[-empyre-] please welcome Tara Mateik

[Christina McPhee]

HI all, another artist is joining us for this coming week-- Tara Mateik

  www.taramateik.com

Tara Mateik is an artist and educator living in New York City. In his  
videos and performances he typecasts himself as theoretical and  
cultural transvestites from pop music, competitive sport, and weird  
science. In 2002 he founded The Society of Biological Insurgents  
(SBI), an embryonic cell organization that wages strategic operations  
to overthrow institutions of compulsory gender. Mateik’s work has been  
exhibited at venues that include The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The  
Project,  and Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, LACE in Los  
Angeles, British Film Institute in London, England, Oberhausen Film  
Festival in Oberhausen, Germany, and Museu de Arte Moderna in São  
Paulo, Brazil. Mateik’s writing and work has been published in Felix:  
A Journal of Media Arts and Culture, LTTR, a queer feminist art  
journal, North Drive Press #2, and Art Fancy. His awards include a  
three-year fellowship at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a grant  
from the Creative Capital Foundation in film/video,  an Electronic and  
Film Art Grant from the Experimental Television Center, and a BCAT/ 
BRIC Rotunda Gallery Video Residency.  He holds a BA from Hampshire  
College (Amherst, Massachusetts) with a concentration in vide, and an  
MFA in integrated electronic arts from RPI (Rensseleaer Polytechnic  
Institute, Troy, New York.

In addition to his own work he has collaborated with collectives and  
artists including Paper Tiger Television video collective to produce  
short videos that demystify and democratize the media. In 2000 he co- 
founded Dykes Can Dance with Emily Roysdon and JD Samson. From  
2004-2009 he brought contemporary art to New York City's public school  
children managing over a dozen collaborations between teaching artists  
and public school teachers for the Education Department at Art in  
General.