Julie Tolentino (she/they interchangeably) is a Filipinx-Salvadorean artist whose performance/installation practice explores the interstitial spaces of race, gender, relationality, and the archive. Expanding notions of durational, erotic , site, and movement practices, their collaborative projects include performance, installation, video, devised objects, scent, soundscapes, and texts drawn from essential outside learning spaces of activism, alterity, advocacy, loss, and caregiving.

Solo and group exhibitions include The New Museum The Kitchen, Participant, Inc., Performance Space New York, Aspen Art Museum, Nevada Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonia, Thessaloniki Biennial, Pact Zollverein-Essen, House of World Cultures-Berlin, Theaterworks-Singapore, Papaya Arts and Manila Contemporary-Manila, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions-LACE, The Lab, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, homeLA, Volume, the Bridge Project, Spaces Cleveland, The School of Temporary Liveness and Commonwealth and Council, (2013, 2019, 2024).

Interdisciplinary projects include 2022 Whitney Biennial, with Ivy Kwan Arce contributing a light and glass installation, durational performance (with Stosh Fila Robert Crouch) and a public program focused on the work of the What Would An HIV Doula Do? collective, Visual AIDS Duets book series with Kia LaBeija; Movements in Blue with the What Would An HIV Doula Do? Collective; Archive in Dirt 2018, the Lesbian AIDS Project Women’s Safer Sex Handbook with Cynthia Madansky; and The Sky Remains The Same, a lifetime body-as-archive project since 2006.

Recent awards include Joyce Award (2023); USArists International (2022); Anonymous was a Woman and the Herb Alpert/UCROSS Residency Prize (2021); Queer|Art Sustained Artist Recognition (2020); Fulcrum Arts Honoree, Foundation for Contemporary Art in Performance (2020), a Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellowships (2019, 2025) and multiple individual and collaborative commissions and international grants.

Tolentino received an MFA as the Dean’s Distinguished Fellow at the University of California at Riverside in Experimental Choreography. They initiated and ran the Clit Club from 1990-2002, Tattooed Love Child, and Dagger in New York City and was a member of the House of Color Video Collective, Art Positive, and WWHIVDD Collective. Since 2012, Tolentino has been the editor of the Provocations section of The Drama Review (TDR).

Appointments include the Professor of the Practice at Brown University (2024); Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Steinhardt (2021), the Alma Hawkins Chair in the World Arts & Cultures Department at UCLA (2022). She is a Queer|Art Mentor: 2022, 2024, 2026. Tolentino joined CalArts as permanent faculty in Fall 2022 and is currently a Program Co-Director in the School of Art.

Tolentino is an artist/maker/contributor with Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.

Photo Credit: Y Kim, 2013

Shoghig Halajian is a curator, art historian, and educator whose work focuses on contemporary performance, queer cultural production, and artistic experiments in collaboration and collectivity. She serves on the Board of Directors at Human Resources LA and previously was Assistant Director at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Select curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and Redcat, 2018); At night the states (Hammer Museum, 2017); DISSENT: what they fear is the light (LACE, 2016); Jibade-Khalil Huffman: Verse Chorus Verse (LACE, 2016); rafa esparza: I have never been here before (LACE, 2015); and The Whole World is Watching (Le Magasin Centre National d'Art Contemporain, 2012). She received her Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from University of California San Diego in 2024. She holds a MA in Aesthetics and Politics from California Institute of the Arts, and a BA in English Literature with minors in Philosophy and Women's Studies from University of California Los Angeles. She has taught at Williams College, University of California San Diego, California State University Long Beach, and is currently a visiting faculty in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons The New School.