ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Scott Andrew is a multimedia artist, working in video, installation, performance, and new media. He creates speculative fantasies that peer into otherworldly portals and voids. Scott has most notably exhibited with the Institute for New Feeling at MoMA’s PopRally (NYC), Recess (NYC), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa, TX), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Black Cube (Denver, CO), the Hammer Museum (LA), the J. Paul Getty Museum (LA), as well as many regional, national, and international venues.

Scott is an educator, advising and teaching animation, video, and performance courses as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Pittsburgh, and with the CMU Pre-college program. Scott has taught at Youngstown State University, Seaton Hill University, Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School, and has conducted workshops at the Andy Warhol Museum, Mattress Factory, and Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

Scott is a curator of TQ Live!, with Joseph Hall and Suzie Silver, an annual LGBTQIA variety performance at the Andy Warhol Museum. Along with Angela Washko, Scott has started a new curatorial performance series called Fail-Safe that recently debuted at the Glitterbox Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA. Other previous curatorial projects include the drift and the Institute for New Feeling’s Felt Book. 

Scott’s work is inherently collaborative in nature, spanning many modes of inquiry, processes, and themes, including investigations into queerness, queer aesthetics, divas + camp + kitsch + drag, voids and vortexes, dominance and submission, and speculative fantasies. Previous collaborators have included The Institute for New Feeling with Agnes Bolt and Nina Sarnelle, TQ Live! with Suzie Silver and Joseph Hall, ‘Subsurface: Site Specific Sight and Sound’ with Jesse Stiles, ‘The Drift’, with Steve Gurysh, ‘The Long Song’ with Jennifer Meridian, Afronaut(a) with Alisha Wormsley, ‘The Diva Saga’ with John Musser/Veronica Bleaus, Fail-Safe with Angela Washko, among others.

Jesse Factor creates dance projects inhabiting divas, queer nostalgia, and longing. Using the body to re- think and to re-imagine performance and gender, the work endeavors to “remember into the future”. Factor’s growing performance repertory is informed by traditions of theater, dance modernism, and drag. Jesse employs the aesthetics of camp and genderfuck through diligent creative research. The performance work pushes a hyper-theatrical body into innovative theatrical scenarios. Jesse’s solo performance reckons with the past and future of queer aesthetics, legends, and desires, often through the medium of femiconicity. Factors studied channeling of diva icons in exile–from time and bodies– hauntingly rejects the impressions they’ve left behind.

Jesse Factor’s work is consistently recognized for physical virtuosity, dramaturgical rigor, and creative audacity. Factor’s ongoing Marthagany series has been enthusiastically received at the American College Dance Association, Blunderland Variety Show at Brooklyn’s infamous House of Yes, Boston Contemporary Dance Festival, City Center Studios NYC, Donatella Queer Variety Show in Pittsburgh, PA, Fierce! Queer Festival in Toronto, ON, Flyover Festival in Iowa City, IA, KYLD Performance Series in Philadelphia, PA, Midwest RADfest in Kalamazoo, MI, OUTsider Fest in Austin, TX and PEARLpresents in Pittsburgh, PA. Jesse’s additional dance work, including Mommie Queerest, Relic, and Kween Kong have been selected for presentation at the American College Dance Association Gala, Chicago Harvest Contemporary Dance Festival, Greenspace NYC, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery NYC, Suite Summer Festival NYC, and the Tank NYC. Factor received the Iowa Arts Fellowship (2015-2016) and an Obermann Graduate Institute Fellowship (2017) at the University of Iowa. Jesse danced professionally with the Martha Graham Dance Company and Graham II, received a BFA in Drama with honors from Tisch/NYU, and an MFA in Dance from the University of Iowa.