Eli Nixon
Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist, or exist but call for creative intervention. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, parades, pageants, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with artists, activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. Eli performs naturedrag, draws cartoons, and concocts installations, flotillas and mobile sculptures on beaches, parking lots and stages. They are a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land and a New Georges affiliated artist. Eli has MFAs in Writing for Performance (Brown, 2018) and in Interdisciplinary Art (Goddard, 2009). They organize with Showing Up for Racial Justice-RI and were part of artEquity’s 2019 national facilitator training. Eli’s current creative efforts include parenting a 12-year-old human, slowly learning trombone, and supporting local and planetary movements for abolition, reparations, and multispecies justice.
