Lois Weaver is an independent performance artist and activist and Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice, Department of Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. She was co-founder of WOW Theatre in New York and has been a collaborator with the Split Britches Company since 1980. She was Director of PSi12: Performing Rights, an international conference and festival on performance and human rights in 2006 and is currently Artistic Director for Air Project, an initiative that nurtures and sustains live art practitioners in the UK. Her practice-based research uses performance to initiate conversations on human rights in women’s prisons with the project Staging Human Rights; technology design with Democratising Technology; and the role of democracy in public engagement with The Long Table. Tammy WhyNot has accompanied Lois since 1978 as her alter-ego, performance partner and research associate.
Tammy Whynot was conceived in The LysistrataNumbah created and performed by Spiderwoman Theatre in 1978 and born again in a caravan under the Brooklyn Bridge in a show called Upwardly Mobile Home written and performed by the Split Britches Theatre Company in 1984. She got her start in show business in the late eighties as a solo artist on the New York downtown performance scene appearing at WOW, PS122, The Club at La MAMA and the Limbo Lounge. She made her first international appearance as mistress of ceremonies for Club Girrls at the ICA in 1994. After that she toured the UK with cLUBbENT, presented in association with It’s Queer Up North and Gay Sweatshop. Her celebrated London appearances include, Saturday nights at Duckies, Club Deviance at the Almeida Theatre and Tammy Whynot’s X-rated Xmas Xtravaganza at the Oval House and Tammy’s Art and Beauty Salon and East End Collaborations at Queen Mary, University of London. She has performed in Helsinki, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Rio de Janeiro, NYC, Los Angeles and London.
