Julie Tolentino is a Filipinx-Salvadoran artist whose practice extends across durational performance, movement, installation, sculpture, video, and sound. Over the past three  decades, she/they have created work occupying the interstitial spaces of relationality and memory, race and empire, sexuality and the archive. Her projects across media are drawn in intimate response to the rich learning spaces of activism, underground nightlife, loss, and caregiving. Most recently, her installation and performance-based projects HOLD TIGHT GENTLY and ECHO POSITION (created in collaboration with Ivy Kwan Arce) were featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Her work has also been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), The New Museum, Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, Performa ’05 and’13, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Aspen Art Museum, House of World Cultures/Berlin, Theaterworks Singapore, and the Thessaloniki Biennial, among many other venues.

Collaboration has long been a cornerstone of Tolentino’s practice, which has encompassed projects developed with artists including Stosh Fila, Robert Crouch, Kia Labeija, Jonathan Berger, Ron Athey, and David Roussève, among others. A member of ACT-UP, Art Positive, and the House of Color Video Collective, Tolentino also founded and led the Clit Club, the legendary lesbian/queer/punk performance party that ran from 1990 to 2002. Their interdisciplinary curatorial and publication projects have included Movements in Blue with the What Would An HIV Doula Do? Collective; The Lesbian AIDS Project Women’s Safer Sex Handbook with Cynthia Madansky; and Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women, a restaging of the pivotal 1993 exhibition originally curated by artist Ellen Cantor. Since 2006 she has been engaged in the creation and exhibition of The Sky Remains The Same, a lifelong project to “archive” works of durational and performance art by Tolentino’s friends, peers, and collaborators through reperformance and other strategies of embodiment.

Tolentino is a recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a Queer | Art Sustained Achievement Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts in Performance, a MacDowell Fellowship, as well as major support from Art Matters Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation Award. Since 2012, Tolentino has been the editor of the Provocations section of the performance studies journal TDR: The Drama Review. She holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California at Riverside and is currently a Fall 2024 Visiting Associate Professor of the Practice of the Arts at Brown University (TAPS, MCM, BAI) and core faculty at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

She/They are represented by Commonwealth & Council Gallery in Los Angeles and Mexico City and resides between LA and Joshua Tree.

Stosh Fila (she/he/they) is a professional scenic artist and performer based in Marin County, CA, and Joshua Tree, CA. They have worked for nearly four decades in the Los Angeles television commercial and movie industry, including freelance work for private clients. Stosh, aka Pigpen has toured with Tolentino for the last fifteen years. Fila performed in Ron Athey & Co’s Torture Trilogy series and in the club performance scene in Los Angeles. They were featured in Catherine Gund’s film, Hallelujah. Since the 1990’s, Fila's multi-disciplinary practice has been featured in Catherine Opie’s work, most recently in the 2018 film, The Modernist.

Liam Dean-Johnson is a Ph.D student in Brown University’s Department of American Studies. His interests encompass queer studies, performance studies and visual culture, consciousness studies, and countercultural and utopian histories. Liam holds an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University and a B.A. in American Studies and Ethnic Studies from Brown University.

Isaac Essex (they/he) is a Ph.D student in the American Studies Department. They work in trans studies, decolonial environmental humanities, and aesthetics and visual culture to think through queer and trans endurance amid hostile climates, extractive atmospheres, and ecological precarity. His work is particularly interested in what it means to be queer and have bad feelings, how to move through them, and how to find common places for persistence. They think with the notion of 'weathering' as it refers to the act of endurance that is being worn down, and the attempts to withstand atmospheric pressure that foster modes of survival amid a climate of hostility. Isaac holds a B.A. in English and Gender Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His critical and creative work has been published or is forthcoming in such places as Transgender Studies Quarterly, PANK, Apiary, and Cul-de-Sac of Blood.

Andy Sowers (Lighting Designer, Technical Manager) is a designer, director, and technician currently serving as the Director of Production at Performance Space New York, where he met and first worked with Julie on Slipping Into Darkness, and continued that collaboration as project manager and lighting/video designer for HOLD TIGHT GENTLY and ECHO POSITION at the Whitney Biennial in 2022. Andy was the project manager for Moriah Evans’ Remains Persist (MoCA LA 2023) and the Technical Director / Audio Engineer for Half Straddle's 2019 international tour of Is This A Room. He has shown theatrical work (Ile, and In The Zone) at 122CC Second Floor / Mabou Mines Theater and the Collapsable Hole, and is currently directing ILE // IN THE ZONE, to be presented on board the Wavertree at the South Street Seaport Museum in January, 2025.