Performances and Exhibits
Walking on Broken Class (work in progress), Multi-media live performance
Multi-media performance collage using archival footage of Lucky Strike cigarettes and Palmolive dish-soap commercials, excerpts of Amy Vanderbilt’s Guide to Etiquette (1952) and autobiographical material to explore the embodiment of class, gender, whiteness and regional politics in the United States.
“We. Went. To. The. Castle.” (2026), Audio Track 7:10
Composed from conversations and voice memos recorded in 2019, “We. Went. To. The. Castle.” is a sound collage that centers a longstanding gothic industrial club in Ybor City called The Castle. Through overlapping voices, recollections, dissonant sounds, and fragmented storytelling, it situates The Castle as a site of belonging and refuge for those who moved through its spaces across different eras.
“We. Went. To. The. Castle.” is one track in an ongoing oral history project that archives the queerness of Ybor City, a historic neighborhood in Tampa, Florida. Ybor City grew as an industrial and immigrant settlement with strong ties to cigar manufacturing, and over time became a site where labor movements, mutual aid societies, and socialist-leaning ideas of collective responsibility often intersected in everyday life.
Forthcoming in Oh, Cuore Mia: Love Letters to Ybor City, Tempus Projects Gallery, Tampa, FL (July, 2026)
QweerQuitchen (2020), live collaborative performance, Earth Dance Residency, Plainfield, MA
This collaborative live performance interrogates how gendered labor, care, and domesticity are rehearsed, disrupted, and transmuted through the body.
The performance treats the “kitchen” as both a site and system that produces, disciplines, and choreographs behavior. Through manipulated vocalization and everyday actions the piece stages this domestic space as at once familiar and unstable.
Presented through Earthdance Residency, the work frames domesticity not as private space but as a contested field where intimacy, work, and identity are continuously negotiated.
Care Is A Four Letter Word: Notes Toward Chronic Hesitancy (2019), live performance, Global Center for Academic and Spiritual Life, New York University, New York, NY
Care is A Four Letter Word: Notes Toward Chronic Hesitancy is a live performance that asks what care looks like when it becomes indistinguishable from labor, and what labor reveals when it is reframed through care. Using a massage table, video installation, ritual ingestion of honey, polarity therapy, and sound, the work constructs an environment where touch operates as both medium and question.
Through slowed sensory exchange and mediated perception, the piece considers how touch is authorized, withheld, or instrumentalized in such spaces, and how restoration is negotiated rather than resolved. It reflects on the paradox of producing “original” work within conditions that strain the nervous system, staging care not as relief or solution, but as an unstable, embodied practice unfolding in real time.
Poem Tending (durational participatory action, 2018), for “Return” by Kathy Engel, Eco-justice Poetry and Diasporic City, Kimmel Windows, New York University, New York, NY.
Collaborative-participatory act of tending to one of eleven poems in a window vitrine featuring site-specific artworks inspired by the book Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology.
(of) Honey (2016), multimedia exhibition with live events, video, sound, silk & metal installation, Cunsthaus Gallery, Tampa, FL
(of) Honey is a durational multimedia exhibition with live events, video, sound, silk and metal installation, and participatory actions that considers how humans relate to nature through systems of cultivation, extraction, and care. Developed over several years, the work centers honey as both material and metaphor, tracing its entanglement with industrial farming practices, land development, and the ecological crisis of colony collapse disorder affecting bee populations.
Through ritual gestures of collecting, sharing, and handling honey, alongside poetry and sensory installation, the project stages attention to interdependence between species and the fragile infrastructures that sustain life. It asks how acts of care and consumption coexist within extractive systems, and how meaning might be reconfigured through slowed, embodied participation with ecological materials over time.
Honey Collectivity (live performance), Haybarn Theatre, Goddard College, Plainfield, VT (2016)
Residencies
Artist in Residence (creative writing), Field Trip Arts, Rainier, OR (2026)
Artist in Residence (research-based somatic and interdisiplinary practice), Earth Dance Creative Living-Plainfield, MA (2020)
Founder and curator, Lector Social Club Writer’s and Performance Art Residency and literary event series, Tampa, FL (2016-2019)
Artist in Residence and Academic-in-Residence (developing and presenting a live performance), Goddard College, Plainfield, VT (2016)
micheal hooker, ph.d. 