ARTIST
RESIDENCY
ARTIST
RESIDENCY
The Critical Acts Artist Residency is an immersive multi-week engagement that brings nationally and internationally recognized artists to the UW Bothell campus each spring. Critical Acts Artists are performing and interdisciplinary artists who interact closely with students in classes and perform at larger campus-wide events. The residency program highlights a collaborative and experiential learning pedagogy valued by faculty teaching at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (IAS). Guest artists enrich and energize the Bothell campus, helping to grow a culture of art-making and performance participation across various IAS classes. The residency also seeks to create stronger links between the UW Bothell, Cascadia College and UW Tacoma campuses, as well as broader off-campus communities in the Pacific Northwest region which generally have had less access to arts funding and arts programming. Past Critical Acts Artists have presented or performed at Mobius Gallery, Seattle Public Library, Tacoma Art Museum, Alma Mater, Lincoln High School, Tacoma Community College and the University of Puget Sound.
Invited artists collaborate with Global Media Lab under the guidance of Professors Anida Yoeu Ali and Masahiro Sugano. The curriculum of Global Media Lab is conceived entirely around the invited visiting artists, bringing lived experiences and narratives from a range of artists directly to media savvy students. Each year Global Media Lab creates outstanding professional standard videos, both artistic unique short films and documentation of Critical Acts events.
avery r. young (2018)
Interdisciplinary artist and educator avery r. young is a 3Arts Awardee, Cave Canem fellow, and a co-director of The Floating Museum. His poetry and prose have been featured in anthologies such as BreakBeat Poets, Teaching Black, and Poetry Magazine, as well as alongside images in photographer Cecil McDonald Jr.’s In The Company of Black. As an artist-in-residence at The University of Chicago, young created an assemblage and sculpture series along with his first recording, booker t. soltreyne: a race rekkid. His theater credits include co-writing and co-producing the soundtrack for Lise Haller Baggesen’s Hatorgrade Retrograde: The Musical and writing the libretto for Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Twilight: Gods. His performance and visual work have been exhibited and/or presented at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The National Jazz Museum, Hip Hop Theatre Festival and other institutions. An award-winning teaching artist, young co-mentors the Rebirth Poetry Ensemble. He is the featured vocalist on Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening and has tours planned with his band de deacon board. Young’s latest full-length recording, tubman, is the soundtrack to his first collection of visual and traditional poetry, neckbone: visual verses.
Gregg Deal (2019)
Gregg Deal, (Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe) is a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and “disruptor.” His work is informed by his Native identity and includes exhaustive critiques of American society, politics, popular culture and history. Through paintings, murals, performance work, filmmaking, spoken word, and more, Deal invites the viewer to confront these issues both in the present and the past tense. In a 2018 TED Talk, Deal described his work as “honoring Indigenous experiences, challenging stereotypes, and pushing for accurate representations of Indigenous people in art.” It is in these “disruptions” of stereotypes and ahistorical representations which Deal uses the term to describe his work. Deal’s activism exists in his art, as well as his participation in political movements. Gregg Deal has exhibited his work at notable institutions both locally, nationally, and internationally including the Denver Art Museum, RedLine Gallery, and The Smithsonian Institution. The artist currently lives with his wife and five children along the Front Range of Colorado.
Dakota Camacho (2019)
Dakota Camacho (Matao/CHamoru) is a multidisciplinary artist researcher working in spaces of Indigenous lifeways, performance, musical composition, community engagement and education. Camacho holds a Masters of Arts in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in Gender and Women’s Studies as a First Wave Urban Arts and Hip Hop Scholar. Camacho is a chanter, adjunct instructor and core researcher for I Fanlalai’an Oral History Project based at the University of Guåhan. Camacho co-founded I Moving Lab, an international, intercultural, intertribal, and interdisciplinary arts collective that creates community and self-funded arts initiatives to engage and bring together rural and urban communities, universities, museums and performing arts institutions. Camacho has worked at festivals, universities and community organizations as a public speaker, facilitator, composer and performer, across Turtle Island (USA), Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Sweden and South Africa.
Neve Kamilah Mazique-Ricardi (2020)
Neve Mazique-Bianco, or NEVE, is a Black punk disabled queer fairy beast. A certified personal trainer and integrated dance teacher trained by NASM and Axis Dance Company respectively, NEVE cares about the welfare and equitable access to joy, sensuality, community, self-expression and liberation of all bodies. NEVE has received film and theater directing awards from East Bay Express in Oakland, the Toronto International Porn Festival and Seattle Gender Justice League. In 2018, NEVE joined the artistic board of directors of PlayThey Studios, a media and event production cooperative company of queer/trans/Black/disabled and otherwise marginalized artists building celebratory spaces in Seattle. For their evening-length work Lover of Low Creatures, NEVE is a 2019 City Artist and Pacific North West Afro X Fellow. NEVE is a co-founder of Access-Centered Movement.
Robert Farid Karimi (2020)
Robert Farid Karimi (they/he) is a critically acclaimed performer, author and social engagement artist who makes healthy messaging delicious with his Diabetes of Democracy / ThePeoplesCook Project: a culinary engagement project which combines humor and food. Karimi inspires audiences to exchange their cultural culinary histories and connect with one another over food to discover their own power towards personal balance. Diabetes of Democracy served over 60000 people from 2009-2019, not including TV audiences. A Creative Capital artist, Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, Robert Farid Karimi featured their work on NPR, The Smithsonian, South X SouthWest, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, Los Angeles Times, Callaloo, Total Chaos: an anthology of Hip Hop theory, Asian American Literary Review, and A Good Time for The Truth: Race In Minnesota (selected as this year’s One Book/One Minnesota) and various platforms worldwide. Karimi designs games and interactive performance experiences to spark audiences/players, in all manner of civic spaces, to imagine worlds of mutual community nourishment. They serve as Assistant Professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theater at Arizona State University.
Golda Sargento (2021)
Golda Sargento is a musician, songwriter and theater artist, born in Manila, raised in Anchorage and living in Oakland. She was a member of theater group Overseas Artist, spoken word group 8th Wonder, and the sketch comedy group Taste Better Wit. Her music bands Golda Supernova, Golda + The Guns, Ninja In Slow Motion, Death Glam and The Soft Stars have performed at music venues and festivals throughout California. Additionally, Golda played leads in Jeannie Barroga’s Gadgets, Patty Cachepero’s Anak ti Diablo at Bindlestiff, Sam Shepard’s Holy Crime and Jessica Hagedorn’s Gangster of Love, composing and performing music for the latter three. She performs, directs and produces for other community productions, including book readings for Arkipelago Books, a bookstore she co-runs in San Francisco, California’s SOMA district, where current works include two books about Bay Area Filipino Theater.
Bennyroyce Royon (2022)
Bennyroyce Royon is a Filipino-American director, choreographer, and dancer based in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School in 2006. As a performer and collaborator he has worked on Broadway (The King and I), Off-Broadway (Artist of Light), at The Metropolitan Opera (Madama Butterfly, Turandot, The First Emperor), at the New York Philharmonic (The Cunning Little Vixen), and with many dance companies including Armitage Gone! Dance, The Nilas Martins Dance Company, Collective Body Dance Lab, and Bad Boys of Dance. As a choreographer, Royon has received commissions from Atlanta Ballet, Ballet Hispánico, Point Park University, and The Joffrey Academy of Dance to name a few. In 2010, he founded Bennyroyce Dance, a project-based contemporary dance company. His company has performed at venues in New York City including The Joyce Theater, Baruch Performing Arts Center, Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, Bryant Park Presents, and more.
Kellie Richardson (2022)
Kellie Richardson is an artist, writer and educator born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. Her work explores intersections of identity and themes of love, loss, and longing. More specifically, Kellie’s work centers Black humanity as sacred and divine. Her visual art is informed by and sometimes partnered with her writing. As the 2017-2019 Tacoma Poet Laureate, Kellie worked to ensure literary arts are accessible to and representative of the community. She designed and curated Tacoma’s first Summer SOULstice, featuring visual and performing art of BIPOC and LGBTQ artists. Kellie has published two collections of poetry, What Us Is and The Art of Naming My Pain, both published by Blue Cactus Press. She believes her work has one purpose: to be used as a tool for liberation and healing. Sometimes through provocation or confession, other times through belly laughs or tears, Kellie works to celebrate the beauty and power of everyday folk and put some funk into the dread we call survival.