Mark Jeffrey (B. 1973 Doveridge, UK) is a Chicago based Performance / Installation Artist, Curator and teacher. Mark received his BA (Hons) in Visual Performance from Dartington College of Arts in UK. He was awarded a Junior Fellowship in Live Art between the University of the West of England and Arnolfini Live.

He has been making collaborative and non-collaborative performance / installation / internet / screen works and participation based exhibits in numerous spaces and contexts since 1993 including Hyde Park Art Center Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Ontological Theatre NYC, Performance Studies #15 Zagreb, Croatia, Interrupt Digital Arts Festival (Brown University), Kunsthalle Museum (Norway), Site Unseen (Chicago Cultural Centre), Nottdance (Nottingham), Taxi Gallery (Cambridge, UK), National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), ICA (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), Firstsite (Colchester), Green Room (Manchester), and Chapter (Cardiff).

He was a member of Goat Island Performance Group from 1996 – 2009. He collaborated and performed in 5 of Goat Island’s works, touring and teaching extensively across North America and Europe. Teaching included a 10 yearlong annual summer performance institute at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Other educational cities including Bristol, Glasgow, Nottingham, Aberystwyth, Zagreb, Prague and Berlin. Goat Island completed touring its last performance work, The Lastmaker, in February 2009. Performances included PS122 (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Eurokaz Festival (Zagreb), The House of World Cultures (Berlin), New Moves (Glasgow) and Arnolfini (Bristol). The company presented their penultimate work ‘When Will the September Roses Bloom Last Night Was Only a Comedy’ at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

In 2009, Mark began a new collaborative teaching summer Performance Institute with Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson titled Abandoned Practices – something out of the ordinary: www.abandonedpractices.org.

After 13 years of working at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where she was Associate Curator, Tricia Van Eck recently left to focus on 6018 NORTH. Her last project at the MCA was the Chicago presentation of Mark Bradford’s Retrospective and his community residency exhibition. At the MCA she presented over 70 exhibitions much of which were audience engaged, interactive, or extended the MCA’s reach into the community such as the recent Interactions: A Four month series of artist and audience activations as a companion to Without You I Am Nothing: Art and Its Audience, Jan Tichy’s Project Cabrini Green, Theaster Gates: Temple Exercises, Tino Sehgal’s Kiss, Here/Not There, and Hide and Seek: An Out of Gallery Experience. She curated the MCA Chicago presentations of various traveling exhibitions such as Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe; Italics: Tradition and Revolution, Italian Art from 1968-2008; and Andy Warhol: Supernova. She coordinated numerous exhibitions including the Jeff Koons retrospective and curated numerous exhibitions of Chicago artists including Mapping the Self and Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing Meditations on Black Aesthetics as well as many artists’ book shows and UBS 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work exhibitions, which showcased the work of emerging Chicago artists. About her new direction Tricia Van Eck says, “I am indebted to the remarkable artists with whom I have collaborated at the Museum of Contemporary Art these past thirteen years and I am very excited to bring this experience to a new and experimental cultural space that aims to increase opportunities, visibility, and audiences for Chicago artists.”

Ania Greiner s an interdisciplinary performance artist and arts administrator. She is part of the performance group 3 Card Molly, and is co-curator of Food & Performance, a performance series involving edibles.
Jessica Hannah is an interdisciplinary performance artist, natural perfumer and teacher. She is co-curator of Food & Performance, an on-going performance showcase involving edibles.

Jill McDermid-Hokanson is a performing artist and curator. She has curated performance events Fountain Art Fair, LUMEN Video & Performance Festival, 10th Anniversary Open International Performance Art Festival, Beijing, China, and many others. She is also the Founder-Director of The Alice Chilton Gallery for the Preservation of Performance Art and Founder-Co-director of the Grace Exhibition Space for Performance Art, in Brooklyn, NYC.

Grace Exhibition Space seeks to present the best in today’s Performance Art. We invite artists who are established in the Performance Art field, while encouraging artists who are new to Performance Art. Jill McDermid began organizing Performance Art Events in New York City in 2001, after attending the first meeting of IAPAO with Performance Art luminaries Boris Nieslony, Roi Vaara, Adina Bar-On and Sylvie Ferre. Ms. McDermid struggled to find the right place for Performance Art in NYC, until she opened the Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, a home for the best and the newest in Performance Art today, specifically for a New York City audience. Since then, she has attempted to create a bridge between cities, to bring the artists to Chicago, Boston, Albany and Detroit. She hopes to continue to bring great programming of international and local Performance Artists, to other cities, while expanding the curatorial visions of Grace Exhibition Space for Performance Art this autumn with new curators such as Hector Canonge of the Iternerant Festival in NYC, the curators of ]Performance Space[ in London in September, and the unique vision of Non Grata Group from Estonia in October and November.

Claire Geall Sutton is Executive Director of MuddyFeet Productions. Her work in performance art began 21 years ago in Charleston, SC when, as part of the internationally renowned Spoleto Festival, she helped present “Places with a Past: New site-specific Art in Charleston.” During here 18 year career as Director of Theater for the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Ms. Sutton produced over 100 performance art pieces presented annually during SITE UNSEEN and the IN>TIME Series. Artist highlights include Fred Wilson, Ernasto Pujol, Lorna Simpson and Julie Laffin.

Nora Taylor is a Chicago-based art historian of modern and contemporary Vietnamese art and professor of Southeast Asian Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is author of Painters in Hanoi (Hawaii 2004 and NUS 2009) as well as numerous articles on Vietnamese art.

Erica Mott is a performer, director, and deviser whose work is particularly inspired by observation of her immediate environment. Through mask, clown, butoh-inspired movement and site-specific performance, she attempts to capture and heighten the magic, mystery and tragedy in everyday activities and interactions. She endeavors to find universality in these actions and her performance that may be communicated across social, economic, and cultural boundaries.

Erica’s most recent site-specific performances were featured at North Carolina’s Penland School of Craft, Chicago’s PopUp Art Loop, SPOKE Chicago, Toronto’s Beaver Hall, Minneapolis Fringe Festival, Random House Classics, the City of Chicago’s Lurie Gardens Celebration in Millennium Park, and the Chicago Cultural Center. Erica has performed locally with Synapse Arts Collective, Blair Thomas and Company, Redmoon Theater, Storybox, and Local Infinities Visual Theater, as well as Washington Improv Theater in Washington DC. She received a Patrick Stewart Human Rights Fellowship and a English Speaking Union Scholar Award to serve as the artistic director of the MUKA Project Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa. Erica has taught workshops for Lookingglass Theater, Northeastern Illinois University’s Teacher’s Center, Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) and The Second City Training Center. Additionally, she has designed and facilitated lectures and residencies for a variety of academic institutions, corporations and community organizations including but not limited to, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Amnesty International, The Memphis Theological Seminary, The College of Wooster, Chicagoland Librarians Association, University of Witwatersrand (RSA) and University of Kwazulu-Natal (RSA). She has a Masters in Psychophysical Theatre Practice with an emphasis on intercultural performance from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. Erica is a recipient of the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) and the Neighborhood Arts Program (NAP). She was recently awarded a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Fellowship.