Bizzy Barefoot

Teaches at Northeastern Illinois University CAPE

Bizzy Barefoot is a radical queer, transgender artist, activist, communitarian, and Faerie. Her 30 year artistic career has been evenly divided between performance and visual art. She has performed on hundreds of stages all around the United States, in Canada and Europe, and has served as Artistic Director for the Pittsburgh Queer Theater Festival, and for two successful theater companies in Pittsburgh and NYC, of which she was also a co-founder. 

In addition she's a longtime member of the critically acclaimed experimental performance group, The Nerve Tank in NYC. As visual artist and activist, she has spent 9 years working with MIX NYC, and for the last 6 of them, as an in-house venue designer. She's also co-designed and built installations and puppets for the likes of Green Peace, Gawker Magazine, Pace University, and The People's Climate March, and has been featured in Vice and I.D. Magazines as well as in the Visuals AIDS Anniversary exhibition at LaMama Galleria. 

She has worked as stage/costume and media designer, window designer, and portrait artist. Her present focus is the powerful confluence of art making and community building, manifesting in the making of elaborate and immersive, community built T.A.Z.s (Temporary Autonomous Zones) in which queer community can deeply explore itself outside the critical and often punitive eye of heterosexual culture and the law. 

She holds degrees in theatre and music. Jason and Shirley is her first major film project.