Jerri Allyn and Kayla Tange

Jerri Allyn is an artist, activist, scholar, and birth mother interested in civic engagement through projects that provide forums for multiple voices. With Kayla Tange, Allyn performed a version of Shades of Shame and Grace at the Celia Center Arts Festival in Los Angeles. Allyn is a survivor of gang rape and a pleasure activist, and in the artist’s words, the arts and her social justice actions have “saved her soul.” Allyn is committed to supporting others, including those in underserved communities, in finding their voice through the arts as well. Exhibited internationally, Allyn has received residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation (Italy) and Wallace Foundation (Mexico) as well as grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and PEW Charitable Trust. Allyn has an MA in Art and Community from Goddard College. Read more at the artist’s web site.

Kayla Tange is a Los Angeles–based artist born in South Korea and adopted by a Japanese American family. Shifting between the literal and absurdly satirical, her practice uses collaboration to transform stories of shame into a symbolic and valuable medium, operating in the belief that other, unnamed worlds are possible. Tange strives to recalibrate her own sexuality through performance and visual art—expressing the freedom her own mother was forbidden—while conveying the feeling of being tied between two cultures and the perpetual limbo that lack of belonging creates. Tange’s work has been presented at REDCAT, OUTFEST, Human Resources, Highways Performance Space, and Torrance Art Museum in California as well as at Performance Studies international in Melbourne, Australia. Tange has a BA with a minor in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Read more at the artist’s web site.