Wendy Clupper

Wendy Clupper is a performer and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. Her most recent performance piece was presented at the University of Maryland Union Gallery Showcase of selected student works where she performed a one-woman show called "Academeese." Originally from Iowa, where she was a founding member of the Impossible Theatre Company, Ms. Clupper has a Masters degree in Performance Studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and a Bachelors degree from Douglass College at Rutgers University in Women's Studies. Her research interests include: Countercultural Performance, Festival Culture, Folklore, and the American Avant-Garde. Her dissertation is entitled: “The Performance Culture of Burning Man.” Her forthcoming publications include the essay “Burning Man: Festival Culture in the United States,” in the book Festival Culture in a Global Perspective (International Federation for Theater Research/ Rodopi Press Publications. Publication Date: 2007). As well as the essay, “The Politics of Performance at Burning Man,” in the forthcoming book Politics and Performance in a Global Perspective (IFTR Publications/ Rodopi Press. Publication Date: 2007). Along with her work as a practitioner of performance art, Wendy teaches theatre and has served for four years as a panelist on the Maryland State Arts Council's Folk and Traditional Arts Panel.

Sara Dierck

Sara Dierck utilizes sculpture, photography, interventions and other means to attack and question concepts of waste, political influence on daily life, communication breakdowns in a fast-paced society, and forgotten or dismissed people and objects. Engaging the public and finding new dialogues about these issues and about art-making is another important aspect of Sara's work. She creates objects that are borderline functional, meant to be accessible, and highlight larger problems with a careful, loving, handmade touch. Sara's fascination with safety and security products and safety and security issues that people have or have to deal with is a current fascination for her.

Born and raised in Washington State, Sara moved to California to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received a BFA in photography, and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in Washington, DC, Baltimore, Brooklyn, San Francisco, San Diego and Havana, and has been featured in Kitchen Sink magazine. In 2005 and 2006, Sara worked with the Anti-Advertising Agency, a Bay Area-based group using art to discuss uses of public space. www.saradierck.com

SLAPDOWN!

Slapdown! began in May 2004 as the collaborative project in Tampa, Florida
and its members have taken their grudge matches to New York City's Coney
Island, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami and Tampa.

Wham bam thank you mam! If you're looking for some over-the-top tough girl
mayhem SLAPDOWN! is for you. These bad girls have a bone to pick and they're ready to go to the mat. Slapdown! Wrestlers settle their prime time grudges with maximum impact in a main event extravaganza. Low blows are to be expected as each fight is filled with highflying athleticism, full fury or
just plain dirty antics as these misfit mademoisellesfight it out in "take
no prisoners" style.

Pamela Sunstrum

In my work I allude to histories that are ancestral and archaeological, while blurring them with stories that, in their urgency and immediacy, conjure current and impending moments. Bodies, as figures, in my work become whispering coconspirators busy at the task of defacing dominant histories while themselves refusing to be obliterated, removed, or otherwise worked over. These embodied stories -- these communicative pathways -- persist as residues, repetitions, rituals, stains, tracings, re-tracings, iterations and re-iterations that are as much about the fierceness of a collective self as they are about the dispersion of multiple selves through time and across space.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum was born in Mochudi, Botswana and grew up in different parts of southern Africa and south-west Asia. She came to America in 1998 to study at the United World College of the American West in Montezuma, New Mexico. While pursuing her undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), Pamela was fortunate to spend several months in Portobelo, Panama where she was an artist-in-residence at El Taller Portobelo, an international artist collective comprised of Afro-Diasporic artists. In 2004 she graduated from UNC-CH with Highest Honors in International and Trans-national Cultural Studies. In May 2007, Pamela will complete her Masters in Fine Arts in the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art.

Pamela, Sunstrum, "my mothers, they"
stop motion animation (still)