My work - as an artist, researcher, facilitator and administrator - focuses on group-based meaning making and action to connect radical imagination and implementation. I do this through processes of participatory research and using a variety of arts, storytelling and facilitation practices. I work through evolving and long-term relationships, invitation and as a convener of edge-zones that cultivate collaboration between people who may not otherwise work together. My work is guided by love and interdependence as manifest in collective care, noticing and solidarity.
Bio
Evan Bissell (he/him, white) facilitates participatory art and research projects that support equitable systems and liberatory processes. With groups around the country, he has supported the development of curriculum, public art, laws, books, and convenings that build imagination, power and capacity around the just transition, anti-prison and police efforts, housing justice, and health equity, among others. Most recently Evan created the Arts & Cultural Strategy program at the Othering & Belonging Institute and helped found Richmond LAND, the first community land trust in Contra Costa county. He holds a master’s in Public Health and City Planning from UC Berkeley and a BA in Painting and Ethnic Studies from Wesleyan University. He lives in Berkeley, California, the unceded lands of the Lisjan Ohlone (#giveshuumi) and is a parent of two kids who love to draw on walls.
While at the Othering & Belonging Institute (2016-2022), Evan brought over 60 artists into working with the Institute’s materials, programs and events. This included an Artist-in-Residence program that supported the creation of the Grammy-Award winning album The Movement (Alphabet Rockers), participatory action research projects that led to policy development and implementation, and programming for the Institute’s flagship conference. Evan has collaborated with leading artists in a variety of fields including Brett Cook, Chinaka Hodge, Josh Begley, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Christine Wong Yap. Evan has exhibited at CUNY Graduate Center, on Alcatraz Island, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Intersection for the Arts, and SOMArts, and facilitated projects in schools (K-12) and community settings throughout the country. From 2016-2019 he taught a studio art course on social change at UC Berkeley. Evan was an activist-in-residence at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College (2015), the first artist-in-residence at the American Cultures Engaged Scholar Program at UC Berkeley (2013), and was awarded a Headlands artist-in-residence (2013) and the Roselyn Lindheim fellowship (2015). He compiled the first Health in All Policies report for the City of Richmond (2015) and worked as an artist/researcher with the Public Science Project at CUNY Graduate Center (2014-15).
“The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”
Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks
Info
evanbissell at gmail.com