Fusebox Festival (now known as Fusebox Live) is a biennial festival of contemporary performance works (dance and theater) held in Austin, Texas, each spring. [1] Founded in the mid-2000s, [2] Fusebox is one of multiple interdisciplinary festivals that sprouted in the United States in the 2000s and was modeled on the Portland Time-Based Art Festival. [3] In turn, Fusebox inspired other festivals, including the CounterCurrent Festival in Houston [4] and Live Arts Exchange in Los Angeles. [5] The festival is known for supporting local artists. It is part of an Austin city planning initiative to revitalize a 24-acre former airplane fueling facility into a creative district. [6] Fusebox has grown from an original audience of 500 attendees in 2004 to 250,000 in its seventh festival, in 2011. [3] In the mid-2010s, Fusebox made its shows free to attract a wider audience. [7]
An Art in America review described the five-day 2019 show as provocative and challenging. [8]
Alvin Ailey Jr. was an American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). He created AAADT and its affiliated Alvin Ailey American Dance Center as havens for nurturing Black artists and expressing the universality of the African-American experience through dance.
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects.
Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in many major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The J. Paul Getty Museum.
The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the largest university art museums in the U.S. with 189,340 square feet devoted to temporary exhibitions, permanent collection galleries, storage, administrative offices, classrooms, a print study room, an auditorium, shop, and cafe. The Blanton's permanent collection consists of more than 21,000 works, with significant holdings of modern and contemporary art, Latin American art, Old Master paintings, and prints and drawings from Europe, the United States, and Latin America.
The Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) is an annual interdisciplinary art and performance festival presented each September in Portland, Oregon by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA).
Spiegelworld is an American comedic theater company and contemporary circus known for its current shows: Absinthe, DiscoShow, and Atomic Saloon Show, all in Las Vegas, and Atlantic City's The Hook. The theater company takes its name from the traveling Belgian performance tents known as spiegeltents in which it has staged a number of productions.
Sarah Seager is a conceptual artist associated with the California Conceptualism movement of the late 1980s through mid-1990s based out of Los Angeles, California. She is known for making "clean works, many of them white, in which objects seem not so much removed from function as between functions" as described by Michael Brenson of The New York Times. She is also known for her published art work by the title "Excuse my Dust" that was done in conjunction with the curators of the Smithsonian Institution.
Colin Connor is a Canadian–British dancer, choreographer, and educator, based in the United States. With over forty commissions that span the worlds of contemporary dance, ballet and flamenco. Works draws from a large range of influences – musical, literary, social, and scientific – all used to bring attention back to the communicative power of the human body. He frequently, collaborates with artists of other disciplines, including composers, artists, and designers. As a choreographer, teacher and dancer, Connor is currently influencing the next generation of contemporary dancers and dance makers. Dancers who have trained with Connor have gone on to Mark Morris Dance Group, Scapino Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance, The Limon Dance Company and others.
Juliana Huxtable is an American artist, writer, performer, DJ, and co-founder of the New York–based nightlife project Shock Value. Huxtable has exhibited and performed at a number of venues including Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Project Native Informant, Artists Space, the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Institute of Contemporary Arts. Huxtable's multidisciplinary art practice explores a number of projects, such as the internet, the body, history, and text, often through a process she calls "conditioning." Huxtable is a published author of two books and a member of the New York City–based collective House of Ladosha. She is on the roster of the talent agency Discwoman, a New York based collective and talent agency that books DJs for parties and events around the world. She previously lived and worked in New York City, and has been based in Berlin since 2020.
Michelle Ellsworth is an American dancer and performance artist, as well as a professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at University of Colorado Boulder. Her "smart, singular" work spans live performance, video, performable websites, and drawing, employing absurdist humor, carpentry, technology, monologue, and dance. Ellsworth has received, among other awards, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Impact Award, a Creative Capital Grant and a United States Artists Knight Fellowship. ArtForum has described her work as "some of the most engrossing explorations of how the body and technology coexist and collide."
Yuval Sharon is an American opera and theater director from Naperville, Illinois, based in Los Angeles. He is the founder and co-artistic director of The Industry Opera. Since 2020, he has served as the Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director of Detroit Opera.
Blakeley White-McGuire born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is a dancer, choreographer, répétiteur, and educator. She is a Principal Guest Artist and former Principal Dancer of Martha Graham Dance Company. Described by Gia Kourlas of the New York Times as having a "powerful technique and dramatic instinct with an appealing modern spunk", White-McGuire has received widespread critical acclaim as a Graham dancer.
The American pavilion is a national pavilion of the Venice Biennale. It houses the United States' official representation during the Biennale.
Elizabeth Colomba is a French painter of Martinique heritage known for her paintings of black people in historic settings. Her work has been shown at the Gracie Mansion, the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, the Musée d'Orsay, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Becca Blackwell is an American trans actor, performer, and playwright based in New York City. Blackwell's pronoun is the singular they. Their play "They, Themself and Schmerm," has been presented by a number of venues including The Public Theater's 2018 Under the Radar Festival, Abrons Arts Center and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's TBA Festival. Musician Kathleen Hanna, writing for Artforum, listed Blackwell among their favourite performers of 2014. Blackwell was a recipient of a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award. In 2016 they were interviewed by Jim Fletcher for BOMB Magazine. Blackwell is part of the 2019 class of the Joe's Pub Working Group, a program dedicated to supporting artists at a critical point in their careers.
OntheBoards.tv is an online streaming video service for contemporary performance, theater, and dance. Launched in 2010, the platform records and distributes recordings with pay-per-view, video download, and video streaming options.
Don Bacigalupi is a curator specializing in contemporary art and popular culture and a museum administrator. Bacigalupi helped to set the direction for two American museums early in their history: The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
Steve Parker is an artist and musician in Austin, Texas. He is the winner of the Rome Prize, the Tito's Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Michel Kouakou is an Ivorian choreographer and dancer, recognized for his international contributions to contemporary dance. He is the founder and artistic director of Daara Dance and the recipient of the 2012 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Dance and the Carnegie Corporation Great Immigrants Award.