These seven artists, representing a wide range of disabilities and artistic disciplines, have been working together for nine months to incubate, develop, and produce this performance, with the direction of Nomy Lamm:



Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi

Colleen Nagle

Fayza Bundalli

Lateef McLeod

Matthew Blanchard

Redwolf Painter

Tee



Sins Invalid is a non-profit organization that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists. Our performance work explores themes of sexuality, embodiment, and the disabled body, stripping taboos off sexuality and disability, and offering a vision of beauty that includes all bodies and communities.



Artist Bios:



Chun-shan (Sandie) Yi makes body adornments for the disabled bodies with metals, fabrics and found objects. Her work examines the potential of art to address the relationship between the body and social standards pertaining to beauty and disability. She has a BFA and MA in art therapy from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She had worked as an art therapist for four years in Chicago and Taiwan before she began pursuing a MFA degree at UC Berkeley in 2009. She has exhibited in Chicago, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Berkeley, Prague and Hong Kong. She was featured in PISTIL magazine, Fall 2005 and was the recipient of 2006 Disability Arts and Culture Honor. She recently published an article in an edited book in art therapy.



Colleen Nagle lives in San Francisco where she writes and creates music about the intersection of hope, hardship, and mental health. Colleen's creativity also extends onto the web, where she has been building web sites for nonprofits, small businesses, and community driven projects for a living for the past 13 years. During her artist in residency with Sins Invalid, she has worked collaboratively to create music and words to incorporate into the performance.



Fayza Bundalli is a poet, femme, a healer in a long line of medicine womyn. Vancouver-grown and San Francisco-based, her poetry connects her South Asian roots to her queer identity. Fayza has been published in numerous undergraduate student journals, from philosophy to gender studies, and is currently completing her Masters of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, where she co-chaired the Diversity Task Force. She interns at the AIDS Health Project in San Francisco.



Lateef McLeod is a phenomenal black poet with cerebral palsy who just published his first poetry book entitled A Declaration Of A Body Of Love this year. He is also in process of writing a novel tentatively called The Third Eye Is Crying. He was also a cast member of the 2007 Sins Invalid performance. He works at United Cerebral Palsy of the Golden Gate as a grant writer and blogger and for the World Institute of Disability as an intern. He has earned a BA in English from UC Berkeley and a MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. You can gain more information about Lateef from his blog at teefdabiggafigga.blogspot.com.



Matthew D. Blanchard - Born & bred a White Trash Euro-mutt Slut American, “QHereKidSF” escaped the doubled-locked, triple-chained closets of conservative Southeastern Virginia, only to be embraced by the welcoming arms of GAY MECCA’s chaotically corrupt, Crystal-lined, “Tina-torn, AIDS-quilted” community of wanton, woebegone whores & hustlers. The life this queer kid has led since arriving to the Bay Area in 2002 – a life predominated by “Party’N’Play” – contrasts concretely with his former life as a thespian erudite. However, with drug dependency, disease, disfigurement and depression has come the recovery, rehabilitation, reconstruction and resilience of his “last-stitch, last-chance life.” Today, above all else, Matthew is grateful for God’s boundless love of & faith in his own purely imperfect and human desire “for elaborate beautification & solemn self-betterment.” Matthew has studied performance arts in Paris, France, Florence, Italy, and at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Matthew is proud to present a sneak preview of his first cinematic performance in CONSTRUCT, an experimental documentary directed by Daniel Cardone as part of The HIV Story Project’s compilation of short films honoring the individual lives of People With AIDS (PWAs), entitled STILL AROUND (2010).


Redwolf Painter is a two-spirit, mixed blood, heyoka, ex-punk storyteller from Alaska.


Tee is a visual artist living and working in San Francisco. As a person of color, Tee is a fierce social justice activist and likes to facilitate workshops breaking down the systems of oppression. Different topics such as disability, sexuality, gender, and social class are frequently explored in both the arts and during workshops.


Nomy Lamm is a writer, performer, and voice teacher living in San Francisco. Her band, nomy lamm & THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, is a flexible platform for collaboration with everyone and everything. She performs with Sins Invalid, writes an advice column for Make/Shift Magazine, and is currently working on an MFA in Creative Writing at SF State.