Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist.
They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, parades, pageants, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with artists, activists, and the more-than-human world to create performances, installations, and civic choreography on street corners and stages.
For 20 years Eli has also been concocting theater and parades with schools, senior centers, libraries, and addiction recovery and mental health programs. Eli’s current creative efforts include identifying opportunities to dismantle Manifest Destiny, foster intra and interspecies kinship, probe the ethics, perils and possibilities of anthropomorphization, and parent a 13-year-old human.
Eli is a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett and Wampanoag land. They are a New Georges Theater affiliated artist, a member of The 3rd Thing Press’ 2021 author cohort, an alumni of Company One’s 2020 PlayLab Unit, a member of artEquity’s 2019 cohort of artist-activists and a URI Coastal Institute Fellow. Eli organizes with Showing Up for Racial Justice-RI and has been co-facilitating an antiracism working group for white parents since 2015. They have MFAs in Writing for Performance (Brown University, 2018) and in Interdisciplinary Art (Goddard College, 2009) and a BA in Human Ecology (College of the Atlantic, 1999).
Some places they’ve shared their work include Judson Church, Dixon Place, Philadelphia Live Arts, First Person Arts, Philly & Providence Fringe Fests, Pvd Queer Arts Fest, AS220, Andorra International Festival of Women Clowns, The Gabfestry for Creative Dissent, and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Encuentro. Eli’s work has been supported by The Independence Foundation, Leeway Foundation, Pew History & Performance Incubator, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Millay Colony, Hewnoaks, RI State Council on the Arts, The Manitoulin Conservatory for Creation and Performance and a host of other organisms. Eli has worked with Pig Iron Theater, Bread & Puppet, Spiral Q, and New Urban Arts.
Eli is in the midst of proposing a new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs, encouraging everyone to check for ticks, and supporting local and planetary movements for abolition, reparations, land return, and multispecies justice. They believe in the transformative power of snacks, tide pools, costumes, friendship and “free time.”
You can reach Eli here.
Photo credit (above): Eli Nixon
Photo credit (below): The Honk King
