I am a multimedia performance artist and videomaker with an extensive background in education and community activism. My creative work and pedagogy are driven by my interdisciplinary practice, which draws on a range of fields, including media activism, performance studies, video art, queer theory and history, arts education, and media archaeology. I am deeply committed to issues of social justice and have worked with students, artists, and community members from marginalized backgrounds throughout my career. This commitment is reflected not only in my teaching, but also in my artistic practice; in each forum, I emphasize collaboration and responsiveness to political contexts.
In my videos, performances, and installations, I create critical reenactments that underscore moments of collective transfeminism across historical and geographic locations. My projects revisit key moments in pop culture where sexual, social, and economic power structures are in flux; these reenactments, then, are not passive recreations of the past, but political interventions into our understanding of history. Specifically, I work with queer iconography to explore the ways in which history is written on, and by, actual bodies. Performing with other gender nonconforming bodies, my work is intended to disrupt participants’ expectations, to present the imaginable as real, and to generate new political potentialities—in essence, to pervert the audiovisual archive.
Email: taramateik@gmail.com