Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.
Fierce! is an international performance festival that has taken place annually in and around Birmingham, England since 1997.
Ron Athey is an American performance artist associated with body art and with extreme performance art. He has performed in the U.S. and internationally. Athey's work explores challenging subjects like the relationships between desire, sexuality and traumatic experience. Many of his works include aspects of S&M in order to confront preconceived ideas about the body in relation to masculinity and religious iconography.
Tim Etchells is an English artist and writer based in Sheffield and London. Etchells is the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, an experimental performance company founded in 1984. He has published several works of fiction, written about contemporary performance and exhibited his visual art projects in various locations. Etchells' work spans performance, video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. He is currently Professor of Performance and Writing at Lancaster University.
Anne Bean is a London-based artist who works in installation, large-scale sculpture, sound art, and performance art. She was born in Livingstone in Northern Rhodesia. She lives in Limehouse in the East End of London.
Kira O'Reilly is a performance artist based in the UK. She graduated from Cardiff School of Art in 1998, and has participated in a number of performance art festivals throughout the UK and Europe, including at the Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University 1998, the National Review of Live Art, in Glasgow, at Arnolfini in Bristol, at Home in London and at several European festivals including Break 21 Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2002 and ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival 2003, Kuopio, Finland. She performed in China at the Dadao performance art festival, Beijing, organised by Shu Yang 2006.
Frank James Moore was an American performance artist, shaman, poet, essayist, painter, musician and Internet/television personality who experimented in art, performance, ritual, and shamanistic teaching since the late 1960s.
Robin Deacon is an artist, writer and filmmaker. His interdisciplinary practice has spanned a variety of disciplines and themes, including explorations of performer presence and absence, the role of the artist as biographer, the possibility for journalistic approaches to arts practice, and the mapping and ethics of performance re-enactment. He graduated from Cardiff School of Art in 1996, and went on to present his performances and videos at conferences and festivals in the UK and internationally in Europe, USA and Asia. His work has been commissioned and programmed by venues such as The ICA, London (1996), The Young Vic, London (2000), CCCB, Barcelona (2006), Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna (2007) and the Centre d'art Scenique Contemporain Lausanne, Switzerland (2009), Tate Britain, London (2014) and the Barbican Centre, London (2015). He has also been artist in residence at MacDowell, New Hampshire, USA (2017) Sophiensaele, Berlin (2005), Camden Arts Centre London (2006) and Robert Wilson's Watermill Center, New York, USA (2009). He has received a variety of awards and fellowships from organizations such as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Delfina Foundation, British Arts Council, Live Art Development Agency and Franklin Furnace Inc. Between 2003 and 2012, he was an Associate Artist of contemporary artists producing organization Artsadmin. From 2004, he was Course Director of the Drama and Performance Studies program at London South Bank University before relocating to the USA in 2011. After ten years spent as Professor and Chair of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Robin returned to the UK in 2021 to take up the role of Artistic Director and CEO of the Spill Festival of Performance.
SPILL Festival of Performance is an artist-led biennale of experimental theatre and live art in the UK which began in 2007 and takes place in a variety of venues in London and Ipswich, England. The festival is produced by Pacitti Company and the Artistic Director is Robert Pacitti.
Lee Adams is a London based performance artist, curator and experimental film maker. Much of his work has been influenced by the ideas of French dissident surrealist and philosopher Georges Bataille.
Forced Entertainment is an experimental theatre company based in Sheffield, England, founded by Tim Etchells in 1984.
Lois Keidan is a British-born cultural activist and writer. She co-founded the Live Art Development Agency with Catherine Ugwu in 1999 and was the Director of the Agency until 2021. She was the former director of live arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) from 1992 to 1997. Prior to working at the ICA, she was responsible for national policy and provision for Performance Art and interdisciplinary practices at the Arts Council of Great Britain.
The Long Table is an "experimental open public forum that is a hybrid performance-installation-roundtable-discussion-dinner-party designed to facilitate dialogue through the gathering together of people with common interests" developed by the artist and academic Lois Weaver. The Long Table is part of Weaver's Public Address Systems project, under the strand "Strategies for Engaging the Public Through the Everyday".
George Chakravarthi is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography, video, painting and performance. His work addresses the politics of identity including race, sexuality and gender, and also religious iconography among other subjects. He was born in India and moved to London, England in 1980.
Sheree Rose is an American photographer and performance artist. She is best known for her collaborative work with performance artist Bob Flanagan, and her photography documenting a wide range of Los Angeles subcultures, especially in relation to BDSM and body modification.
Amy Sharrocks is a UK based live artist, sculptor, filmmaker and curator from London, England. Sharrocks' work focuses on collaboration and exchange, inviting people on journeys that they also help to create. She is known for large scale, live artworks in public places that use everyday activities, such as swimming or walking, in spectacular ways. Many of her artworks investigate the nature of cities, explore the importance of fluidity as a way of thinking, and question our constructs of city life. Her work has been supported by Arts Council England, The Live Art Development Agency and Artsadmin. Major works include SWIM (2007), a 50-person swim across London, and the ongoing Museum of Water (2013-Ongoing), a collection of over one thousand bottles of water from around the world.
Katherine Araniello was a London-based live art, performance and video artist, who responded to the negative representation of disability. She used a range of mediums including film, large scale production and live art performances. Araniello was a member of The Disabled Avant-Garde (DAG) with deaf artist Aaron Williamson.
Julia Bardsley is an artist working with performance, video, photography, sculptural objects and the configuration of the audience. Her work challenges definitions of theatre and has been described as 'a major force in British experimental theatre and live art'.
Hayley Newman is a London-based artist and Reader in Fine Art, who was born in Guildford, Surrey, in 1969. She is known for her work in performance art which has been exhibited since the early 1990s at venues including Tate Modern, the Ikon Gallery, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. She teaches at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. In 2004–2005 she was the Helen Chadwick Fellow at the British School in Rome.
Catherine Oliaku Ugwu is a British executive producer, artistic director, and consultant working in large-scale ceremonies and events, including for the Summer and Winter Olympics, the Summer Paralympics, the Asian, European, Islamic Solidarity, and Commonwealth Games, and the Millennium Dome.
