Show & Tell: Intimacy, Performance, Spectacle
About the Event
BMI Shearing Fellow Bonnie Chau and special guests invite you to participate in a night of show & tell. Hear artists, writers, and curators explore themes of intimacy, performance, and spectacle in their creative work. Attendees are encouraged to share an object, short text, or piece of writing – perhaps one that connects us to the city and mythos of Las Vegas.
Bonnie Chau is a writer from Southern California. She earned her MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University; and has received fellowship and residency support from Kundiman, Art Farm Nebraska, the American Literary Translators Association, Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony. She is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (2018).
Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud is an arts writer, curator, and assistant professor in the Department of Performing Arts & Arts Leadership at Seattle University. She researches and writes about Black aesthetics, contemporary performance, race, arts/cultural policy, and urbanism. She also has curated performance conferences with an attention to memory, embodiment, urbanism, race, and labor, and founded the independent magazine The Arts Politic. She is currently a governor-appointed Washington State Arts Commissioner. She received her PhD in Performance Studies (Northwestern University), MA in Arts Politics (Tisch School of the Arts at NYU), and BA in Government (Harvard).
Haleigh Nickerson is a multidisciplinary artist originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA. In 2017, Nickerson earned her MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons: The New School for Design. Prior, in 2015, Nickerson received her Bachelor’s in Art Practice with a minor in Ethnic Studies from The University of California, Berkeley. Nickerson’s works explore race, gender, desire and power through works that take the form of photography, video/film, sculpture, installation and performance. Nickerson explores the complexities and slippages of identity through real/imagined worlds.
Director/producer Matt Yoka began his career making TV programs with Vice Media (Vice Does America, Epicly Later’d, Huang’s World, and HBO’s Vice Special Report: A World in Disarray). He developed a distinct visual style directing music videos for record labels like Drag City and Sub Pop, collaborating often with Ty Segall. His first feature documentary film, Whirlybird, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (2020). Before all that, he got a master’s degree from USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism.