Performance

Brennan Gerard

Film Director

Brennan Gerard was born in Piqua, Ohio, in 1978. Gerard received a BA in women’s and gender studies from Yale University, New Haven, in 2001. Gerard completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP) in 2010 and received a MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Art in 2013.

Brennan Gerard & Ryan Kelly began collaborating in 2003 and employ multiple disciplines—performance, video, and installation—to examine questions of collective and individual memory, gender and sexuality, queer...

Tavia Nyong’o

Professor of African American Studies at Yale University

Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater Studies at Yale University. He works in contemporary aesthetic and critical theory with a particular attention to the visual, musical, and performative dimensions of blackness, as well as to the affective and technocultural dimensions of modern regimes of race. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minnesota, 2009), won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theatre and performance studies. He is...

Alexandro Segade

Interdisciplinary Artist & Assistant Professor of Art at UCSD

Xandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist whose queer world-building projects propose speculative group identities. Often working in collectives, Segade makes spaces for critical play, using collaboration to complicate utopian impulses with radical ambivalence. Segade’s practice traces connections across performance, writing and drawing, making video, installation, theater, sculpture, music, costumes and comics that defy genre distinctions, subverting contextual frameworks, disrupting the political imagination.

Segade’s multimedia science fiction performance...

Shannon Jackson

Former ARC Director, Professor of the Arts & Humanities, Department Chair of History of Art, and former Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities, Department Chair of History of Art, and former Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design. Jackson’s research focuses on two overlapping domains: 1) collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and 2) the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent books are Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and the Social (Northwestern University Press, 2022), and The Human Condition: Media Art from the Kramlich Collection (Thames...

made@berkeley | Change and Stillness: Bodies and Gestures within Sensor Technology

April 22, 2016
made@berkeley
Change and Stillness: Bodies and Gestures within Sensor Technology Friday, April 22, 2016
2 Sessions: 12:30pm-2:00pm or 2:30pm-4:00pm
Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley

A collaboration with Theater, Dance and Performance Studies; Cal Performances; Berkeley Center for New Media; Center for New Music and Audio Technologies; Music; Art Practice; and the ARC | Arts + Design Initiative, Change and Stillness is part open lab, part talk, and part live demonstration. This event will showcase the multi-disciplinary art making processes that...

Salon: Ed Campion

November 7, 2011
We had the opportunity to hold another ARC Salon to celebrate the work of UCB faculty composer, Ed Campion, when Cal Performances featured the performance of his work by the stunning Paris-based group Ensemble Zellig. Ed is a leader in the fields of electronic and digital music composition, crafting what are not so much “scores” but alternate “systems” for composing, calibrating, integrating, and synthesizing musical and sonic forms. Cal Performances director, Matías Tarnalpolsky, joined us for a pre-show talk and a post-show reception to help us think about the beauty of Campion’s work...

Bay Area Arts: The Brother/Sister Plays

October 29, 2010
This fall, three Bay Area theatres joined forces—and resources—to co-produce the incredible Brother/Sister trilogy of plays written by the incredibly gifted Tarell Alvin McCraney. McCraney’s reputation as one of the “hottest” “emerging” American playwrights only begins to do justice to his skill and depth of vision, and the decision on the part of A.C.T., Marin Theatre, and the Magic to bring the trilogy to the Bay Area allowed audiences here to see why. McCraney grew up in the housing projects of Liberty City in Miami-Dade County and describes his work as an attempt to bring forward the...

Bay Area Arts: PAI and Pocha Nostra

March 30, 2013
Last week offered the chance to experience two important time-based art initiatives in one evening. The Performance Art Institute, initially conceived with Marina Abramovic and now led entirely by her co-founder Stephen Tourrell, has an absolutely incredible space (I should say spaces) on Sutter Street. As a partner in the already successful Toomey Tourrell gallery, Stephen has turned his attention to performance and has secured a multi-storied space for...

Arts Elsewhere: Berkeley-Taipei Forum

January 29, 2013
Our colleague Wen-hsin Yeh helped to engineer an incredible memorandum of agreement between UC-Berkeley and Taiwan’s educational ministry. To celebrate, the university organized the Berkeley-Taipei Forum in which two distinguished alums and Taiwanese citizens—Stan Lai and Kris Yao—were invited to speak about their work in theatre and architecture respectively. Along the way, they chronicled the impact of what they referred to as “the Berkeley Spirit” on their art practice. It was a privilege to be a part of the gala, to be in the presence of Stan Lai whose work I have admired for so...

Curating People: Lisa Wymore

April 28, 2011
Lisa Wymore
Confessions of an experimental artist who has also become an academic and a dance/performance educator and mentor | Like many who are part of this symposium, I wear multiple hats in one day. I am both an administrator of a dance program within a university and an artist who manages, runs, and creates for my own dance company. My choice to make artistic work within an academic institution has provided me with distinct types of support and opportunity. I can make work with students and improve upon my own artistic process. I can educate about dance and deepen my understanding...