issue 37 | O C T O B E R |
Melissa Word is an artist, performer, and facilitator researching presence and the politicized body. Melissa makes highly collaborative, often improvisational social events, part underground disco club, part psychic-medium group therapy, playing at the crossroads of power, identity, divination, and the quest for pleasure and healing inside systems of domination.
Her work has been presented by the High Museum of Art, Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, Dashboard, The Lucky Penny, Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech, Wonderroot, The University of North Carolina, Triptych Collective and KIN. She founded KIN in 2013 in Birmingham, Alabama to create an experimental art and performance platform for emerging artists living in less artistically saturated and resourced cities around the Southeast.
Melissa is a teaching artist at the High Museum and Alliance Theatre, and is program facilitator for the High’s Summer Teen Internship program. She graduated with honors from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2011.
She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Photo credit: jonathan bouknight
Hez Stalcup is an experimental dance artist based in Atlanta, GA. He began dancing professionally in 2012. Since then, Hez has created dance and performance pieces for Eyedrum, Dance Truck, ELEVATE Atlanta, WonderRoot, Dance Chance, Flux Projects, Sumptuary Arts, The Hambidge Center and The Lucky Penny. Hez was a 2014/2015 Leap Year Artist with MINT Gallery, and a Resident Artist in The Lucky Penny’s Work Room studio until 2018. His goal is to create smart, queer, emotionally condensed, compelling work.
Ginny Cook is a performer, event producer and curious bitch living in Chicago. She likes to feel good, is always on time, and loves animal prints. She has performed in nine years of The Fly Honey Show and works for creative studio, Land and Sea Dept. Email her if you're ever in the city, she loves to give recommendations : cook.virginia@gmail.com
Shawna Floyd aka Shawna Floyd Artist makes art to hear herself think, feel and be over the racket of—tell it, bell!—"the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy," over the din of trauma, over the liveliness of her family; to do some of her clearest thinking and knowing; to enshrine messages to herself and to her children; to gnaw back on what is gnawing at her; to get and stay free. She is a poet, writer, singer-songwriter, lover, gardener/landscaper in the capitol A of the Dirty South who recently sent her son to a one semester art boarding school on the occasion of his senior year in high school. She is known in some circles and hearts as Shawna J. Floyd. J is for justice.
Photo credit: Annabeth balance