Bios

Drew Denny was born in Texas but escaped at 18 to research the relationship between sweatshop labor and the sex trade in Southeast Asia and the Movement of Landless Workers in Brazil. After graduating with Honors from the USC Cinema Production program, Drew grew her practice through teaching, writing, installation, curation, terrarium construction and gift/ game composition. Drew performs in Big Whup, teaches eco-art, and is directing a documentary about the Mineros San Juan settlement of displaced miners in Bolivia. Drew is the Art Editor for LA Record and is pursuing an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts where she engineers Brain House and performs Balinese gamelan. She co-founded Reclamation with Kyoung Kim.

Jack Heard, born John Matthew Mortimer Heschel Heard, spent his youth in the northeastern United States attending so-called progressive institutions where he learned to live communally. Jack began his higher education studying Religion at Oberlin College before deciding to be an artist. He has since practiced the forms of performance, sculpture, and performative sculpture at Otis College of Art and Design and the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.

Kyoung Kim co-founded Reclamation with Drew Denny. She was an active member of the Reclamation group of Drew Denny, Morgan Gee, Jack Heard, Edwina Portocarrero, and Claudia Slanar from the project’s inception in January 2009 through October 2010.

Edwina Portocarrero was born and raised in Mexico City. She’s lived in Brazil, Honduras, Boston, LA and Mexico. Serendipity, causality and synchronicity has led her life, teaching her experience is the ultimate authority. Interests in exchanges, transmissions, transitions, attachments, inhabiting, rites and objects have led her to work in documentary film making, theatre design and animation. Aiming to have a greater impact in the practical world, she is doing research at the Center for Future of Storytelling and is part of the Object Based Media Research group at the Media Lab, MIT.

Claudia Slanar was born in Vienna, Austria. She studied business administration, art history and film studies, worked as freelance writer, curator and art educator for fine arts and film/video art, then came to Los Angeles as a Fulbright Scholar to study Aesthetics and Politics in the MA program at the California Institute of the Arts, and decided to stay a bit longer. In her theoretical and practical work Claudia wants to challenge forms of representation, narration and seemingly fixed identities. She loves to design pseudonyms, invent fake companies and work in collectives.