Bethany Ides

Bethany Ides is a queer writer, artist, teacher, theater-maker, and organizer who also co-directs DOORS UNLIMITED with Ora Ferdman and Mahshid Rafiei. DOORS UNLIMITED is a generative structure for hosting collaborative research in convocational technologies and speculative folklife. DOORS UNLIMITED events typically engage large groups of people walking, eating, reading, diagramming, discussing, experimenting, play-acting, planning, drawing, laughing, listening, and/or deciding together.

Ides’ research involves applied drama, decolonial education, investigative poetics and operatics, community reading rituals, sites of public discourse, ephemeral and inscrutable communications, and collectivity. Her courses at Pratt often focus on particular aspects of relation and ways that the pedagogical social environment reflects those. Topics like Play, Dialogue, Sense-making, Sharing, Interiority, and Pleasure become structuring principles for modes of inquiry that actively combine academic study with imaginative intervention and processual reflection.

MFA, Bard College

Ides’ performance projects have been featured in publications ranging from BOMB Magazine to the Woodstock Times, and presented at numerous rural and urban venues across the U.S. and Canada such as the Harbourfront Centre, Knockdown Center, the Brooklyn Museum, Fragmental Museum, Mandragoras Art Space, Tritriangle, FADO Performance Art Centre, CounterPULSE, Dixon Place, Sunview Luncheonette, Worksound Gallery, The Poetry Project, PS122, Habitable Spaces, PerformanceWorks NW, and the Prattsville Art Center, in addition to publicly shared, open spaces.

Ides co-founded and edited the interdisciplinary project, FO (A) RM Magazine (2002 – 2006) and has co-curated several festivals and intramural occasions, including the Gilded Pony Performance Festival in Troy, NY (2006), The Third Side in Portland, OR (2010), Initial Contractions in Maspeth, NY (2013), Between Night in the Widow Jane Mine Cave, Rosendale, NY (2015) and the roving Deathbeds Festival in locations across Montréal, QC (2016).

She is the author of two chapbooks: Indeed, Insist (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Approximate L (Cosa Nostra Editions). Her prose, poetry, essays and plays have appeared or are forthcoming in Tongue & Cheek (Montez Press) and Mahshid Rafiei: Of Mythic Proportions (Warehouse 421), as well as in journals including Community Literacy Journal, Radical Teacher, Shifter, Ear|Wave|Event, C Magazine, The Candidate Journal: Psychoanalytic Currents, Orange Mercury, Spirit Duplicator, the Seneca Review, Temporary Art Review, Pelt: Feminist Temporalities, fields magazine, and HAUNT Journal of Art.

Most recently, Ides co-organized a multi-disciplinary project on the technicities of clarity with Mitchell Akiyama, wrote/directed a one-act play about telephony and ventriloquism, and hosted a visit by Shawn Wilson on indigenous research methodologies.