Dorothy Allison |  1949-2024

1995 bio

Allison was born in Greenville, SC, and now lives in Northern California with her partner, Alix, and her two­-year-old son, Wolf Michael. Her novel, Bastard out of Carolina, was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award and won both the Ferro Grumley and Bay Area Book Reviewers Awards for fiction. Her second novel, Cavedweller, is forth­coming from Dutton.

Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature, a collection of Allison's essays, speeches and performance pieces, was pub­lished by Firebrand Books in 1994. In 1989, Trash, Allison's collection of short stories, won Lambda Literary Awards for Lesbian Fiction and Lesbian Small Press Book. Two editions of her book of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, were published in 1983 and 1990. 

Allison's work for performance includes The Body in Context: Her Body, Mine, and His, originated at Southern Exposure in 1989; Lust and Discontents, performed at Hallways Art Space in Los Angeles in 1990; and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, a multi-media work-in-progress dealing with issues of sexuality and sexual abuse that was performed at the Lab in San Francisco in 1991 and at the Artemisia Gallery in Chicago in 1992. Her most recent performance work is Femme in a Butch World, performed at the Women's Building in San Francisco in 1993.

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2023: Current information about Dorothy Allison can be found on her Wikipedia page.

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2024: Dorothy Allison obituary​

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Elia Arce | 1995 bio

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Arce is a performer, writer, director and filmmaker. She was raised in Costa Rica and has been living in the United States for the past 11 years. She worked with the Bread and Puppet Theater and co-directed and performed with the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) during the group's first five years.

For the Festival Latino in Los Angeles, she directed and co-authored El Otro Lado/The Other Side. For the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, she co-directed and performed with the LAPD in Jupiter 35. As an artist-in-residence at the Banff Center for the Performing Arts, Arce conceived, directed and performed with the housekeeping staff of the Center in !Maid, Please Make Up Room/Please Do Not Disturb!. Her first full-length solo performance work, I Have So Many Stitches That Sometimes I Dream That I'm Sick, premiered at Highways in Santa Monica in 1993 and was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1994. In 1993, Arce received a J. Paul Getty Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship.

2023: More recent information about Elia can be found on her website. 

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Terry Galloway | 1995 bio

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Galloway is a deaf, queer playwright, poet, essayist and performer. Her formative years were split between Germany and Texas. She holds a degree in American Studies from the University of Texas, Austin, and had a two-year combative relationship with Columbia University in New York City. In the early 1980s, she began presenting her one-woman

shows in New York at W.O.W., Limbo Lounge, P.S. 122, the  Women's Project and American Place Theater. Since then, her shows have been produced all over the United States, England, Canada and Mexico. She has helped create original grassroots theater in communities in Austin, TX, and in Tallahassee, FL, co-founding Esther's Follies (in its 16th

year) and the Mickee Faust Club (in its 7th). She has published a play, a book of poetry, a performance text, comic and dramatic monologues and a handful of articles. She writes, teaches and lectures about the feminization of the critical process, the creation of grassroots theater, sex as art, humor as a subversive tool, the necessity of falling in love with one's parents, snottiness towards the disaffected and the gentle tactics of revenge. Her more personal life could be the subject of

gossipy speculation. She lives in the part of Florida that is not

Miami Beach.

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2023: For more recent information about Galloway, visit

https://cah.georgiasouthern.edu/pattipace/terry-galloway-bio/

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Stephanie Heyl | 1995 bio

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Stephanie Heyl was born in Germany and raised in the cornfields of Normal, IL, where she developed a keen eye for the absurd masquerading as the mundane. Currently, she lives and works in San Diego as a performance/

installation/video artist. She has exhibited and performed in more than 40 solo and group exhibitions since 1989. Heyl's collaborative work tends toward the political and ranges from screening the video Vibrant Voices: People of Color Speak Out with coproducer Eloise De Leon at MOMA in New York as part of the "Deep Dish Satellite" series on censor­ship to singing with talk-poet Jerome Rothenberg at Poets House in SoHo to touring upstate New York migrant camps with the Border Arts Workshop. Heyl's solo work often is intensely personal, and recurring issues include a decade-long negotiation with a muscle disease; a commitment to maintain­ing a sense of wholeness while navigating the reality of being a mixed blood (Anglo/Pima Indian); and a belief that being a twin, being a woman and being queer have important impact on her experience of the world. Consistent motifs in her work are her use of her body as a foil and her voice as a vehicle to tell a story about what it is to be a human being today, and how one might mark a path into the next century.

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2015: She is now known as Violet Juno and as of 2015 was working as Program Coordinator for the Alameda (CA) Arts Commission.

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Eileen Myles | 1995 bio

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Long a pioneer of self-consciousness, EILEEN MYLES has been at it for 20 years as a poet, playwright, performer and, in 1992, as a Presidential candidate. Lately she's been touring her new show, Chelsea Girls - poems and excerpts from an autobiographical work of fiction by the same name from Black Sparrow press which Out magazine dubbed "a pseudo-cool voyeur's tour of chaos: messy sex. drinking and drugs, coming of age." Myles has toured Germany with her writing and performed in the USA in spots ranging from St. Mark's

Church, NYC (where she was artistic director from 1984-86) to the ICA in Boston, Walker Art Center, Cal Arts, the Naropa Institute, Yale,

Brown, Rutgers, Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, Hallwalls, New Langton in San Francisco and was called "a highlight" of Lesbopalooza, the world's first lesbian rock festival, by The New York Times. Myles is currently writing a solo piece called Our Sor Juana for the performance

artist Alina Troyano. She premiered two of her plays, Feeling Blue Pts 1, 2 & 3 (1988) and Modern Art (1990) at PS122 and has been performing with the PS122 Field Trips since 1992.

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2023: Myles has their own website and Wikipedia page.

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Jo Carol Pierce | 1944-2022

1995 bio + see her program note on the main (mal)Adjustment page

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In 1993, Pierce was designated Songwriter of the Year at the Austin Music Awards. She also has written a number of plays, including In the West, which ran in Austin for five years and was presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in 1991. In the 1970s, Pierce was a social worker for the state of Texas and now works nights as a counselor on a state child abuse hotline in Austin.

​2023: Pierce died of cancer on December 2, 2022 at the age of 78. For more info about her go to her Wikipedia page and this Texas Monthly YouTube video and feature article.

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Anne Charlotte Robinson | 1949-2012

1995 bio

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Robertson was born in Columbus, OH, on March 27, 1949, at 3:27 pm, after a 24-hour labor. She has been making films since 1976. Her schooling includes a BA magna cum laude degree in art and psychology from the University of Massachusetts/Harbor Campus, Boston, and an MFA with honors in filmmaking from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. She has been diagnosed as a manic-depressive, a conclusion she denies, preferring instead to think of

herself as a typical anxiety neurotic of the obsessive-compulsive sort, with marked tendencies for fantasy, joy and panic. She is no longer a depressive, and film has been the cure. Her avocation is organic gardening, and this too has been a healing force for her. Her films total more than 45 hours running time; her gardens total more than 5,000 square feet. She believes in Super 8 and art (plus life) as therapy. Creativity is the source of hope. [ed. note: Over the years, Robertson's

films have been screened in various locations in North America, Europe and Australia, with recent solo showings at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the San Francisco Cinematheque. This spring, her work will be featured at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She lives in Framingham, MA.]

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Robertson died of lung cancer in 2012. Here is her Wikipedia page. 

Here is her page at Harvard Film Archive, which acquired her films after her death.