Matt Sheridan (MFA, Art Center College of Design 2008) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work invites participants into spaces of conceptual painting. His video installations and paintings address contemporary power relations between physical reality and the click + drag mentality.  Sheridan makes work (residencies in France, Finland, Brazil and USA), exhibits (USA, UK, France, Netherlands, Finland, India, Brazil, and Iran) and teaches (NYU/Tisch School of the Arts -- Manhattan + Singapore campuses -- SVA and Pratt Institute) globally. In 2012 Sheridan completed the La Napoule Art Foundation Spring Residency on the Cote d'Azur in France, received an ARC grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation for a San Diego exhibition, showed in the Downtown Film Festival -Los Angeles and participated in the Sacatar Foundation Fellowship artist residency program in Bahia, Brazil October 2012 courtesy of Los Angeles' Department of Cultural Affairs' Cultural Exchange International program grant.

I Want to Break Free (unveiled 1 day after Obama's election in 2008) was designed to make the American flag a barred cage during a time of what seemed like euphoric release. Inside at night, the window reflected viewers caught in a scrolling cage as gestalts of soldiers in fatigues catapulted themselves against red bars, creating impacts with exploding stars. In daytime this "videogame fresco" raged on in broad daylight in a hubristic attempt to "beat up the sun." In the context of two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the movement of this work reflected the strategies our government used to fight the wars: a) throw stuff up against the wall until something sticks and b) throw money we didn't have at the problem. I Want to Break Free demonstrates battles against the self, where expectations and outcomes become a crushing ideological infinity loop when lessons learned are ignored.

Michael Milligan
Michael Milligan is a performer who has been writing and acting for the theater for almost two decades. Milligan has appeared on the Broadway stage as Little Charles in August: Osage County, De Bries in La Bete, and as a 'raver' and understudy on Jerusalem. No stranger to the one man show, Milligan performed Will Eno's 'Thom Pain' in the original New York run taking over from James Urbaniak and T. Ryder Smith at the DR2. Other New York credits include The Golem with Robert Prosky, the world premiere of 'The Empty Ocean' with Harold Clurman Theater Lab, and 'Nightlands' with New Georges.
Milligan received his training from Juilliard where he won the John Houseman Prize for excellence in classical drama.
He has also appeared at many of the nation's top regional theaters including the Guthrie, Westport Country Playhouse, Charlotte Rep, The McCarter Theater, and Folger Theater in Washington D.C.

Mercy Killers -- Joe loves apple pie, Rush Limbaugh, the fourth of July and his wife Jane. He is blue-collar, corn-fed, made in the USA and proud, but when his uninsured wife is diagnosed with cancer his patriotic feelings and passion for the ethos of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are turned upside down. In Mercy Killers, a new one-man play, Joe struggles with the uniquely American experience of losing your health in the land of plenty.

Movement of the People Dance Company

Movement of the People Dance Company, founded in 2005 by Joya T. Powell, is dedicated to unearthing historic and present sociocultural issues and addressing them through the healing elements of dance. The company is comprised of dancers from diverse multicultural backgrounds and international experiences. In the past six years MOPDC has performed in various celebrated dance festivals and venues including: Amnesty International's Human Rights Art Festival (Maryland), City Parks Dance, Huntington Arts Festival (Long Island), Dance New Amsterdam, The TANK, Evoke's Celebrate Dance Festival (San Diego), Riverside Theatre, The Outlet Dance Project (New Jersey), White Wave's COOL NY Dance Festival, WAXworks, and BAAD!. MOPDC partners with Free Arts NYC, providing workshops for under served inner city youth.

Taste the Rainbow -- Inspired by the Trayvon Martin case, this piece addresses racial stereotypes and preconceived prejudices. MOPDC's multicultural cast weaves in and out of emotions stemming from the case, including movement representations of the viral reactions people have included on the internet, as well as look to find humanity in our humanity.

santiago venegas
Santiago Venegas is a performer, textile designer, and singer-songwriter from Bogota, Colombia. Featured New York performances include Re:Galli Blonde by Justin Vivian Bond at The Kitchen and Puppy Love: A Stripper's Tail by Erin Markey at P.S. 122. He has performed his original monologues and songs at various venues, including Pussy Faggot at Public Assembly; his debut cabaret show, Uplifting Songs was featured in the HOT Festival at Dixon Place in 2012. Venegas was a member of the 2012 cohort of the EMERGENYC program of the Hemispheric Institute of Politics and Performance at NYU.

Sara Lyons
Sara Lyons makes theatre/does feminism. Primarily a director, credits include work with EstroGenius Festival (Life on Mars), Culture Project (Mind the Gap), Variations Theatre Group (Without A Safety Net), Primary Stages, Project Girl Performance Collective, Red Fern Theatre Company, The Internationalists, Planet Connections (Tulpa, or Anne&Me), and others. As a performer, credits include Organs of State's Americana Passover and original work at LaMaMa, P.S. 122, The Mobius Space (Boston), and more. Her work as a theatre educator has taken her to Mexico, South Africa, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. She is a member of the 2012 EMERGENYC cohort of performance-makers at NYU's Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. Many thanks to Jesse and BAX. www.sara-lyons.com

MIND THE GAP is a devised theatre piece that exposes the holes in the stories we hear in mainstream media about women's political, social, and bodily needs. The piece lifts text directly from major news media outlets, all quotations by men about women's health issues, and the performers (both women) deconstruct, twist, and blur the understanding of these statements by reordering and reappropriating them, and by constantly changing their gendered appearance. What does it mean to hear a woman versus a man deride Planned Parenthood, or a young black person versus a young white person? How does it change the meaning and impact of a statement, and whose personal and bodily experiences at the heart of issues like birth control and abortion regulation are being silenced? Who is speaking about whom? How can women recover their bodies and their autonomy from these rhetorical assaults?

screaMachine
Gearóid Dolan, after graduating from art school in Dublin, Ireland, moved to New York in 1987 where he continues to work on an ever-evolving project titled "screaMachine". ScreaMachine is realized in the form of installations, performances, audio and video works, films, digital media art and more. The work is by nature experimental; it pushes the boundaries of new media, experiential and time based art. Under the title of screaMachine, Dolan has shown internationally as well as extensively in the United States, with a particular interest in New York, including: Ireland, England, Austria, Yugoslavia, Canada, Brazil, India, Estonia and the USA. He has shown/performed at Franklin Furnace, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, Art in General, The Kitchen, Moving Image Gallery, ArtHouse, ISCP, Storefront for Art & Architecture and many festivals. He has received awards from NYSCA, Experimental TV Center, Media the Foundation, C.A.S.E., NYFA, has lectured and been a visiting artist in many schools and has been Director of the Computer Studio at The Cooper Union of the Advancement of Science and Art since 2000, teaching many forms of digital media art production. He continues to work on back to back grant projects funded by the New York State Council on the Arts Film/Video and New Technologies Award, since 2002, developing new and innovative technology enhanced artworks that interact with the New York City public directly in the form of public interventions and performances. Known for his distinct B/W animations, projected media and political slant, Dolan mixes the world of art and politics on the city streets, remaining mostly outside of the pristine gallery system, inhabiting the underworld of art, the dark corners of the city. Most recently he has been working on a project titled "the 99%", animating footage he shot during many Occupy Wall Street protests and producing an ongoing series of shorts.

The 99% -- Using hand held footage and captured audio, from inside the Occupy Wall Street protest movement on many interventions on the streets of Manhattan, New York, screaMachine deconstructs the documentation of entire protest days and compresses them into time shifted semi-animated clips that place the viewer in the center of the action. Attention is focused on the protest signage, the chanting protesters, police sirens and commands, and the interaction between those forces against the background of the city landscape. The pixelated, jerky, harsh black-and-white clips reflect the low tech methodology and on-the-fly actions of the protesters. Hightened by the intense and passionate chanting of the protesters, intruded upon by police sirens and police vehicle beeping, The 99% creates a sense of what it is like to be part of a movement exploding out of the underbelly of the beast.
The 99% is an ongoing series: there are 8 parts to date

Shanté Paradigm
Shanté Paradigm Smalls is a third-generation performer who uses song, rap, spoken word, and theatre in her artistic work. Currently in exile from Brooklyn in North Carolina, she works as a visiting assistant professor in the English department at Davidson College.
Smalls is a graduate of NYU's Performance Studies department, where she received a PhD. She is currently working on a scholarly book about hip hop, gender, sexuality, and race; an album, tentatively titled, Parapraxes; and a book of experimental prose and poetry.
In 2013, Smalls will relocate to Albuquerque to teach at University of New Mexico in the American Studies department.

Hoping through Fear: Exchanges in Unreality -- Through storytelling, archival work, image, song, rap, and movement, this work-in-progress tracks the fractures and fissures of collegiality, friendship, and politics within the US left (liberals, libertarians, leftists, communists, progressives, socialists, radicals, and others). Particularly focused on criticism of the Obama Administration's civil liberty infringements and war-making, Hoping through Fear: Exchanges in Unreality explores the very problem of hope of a political, emotional, and organizing concept and hope's inherent relation to it's twin, fear.