Resistance & Respiration
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Anna Berry

Self-taught UK artist Anna Berry is best known for her grassroots interventions in non-gallery environments, as well as large-scale immersive installations. Because her work encompasses a wide variety of processes and ideas, it can be hard to pin down, but it often involves non-archival materials, long repetitive making, and short-lived ephemeral outcomes. As such, Anna’s practice operates at the intersection of making, performance, installation, and recording. 

Her work is responsive to place, community, and politics, and is often concerned with our experiences of reality. In 2021 Anna was selected for the Jerwood Art Fund Makers Open, which culminated in a new body of work that was exhibited at Jerwood Space, London, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, and Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen. 

Anna was born in Glasgow and currently lives in Milton Keynes. She is also a musician, writer and photographer.

Erik Benjamins & Finnegan Shannon
(he/him) & (they/them)

Erik Benjamins is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. His practice adopts textures and languages from design, writing and performance to celebrate the intimate, subjective possibilities of embodied knowledge. Recent work includes For Modern Resting, a collaborative exhibition of functional sculpture positioning rest as a vital act; To Sit is to Time Travel, an experimental audio tour engaging with an architectural landmark’s history of seating; and Let the Sun In, an ongoing suite of minimal, descriptive poems inspired by alt text composition and collection-making as a creative act. A former university professor, Erik continues to explore weirder pedagogical frontiers, especially as it pertains to writing, on and off the page. He has realized projects with EKWC in The Netherlands; the Banff Centre; Spring Workshop in Hong Kong; Foreland Catskill; and in Los Angeles, the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, the Institute for Art & Olfaction, and Marta.

Finnegan Shannon (b. 1989, Berkeley, CA) is an artist experimenting with forms of access. They intervene in ableist structures with humour, earnestness, and rage. Some of their recent work includes Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, an ongoing project that gathers people together who share an aversion to stairs; Alt Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; and Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces. They have done projects with the Queens Museum, the High Line, MMK Frankfurt, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Nook Gallery. Their work has been supported by a Wynn Newhouse Award, an Eyebeam fellowship, and grants from Art Matters Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Disability Visibility Project.

Atanas Bozdarov
(he / him)

Atanas Bozdarov is an artist and designer whose recent projects have explored systems of access and accessibility, unnoticed conditions of disability and design, and architectural propositions for public space. He has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Mississauga; University of Waterloo Art Gallery; Contemporary Calgary; the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto; Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto; and MAI, Montréal, arts interculturels. Bozdarov received his MDes from OCAD University, and he teaches design in the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College’s joint Art and Art History program.

Hannah Bullock
(she/her)

Hannah Bullock is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and researcher from Tkaronto, Ontario. She graduated from the printmaking program at OCAD University in 2018 and completed her MFA in Visual Art at York University in 2021, where she is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Critical Disability Studies. Across her interdisciplinary practice, she grapples with themes of authenticity, performativity, failure, meaning-making, and labour through the lens of her lived experience with chronic pain and illness. She is particularly interested in using her work to interrogate cultural narratives of morality that assign value and meaning to experiences of suffering. Recently, Hannah’s artwork has been shown at Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto, and she has published writing with Public Parking, Silverfish Digital and PUBLIC Journal.

Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose
(he/him) & (she/her)

Bob Flanagan (December 26, 1952 – January 4, 1996) was an American performance artist and writer known for his work on sadomasochism and lifelong struggle with cystic fibrosis. Sheree Rose (born 1941) 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.

Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose began their artistic collaboration during the late 1980s in the Los Angeles club and art scenes. Their performance, photography, and video integrate elements of BDSM, which culminated in the exhibition Visiting Hours at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and New Museum of Contemporary Art. After Flanagan died from cystic fibrosis in 1996, Rose continued to make artwork honouring his legacy and their collaboration. The final years of Flanagan's life, including his death, are the subject of the Kirby Dick documentary SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Flanagan's participation in the film was contingent upon his death being part of the completed project.

Andrew Gannon
(he/him)

Andrew Gannon (b.1980, Bolton, England) lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is an artist whose work bridges performance and sculpture, using everyday gestures, moments and objects as the basis for his interventions. In 2019 Gannon made the decision to centre his disability in his practice. 

 He received a BA Honours in Fine Art from Manchester Metropolitan University (1999–2002) and an MFA in Contemporary Fine Art Practice, Edinburgh College of Art (2010–2012),

Previous exhibitions include: Impressions, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, (2022), Eccentric Limbs, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, (2021), Stand Up!, Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2015), and No Reading No Cry!, Open Graphic Art Studio, Museum of the City of Skopje, Macedonia, (2015).

Darrin Martin
(he/they)

Darrin Martin engages the synesthetic qualities of perception through video, performance, sculpture, and print-based installations. Influenced by his own experiences with deafness, his projects consider notions of accessibility through the use of tactility, sonic analogies, and/or audio descriptions. His works have screened at the Museum of Modern Art (NY); Pacific Film Archive (CA); Impakt Festival (Netherlands); European Media Art Festival (Germany), among many others. His artworks and installations have exhibited at venues including Grand Central Art Center (CA), Moscow State Vadim Sidur Museum (Russia), McIntosh Gallery (Canada), Krannert Art Museum (IL) and, most recently, at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI) and the Saint Joseph’s Art Society in collaboration with Telematic Media Arts (CA). Martin occasionally curates, most recently selections from Electronic Arts Intermix through a crip lens in (Mis)Reading the Image. He is Professor and Co-Chair of the Art and Art History Department at the University of California, Davis.

Dylan Mortimer
(he/him)

Dylan Mortimer graduated with a BFA Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from the School of

Visual Arts in New York. He has created public art installations in several cities including New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City and Denver. His exhibition history includes Columbia University, The Longwood Arts Gallery in the Bronx, the Dumbo Arts Center, PS 122 Gallery in New York, the Kansas City Jewish Museum, the Nerman Museum in Overland Park, KS, and Haw Contemporary in Kansas City. He has been featured in the New York Times, The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun, The Baltimore Sun, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, SF Gate, The Daily Mail (UK) Metro News (UK), Sculpture Magazine, Public Art Review, and several other publications internationally.

Liz Nurenberg
(she/her)

Liz Nurenberg (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles based artist. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Grand Valley State University (2003) and a Master of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate University (2010.) Liz is an Associate Professor in the Foundation department at Otis College of Art and Design. She is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles. Liz was awarded a fellowship to Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency, a Helen B. Dooley Fellowship at Claremont Graduate University, and received a California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at such venues as the Holter Museum (Helena, Montana), Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), Elephant Art Space (Los Angeles, CA), HilbertRaum Gallery (Berlin, Germany), Galleri CC (Malmo, Sweden), and the Torrance Art Museum.

Dominic Quagliozzi
(he/him)

Dominic Quagliozzi received an MFA in Studio Arts from Cal State University, Los Angeles and a BA in Sociology from Providence College. His work is in the permanent collection at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. He has exhibited work in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Providence, Denmark and at Casula Powerhouse Art Centre in New South Wales, Australia. In 2018, he was on the Keynote patient panel at the Nexus Summit for Interprofessional Care and Education at the University of Minnesota. He is on the Arts Council for Creative Healing for Youth in Pain and has given workshops and lectures at the Rhode Island School of Design, UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, USC Keck School of Medicine, Chapman University, Cal State Los Angeles and Cal State Long Beach.

Aislinn Thomas
(she/her)

Aislinn Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, performance, sculpture, installation, and text. She culls material from everyday experiences and relationships, creating work that is by turns poignant and absurd. Many of Aislinn’s recent projects respond to disability and standard approaches to access–or the lack thereof. She gratefully works alongside and in the legacy of so many who treat access and survival as spaces for creative acts.

Aislinn is a white settler of Ashkenazic and mixed European descent. She is grateful to live and work in Unama’ki, part of Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq covered by the Peace and Friendship treaties.

Alice Wong & Georgia Webber
(she/her) & (she/her)

Alice Wong is a disabled activist, writer, media maker, and consultant. She is the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture. Alice is the editor of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, an anthology of essays by disabled people and Disability Visibility: 17 First-Person Stories for Today, an adapted version for young adults. Her debut memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life is available now from Vintage Books. Disability Intimacy, her next anthology, will be out in 2024. Twitter: @SFdirewolf.

Georgia Webber is a comics artist and teacher living in Newfoundland, Canada. From her years living with chronic health conditions, Georgia developed a unique way of living and teaching her art practice that takes health and the body into account. Of her published work, Georgia is known for her graphic medicine comics, such as her memoir Dumb: Living without a Voice (Fantagraphics 2018), collaboration with Vivian Chong titled Dancing After TEN (Fantagraphics 2020), and her short comics published by The Believer, Taddle Creek, and others. Georgia teaches independently online under the name Drawing the Inside Out, and with the Sequential Artists Workshop based in Gainesville, Florida. Learn more at www.drawingtheinsideout.ca.