Marcela Michelle is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, facilitator, and producer based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce. Her artistic practice spans mediums and genres, engaging dance, music, physical and scripted theatre, design, burlesque, literature, construction, performance, theory, composition, devising, and the culinary arts. Her work has historically been concerned with identity, simultaneity, im/mutability, euphemism, and expectations of “truth” in queer performance. She is the Executive Artistic Director of Lightning Rod - a leading QTGNC focused arts organism in the Twin Cities. Her original work as been presented by Walker Art Center (Choreographer’s Evening), Red Eye Theater (NW4W), Guthrie Theater’s Dowling Studio, Northern Spark, Right Here Showcase, The Minneapolis Burlesque Festival, Wanderlust Productions, and 20% Theatre Company, where she worked in many capacities from 2015 to 2021, ultimately serving as Artistic Director in its final years. She is a 2019 mentee of The National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation (Pangea World Theatre/Art2Action), and a member of Actor’s Equity.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am arriving at this fellowship in my 31st year. Virgo Sun, Gemini Moon. Venus in Libra, Mars in Cancer. I know so much of Transition and am a new Student of Time. Southern child, eldest cousin. Self-named, Wed, I feed. Without apology, a new score. Autonomous entrances and exits. Available to possession and exorcism, avoidant of martyrdom and apotheosis. Curbed censor, encouraged teacher. Naming, creating, re-naming, re-creating. Of course there will be New Works Multi-Cross-Trans-Inter-Extra Disciplinary (eek). Of course the humor the wink the glint the cheek the nod the glance the smile the ode homage collage décolletage. An Icon in the making, hunny. Always gild the lily, why else be Gay? I'm over joy resistance rage. Down with meaning and conjuring and proselytizing didactics. Here’s to the dilettante the liar the raccoon the conduit the Transsexual aesthete. The charlatan dances and still we clap laugh cry eat come. It’s all in the making every second even now.

Photo by Steve Campbell (Locomotofx).

A.P. Looze is a transgender multi-disciplinary artist whose creative practice supports them to turn toward the history of pain in their family and this nation in order to end lineages of violence and open up portals to love. Their original solo performances have included The Ways I Wished to Love Her at Pillsbury House + Theater, Foray Softly at The Guthrie, The Grief Experiments through 20% Theatre Company, A Dream of Brightness at the Red Eye Theater, God Made Me Crooked at Queertopia, and Finding Loaded Guns in Weird Places at Pleasure Rebel. Their tennis-inspired music video musical C’Mon Baby Stroke It premiered at Trylon Cinema in 2021. They were a 2016 20% Theatre Q-Stage Fellow, a 2018 Pillsbury House + Theater Naked Stages Fellow, a 2019 Northern Lights Artist on the Verge Fellow, and part of the 2022 Red Eye Theater Isolated Acts Cohort.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will use this fellowship to deepen my contemplative practice and continue to explore decoloniality, making interdisciplinary work inspired by spiritual/economic/political liberation. For the past ten years, I have explored questions of embodiment as a trans person. As my gender’s boundaries dissolve, I am more interested in surrendering to the vast pluriverse of non-human wisdom. This fellowship will support my work with the Akashic Records, a realm of consciousness that holds unconditional love for all souls. The Records have provided insights through music, poetic words, and imagery that I have integrated into recent performance and installation work. I will continue to open the Records, holding pressing questions related to whiteness, embodiment and decoloniality. I will follow the inspiration of what emerges to create new multi-disciplinary work in collaboration with my creative process and spiritual explorations.