Current Artists
The Whole Shebang houses many incredible local artists through our Artist Share. Learn about our Artist Share here; learn about our current artists below.
Benjamin Bass /
Broken Mirror Studio
Benjamin Bass is a queer multi-disciplinary artist living in Philadelphia, as well as the founder of Broken Mirror Studio.
They hold a B.F.A. in acting from S.U.N.Y. Purchase and have been fortunate enough to both work and continue training all over the world. Notable works include "We Own This City"; "Audrey's Children"; The obie award winning hit, "The Woodsman", Trey Lyford's "The Accountant" and the Chinese national tour of, "One Starry Night." Benjamin is a proud member of both Actor's Equity Association and the Screen Actor's Guild
As an educator Benjamin is the head instructor at Broken Mirror Studio. They have taught master classes for N.Y.U., S.U.N.Y. Purchase, University of the Arts, UPENN, Drexel University, as well at various other studios throughout NY and Philadelphia.
Nicole Bindler
Nicole Bindler–dance-maker, Body-Mind Centering® practitioner, writer, and activist–has practiced contact improvisation since 1997. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, and presented on four continents. Recent projects include curating an evening of Palestinian dance films; somatic research on the embryology of the genitalia from a non-binary perspective; a workshop on neuroqueering embodiment; co-producing the Consent Culture in Contact Improvisation Symposium; and a solo dance, The Case for Invagination, in which her scars speak candidly about trauma and desire. Current engagements include co-editing a book, Gathering Sparks: Jewish Arts and Somatics, and contributing essays to the 2024 issue of BMC Currents, and the Embryo Book Project.
https://www.nicolebindler.com/
Miryam Coppersmith
Miryam Coppersmith (she/they) is a Philadelphia-based performance artist and educator who aims to create spaces for transformation for her collaborators, audience, and greater community. Miryam creates eclectic performances using movement, speech, and sound coming from her own body and drawing from a variety of trainings.
Through structured improvisation and audience interaction, Miryam's work acknowledges that performance is co-created in real time with an audience. Her performances often explore the tender, embodied, emotionful reality of living within our societal systems and the impact of history on the body. Whether explicitly playing with Jewish themes or not, Miryam's work is always deeply rooted in her experience as a queer Ashkenazi Jewish woman born on unceded Lenape land in America.
https://www.miryamcoppersmith.com/
Jordan Deal
Jordan Deal (they/them) is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary practitioner and conjurer. Their investigative practice uses performance, sound, film, writing, sculpture, and their body as a conduit between unseen forces, socio-political structures, and anomalies. Through their use of speculative philosophy, punk tonalities, myth, and process-based research, they have developed an artistic/scholarly practice that bleeds into avant-theatrical performances, happenings, and sonic compositions. They utilize vocal and movement based improvisational techniques in order to harness and disperse a concept they call chaos force as a subversive material and methodology. Their shapeshifting forms are intended to experiment with embodied black queer futurity–rendering the space between fugitivity, subterranean landscapes, worldbuilding, resistance, and a love poetic.
Deal has presented performance work internationally such as at Cafe OTO London, Performing Arts Forum France, Judson Memorial Church NYC, the Center for Performance Research BK, NY, and Icebox Project Space Philadelphia. They have exhibited sculptural and sonic installations at Fleisher-Ollman gallery (Phila, PA), Vox Populi (Phila, PA), Grizzly Grizzly (Phila,PA), Fleisher Art Memorial, amongst others.
Meg Foley/ Movingparts
Meg Foley is a queer dance artist, educator, and parent who creates performances and somatic-based events as self-affirming practices. She currently researches gay and trans families, geology, and how we are formed.
Her improvisational practice builds detailed movement vocabularies out of scientifically engaged research and lived experience. Diving deeply into the fluctuating nature of the body and identity, she creates interactive performances that invite audiences to engage with concepts through their own bodily experiences. Serial in nature, each of Foley’s projects attempt to answer questions posed by previous works, repurposing materials, choreographic principles, and sculptural objects.
Her work has been presented at Velocity Dance Center, ONE Archives at USC, Painted Bride Art Center, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Visual Art Center of Richmond, CounterPulse, TanzFabrik Potsdam, Art Stations Foundation at Malta Festival, Prague Quadrennial, SummerWorks Festival (Toronto), LA Performance Practice, DraftWork at Danspace Project, CATCH! at Invisible Dog Art Center, Philadelphia Contemporary, Philadelphia Fringe Festival (curated), Moore College of Art and Design, Pilot+Projects, and Vox Populi.
Jenna Horton
Jenna Horton is an artist and writer based in Lenapehoking/Philadelphia. She works within assemblage, fluxus, DIY and performance art lineages. Her work deploys performative elements, collection, discarded materials, 2-D imagery, text, personal experience, and site. You’ll see her work in in a public park, an apartment, on a street corner as much as you’ll see it in a white or black box. Art doesn’t belong solely to a capital “A” art world or museums.
IMAGE NATION: A Tour, her most recent solo show, written in collaboration with Kurt Chiang, was featured at LMDA’s 2022 Conference: Performance Outside the Procsenium. She has an extensive background working as a collaborator/performer with experimental theatre companies and artists, including Headlong, Team Sunshine, Annie Wilson, and Swim Pony.
She’s currently working on a series of sculptural assemblages using discarded sports trophies.
She is an alumna of Headlong Performance Institute, a former writer for thINKingDance, and holds a BA in Performance Studies from Brown University. She also studied at Escola de Clown in Barcelona, Spain.
Carmichael Jones
Carmichael Jones is an artist who works in installation, sculpture, film, photography, and performative objects to upend parameters of the encounter and orientation. They have shown at places such as Vox Populi, the Museum of Glass, and Heller Gallery. Jones is creative co-director of The Whole Shebang and a former fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America.
carmichaeljones.com
Vince McNeil Jr /
Noteworthy Philadelphia
Vince McNeil has been a musician since the 4th grade. He sings, plays piano and guitar, and recently picked up the bass and clarinet. He studied mathematics and Spanish in college; however, higher education is where his passion lies. He loves the entire student experience and believes that in-school student success and retention, positive post-graduation outcomes, and enthusiastic alumni engagement all start at, or even before, strategic recruitment and enrollment.
He loves working with students, faculty, and staff to create programming and policies that generate pathways to higher education for those who want to attend college and pathways to enrichment for those for whom traditional college is not the next step. In his career, he focuses on destabilizing barriers for student understandings by demystifying the hidden college curriculum.
Vince is also the founder and Executive Director of Noteworthy and serves as a principal arranger for the group as well.
