Our art praxis and “An Uprising of Dreams” are calling us to move far beyond mainstream concepts of wellness. It asks us to study the ways in which our divinity, higher purpose, and ability to resist violent and oppressive systems are intertwined with how we access our rest, imagination, and DreamSpace. Tricia’s work is a pathway to the rest practices needed to collectively build and imagine new worlds as we simultaneously dismantle and deprogram ourselves from the systems that prop up and perpetuate the racial, social, and environmental harm done by white supremacy and extractive capitalism. This work was created collaboratively as our healing and liberation will not happen alone. Our collective rest and commitment to community care will save us.

The Nap Ministry
Founded by artist and theologian Tricia Hersey in 2016, The Nap Ministry are the originators of the ‘rest as resistance’ and ‘rest as reparations.’ We engage with the power of performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing to install sacred spaces for the community to rest together. We facilitate immersive workshops, and curate performance art that examines rest as a radical tool for community healing.  We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue. Our work is seeded within the soils of Black radical thought, somatics, Afrofuturism, womanism, and liberation theology, and is a guide for how to collectively deprogram, decolonize, and unravel ourselves from the wreckage of capitalism and white supremacy. We believe our bodies are portals. They are sites of liberation, knowledge, and invention that are waiting to be reclaimed and awakened by the beautiful interruptions of brutal systems that sleep and dreaming provide.

Tricia Hersey
Tricia Hersey is a multidisciplinary artist, activist, writer and theologian. She is the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations by curating spaces for the community to rest via rest activations, immersive workshops, and performance art installations.  She holds a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from Eastern Illinois University and a Master of Divinity from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Her research interests include Black liberation theology, womanism, somatics, and cultural trauma.  She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto and The Nap Ministry’s Rest Deck: 50 Practices to Resist Grind Culture.  You can learn more about her work at thenapministry.com

Helen Hale
Helen Hale is a dance maker, embodiment scholar, and plant enthusiast. She is the director of Helen Hale Dance, designer of HAVEN floral arts, one half of collaborative duo GINKGO, and founder/facilitator of the KUDZU NATION. Helen's work has been presented by the High Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Galleries at Moore, Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, Dance Truck, Dashboard, The Lucky Penny, Spark and Echo Arts, Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, Temple University, Alfred University, and WonderRoot, among others.

Educated by a rogue mix of artists, activists, and cultural workers in inner-city Atlanta, GA., Helen migrated north to earn her BFA through study at Temple University (PA) and Hellenic International Studies in the Arts (Greece). Having since worked with both Philadelphia and Atlanta as home bases, she has been honored to collaborate and perform with a bounty of incredible artists in the States and abroad including Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, Nichole Canuso Dance Company, Carnival de Resistance, Tricia Hersey/The Nap Ministry, Team Sunshine Performance Corporation, Dishman + Co., PushPush Theater, Tahni Holt, Afterculture Theatre, Santiago Páramo, Staibdance, Protect Awesome, Pedro Ramirez, La Banda de los Cienaños, Duende Dance Theater, Meg Foley/Moving Parts, Gathering Wild, Troupe Hellas, Ground Delivery Dance Theater, Room to Move Dance, and the Just Act Ensemble.

Helen moves in and out of roles as a choreographer, performer, teacher, researcher, consultant, curator, administrator, gardener, daughter, sister, auntie, friend, collaborator, instigator, and party thrower. Her current focus is creating content to forward the work of decolonization and anti-racism, and building up the Kudzu Nation.

Helen is a part of the Dashboard family of artists and a member of Alternate Roots.

Centre for Projection Art
Centre for Projection Art activates public spaces through artistic outcomes engaging projection art that invites our audiences to be curious, and reflective and to bring their sense of discovery with them. We work responsively through site-specific works and use projection art as a way to gather and be in conversation with our community.

Working with both practising and emerging artists, to help them explore, learn and develop their language around projection art, we resource and support artists interested in this medium with the digital literacy that allows them to expand and realise their practice further. From staging workshops, masterclasses, and mentorship programs, to running artist residencies and more, we are committed to developing the integration and use of Projection Art within a range of artistic mediums.

We’re also passionate about sharing what we do with others by producing and consulting on events that showcase the scope of Projection as an art form, continuing to present the much loved Gertrude Street Projection Festival. The festival is Australia’s longest-running projection festival. We have a reputation for discovering artists, uncovering interesting sites, exploring ideas and bringing together locals and visitors by night to experience playful, thoughtful and inspiring new media work.

Our events are a chance to share what we love with the wider communities and we celebrate the opportunity to bring people together.

Priya Namana
Priya Namana is an Indian contemporary artist and curator living and working on the unceded lands of the people of the Kulin Nations in Naarm. Working at the intersection of digital practice, sound, performance, and moving image, she currently holds the position of Director at the Centre for Projection Art where she applies her practice-led thinking to strategic and curatorial development at the organization.

Victoria Pham
Victoria Pham is an Australian installation artist, composer, archaeologist and evolutionary biologist. She is a PhD Candidate in Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, holding the Cambridge Trust’s International Scholarship. As a composer she has studied with Carl Vine, Richard Gill, Liza Lim and Thierry Escaich.

She is represented by the Australian Music Centre as an Associate Artist. Pham has been exhibited and commissioned by a number of institutions like TATE Britain, the AGNSW, Anna Schwartz Gallery, West Space Gallery, Liquid Architecture and Centre for Projection Art, and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, amongst others. She has featured in festivals from VIVID to BLEED. Pham is currently the Artistic Director of FABLE ARTS and is the host for the podcast, DECLASSIFY.

As a scientist, her scientific specialisation is in archaeo-acoustic technology and evolution of music. Supported by the Cambridge Trust, she is a current PhD candidate for Biological Anthropology where she seeks to expand her interdisciplinary work into a broader exploration of acoustic technology and bioacoustics.

Her artistic and musical work is driven by explorations into the sonic connections between second-hand memory, examining modes of decolonisation, communal story-telling, intertwining electronic sound with acoustic instrumentation, and ecological expressions of construction.

Lead Artist: Tricia Hersey
Co-Director: Helen Hale
Curatorial Advisor: Priya Namana
Collaborating Artist: Victoria Pham
Creative Development Consultant: Ihab Balla