working title No. 5

A pilgrimage through sacred spaces, profane realities, and everything in between!

exhibition of experimental art+music

MAY 28 - 30, 2026 6:00 – 9:00 PM → ST. PAUL’S EPISCOPAL CATHEDRAL

WORKING TITLE is Project [BLANK]’s fifth-annual exhibition of experimental art and music, featuring dozens of visual artists, filmmakers, sound and performance artists, composers, and musicians. This three-day, community-based event will include new works, world premieres, and thought-provoking performances featuring some of the most exciting creative voices in Southern California, Tijuana, and Baja California curated by sculptor Diana Benavídez and Artistic Director Leslie Ann Leytham, and artist submissions will be reviewed by a panel of artists: Alessandra Moctezuma, Alvaro Díaz, Cat Gunn, and Luisa Martínez. Join us on a pilgrimage of ideas, with bold new works that offer invocations and intercessions of sacred and profane inspiration.

PERFORMANCE NOTES

INSTALLATION DESCRIPTIONS

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

PERFORMANCE NOTES

Esther Gamez Rubio (Ensenada, BC. MX)
RITUALS FOR RELINQUISHING A BODY, 2024
Mixed media installation
photo by Robby Bui

ALL THREE NIGHTS

8:00 PM

Excerpts from the Office of the Dead (world premiere) by Michelle Lou

Drawn from Latin texts from the Book of Hours, the Office of the Dead, the Vulgate Psalms, the Book of Job, and the liturgies of Sexagesima, the work can be thought of as a meditation on faith and lamentation - an attempt to give form to suffering. Fragments of chant and scripture emerge and dissolve across shifting sonic tapestries. The Psalms introduce images of entrapment and descent: “The groans of death surrounded me; the sorrows of hell encompassed me,” while penitential liturgy repeatedly returns to the earthbound body, Adhaesit in terra venter noster, “our belly cleaveth to the earth.” In the Book of Job, bodily existence dissolves as flesh is imagined as decaying and porous, reduced to dust, worms, and scattered remains, where life steadily unravels into matter: “My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken and loathsome,” and “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are scattered.”

The work is particularly shaped by the atmosphere of Sexagesima. The liturgy stages humanity crying out from the dust: Exsurge, quare obdormis, Domine? (“Arise, why do you sleep, Lord?”). In these texts, suffering is not resolved or explained, but endured through repetition, lamentation, and ritual utterance. This work emphasizes this sense of ritual listening, where sound moves as invocation and residue.

Timor mortis conturbat me, “the fear of death disturbs me,” is sung repeatedly at the closing of the piece, leaving us suspended in an unresolved articulation of faith suspended between terror and hope.

PERFORMED BY: Gabriel Arregui (pipe organ), Jonathan Nussman (voice), Jonathan Piper (tuba), Leslie Ann Leytham (voice), Mattie Barbier (brass)

THURSDAY, MAY 28

7:00 PM

LOVE AS A SANCTUARY BY DUO LINGUA

Trumpet, voice and electronics

The piece invites us to reflect on love as a refuge. It serves as a metaphor for "resonance," as articulated by Hartmut Rosa, and echoes bell hooks's ingredients of love: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest and open communication.

For Rosa, "resonance" highlights our connection to the world, consisting of four key elements: Affection, which is the feeling of being genuinely moved; Emotion, our ability to respond and reciprocate that affection; Transformation, the way the experience changes us; and Unpredictability, as resonance cannot be forced or designed, making its occurrence and form unpredictable.

This piece invites you to engage by sharing messages of love on the provided postcards, which act as the performance score. When we ask, “How does love resonate within us?”, please respond aloud, reflect quietly, or complete the prompts. Help us create this resonance so it can serve as a sanctuary of love for all of us.

7:30 PM

Datura BY DIA BASSETT

Dia Bassett (dancer, choreographer, editor, vocalist), Jessica Flores (guest dancer), Demetrius Antuna (sound artist), Jantina Perry (vocalist), Paul Bassett (pianist), Shane Robertson (video editor), Tim Hardy (photographer)

The trickster energy of the Datura flower is revealed through ongoing character shapeshifting derived from a meditative vision. The video features a series of ever-changing characters that expose the psychedelic-deliriant effects of the flower.

In the dance, I seek to engage with and understand the Datura’s powers, whether they be playful, erotic, or sinister. An encounter with a snake begins softly but then becomes charged. A new character’s identity is a mystery. Is she a self-reflection, a lover, or a shadow?

The only answer to my own darkness is to release all to the ever-flowing river of change. Everything is released to the metaphorical water—my love, my own flesh and bones, all that is surrounding me. It all sifts away like sand in a final release. What isn’t released is taken up by the Datura flower. As I face death, I become death, a psychopomp to guide souls home.

The vintage and repurposed costume materials carry histories of labor, femininity, and care; their fragility and endurance shape the movement vocabulary, and influence how our bodies vacillate between tension and release.

Ilana Waniuk & Teresa Diaz de Cossio (San Diego & Ensenada)
ARCHIVE for flute, electronics, and live visuals
photo by Robby Bui at WORKING TITLE No.3, Jan. 2024

FRIDAY, MAY 29

7:00 PM

HEART SCENES BY marguerite brown performed by melissa Achten

Solo amplified harp

HEART SCENES is a composition for solo amplified harp, composed by Marguerite Brown in collaboration with harpist Melissa Achten. The work unfolds in three contrasting scenes and is inspired by the intimate, kinetic nature of the human heart—an instrument whose sound is driven by tension, vibration, and resonance.

Throughout the piece, the performer uses both traditional playing and unconventional techniques to draw out a wide range of textures. These include activating the pedals by hand, creating buzzing tones by positioning the pedals between notches, plucking near the tuning pins, and preparing the lower strings with honey dripper spoons. These approaches expand the instrument’s sonic character and contribute to the distinctive atmosphere of the piece, where noise-based and unstable sounds are treated as integral components of the musical language.

For the duration of the work, the performer sits with their back to the audience, reinforcing the theatrical dimension of the piece and shifting focus toward the sound itself. The score combines traditional notation, graphic elements, and written instructions, allowing for interpretive flexibility within a defined structure. Overall, the work seeks to expand the expressive and sonic possibilities of the harp beyond its conventional role.

7:30 PM

Our Intention Driven Anomalies: Copper Tunnels by don nichols

Circuit bent omnichord

Our Intention Driven Anomalies: Copper Tunnels crosses radical musical frontiers, grounded in glitchy, analog synth sounds of the 1980’s. ‘Intention-driven anomalies’ alludes to the mysterious phenomenon where the power of a person’s thoughts may influence patterns within randomly-generated numbers. ‘Copper Tunnels’ suggests themes of insulation, sanitization, and directing flow, while also referring to the physical properties of this Folktek circuit-bent Suzuki Omnichord. Rows of copper pads covering the instrument allow sound to be activated through touch and manipulated through the performer’s body, creating a direct electrical connection between performer and circuit.

This performance uses no overdubs, special effects, pedals, loops or other enhancements, reflecting Nichols’ intent to reveal the Omnichord’s vast and unpredictable nature in its purest form. It is part of an ongoing investigation of this mercurial instrument in real-time improvisation. The accompanying video was co-created with Rebecca Bryant and allows a closer view of the subtle movements involved in the instrumental manipulations.

David Aguila (San Diego, California)
GHOST TONES by Nasim Khorassani
photo by Robbie Bui at WORKING TITLE No. 3, Jan. 2024

SATURDAY, May 30

7:00 PM

: out of : away : off by William kuo & julia anne cordani

mouth, microphone, loudspeakers

severance as transfiguration;
voids upon voids.

7:30 PM

Sanctuary for a Vanishing Sound by anqi liu

choor khuur & electronics

Sanctuary for a Vanishing Sound is a site-responsive solo performance for Mongolian choor khuur and speakers that imagines sanctuary as a condition of listening: a space where fragile sound may emerge, unfold, and remain with care. At its center is the choor khuur, a traditional Mongolian skin-fiddle whose grain-rich, breath-like voice is deeply tied to touch, material, environment, and embodied presence. Hovering at the edge of silence, its resonance carries a subtle vitality felt as much as heard.

The work emerges from Liu’s long-term research on Mongolian choor khuur and Indigenous musical practices, developed through her dissertation framework, Ecology of Fraysonics. Within this framework, sound is understood as a threshold shaped by memory, erosion, relation, and endurance. The choor khuur is approached as a living sonic body, porous and situated, carrying modes of perception and transmission.

In dialogue with the cathedral’s stone, height, and reverberant air, the instrument enters an expanded field of acoustic and spiritual resonance. Speakers gently extend its delicate textures, allowing the sound to breathe beyond itself. The performance invites listeners into a temporary sanctuary where sound is encountered, sheltered, and allowed to continue on its own terms.

INSTALLATION DESCRIPTIONS

beck haberstroh & Kirstyn Hom (San Diego, CA. USA)
The fruit of the tree looks like a human head, 2024
multimedia sculpture
photo by Robby Bui, WORKING TITLE No.3, Jan. 2024

ANGIE JENNINGS: Painted Futures (2017)

Painted Futures is a participatory performance work that includes the making of paintings or drawings to denote and foretell one’s future. When performed live, participants write their name on a piece of paper that is then given to the reader, in which the participant's future is made visible.

These intimate prophecies serve as devices of personal reflection, functioning as reminders of the expanse and possibilities found in the past, present and future.

Participants are encouraged to keep their futures, navigate them with insights and great care.

New Orleans, Louisiana
Performance Art

APRIL ROSE: HOME ALTAR (2025)

“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls roofs and objects just as we hang onto our liver skeletons, flesh and bloodstream” - L Carrington

This altar represents the sanctuary of an idealized home and the fires within that warm us. Made from a Victorian doll house representing a form of ideal refuge providing safety and comfort. A safe space filled with rituals performed and cycles celebrated.

A sanctuary for holding on to disappearing traditions. Ritual as resistance to our societal shift of the rapid changing culture where less human connection is encouraged and we are having less authentic shared experiences.

The gatherings of life by fire light and the rituals of candle lighting for celebrations, in memory of loved ones, or for a prayer, a wish, an intention.

Escondido, California
Found materials

ARMANDO DE LA TORRE, Marcos Solorio, & Mindy Donner: LA CASITA (2026)

Shadow puppet screen where shadow puppets shelter behind rejas aka Window Bars which onced protected them from crime now offers protection from our own government.

San Diego/ New Mexico
Recycled cardboard & wood

San Diego, California
single-channel audio-visual piece

CAROLINA MONTEJO: Dimensions (2026)

Excerpt from the poem~

In the second dimension, I was a stone
Polished by pain and masquerading as a crystal,
or perhaps,
A crystal surviving as a stone.
But the dimension was flat,
I am certain I could not distinguish volume.

A pre-photographic image,
existing before technology.
That is what I was,
The fear kept me contained within the margins.

A polished stone waiting for two hands to hold it tight during prayer,
to press against her chest,
to visualize the size of the ocean.

A two-dimensional object of the Earth,
longing for the smell of mud,
for a cave, a shaman, and a crone,
For the fire burning in the pit
and moving in the stars.

A picture of a stone left by that fire burns slowly,
fighting transformation.
Soon it turns into a spiral of heat,
and without intention,
The destruction of the second dimension made me a pile of the past,
Tall,
and wide.

In that state of apparent destruction, my third dimension was revealed,
and we rejoiced in being a bundle of warm ash.

CLAUDIA CANO: ¿Dónde está Rosa? (2026)

¿Dónde está Rosa?

Was she detained, or did she flee out of fear of being detained?

The number of ICE arrests in San Diego has risen faster than the national average (16,000 since January 2025)

Undocumented immigrants still find refuge in churches, but federal immigration authorities no longer see them as "off-limits". Physical shelter at some churches is now considered civic disobedience.

Many immigrants avoid public places to prevent detention and separation from their families due to this constant stress.

San Diego, California
32-gallon trash can and cleaning products

FRANKIE MARTIN: Angel of uncertainty (2026)

Frankie Martin presents Angel of Uncertainty, a quiet, encounter-based performance in which they gift small, optional handwritten notes as surprises. This gesture revives Martin’s extinct childhood practice of passing notes- an intimate mode of connection reimagined as a performance. Here, sanctuary is framed as freedom from expectation and routine. Evoking the spirit of Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy,” the performance invites viewers to understand themes of gentle refuge and unexpected connection. This performance is an extension of Martin’s practice, developed through Surprises- playful, participatory events organized in their NM Studio. Angel of Uncertainty disrupts expectations by suspending time and ordinary behavior, providing sanctuary from normalcy for those who may encounter Martin as they wander. Gifts are offered freely, never owed.

Portales, New Mexico
meandering performance

"Nuestra Señora de Lakwatsa, Mahal na Birhen ng Lamyerda" is the amalgamation of the image of the altar in a Filipino Catholic home, syncretized and indigenized, with a seedy dive bar, a Goth post-punk nightclub, and queer radical spaces. The coalescence of familiarity in the home alongside the departure from it(Lamyerda and Lakwatsa being Tagalog words for going out), finding community, safety, and acceptance in alternative spaces. The collision and contradictions found in the self are thus represented through an altar installation. The installation contrasts contexts within itself, pairing images of the Virgin Mary and saints with the grit and grime of nightlife, cigarette ashtrays holding candles and incense, liquor bottles housing dried flowers and rosaries, shot glasses with holy water, protest flyers set against lace. The installation serves to redefine that which is sacred, in finding sanctity and sanctuary in unlikely places, and invites others to do the same.

San Diego, California
Sculpture & Installation, Epoxy Clay, Mixed Media, Found Objects

JAIME LEYNES: Nuestra Señora de Lakwatsa, Mahal na Birhen ng Lamyerda (2026)

Leila Khalilzadeh Aghdami: Temporary Shelter (2026)

Tent (2026) is a multimedia installation by Ilana Waniuk and Joseph Bourdeau, which uses light, projection mapping, multichannel audio, and video loops to fill an eight by eight space with sounds and images from the artists’ shared home environment, aiming to create a welcoming interactive space from defamiliarized scraps of personal material.

projection by Ilana Waniuk
video by Joseph Bourdeau
construction and design by Ilana Waniuk + Joseph Bourdeau
sound by Ilana Waniuk + Joseph Bourdeau

Los Angeles, California
multimedia sculpture

Yasmine K Kasem (San Diego, CA. USA)
The Philosophers are Incoherent. 2023
Textile and fiber at WORKING TITLE No. 3, Jan. 2024
photo by Robby Bui

Joseph Bourdeau & Ilana Waniuk: tent (2026)

Temporary Shelter is a single-channel video that documents the intimate act of sewing torn fabric by hand. Through repetitive gestures of stitching, the work reflects on sanctuary not as a permanent structure, but as a fragile and ongoing act of repair. The torn textile becomes a metaphor for the body, memory, and the emotional and social ruptures carried through personal and collective experience.

The video focuses on the labor of mending, an action historically associated with care, survival, and often invisible domestic work. Rather than presenting repair as completion or healing, the work remains in a suspended state, emphasizing vulnerability, endurance, and the continuous effort required to hold things together.

Through close observation of hand, thread, and material, Temporary Shelter invites viewers to consider shelter as something constructed through attention, repetition, and resilience, an unstable yet necessary space of protection.

San Diego, California
Video

Maddie Butler & Joe Cantrell: retreats (2025)

These works are a collaboration between artists Joe Cantrell and Maddie Butler. We are both interested in digital technology as a tool for communication and communion, while also acknowledging the deep isolation these devices often propagate. This project posits that the screen is society’s contemporary (and imperfect) sanctuary.

This series of dioramas are made from wood, steel, miniature figurines and recycled iPhone screens. LED lights concealed inside the dioramas are programmed to turn on and off at random, revealing different areas of the constructed universe behind the screen.

Our screens are an inherently contradictory space: they offer both protection and exposure, collective engagement and atomisation, reverence and addiction. They are with us always, structuring our relationships, memories and identities. Our dioramas combine digital and analog technologies, questioning the reality of our coded world while reveling in its potential for magic.

San Diego, California
Broken smartphone screen, LEDs, miniature figurines, arduino, wood, galvanized steel

MATTHEW HEBERT: Home Light and Space Depot (2026)

Home Light and Space Depot, inspired by my nightly dog walks through my neighborhood streets, is also a nod to and spoof of the Light and Space art movement that is so central to the art historical canon of the Southwest. While landscape lights used to be few and far between, the contemporary solar powered LED lights has lead to a more dynamic suburban nightscape. Like fairy rings of the built environment, the lights sprout along the perimeters of walkways and planters often creating mesmerizing patterns on the foliage and pavers. In Home Light and Space Depot I deploy a field of these lights as a “magical ward” around a central clearing that features a sound bath of captured sounds of bells. The viewer is invited to inhabit that central space and bask in the space of light and sound.

San Diego, California
turf, lights, electronics, and belfry sounds

SHAR GARCIA: Un cerco Una cerca (2026)

“cerca” in Spanish means close or near, but as a noun, “la cerca” or “el cerco” means fence or wall.

Un cerco y una cerca is a play on words. One side of the structure is “un cerco de puas,” a barbed wire fence. The other side is “una cerca de madera”. One is close, and one is far; some photographs are from San Diego, and some are from across the border.

To me, houses have never felt like a true sanctuary; they’ve always felt like a cage. I’ve felt most at home in nature, with animals, in the gardens or patios, that sometimes liminal space between a house and a fence. Growing up, I would spend many weekends on ranches where my dad worked. I'd crawl under barbed wire to explore the unknown, slide down cliffs, or see animals; I was allowed to be wild and free.

Having lived in neighborhoods like La Libertad in Tijuana and City Heights in San Diego, I find it comforting to walk around, finding little pieces of myself between fences, finding what to me feels like home, a sanctuary, a resistance to becoming domesticated or homogenized, and remaining true to who we are and where we come from.

San Diego/Tijuana
sculpture & photography

Our Dreams thread into one through the ritual of recording. The night open into a space, hopefully of rest, perhaps for glitches. The rest is an absence.

San Diego, California
The rest is absence. (2025)
Multimedia media sculpture

TASIA PAULSON: Spirits in Waiting (2026)

Yerbamala Taller de Arte y Gráfica

This cinematic experimentation is an attempt to challenge the meaning that is ascribed to the photographic representation of ruins. Beyond the picturesque, central to our consumption of ruin photography, is the aesthetic and moral ambiguity of the ritualized spectacle of destruction, urging us to accept the contradiction in our response between the aesthetic and the moral.

Chicago, IL. USA
Tonalpohualli (2024)
Video

Marlon PV (Tijuana, BC. MX)
AI, in you I trust / IA, en ti confío, 2024
Projection on paper
photo by Robby Bui

Dimensions (2025) is a video poem that explores physical, spiritual, and emotional aspects of the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth dimensions of space/time. Using Super 8 footage, analogue photography, compositing, and 3D animation, the video poem views the material, ethereal, and virtual world as sacred places for groundedness, transcendence, pain, and liberation.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Aaron DeMuth, sculptor

Aaron DeMuth is a former Providence based artist that has had a California license for about five years. His practice is informed by headshops, hardware stores, and a mediocre stamp collection. When not screenprinting, he can be found at the post office on Santa Monica Ave with his dog Moe.

ABI HOOD, performance artist

Abi Hood is an Artist, Educator, and Director based in San Diego. Her passion lies in creating communal artistic spaces full of joy, exploration, and authenticity. Currently, Abi works as a teacher and Resident Artist with Blindspot Collective [Another Day in Paradise, Dancing at the End of the World, IYKYK]. She is a founding member of Boy King Theatre Collective with hopes of bringing unpolished and unapologetic theatre to the San Diego masses. To learn more about Abi and her work...wait for her to make a website!

ADAM ZUCKERMAN, guitarist

Adam Zuckerman (b. 1992) is a composer and multi-instrumentalist working with acoustic, electronic, and environmental materials in the creation of scores, recordings, performances, and installations. His work is inspired and motivated by a wide range of interests, including questions about perception and its ambiguities; the experience of time and memory, presence and absence; the conditions and perceptual limits of change, difference, and gradual transformation; the intangible yet very real perceptual shifts in the atmosphere of a space; noise, both as a reflection of the incidental sounds and experiences of everyday life and also as the totality of sounds and experiences. Above all, Adam considers music to be a reiteration and coalescence of the creative impulses and processes of the world. His music attempts to hear some aspect of this world as it also seeks to open an immersive space for listening, reflection, and imagination.

Álvaro Díaz is a musicologist, conductor, field recorder, and sound artist based in Ensenada, Baja California. He holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the Argentine Catholic University and serves as a professor and researcher at the Faculty of Arts at the Autonomous University of Baja California.

Álvaro’s work explores the intersection of sound studies, migration, and technology-supported soundscapes. His projects have received numerous accolades, including the Sound of the Year Award (2021), the Ecos Sonoros Award from Mexico’s Ministry of Culture (2021), and recognition at international events such as the Latin American Art Triennial in New York (2022).

As a sound artist, Álvaro emphasizes the social dimensions of soundscapes, crafting auditory portraits that reflect the communities he engages with. His field recordings, such as the sounds of the Gray Whale, have been featured in exhibitions like Marine Migrants and even accompany the augmented reality on Mexico’s 500-pesos bill.

Álvaro’s work has been presented in over 15 countries, spanning North and South America, Europe, and Asia. He continues to blend his passions for art, education, and technology, inspiring a deeper understanding of sound and its cultural significance.

Alvaro Diaz Rodriguez, sound artist

Ana Luisa Díaz de Cossio is a performer-composer whose work traverses the space between social structures, individuality, spontaneity, and explores resonance in physical as well as cultural space. Through extreme extended techniques, she challenges conventional instrument playing, exploring the possibilities and limits of sounds within an instrument. Her music is informed by political, social, and cultural awareness of the systems constituting our societies.

Ana Luisa has participated in Manifesté-IRCAM (FR), Darmstadt Summer Course (DE), OneBeat Taiwan (TW), Experimental Institute at Antenna Cloud Farm (USA), Ensemble Evolution (USA), Karp Kamina Residency (Togo), ANMA+NordPlus Music Forum (EE), Dark Music Days (IS), Time for Music (FI), ActinArt (DK) among others. She holds degrees from Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Listaháskoli Íslands, and is currently enrolled at the University of California-San Diego.

Ana Luisa Diaz de Cossio, violinist

Anqi Liu (synths) and Joseph Bourdeau (percussion + electronics), are audiovisual artists currently based in the Los Angeles area. Their work combines surreal and mundane elements to create works which explore the beautiful, boring and terrifying aspects of the everyday.

anqi liu & Joseph Bourdeau, interdisciplinary artists

April Rose (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who has created her own visual language. Using symbols and iconography that evoke universal themes, she explores relations with the elemental and unseen guiding forces that surround us.

Raised in rural Missouri by homesteading parents, she developed an appreciation for the handmade early in life. With an abundance of nature to explore she gained an intuitive relationship with the natural world that has carried on.

Now a mother herself, her making happens in a domestic setting. Melding craft and pop art she draws from myths, folklore and fairytales.

Keeping in rhythm with her childhood self she is explorative with materials. She works in themes of mysticism and escapism, for her art is alchemy and serves as a vehicle to heal from past trauma. She performs, documents and makes marks within her own allegorical rituals.

April works with clay, fiber, wood, collage, soft sculpture, performance, and mixed media. She utilizes accessible materials, salvaged and repurposed supplies along with found objects and foraged natural materials.

April Rose has shown her work throughout the US at MF Gallery in NYC, California Center of the Arts Escondido, MCASD (auction), Ship in the Woods, Teros Gallery and TenAm. She has created props and stage wear for major recording artists. Her work is included in Plant Magic: Library of Esoterica published by Taschen. She lives and works in the northern San Diego county town of Escondido.

APRIL ROSE, interdisciplinary artist

Aurerose Piaña, dance artist

Aurerose Piaña, named after the legacy of her grandlolas, is an archiver of memories, an activator of slowing down, with a rhythmic pulse of gentleness and remedies of the heart. Born and bred on Lenape Territory (Queens, New York) and currently residing on Tongva Territory (Los Angeles, CA) by way of the Luzon regions of what is now named the Philippines, Aurerose practices sound based ceremonies that integrate the guidance of ancestors, floras, and womb tending to uphold storytellings of ancestral celebration, sacred listening and community care.

BABAY L. ANGLES, dance artist

Babay L. Angles aka Bomba Brown / Angelica Janabajal Tolentino / Ifadoja Oyajokun (she/her/they/them) is a Pilipinx interdisciplinary performance artist, DJ, joy and rest practitioner, educator, cultural strategist, and community organizer from San Diego, CA (Kumeyaay Territory), Okinawa, Japan, and Olongapo, Philippines. Babay L. Angles practices deep listening and channels movements to express the inherited resilience of the diasporic psyche. She is moved by funk, bass, percussion, environmental sound, breath, and land memory. Babay blends decolonial hxstorical research, ethnography, trauma informed facilitation, pedagogy, movement, installation, adornment, sound, and ritual to heal and get FREE. She is the creative director of Olongapo Disco, cofounder of The Shake It Show and dances with Time 2 Rock and Whacking San Diego.

Brian Black is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher focusing on interactive sound works, installation environments, and durational performance. He is currently a National Geographic Teaching Fellow focusing on biomimicry design in the classroom.

Zane Alexander S.B. is a composer, performer, and community music organizer that creates experimental music. He is the co-founder of the San Diego New Verbal Workshop and is currently in San Diego State University’s Master of Music program with an emphasis in Composition.

Both artists have collaborated on several sound-based performances since 2023 and recently co-founded a performance collaborative called Division of Labor.

BRIAN BLACK & ZANE ALEXANDER,
performance artists

CAMILO ZAMUDIO, percussionist

Camilo Zamudio-Romero is a percussionist, educator, improviser, and advocate of Latin American popular and contemporary music. For him, percussion is an intimate expression of nature that draws listeners to push their understanding of the world and expand their musical imagination. Camilo converges in his Colombian roots, the chants of freedom of Afro-diasporic voices, and the endless complexity of Contemporary sounds.

He has joined the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia, La Jolla Symphony & Chorus, and performed at major music festivals such as The XIII Cartagena International Music Festival (COL) and the 77th Ojai Music Festival (U.S). Also, he obtained 1st place at the I Latin American Percussion Competition RAZAM in Bogotá (COL), performed in the BLAA Young Performers Series of The Central Bank of Colombia, and the project [BLANK] Salty Series in 2024.

Camilo studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, received a BA degree from the National University of Colombia in 2020, and is currently pursuing Doctoral studies in Contemporary Music Performance at the University of California San Diego as a member of red fish blue fish percussion ensemble.

Coral (she/her) is a research-based new media artist and designer from Madrid and Barcelona, Spain. She holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in Photography and Design from Elisava Barcelona and a BA in Communication from IE University, Spain. Her work has been exhibited at Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona, at Twisted Oyster Film Festival and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, among others. She has been featured in publications such as Vassar Review, the Present Tense Pamphlets edited by the Block Museum at Northwestern University and LoosenArt. She has participated in residencies at the Arquetopia Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, SÍM Residency in Reykjavik, Iceland and Leonardo@Djerassi Resident Artist Program. She is currently a PhD candidate in Art Practice with a specialization in Anthropogeny at UC San Diego.

CORAL PEREDA SERRAS, multimedia artist

DANIEL CUI, composer

Daniel (Jingyang) Cui, a Chinese-born composer, draws inspiration from his rich Chinese heritage, encompassing culture, history, and contemporary social issues. Having spent considerable time abroad, he passionately shares his unique perspectives on China through his musical compositions. His creativity is not confined to grand themes alone, as he finds inspiration in the subtleties of daily life, be it the charm of animals or a whimsical anecdote. Cui's diverse body of work spans from chamber pieces to orchestral compositions, reflecting the breadth of his artistic expression. Cui is pursuing his PhD in composition at the University of California San Diego.

Dom Cooper is a California-based musician, artist, composer, and performer, whose practice is based around the voice. He performs solo as Circle/Temple and has been a student of the cult Irish band United Bible Studies for the past six years. Dom is also a co-founder of SdNVW (San Diego New Verbal Workshop). Originally from the UK, he was a member of the Musarc choir. Notable performances include The BBC Proms with Neil Luck, The London Contemporary Festival, and the Artefact Festival in Leuven. He was also a member of both Cafe Oto’s Experimental and Folk Choirs, which performed works with Annea Lockwood, Sarah Davachi, WIDT, and Áine O’Dwyer.

DOM COOPER, composer & vocalist

Eliana Allize, multimedia artist

Eliana Allize (they/them) is a first generation Nicaraguan-American, multi-media artist, and land worker based in San Diego, California. At a young age Allize learned to value community wellness and ancestral connection in their multi-generational household of urban South-East Los Angeles. They grew up isolated navigating marianismo tradition as a trans youth, but found a political home through challenging the living conditions of the working class as a community organizer. They felt autonomy being able to connect how their difficult experiences were a product of global capitalism and imperialism.

Art is a storytelling tool that has historically been used to tell us about the lived conditions of people before us. Allize's artistry is an archive of central american identity and trans diasporic experience. They want to remind people to document their experience and be the story keepers of the reality less often advocated for. They hope to inspire people to collectivize their grief/hardships and commit to creating a self sustaining future together. Through healing our severed connection to land, diaspora, and self we have the power to change our lived reality.

EMMALIAS, performance artist

Emmalias is a playwright, performer, author, and theater maker currently based in San Diego, California. They are a founding member of Boy King Theatre Collective, and an educator at The San Diego Circus Center. Their work typically explores the nature of flesh, queer bodily forms, and constructions of violence. That is a very buttoned up, ‘they asked for a bio’ way of saying they read a lot of queer theory and love the ewey-gooey-gushy stuff, especially on stage. Emmalias’ written work has recently been heard at New Village Arts, The National Women’s Theater Festival, The Larking House Theater, and The University of California, San Diego.

Emily Barger, soprano & poet

Soprano, poet, and composer Emily Barger is recognized for her dynamic, captivating sound and dedication to emotional expression through voice. She has performed nationally and in Italy as a vibrantly enthusiastic force behind the performance and creation of New Music. Her compositions have been premiered by eminent groups such as the Fonema Consort, (excerpt from chamber opera) Duo Gelland, (accidents happen, for violin and viola) Aurora Borealis, (sonic poem etudes, for soprano and vibraphone) and University at Buffalo Singers (hear me, for SSAA choir). Emily is currently writing the libretto and music for her new chamber rock opera, new choral pieces, song cycles for voice, and instrumental music based on her poetry. Her poems are published under pseudonym eda bee in several art magazines and in a collective titled Because You Are Not Alone.

bad checks is the sonic playground of Eric Derr, a boundary-smashing musician who redefines genre and form through an unpredictable fusion of live percussion and electronic landscapes. Operating on the fringes of experimental classical, hyperpop, and avant-garde electronic music, bad checks' sound is hypercharged and immersive—an undulating blend of rhythm and chaos that fluctuates between orchestral space, art-gallery abstraction, and the release of the dance floor.

As a classical percussionist, Eric has performed with groups like Dal Niente, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the San Diego Symphony, and has appeared at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Disney Hall. His electronic works have been showcased at institutions like the Walters Museum of Art and Mengi in Reykjavik.

bad checks is all about energy, abstraction, and ecstasy. Every performance is a high-voltage invitation to explore a space where the human body meets digital logic, where rhythms are warped and sounds morph into new forms in real-time. Right now, they're working on a new album of maximalist bangers, and plotting an hour-long audiovisual trip for drums, modular synths, and live-processed sound—a journey as cerebral as it is visceral.

ERIC DERR AKA BAD CHECKS,
percussion & electronics

Eric Moderbacher is an artist exploring human interactions with instruments, signal processing and artificial intelligence using his background in computer programming. He organizes the San Diego Creative Coders and is a member of the San Diego modular synthesizer community. Eric is also the founder of The Open Source Appliance Foundation, a non-profit aiming to reduce private ownership of the fruits of human progress.

ERIC MODERBACHER, interdisciplinary artist

GABY ESPINA, mixed media artist

Gaby Espina is a mixed media artist that focuses primarily on sculpture, printmaking, and installation. The bulk of her artistic research goes into exploring the aspects of what it means to exist as a human through the use of body imagery, acknowledgement of mortality, and examining the shift between interlinking emotions.

Gaby grew up in San Diego, California and received her BA in Visual and Performing Arts from California State University, San Marcos. Her work has been shown in various galleries and institutions throughout San Diego.

HAN ZHANG, electronic musician

Han Zhang is a sound artist, computer musician, performer and engineer based in San Diego, California. She actively works on creative projects that explore the new form of multimedia participatory installation performances that deliver immersive interactive experience using sensors and advanced technology that serves her theatrical ideas. She is interested in discussing the collective comprehension of technology, art, and substantive human lives. In the realm of music technology and engineering, she is interested in exploring the interpretability and controllability of timbre in sound and designing musical instruments that incorporate innovative research results. Han is also an amateur radio technician and a nature enthusiast.

INDIA THOMPSON, sculptor

India Thompson is an interdisciplinary artist from San Diego, California, with a background in Applied Design. Her work explores themes of imagination, overlooked spaces, and discovery. Using a variety of techniques and materials, she creates immersive and contemplative pieces that invite viewers to reimagine the everyday and find wonder in the mundane.

JAMES KOO, percussionist

James Koo is a dedicated percussionist specializing in contemporary music, drawing from his background in Traditional Chinese percussion. Recent engagements include performances at the 2024 TROMP Concours, a session at the 2023 Percussive Arts Society International Convention, and a concerto performance with the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, performing Chen Yi's Percussion Concerto. He has appeared with ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and The Orchestra of the Americas. Collaborative works include artists such as Kaoru Watanabe (Silk Road Ensemble), folk contemporary dancer Jay Peng Zhang, and percussionist Dr. Michael Gould. He is working on an ongoing project with Chinese dance theorist and choreographer Dr. Fang Fei Miao. James holds a B.M. from The Boston Conservatory and an M.M. from the University of Michigan. He is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the ensemble red fish blue fish, directed by Steven Schick.

Joe Cantrell is a digital artist specializing in sound art, installations, and performances inspired by the implications of technological objects and practices. By using the physical remnants of these processes as raw materials, his work investigates the incessant acceleration of technological production, ownership, and obsolescence. He has performed and installed at numerous venues in the US and abroad, and has been honored with grants by New Music USA and the Creative Capital foundation, and the Qualcomm Institute Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences among others. Joe holds a BFA in music technology from Cal Arts, an MFA in digital arts and new media from UC Santa Cruz and a PhD in music from UC San Diego.

JOE CANTRELL, sound & performance artist

Jonathan Piper is a San Diego-based tubist and technologist. His work as a tubist centers on the exploration of sonic and gestural possibilities found at the limits of both the instrument and the performing body. Supported by extended techniques and live electronic processing, he combines elements of drone, doom, noise, free jazz, and contemporary idioms. He performs as a soloist and in a variety of duo projects, including with Ryan Ebaugh (1515), Michelle Lou (go by land), vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Meghann Welsh (Codex Confiteor), percussionist Eric Derr (Company Culture), drummer Nick Lesley, and more. Jonathan has also worked as a museum curator, recently guiding a multi-year renovation of and developing interactive exhibitions for the NAMM Museum of Making Music. As a scholar, he has researched and presented work on ontologies in digital media, online fandom practices, and embodiment in heavy metal music. Jonathan received degrees in musical performance at UC Los Angeles and music at UC San Diego, where he completed his dissertation Locating Experiential Richness in Doom Metal.

JONATHAN PIPER, sound artist & tuba player

Josh Mitchell is a researcher, musician, and composer, with a particular focus in all three of these areas on nonlinear feedback and chaotic dynamics. Josh is fascinated by the gritty sonic textures that arise from nonlinear and chaotic systems in “real-world” musical instruments, and strives to make these beautiful textures more accessible by applying similar systems from other areas of physics towards new computer-instruments.

JOSH MITCHELL, computer musician

Jules De Guzman (they/them) is a gender queer Filipino-Chinese multi media artist from San Diego. Their work in photography and interactive art embraces maximalism, reflecting on their experiences with hoarding, collection, and the exercise of eidetic memory. In recent years, Jules has been part of the ever expanding project of Olongapo Disco, focusing on joy and rest while honoring ancestry through the creation of altars. Their hope is to create more portals in their art where people can enter and question what engagements they are comforted by—beyond the ideas of morality and time.

Jules De Guzman, multimedia artist

JULIA CORDANI, soprano

Contemporary vocal trailblazer Julia Anne Cordani “creates an intense crossfire” in the artistic world (Frank Housh, The Arts in Real Life). Julia is described as “a clear, sparkling force” by Buffalo Rising and “a dazzling and sweeping delight” by Cleveland Classical, an adventurous vocal artist and director from Lewiston, New York. Passionate about the performance of contemporary repertoire alongside standard works, Julia has appeared in Buffalo as Alice in Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter (2016), Belinda in Dido and Aeneas (2017), Papagena in Die Zauberflöte (2018), Anne Truelove in The Rake’s Progress (2020), and Spirit in The Golden Ass (2024). With Sotto Voce, she premiered the role of Bird Spirit in Jessie Downs’ The Second Sight (2021) and sang The Queen of The Night in Die Zauberflöte (2024) and Suor Genovieffa in Suor Angelica (2024). With Buffalo Opera Unlimited, Julia has sung Oscar in Un ballo in maschera (2022) and Lucy in The Telephone (2023). An accomplished soloist, she has performed locally and nationally with the Women of Vivaldi, Ensemble Signal, Slee Sinfonietta, the Cleveland Syndicate for the New Arts, HEX Vocal Ensemble, and The Resonance Collective LA. In addition to her performance pursuits, Julia founded and serves as Executive Director for Buffalo-based choral collective INCIPIO. She holds two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree from the University at Buffalo in voice performance and is currently pursuing a doctorate in contemporary voice performance at the University of California, San Diego, under the tutelage of Grammy Award-winning soprano Susan Narucki.

Leila Khalilzadeh Aghdami is a San Diego-based artist whose work delves into the exploration of identity perception, focusing on the complexities of cultural and traditional norms. Her artistic practice engages with themes of gender, cultural identity, and memory, using these elements to create layered and thought-provoking works.

Aghdami’s cultural background and upbringing have significantly influenced her passion for art and critical thinking. Her work often challenges established norms, serving as a metaphor for the intricate tensions surrounding identity. She experiments with materials such as oil on canvas, vinyl, silk, and layered textiles. Her most recent works are two-dimensional oil paintings layered with vinyl, reflecting a nuanced interplay between materiality and concept.

She holds a Master of Fine Arts from San Diego State University and earned her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts (Studio) with honors from UC San Diego. She also received an associate degree in Liberal Arts and Science from San Diego Mesa College.

Her work has been exhibited in the San Diego-Tijuana region, Los Angeles, Europe, and other international venues.

LEILA KHALILZADEH ADHDAMI, interdisciplinary artist

LORA MATHIS, poet

Poet and artist Lora Mathis uses personal symbology to examine cycles of decay and renewal. Drawing from landscapes of domesticity and labor, their layered, intermedia work explores the potential for transformation within the everyday.

Mathis works across a variety of mediums, including poetry, sculpture, painting, and time-based art. Mathis is the author of The Snakes Came Back (Metatron, 2023), Here I Am In It (Burn All Books, 2023), and The Women Widowed to Themselves (Party Trick Press, 2020). Since 2014, they have performed poetry solo and in collaboration with artists such as musicians Matty Terrones, the HIRS Collective, and choreographer Angel Acuña. Their collaboration with Terrones culminated in the live album Sediment (Hello America, 2023).

Their visual work has been exhibited at MRKT Gallery (San Francisco), Junior High (Los Angeles), Bunker Projects (Pittsburgh), Ship in the Woods (Escondido), and Swish Projects (San Diego), among other spaces. Mathis lives in Oakland, California, and frequently works between there and San Diego.

Maria Antonia Eguiarte is an interdisciplinary artist, born in Lansing, Michigan and raised between Mexico City and California. She is currently based in San Diego, California. Antonia is engaged in gesture-based performance and object making. Since the start of her artistic exploration, Antonia has been drawn to vulnerability and care as radical political weapons for quiet gestural revolution. This has been the main focus of her practice as an artist, caregiver, hybrid storyteller, student, and teacher. Her gesture-based performance and object-making center on the possibilities of a transnational body that carries multigenerational knowledge of care. Using textiles, fibers and threads she draws from personal narrative, family and nation myths, non-linear and anti-hierarchical ways of knowledge, to disrupt her relationship with care, community and self.

MARIA ANTONIA EGUIARTE,
interdisciplinary artist

MARTIN GREEN, organist

San Diego native Martin Green enjoys a multi-faceted career as organist, singer, and conductor. He has performed both as solo recitalist and accompanist throughout the US, Mexico, Canada, and abroad. Martin has made guest appearances with the San Diego Symphony and has also appeared on NPR’s “Pipedreams Live.”

He has prepared choirs and accompanied for such notable conductors as Sir David Willcocks, John Rutter, Marvin Hamlisch, Jahja Ling, Martin Neary, and Duaine Wolfe. Martin is the Organist and Choirmaster of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral near Balboa Park, San Diego.

As a singer, he has enjoyed being a member of many of the San Diego region’s professional chorale ensembles. He has appeared as a baritone, tenor, and counter-tenor soloist in a wide range of venues in Southern California and Mexico from small churches to symphony orchestras.

Matthew Hebert has been working under the studio name eleet warez since completing his undergraduate studies in the mid-90s. The name is borrowed from hacker culture and suggests the technical sophistication, improvisational spirit, and freewheeling appropriation that is essential to his work. Matthew creates work that deals with technology and its effects on the domestic environment and our sense of space and place. He takes recognizable forms and layers new use and meaning onto them. Ultimately, generating content through interaction between the object, the environment, and the user.

Matthew Hebert’s work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco; The California Center for the Art, Escondido; The Chicago Cultural Center, and Core77 in New York. Matthew received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley; and his Master of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts. He has taught at several schools including the University of Wisconsin – Madison, CalArts, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently Associate Professor of Art at San Diego State University.

MATTHEW HEBERT, multimedia artist

MATTY TERRONES, sound artist

San Diego-based sound artist Matty Terrones is concerned with the nuances of everyday life — natural and manufactured; the urban sphere encroaching on the rural sphere; silence and noise; the continual and ephemeral process of life. As a self-taught musician, Terrones uses rudimentary techniques and lo-fi objects in their improvised sound practice. Terrones has been a longtime fixture in San Diego's DIY music community, organizing shows for over 10 years. They also front the rock band Neutral Shirt, and have sound/poetry collaborations with Lora Mathis, Nick Bernal, and Adam Gnade. Photo by Evan Demiancyzk.

MICHELLE MONTJOY, textile artist

Collective performative textile work of Michelle Montjoy, Anna O’Cain, Bhavna Mehta, Sarah Bricke, Kline Swonger, Leah Ollman, Gail Goldman, Valerie O’Keefe, Helena Westra, Melissa Walter, Sasha Koozel Riebstein, Lauren Lockhart, Kara West, Katie Ruiz, Jenny Armer, Jennifer DePoyen and others.

A circle of women
In a ritual
Leaving evidence
In a ritual
Marking time, accrual and loss
In a ritual
Of camaraderie and resistance.

natalia merlano gomez, vocalist

Natalia Merlano Gomez is an experimental music performer and composer who explores extended vocal techniques, graphical notation, improvisation, text, visuals, and electronic sounds. Her research examines the performative aspects of voice and text beyond traditional singing. It also analyses the experimental music communities in Latin America, as well as interdisciplinary vocal performers from a decolonial perspective. She integrates voice with electronic devices like pedals and modular synthesizers into her practice. Her solo albums, "Resonances Entrelazadas" (2022) and "CINCO" (2023), along with the collaborative project "Unrestricted Lanes" (2024) with Duo Lingua (David Aguila) and Bogotana Records, are part of her recent works.

Rose Qianyi Sun works at the intersection of computational musicology, music cognition, and artificial intelligence, with a mission to make creative practices more inclusive. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Music Technology from Georgia Tech. Her current research centers on developing interpretable evaluation metrics for AI-generated music, drawing from principles in music theory and perception. As a traditional Chinese Guqin player, Rose loves to explore how technology can facilitate the composition and consumption of understudied music traditions. She is also a flautist with a repertoire in classical, rock and pop, and experimental music.

ROSE Qianyi sun, computer musician

San Diego New Verbal Workshop is a community choir formed in 2023. They perform vocal music from the mid-20th century to the present day, and maintain an open policy and welcome anyone who wants to sing, regardless of their experience level or music literacy. The choir’s mission is to provide a music-making environment that encourages people to engage with their voices and explore new performance concepts, embracing a wide range of expression.

SAN DIEGO NEW VERBAL WORKSHOP, choir

Sashank Kanchustambam is a San Diego-based theatre artist originally from India. An aspiring playwright, he also acts and stage manages, often saying, "I will do anything and everything the theatre asks of me." Last year, he was fortunate to have two of his short plays, That One Girl at the Airport (produced by Trinity Theatre) and Only I Can Say That (produced by Blindspot Collective), brought to life on stage. As a founding member of Boy King Theatre Collective, Sashank is thrilled to showcase the “muddy” brainchild of one of his favorite collaborators, Tommy Huebner.

Sashank Kanchustambam,
Performance artist

Teresita Carson (b. Mexico) is an artist working across disciplines, including moving image, fiber, and installation. Taking an irreverent feminist approach to world and counter-archive building, she explores the abstract intersection between the historical, the speculative, indigenous cosmogonies, and magical peripheries. Recent venues presenting Carson’s work include Mana Contemporary, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, and the 2024 Ground Floor Biennial. She has screened experimental films internationally, notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Slamdance Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Light Matter Film Festival, Festival Internacional de Cine con Medios Alternativos, Antimatter, and Experiments in Cinema. Carson has received grants from DCASE’s Individual Artists Program (IAP), the Artists Run Chicago Fund, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She resides in Chicago, Illinois in the land of the Three Fires Confederacy, Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe Nations.

TERESITA CARSON, FILMMAKER

Tommy Huebner is a multidisciplinary performance artist, stunt performer, and actor currently living and working out of San Diego. After graduating from UC San Diego with degrees in Theatre and Philosophical Anthropology, Tommy has developed his skills in embodied practice and performance through tenures at both the Accademia Dell'Arte in Arezzo and the International Stunt School in Seattle. Recent credits include Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (UC San Diego) and Ranger in Trash Panda-monium (Blindspot Collective). Tommy's current projects explore sensory connection, liminal spaces, states of transformation, and the beauty in everyday behaviors. Tommy is inspired by his family and ancestors, the natural world, and the ordinary things he finds around him.

TOMMY HUEBNER, performance artist

WILLIAM KUO, composer

William Kuo’s practice infuses sound-making with cross-disciplinary investigation, questioning how the “sounding” and “un-sounding” co-exist to imply alternative forms of listening and timekeeping. Drawing attention to the sensing-self hearing itself from within, he seeks to invoke asynchronous experiences of time arising from encounters with unfamiliar pasts and unformed futures.

Yvette Roman is a fronteriza artist, curator, and educator dedicated to making art accessible through community collaboration. Her practice and memory work explore collective memories, oral histories, and traditions, deeply influenced by the borderlands of San Diego and Tijuana. Yvette leads workshops and reflective circles to build community archives and uses a multimedia approach to preserve and share history. Yvette is the recipient of Far South/Border North; Cuentame, Park Social; Collective Memory, Art for Planetary Health; Letters to Mother Earth, and is the founder of Residencia Ranchito Aurora and Cr34tive Gathering.