Episode 7: Orbiting GLORIA
/
RSS Feed
S2 E6:”Colors Are My Actors” feat. a.c.ramírez de arellaño
/
RSS Feed
Indigenous 2 Spirit artist a.c.ramírez de arellaño (Taíno Hiwayawa) utilizes public spaces to create a dialogue that educates, inspires, and builds bridges between communities. The artist seeks to draw attention to the capacity for individuals and communities to heal, grow, and thrive through our interconnectedness. Like many Indigenous peoples who push back against erasure and are writing themselves and their Tribal Nations back into history through their art, a.c.ramírez takes inspiration from ancestral stories to create large pieces of art. Working with leather, oil on canvass, and mask making, their work tells a story of overcoming barriers, and the impact of colonialism at the intersection of their disabled, Indigenous, and queer communities. A recipient of the GLAPN Queer Heroes Award, they have been interviewed on OPB, NPR, and numerous other local broadcasts. They have worked artistically with a number of city offices, school districts, non profits, , and currently are participating in a 2021 artist-in-residency program with Ten Tiny Talks. Their work has been added to Regional Arts & Culture Council’s collection of public art for the City of Portland, Oregon.
S2 E5 Score One For Me feat. Darlene Zimbardi
/
RSS Feed
Darlene Zimbardi is an author and performer. Her illness memoir, “If Only George Clooney Were My Doctor,” is an off-beat take about her time on life support.Her writing about illness advocacy has been performed as staged readings in New York City and her writing on caregiving has been featured in ensemble theater pieces at the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey, and a community reading at the Profile Theater in Portland. Darlene considers herself part of the Narrative Medicine Movement.
S2 E4: Ribbon Their Stories Though Your Hair feat. Jessica Rich
/
RSS Feed
“Jessica Rich is a seasoned veteran of Community Profile, having found herself, time and again, through her own unique intersectionality, identifying as a member of three of our different cohorts. As a mom, a musician and a writer, Jess has been a creative in all of her life, and the poetry she shares here is only one (potent) sliver of that creativity.”
Jessica Rich is a writer and student in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been featured in journals and anthologies here and there, most recently in The Gravity of the Thing and Existere Literary Journal. Rich has performed her work across the country, in bookstores, bars, laundromats and on buses. She is currently studying concurrent degrees in Psychology and Creative Writing with a focus on Nonfiction at Portland State University. Her proudest work, though, is the creative workshops she’s coordinated over the years, currently with a local mental health organization. She lives in typical Portland fashion, in a basement apartment with two cats in her cave and a Treasure Troll upstairs.
S2 E3 Come In and Be Seen feat. Anya Pearson
/
RSS Feed
“Anya Pearson is one of the truly up-and-coming writers of the Portland literary scene. She’s a playwright, a novelist, a poet and a screenwriter. Her writing is intensely personal, intimate and soulful.”
Anya Pearson is an award-winning actress, playwright, poet, producer, activist, and teacher. She is a current Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Anya was the inaugural winner of the $10,000 Voice is a Muscle Grant from the Corporeal Voices Foundation run by best-selling author Lidia Yuknavitch, for her choreopoem, Made to Dance in Burning Buildings. Made to Dance in Burning Buildings was showcased at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater and received its World Premiere at Shaking The Tree Theatre where Anya was the Playwright-in-Residence for the 2018-2019 season. Anya received the $10,000 Problem Play Commission to adapt Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure focused on mass incarceration and the other numerous failings of our criminal justice system. Her adaptation, The Measure of Innocence, was selected for the 2020 Kilroys List and won the 2020 Drammy Award for Best Original Script. The Measure of Innocence was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award – Drama. Anya was a finalist for the 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting and the National Black Theatre’s 2019 I Am Soul Playwriting Residency. She is currently under commission at Portland Center Stage. Her reimagining of Agamemnon, The Killing Fields, was developed at Seven Devils New Play Foundry and is currently at the Great Plains Theatre Conference. Anya’s Three Love Songs, a short play about life during the pandemic, originally commissioned by Portland Center Stage as part of the Play At Home Initiative, was called a “masterpiece that emerged out of the wreckage of 2020” by Willamette Week in their 2020 best of theatre review. Three Love Songs has been performed all over the country including Wolly Mammoth Theatre’s Connectivity Initiative and will be housed at the Library of Congress in their Performing Arts Covid-19 Response Collection. Her spoken word protest poem “What it IS and What it ISN’T” was featured in a community conversation between Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty in October. Anya runs a multimedia production company called Urban Haiku whose mission is to produce groundbreaking work that transcends the traditional boundaries of performance while also serving as the catalyst for art and community action to combine for real social change. She is the Curator of Programming at Corporeal Writing where she also runs a BIPOC mentorship program and collective aimed at increasing accessibility and creative exchange between emerging BIPOC writers in all disciplines and established BIPOC writers who are successfully navigating the literary and entertainment industries. Anya is finishing her debut collection of poetry (“This is the After”), writing three pilots, launching a BIPOC-owned, PDX-based wearable art clothing label, and constantly plotting, planning, devising, creating, imagining, and revising visions of a better world. She is also a Guest Artist at Portland Center Stage where she teaches local high school students in their Visions & Voices program and adults in a BIPOC affinity space. As an actor, she is a member of Actors’ Equity Association and has appeared in numerous regional theatre productions, commercials, and independent films. She is also a member of Linestorm Playwrights, Couch Film Collective, and the Dramatists Guild. Anya is a graduate of the acting program at William Esper Studio in New York City and continues to train at AMAW in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of the writing program at Marylhurst University. Her best production is her 9-year-old daughter, Aidee, who can be seen most nights, trying to circumvent bedtime by asking deep philosophical questions like: “When are we going to see the world? When is my life going to truly begin?”
S2 E2: KISS TO SAY HELLO, FEAT. PAUL BRIGHT
/
RSS Feed
“Paul Bright is a writer/actor/filmmaker who left Hollywood because it was too homophobic. Now he’s making art that is not here to coddle straight sensibilities. He’s upfront, in-your-face, poignant and often hilarious. But there is also a depth of experience and loss that informs his work and gives it its weight.“
Paul Bright wrote/directed/produced eleven feature films. He began writing short plays as a little kid, and his first feature film script led to meetings at Disney Studios in his early 20s. He left homophobic Hollywood in the 80s searching for a place to belong in Reno, Albuquerque, Tempe, Dallas, Austin, New York City and now calls Portland his home. In this podcast he shares a short comical scene from his most recent movie POCKET MOUSE PROTECTOR, which is now in post-production, and two other pieces about living gay. He records audiobooks for Audible, streams raucous social commentary online from his bathtub, and teaches indie filmmaking to over 3600 students on the Udemy platform. The official website for his movies is paulbrightfilms.com
S2 E1: DECIDEDLY UNLADYLIKE, feat. Donna Renee Anderson, MHR, ThM
/
RSS Feed
“I’m a third-culture person, growing up with a military father and Guyanese mother in cultures other than my own. In 65+ years of living I’ve criss-crossed our country and the Pacific Rim living among and experiencing different cultures of our world. Since I was 12, all I’ve ever wanted is to write a good book; still do.”
ARTIST BIO
Donna Renee Anderson is an adventurer, lover, humorist, truth-teller, storyteller, and a spirit-uplifter. She’s the kind of person who manages to give of herself profusely while leaving space to take care of everybody else in the group. All that and she’s a heck of a writer too.
Episode 6: Orbiting The Oldest Profession
/
RSS Feed
Episode 15: Leslie North: The Weight of Her Decision
/
RSS Feed
“Leslie North is as warm and generous-spirited a young woman as you are likely to meet. Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes dark, she’s always just to the left of what you’d expect.” -Bobby Bermea
ARTIST BIO
Leslie is a Memphis native who left a cushy job in the IT world to study at the Portland Actors Conservatory. Now living in Atlanta, Leslie is dipping her toes into the film world. She has already written a short film, Time Sensitive, as part of the BLVCK Film Collective in Portland. Next to acting, her current focus is rediscovering her voice as a writer through comedy sketches, pilots and other original shorts. Leslie is very passionate about telling authentic, relatable stories that represent the unheard and the ‘regular folks’. When she isn’t succumbing to the post-Covid pressure to constantly create, Leslie can be found binge watching her favorite shows, reading, or complaining about dating apps.
Episode 14: Tess Raunig: I Am More Than The Shape Of My Body
/
RSS Feed
“To some, Tess Raunig may live at the intersection of many identities but to their mind, there’s only one: Tess Raunig. Tess is on a mission to break down every myth, every misconception, every lie and every injustice that is an obstacle to any body being their best self. This fire is red hot and a dominant aspect of their words, writing and music.” -Bobby Bermea
ARTIST BIO
Tess Raunig (they/them/theirs) is a disabled, trans multidisciplinary creative and performer based in Portland, OR. They wish to thank Profile Theatre for both featuring them on Voices from The Real World, and for sponsoring and organizing the LGBTIQ+ writing cohort. As an actor, have worked with companies such as Artists Repertory Theatre (Teenage Dick, Mercury Company II and III), Oregon Children’s Theatre (Dragons Love Tacos), Bag & Baggage Productions (Sequestered Soliloquies), Couch Film Collective (Again and Again), Adventuress Films, Oyster Shell Productions, the Disability Art and Culture Project, and Impetus Arts. They are also a junior associate artist with Original Practice Shakespeare Festival. In August 2019, they starred in the world premier of The Poet’s Shadow, a rock opera written by students at PHAME Academy, in partnership with Portland, OR. Tess serves as a teaching artist, and choral assistant at PHAME.
They sing and play keyboard/synth in the Portland based theatrical folk pop band, Sasha and The Children. Tess is also a member of Acchord, an a’capella group comprised of trans and non-binary singers. When they aren’t acting, writing, playing music, or teaching, Tess enjoys drinking tea, social justice activism, and hanging out with their cat child, Sasha. And yes, the band is named after Sasha kitty. linktr.ee/tessraunig
