MARTHA WILSON is a pioneering gallery director and feminist artist. In 1976, she founded Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.—an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion, and preservation of artists’ books, temporary installation, and performance art. As an artist, Wilson creates innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity. The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter describes her as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s.” Wilson has been granted fellowships for performance art from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the recipient of a Bessie Award, Courage Award for the Arts, Obie Award, and Richard Massey Foundation-White Box Arts and Humanities Award. Wilson received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. www.marthawilson.com
ORAISON H. LARMON specializes in archiving, curating, and researching performance art collections. While working at New York University, Larmon processed archival materials for the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. They have served as the curator of the two-day event Performing the Archive (2013), the co-curator of the full-scale exhibition Desperate Archives (2014), and the curator of the performance art program for the Radical Archives conference (2014). Larmon’s work addressing the practical, theoretical, and methodological challenges of archiving performance art has been presented at The New School, Pratt Institute, and New York University, among other institutions. Their current research examines how the archival body of performance art enacts a broader historical discourse through its material, corporeal, and digital compositions. Larmon is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. www.oraisonlarmon.info