series. Year ten marks the first time the Liminal Series joins the New Works Festival, allowing audiences to experience pieces at every stage of artistic development inside a single arc.
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S Franco Recavarren — Hoy es la Envidia de los Muertos / Now is the Envy of the Dead A bilingual excavation of grief, intergenerational trauma, and Peruvian myth, written in the aftermath of the artist's mother's death. Franco Recavarren is a Sephardic Peruvian-American performance artist currently based in Lima.
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Aberdeen Stuart — Ritual A reckoning with childhood inside a high-demand cult-like group, weaving the artist's experience with stories from two siblings and two grandmothers. Stuart is a 2024 BodyVox summer intensive alum.
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Kathleen Cahill — Chemo Brain A one-act comedy at 4 a.m. between a cancer patient and her dog, from the Pulitzer-nominated playwright. Chemo Brain emerged from Cahill's second bout with the disease and her search for writing about cancer that felt true to the experience.
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Laura Cannon — First Times A parfait of humor, movement, and Slacker-era memories that asks the heavy questions and answers none of them. Cannon is a 2023 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellow.
Lobby Installation: Kamala Woods, STRANGER DANGER
The festival's first visual art installation, STRANGER DANGER, occupies the CoHo lobby throughout the run. The photo work documents strangers on the street, collapsing the boundary between self and other in an extended meditation on identity as imitation, performance, and confession. Woods is a multidisciplinary artist working in video, photography, and documentary, and a Lewis & Clark College graduate.
The installation marks From the Ground Up's first formal step into multidisciplinary programming that includes the visual arts.
Closing Celebration: Sunday, July 19
Following the 4 p.m. matinee with the Featured Artist on Sunday, July 19, audiences are invited to an end-of-festival celebration in the CoHo space at 5:30 p.m., featuring swag giveaways, a champagne toast, and cake… frosting and bubbles to celebrate ten years of belonging and becoming!
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