- Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson (born Laura Phillips Anderson, on June 5 1947, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois) is an American experimental performance artist and musician. She is the inventor of the tape-bow violin, which has a tape head in place of strings, and a strip of magnetic tape in place of the hairs on a bow. - Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono Lennon (小野 洋子 "Ono Yōko (ONO Yōko)", born February 18 1933) is a Japanese-American artist and musician. She gained international fame because of her marriage to British musician John Lennon. She currently lives in New York City. Despite having a kanji reading, Ono's name appears in katakana (ヨーコ・オノ Yōko Ono) in the Japanese press and on album credits. - Miranda July
Miranda July (born February 15, 1974) is a performance artist, musician, writer, actress and film director. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California, after having lived for many years in Portland, Oregon. Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger, she works under the surname of "July," which can be traced to a character in a short story by a high-school friend. She was born in Barre, Vermont, the daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. - Karen Finley
Karen Finley (b. 1956, Evanston, Illinois) is a controversial American performance artist, whose theatrical pieces and recordings have often been labelled "obscene" due to their graphic depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement. She was notably one of the NEA Four, four performance artists whose grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were vetoed in 1990 by John Frohnmayer after the process was condemned by Senator Jesse Helms under "decency" issues. - Annie Sprinkle
Annie M. Sprinkle (born Ellen F. Steinberg on in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, North America) is a former prostitute, stripper, porn film star, cable television host, porn magazine editor and writer, and sex film producer. She received a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in 1986. Currently, Sprinkle works as a performance artist and sex educator. According to "Curve" magazine, Sprinkle, who is bisexual, … - Stelarc
Stelarc (born Stelios Arcadiou on June 19 1946 in Limassol, Cyprus to Greek Cypriot parents) is an Australian performance artist whose works focus heavily on futurism and extending the capabilities of the human body. As such, most of his pieces are centered around his concept that "the human body is obsolete". He currently serves as Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University in Nottingham, … - David Lynch
David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, painter, video artist, and performance artist. Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations, for his direction of "The Elephant Man" (1980), "Blue Velvet" (1986), and "Mulholland Drive" (2001). He has won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival. - Leigh Bowery
Leigh Bowery (March 26, 1961, in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia – December 31, 1994, in London, United Kingdom) was a performance artist, club creature, and clothing designer. He died of AIDS and one of his last requests after his 5 week sickness was for nobody to ever know his middlename. - Andy Kaufman
Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman (January 17, 1949 - May 16, 1984) was an American entertainer and performance artist. Though many refer to him as a comedian, Kaufman did not self-identify as one. He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood; instead, he saw himself as a practitioner of anti-humor or dada absurdist performance art. - Tim Miller
Tim Miller (b. September 22, 1958, Pasadena, California) is an American performance artist, whose pieces frequently involve gay identity and immigration issues. He was one of the NEA Four, four performance artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants were vetoed in 1990 by NEA chair John Frohnmayer. He was born in Pasadena, but grew up in nearby Whittier. :"I was seventeen going on eighteen and I was desperate for love and dick. I searched everywhere for it. - Mark McGowan
Mark McGowan is a UK-based performance artist currently working at the Camberwell College of Arts, who has entered the news a number of times for his unconventional approach to public protest and demonstration. He grew up in Peckham, on the North Peckham Estate, and has a degree in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Art, and an MA from Goldsmiths College - Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a Mexican-born writer, performance artist and educator. He moved to the U.S. in 1978. Most of his work concerns the interface between Mexican and U.S. culture. His interdisciplinary projects and books explore borders, physical, cultural and otherwise, between his two countries and between the mainstream U.S. and Latino cultures in general: the U.S.-Mexican border itself, immigration, cross-cultural identity, … - Chris Burden
Chris Burden (born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946) is an American artist. He studied visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and the University of California, Irvine from 1969 to 1971. In 1978 he became a Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, … - Vito Acconci
Vito Hannibal Acconci (born January 24, 1940) is a Bronx, New York-based architect, landscape architect, and installation artist. His father was an Italian immigrant who took him to museums and opera houses and gave him his first arts education. Vito attended Regis High School on New York City. He received a B.A. in literature from the College of the Holy Cross in 1962 and an M.F.A. in literature and poetry from the University of Iowa. - David Blaine
David Blaine (born David Blaine White on April 4, 1973 in Brooklyn, New York, USA) is an American illusionist and stunt performer. He made his name as a performer of street and close-up magic. His father was Spanish-Puerto Rican and his mother, Patrice White, was of Jewish and Russian origin. - Kate Bornstein
Kate Bornstein is a transgender author, playwright, performance artist and gender theorist. Bornstein, born Albert Bornstein on March 15, 1948, underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1986. : "I know I'm not a man...and I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not a woman, either...The trouble is, we're living in a world that insists we be one or the other." - Kate Bornstein in "Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, … - Bob Flanagan
Bob Flanagan (December 27 1952-January 4 1996) was an American writer, poet, musician, performance artist, and comic. He was born in New York City and grew up in Glendale, California. He studied literature at California State University, Long Beach and the University of California, Irvine. He moved to Los Angeles in 1976. In 1978, he published his first book, "The Kid Is A Man." He also worked with the improv comedy group The Groundlings. - Holly Hughes
Holly Hughes (b. 1955) is an internationally acclaimed performance artist whose work maps the troubled fault lines of identity. Her combination of poetic imagery and political satire has earned her wide attention and placed her work at the center of America's culture wars. In 1990 Hughes earned national attention as one of the so-called NEA Four, artists whose funding from the National Endowment for the Arts was vetoed by endowment chairman John Frohnmayer on the basis of subject matter. - Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy (born in 1945 in Salt Lake City, Utah) is a performance artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on the study at the San Francisco Art Institute getting his B.F.A. in painting. Then in 1972 he studied film, video, and art at the University of Southern California getting his M.F.A. From 1982 until the present he has taught performance, video, installation, … - Ann Magnuson
Ann Magnuson (January 4, 1956) is an American actress, performance artist, and nightclub performer who first gained prominence in the 1985 film "Desperately Seeking Susan". - Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta (18 November 1948 - 8 September 1985) was a Cuban American artist famous for her performance art and video works. Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba but moved to the United States at a young age. At 13, she and her older sister were exiled from Cuba because her family opposed the revolutionary government. They were placed in foster care in Iowa through Operation Peter Pan run by the U.S. government. - Ron Athey
Ron Athey (born December 16, 1961) is an American artist associated with body art and with extreme performance art. He has performed in the U.S. and internationally (especially in the UK and Europe). He has also, with Vaginal Davis, curated performance art festivals in the U.S. and in Europe. As an artist, Athey uses his body to explore controversial subject matters such as the relationship between desire, sexuality, and self-mutilation. - The Scary Guy
At 6ft tall, 18 stone and tattooed from head to toe ... The Scary Guy is quite possibly the most powerful Agent For Change on the planet today! The Power to Create World Peace Lives Within Each and Everyone of Us. - The Scary Guy 2000 - Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) is an American performance artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. A member of the Fluxus group, her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relationship to social bodies. Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, … - Suzanne Muldowney
Suzanne Muldowney (a.k.a. "Underdog Lady" and "Mary Poppins", born 13 August 1952 in Camden, New Jersey) is a performance artist best known for her dance interpretation of the cartoon character Underdog in parades and on the Howard Stern show. - Klaus Nomi
Klaus Nomi (January 24, 1944 - August 6, 1983) was a German countertenor noted for remarkable vocal performances and an unusual, elfin stage persona. Nomi is remembered for bizarrely theatrical live performances, heavy make-up, unusual costumes, and a highly stylized signature hairdo which flaunted a receding hairline. - Nea Four
The "NEA Four", Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, were performance artists whose proposed grants from the United States government's National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were vetoed by John Frohnmayer in June 1990. Grants were overtly vetoed on the basis of subject matter after the artists had successfully passed through a peer review process. The artists won their case in court in 1993 and were awarded amounts equal to the grant money in question. - Hermann Nitsch
Hermann Nitsch (b. 1938) is an Austrian artist who works in experimental and multimedia modes. He is associated with the Vienna Actionists, and like them conceives of his art outside traditional categories of genre. In the 1950s, Nitsch conceived of the Orgien Mysterien Theater (which roughly translates as "Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries"), staging nearly 100 performances between the years of 1962 and 1998. - Danny Hoch
Danny Hoch is an actor, playwright and director whose plays Pot Melting , Some People , and Jails, Hospitals, Hip-Hop have garnered many awards including two OBIES, an NEA Solo Theatre Fellowship, Sundance Writers Fellowship, CalArts/Alpert Award In Theatre and a Tennessee Williams Fellowship. His theatre work has toured to 50 U.S. cities and 15 countries. - Michael Smith
Michael Smith is an American artist born in Chicago, in 1951. He has been an influential figure in performance art, video art, and installation art since the early 1980s. He is best known for his performance persona named Mike, the central figure in an ongoing series of narrative projects. Mike, an innocent character who continually falls victim to trends and fashions and his own naive ambitions, … - Rachel Rosenthal
Rachel Rosenthal is an interdisciplinary artist, a teacher, and animal rights activist based in Los Angeles, California. She is best known for her full-length performance art pieces which she has toured, with The Rachel Rosenthal Company, to numerous venues both within the United States and abroad. Theatres and festivals she has visited include: the Dance Theatre Workshop and Serious Fun! at Lincoln Center in New York City, the Kaaitheater in Brussels, … - Eleanor Antin
Eleanor Antin (born 1935 in New York City, New York) is a performance artist, film-maker and installation artist. For more than three decades, Antin has been a notable presence on the American art scene. A native of New York, she eventually made her home in Southern California. She has been granted dozens of solo exhibitions, as well as represented in countless group exhibitions. Sometimes compared to contemporaries such as Carolee Schneemann and Judy Chicago, … - Linda Montano
Linda M. Montano, a seminal figure in contemporary feminist performance artist, has been actively performing since the mid-1960s. Her work investigates the relationship between art and life through intricate, life-altering ceremonies, some of which last for seven or more years. She is interested in the way artistic ritual, often staged as individual interactions or collaborative workshops, … - Dennis Cooper
Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is a poet, writer and performance artist, most noted for transforming the visual/verbal aesthetic of punk into its written counterpart. - Joey Arias
Joey Arias is a New York based performance artist, cabaret singer, and drag artiste. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he was six when he moved with his family to Los Angeles. After singing with rock bands and a stint with famed improvisational group the Groundlings, he moved to New York City in the mid-70's and eventually got a job at the Fiorucci designer clothing store. He became friends with alternative icon Klaus Nomi, … - David Wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz (September 14, 1954 - July 22, 1992) was a gay painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s. He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, … - Dan Graham
Dan Graham (born 1942) is a New York based U.S. artist. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and a well-versed art critic and theorist. <small>"Two-Way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth". "Family in a box, Minneapolis" photo by Wendy Seltzer</small> He was born in Urbana, Illinois, but moved to Winfield Park, New Jersey at age 3, and then to Westfield, NJ at age 13. - Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor (aka "Monty Cantsin", and "Amen!") (born 27 August, 1949 in Budapest) is a Hungarian born Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and founder of Neoism. In the 1970s, he studied medicine, but also participated in the underground arts scene of communist Budapest around Laszlo Beke as a folk singer. - Harry Houdini
Harry Houdini (March 24, 1874 - October 311926), whose real name was Ehrich Weiss (which was changed from Erich Weisz when he emigrated to America), was a Hungary-born American magician, escapologist (widely regarded as one of the greatest ever), stunt performer, as well as an investigator of spiritualists, film producer, actor, and an amateur aviator. - Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás is an American-born avant-garde performance artist, vocalist, keyboardist and composer. Known for her distinctive, operatic voice, which has a three and a half octave range, Galás has been described as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror". Galás often shrieks, howls, and seems to imitate glossolalia in her performances. Her works largely concentrate on the topics of suffering, despair, condemnation, injustice and loss of dignity.
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