2022 MOONBLOOD Summer Fellowship
Boss Witch Productions is committed to service and support of our community.
In honor of our deep love and appreciation for artist Ron Athey, we are excited to announce our inaugural MOONBLOOD Summer Fellowship. An iconic creator with an incredible legacy and body of work, Ron Athey provides inspiration, leadership, and mentorship to a community of artists across the world. His work has helped open doors for generations of creatives, especially queer and trans artists, and those working in disciplines traditionally regarded as transgressive. We created the Boss Witch MOONBLOOD Summer Fellowship in honor of Ron, celebrating everything he has taught us about building community and how we would like to give back to these systems of support.
The Boss Witch MOONBLOOD Summer Fellowship offers organizational support by connecting established artists with supportive artist fellows in the Los Angeles area to provide logistical and administrative assistance during the summer months. This award is available annually by internal nomination and availability of funding.
OUR INAUGURAL 2022 FELLOWSHIP IS AWARDED TO ARTIST RON ATHEY .
Artist fellow in 2022 is Zeina Baltagi.
Ron Athey has been working at the vanguard of performance art for 25 years. Self-taught, his work developed out of post-punk/pre-goth scenes and begins with Premature Ejaculation (PE), an early 1980s collaboration with Rozz Williams. Their approach to performance art was informed by the club actions of Johanna Went and the formulation of Industrial Culture, the idea of psycho/neuro acoustics in sound performance. In the 1990s, Athey formed a company of performers and made Torture Trilogy, a series of works that addressed the AIDS pandemic directly through memorializing and philosophical reflection.
This work is characterized by the physical intensity of 1970s body-art canon, such as COUM Transmission, Carolee Schneeman and the Viennese Actionists, which toured internationally. The trilogy’s final chapter, Deliverance, was commissioned and premiered at the ICA London. In the 2000s, Athey developed genre-stretching theatrical works like Joyce and The Judas Cradle, and a series of major solo performances such as The Solar Anus, Sebastiane, Self-Obliteration Solo and Incorruptible Flesh, a series of solo performances that reflect Athey’s collaborations with the late Lawrence Steger.
Gifts of the Spirit: Prophecy, Automatism and Discernment is Athey’s vision for an automatic writing machine brought to life in collaboration with composer and opera director Sean Griffin. Athey has been writing Gifts of the Spirit since 1980 when he moved away from the Pentecostal and Spiritualist practices in which he was raised. These writings describe his experience of growing up as a “living saint” within an environment of abuse, vibrating with the energy of the otherworldly and doing so without faith.
Currently Athey is presenting Acephalous Monster, is a performance with projections, readings, lectures, appropriated text and sound. Largely inspired by the secret society of Acéphale, Andre Masson’s design of a mascot, and drawing parallels between pre-Occupation 30s Paris with pre-Operation Spanner UK, the work is an attempt to make sense of a current reality where neo-fascism is mutating, creeping, and marching.
Zeina Baltagi is an artist and educator, raised between California and Lebanon. Her work reveals intimate transformations in relation to lived experiences with physical, emotional, economic and cultural mobility.
Zeina holds a B.A. from California State University, Northridge, and an M.F.A. degree from University California, Davis. She has exhibited work with; Basement Gallery, LADOT, Union Station, Los Angeles Road Concerts, PØST, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, bG gallery, and Klowden Mann. As well as numerous University galleries including; University of Southern California, Claremont Graduate University, California Lutheran University and California State University, Northridge.