CURATORS
YF is happy to introduce two guest curators, Eleanor Kipping (NYC) and Rana San (Seattle, US), who will collaborate alongside Babette Pendleton to work with selected artists to co-curate a long-term festival including remote and in-person programming. As an artist driven festival, curators and staff will enter into a long-form durational engagement, infusing the administrative sides of the festival with similar thematic explorations as the artists, and dedicating their time and actions to practicing and expanding upon Care Methodologies amongst one another.
ELEANOR KIPPING (NYC, US)
New York-based socially engaged artist, educator, and arts administrator Eleanor Kipping’s interdisciplinary practice explores the experience of the Black Diasporic female body in the united of amerikkka through the examination and deconstruction of historical and contemporary narratives. She is interested in the public, private, and civic negotiations of race, gender, and class in addition to the effect and practice of violence, and surveillance on the body. This hybrid work exists as performance, video, and photography, poetry/spoken word, collaborative education, educational collaboration, installation, & writing but often draws on other methods such as social practice, and design. Eleanor is originally from Maine and has a BS in Video Production from the New England School of Communications (2007), an MFA from the University of Maine (2018) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018. Eleanor currently lives in Brooklyn and works as the Audience Activist at HERE, an off-Broadway theatre venue and residency program in Lower Manhattan. eleanorkipping.com @elfelicia
RANA SAN (Seattle, US)
Rana San is an artist and arts administrator whose creative practice melds dreamwork, written word, body in motion, video poetry, and analog photography. She’s interested in the ways we relate to ourselves, each other, our surroundings, the unknown, and the new meanings that are made in spaces where artistic mediums meet. In community, Rana crafts collective experiences that elevate the work of artists and activists using film, media, and contemporary performing arts to incite connection. She has curated and produced cultural festivals, museum programs, and intimate creative salons in Seattle, Istanbul, and Barcelona and serves as the Artistic Director at Northwest Film Forum.
BABETTE PENDLETON (NYC, Baltimore, US)
Babette DeLafayette Pendleton creates activated environments through her multidisciplinary work as an artist, curator-producer, and creative entrepreneur. Babette utilizes her background as a choreographer and performance artist to build immersive body, sculpture, and multimedia based installations and performances. Babette explores work which encompasses intentional, investigative collaboration and believes in the kind of artwork that involves experimentation and expansion of medium, complexity, social engagement, and a rethinking of traditional approaches to curation and presentation. Her professional practice currently brings awareness to the significance and study of time through a multitude of cultural practices and artistic mediums while facilitating community involvement in historical and contemporary thought surrounding durational performance art. Babette supports the work of dissent and disruption in socially regulated time and culture, and Live Works that resist traditional models of consumption.
She began her early training at Baltimore School for the Arts and received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Curatorial Practice at MICA in Baltimore. Babette is the Director and Co-Curator of Yellow Fish.
FENJA FRANCES (Minneapolis, Seattle, US)
Fenja Frances (they/them or she/her) is a semi-nomadic artist with an equally roving interest in performing, creating, producing, curating, and social disruption through radical empathy and action. Fenja's artistic work is unlimited by form—playing with whatever necessary in order to invigorate sense memory, build/subvert expectation, and create conditions through which audiences can have a collective emotional experience. This sometimes looks like choreography, film, burlesque, comedy, durational performance, environmental installation, or costume. Fenja has curated and produced staged, site-specific, long-distance, and immersive performances of all kinds. They have been active in New York City, London (UK), Seattle, and their hometown of Minneapolis (MN). They began working professionally while attending high school at St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists (MN), and received their BFA from Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle) in 2017. Fenja Frances acts as the Assistant Director of Yellow Fish.
LIVIA XIE (LA, Chicago, US)
Livia Xie is an artist, graphic designer, and illustrator. Having moved from city to city, country to country throughout her life, her practice explores the intersection of place, memory, and identity in art and design, specifically through the lens of her Eastern cultural heritage and Western upbringing. Fascinated by the versatility of graphics to tell and shape narrative, Livia engages with multiple mediums to create experimental books, paintings and prints, and immersive installations. She has designed exhibition graphics and catalogues for exhibitions at the Bund One Art Museum, Shanghai including Ukiyo-e: A Dream Journey to Edo and Monet: Impression Sunrise. She received her BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MA in Graphic Design from Maryland Institute College of Art. Livia currently oversees Art Direction and Design at Yellow Fish.
