Yanira Castro

Yanira Castro Court/Garden Performance work 2015 Federal Hall, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's River To River Festival photo by Maria Baranova photo

Yanira Castro's interdisciplinary work takes the form of live performances and installations that incorporate text, movement and video. The work focuses on the significance of gathering and watching--the historical, political and social resonances of the act of being present together in performance. In her work, Castro negotiates complexities of sources, authorship and practice with a team of collaborators (including the audience) to build the work as a communal act. Castro is a Puerto-Rican artist based in Brooklyn. In 2009, she formed the interdisciplinary collaborative group, a canary torsi, an anagram of her name. Her work has been presented and commissioned extensively in New York by organizations including The Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Arts Center, Invisible Dog Art Center, ISSUE Project Room, Danspace Project, and Dance Theater Workshop. She is a 2016 NY Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellow, 2017 Gibney Dance Center DiP Artist, and a participant of LMCC’s Extended Life program (2017-2015). She has been a Returning Choreographic Fellow at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Vermont Performance Lab Artist, BRIClab Artist, Dance New Amsterdam Artist-in-Residence, Artist Ne(s)t AIR (Romania), Sugar Salon Fellow, and Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow. Her work has been recognized with awards including NEFA’s National Dance Project, The Jerome Foundation, MAP Fund, New Music USA, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and USArtists International. In 2009, she won a Bessie Award for “Dark Horse/Black Forest” at The Gershwin Hotel presented by PS122. The archive for her participatory performance project, "The People to Come" (thepeopletocome.org), was featured in The New Museum’s exhibit “Performance Archiving Performance” in 2013. In 2017, her trilogy of works CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR were presented simultaneously over three weeks in NYC by three commissioning organizations, The Chocolate Factory, Abrons Arts Center and The Invisible Dog Art Center. Castro received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature from Amherst College and in 2017 received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater.

acanarytorsi.org

Xandra Ibarra

Ibarra's interactive treadmill and video installation invites the viewer to cross the border in tandem with her via video. The viewer must walk on the treadmill in order for the video to play. The video captures Xandra Ibarra running on the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo and various locations in the Chihuahuan desert between the United States and Mexico on the border of El Paso/Juarez

Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based performance artist from the El Paso/Juarez border who performs and sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom. Ibarra uses hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization to test the boundaries between her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness, and Mexicanidad. Her practice integrates performance, sex acts, and burlesque with video, photography, and objects. Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Broad Museum (LA, USA), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe’s Pub (NYC), PPOW Gallery (NYC), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF) to name a few. Recent residencies include Marble House Project, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, National Performance Network, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has been awarded the Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, ReGen Artist Fund, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. Currently, Ibarra is co-curator of EN CUATRO PATAS, a feminist Latinx performance art series that will take place throughout 2018 at The Broad Museum. Ibarra’s work has also been featured in several recent and forthcoming books. Juana Maria Rodriguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings features her performance “I am your Puppet” (2007) while Amber Jamilla Musser’s Brown Jouissance: Feminine Imaginings includes a chapter about Ibarra’s collaboration with performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson, “Untitled Fucking” (2013). Leticia Alvarado’s Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production features Ibarra’s “Skins” (2015) performance work on the cover. As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within immigrant, anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist of color organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. She currently lectures within the Critical Studies program at California College of the Arts.

www.xandraibarra.com