Marian Glebes, Ryan Patterson, and Fred Scharmen have spent several years collaborating around Natty Bohs in venues including: Ryan’s front porch, Ryan’s back porch, Marian’s garden, the parking lot by Fred’s place, and the Gwynns Falls Trail. Equal parts trash talk, wishful thinking, and conspiracy theory, their work centers around placemaking, interaction, urban systems, and the things that go wrong (or right) with them.

 Jenny Graf is an artist who uses video, music and performance to explore perceptual states and social pretexts. She is one half of music/art duos Metalux and Harrius. She has done creative research about the emerging field of Creative Aging. And she wrote and contributed footage to the new documentary I Remember Better When I Paint, which explores the creative dimension of the brain within those with Dementia. In 2008, Graf founded the Stone Carving Oraclestra, an psycho-sonic performance group, and for several years ran Cabeca Gorda, a basement restaurant/sound venue that explored intimacy. Graf’s work has been performed and exhibited at PS 1 in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Maryland Film Festival, Mukha Museum in Antwerp, MOFFOM Festival In Prague, Ladies Fest in Copenhagen, and the Director’s Lounge in Berlin.

http://jennygrafsheppard.com/

Eve Hanan is a dance/movement therapist and former criminal defense attorney who performed traditional Middle Eastern folkloric and classical forms of dance for almost a decade after living and traveling extensively in the Middle East. Her recent work has moved from the traditional structure of Middle Eastern dance into explorations of its transposition into the framework of experimental dance and performance art. 

Hanan’s creative work seeks to explore and evoke the experience of liminality, the transitional space between identities and states. She has performed at Swarthmore College, the Mascher Cooperative in Philadelphia, The 14Karat Cabaret, the Studio 34 Series of Philadelphia, the Creative Alliance, the Charm City Kitty Club at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and numerous Arab American venues and cultural events in the Boston and D.C. areas.

Laure Drogoul is an interdisciplinary artist, cobbler of situations and founding director of The 14Karat Cabaret, Maryland Art Place’s performance space and experimental laboratory. Laure is a long-time citizen of Baltimore and a cultural crackpot who is actively engaged in instigating strategies that emphasize people’s relationships to each other and their environment.

Rebecca Nagle is a performance, new media and community artist. She grew up in Kansas.  She is an internationally exhibited and collected artist with works in the New Museum, NY and Ssamzie Art Warehouse, South Korea. Nagle has shown at WOW cafe, AS220, Art in General, Site Santa Fe, and Conflux Festival.She was hailed by Baltimore City’s Paper’s senior arts editor Bret McCabe as “Baltimore’s very own life-is-art-is-life performance maven…mingling the internet and performance into a fresh and vital new thing”. Rebecca’s performative, interative and community art projects challenge people around issues of intimacy, the body, power, boundaries and efficacy. She is currently trying to make the world a more open, equitable and creative place through community organizing and radical performance art. To follow her efforts go to www.rebeccanagle.com.

Valeska Maria Populoh is a community-based artist, performer and teacher living in Baltimore, MD.  Valeska utilizes costume, mask and puppetry techniques to create performances and actions in public spaces that respond to environmental and social concerns.  An interest in meditation and right action as pathways for transformation, both personal and societal, are central to her work.  Valeska in on the faculty of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She also works in collaboration with other artists, community organizations and performance groups to invent, create and curate cultural actions and performance events.

The Copycat Theatre is a DIY experimental theatre located in the Copycat warehouse, focusing on building community and dialogue through theatre and performance. We aim to alter traditional conventions of space, movement, tension, language, and sound through theatre and collaborative experiences. We are currently interested in creating a total experience for the senses, instilling magic in possibility!

Claire Cote is a dance and visual artist living in Baltimore and collaborating with the Effervescent Collective, Iron Rainbow Dance Theatre, and BXDC (Baltimore Experimental Dance Collective).  She recently featured work in the Baltimore Experimental Dance Round Robin at the Lumberhaus and directed Effervescent Collective’s production of “Dirty Dancing” at the Annex Theatre.  Her artistic work is influenced by her studies in Anthropology at Goucher College and experience of culture in Baltimore and abroad.  She plans to participate in and contribute to Berlin’s dance and theater community as a resident artist, but she is glad to have established roots in the Baltimore arts community .

Carly Ptak
has an uncanny knack
for finding the cracks
in the back
of people’s perceptions.
Then she injects them
with perplexion
then reminds them
that they can define them
without unneeded exceptions.
Turning the black
of the cracks
into a clear connection.