Elioa Steffen (She/her) is an artist working in the fields of performance, facilitation, and curation. Her work focuses on the intersection of communal narratives, cultural norms, and systemic violence. With over 10 years of experience as a facilitator, Elioa crafts encounters that investigate the relationships between personal needs and communal truths. Heavily influenced by queer art lineages, Elioa’s work melds critical theory, camp, and drag in participatory performances that question audiences’ relationships to each other, power, and the state.
Elioa’s previous performance Strange Utterances was a queer grieving ritual exploring invitation, haunting, and loss through clay sculpture, participation, and choreographic score. Her new artistic research explores queer monstrosity, female rage, and the ecstatic through a drag deconstruction of the Medusa myth.
Elioa has been commissioned and produced by The Warp, DOOResidency, (Amsterdam) Gay City, On the Boards, Studio Current, (Seattle), Risk/Reward (Portland), Dixon Place (New York), and Vashon Center for the Arts (Vashon Island) among others. Their curation has been featured in the Special Effects Festival (New York), NW New Works Festival, as well as their own productions The Temenos Project and the Rain City Advice Hour (Seattle, WA). Elioa has studied with Anne Bogart’s SITI company, Gender Tender and Vanessa DeWolf. She holds a masters’ degree from DAS Theatre, Amsterdam.
In 2021, Elioa co-founded In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities, Queer Performance Pedagogy and Feedback (IPOP) within DAS Research at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. IPOP is an educational, artistic research platform exploring how educational institutions can better foster queer artists and practices. Now in its second year, IPOP is engaged in a collective research project investigating theories and methodologies for effective feedback for queer artists as well as what queer lenses can offer arts education and feedback more generally.
As a writer, Eli focuses on the connections and conflicts between trauma, desire, and communal identities. Firmly situating her writing in an expansive queer identity, aesthetic, and theory, Eli explores her personal experiences in a shifting queer landscape. Her writings have appeared in, Queering Artistic Feedback, T(OUR) Magazine, The Bent Mentor Showcase Anthology, and Hoax.
As a curator, Eli has worked on a wide range of projects including The Northwest New Works Festival (Seattle, WA), The Special Effects Festival (New York, NY), as well as her own projects.
