Environmental Performance Agency

Environmental Performance Agency

2018 Ecotopian Toolmakers

The Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) is an artist collective using artistic, social, and embodied / kinesthetic practices to advocate for the agency of all living performers co-creating our environment, specifically through the lens of spontaneous urban plants, native or migrant.

Catherine Grau is a New York based artist and EPA agent. In her predominantly collaborative practice, she fosters embodied research methodologies, collective experiences and intimate encounters that aim to generate processes of de-colonizing and unlearning anthropocentric paradigms.

Andrea Haenggi has a research-based creative practice she calls Ethno-choreo-botan-ography that employs her roles as a choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, dancer, radical care sitter, somatic educator and EPA agent. Her sensual-bodily-tough works confront audiences with a world beyond humans.

Christopher Lee Kennedy is an EPA agent, transdisciplinary artist and educator who creates site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’ and the biocultural possibility of interspecies agency and collaboration.

Ellie Irons is an artist, educator, and EPA-agent based in Brooklyn & Troy, NY. She works in a variety of media, from drawing to gardening, to reveal how human and nonhuman lives intertwine with ecological systems. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Electronic Arts at RPI in Troy, NY.

Aislinn Pentecost-Farren is an artist and curator with particular focus on parks, public history and ecology. Currently she curates a site-specific environmental artist residency and after-school program with Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, and is an artist and curator for a series of community-engaged art projects based out of Bartram’s Garden, the first botanical garden in the United States.

Thomas Choinacky crafts spatial experiences through genre-defying performance. A queer, interdisciplinary artist Thomas has been the grantee of 1812 Productions’ Jilline Ringle Solo Performance Program and has been awarded artist residencies at Kultuuritehas Polymer in Tallinn, Estonia and Elsewhere in Greensboro, NC. He is a founding member of Applied Mechanics, a radical, immersive theater collective based in Philadelphia, PA.