ICP CLASS OF 2026

Sarah Applin is a performance artist whose work spans devising, acting, directing, dance, and stage management, with a focus on creating spaces for storytelling, collaborative improvisation, and liberation. Their work is rooted in honoring ancestors, naming and resisting colonization and white supremacy, decolonization, and operating from love, curiosity, and abundance.

Sarah delights in movement, with change being a driving force, bringing about a shift to what is needed, a catastrophic ending, a sensational beginning. This perpetual movement brings about endless color shifts to our worlds, dimming or brightening our emotional connection to the physical state. Sarah creates work driven by these shapeshifters, and the ways they form individual lives, stories, and identities. 

Recent production roles include Assistant Director and Lobby Installation Designer for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding Salon, Stage Management for Congruency Tap Collective’s Waveform, and Stage Management and Dramaturgical work for PUSH: Black Mamas Changin’ the Culture of Birth. Recent acting roles include Jennifer in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding Salon, Everybody in Everybody, Deviser/Ensemble in Y/Ours: The Work of Mutual Aid in a (Lonely) Democracy, PUSH, and Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes.

Luca Baggs (they/he) is a mixed-media artist, writer, improviser and performer.  Growing up as an actor in Portland, they are excited to return to the city with a body and name that feels more like home. Outside of performing you can find them making freehand crochet, analog collages, collecting vintage kewpie dolls or processing fish leather.  He is excited to find new ways to meld mediums together to explore new worlds. You can find more of their work on instagram @babyshelfcreative

Some of their past work has been performed, experienced or published at Two Cent Lion (CO), Kickstand Comedy, RISE comedy (CO), Portland Center Stage, Denver Fringe Festival, St Mary’s University (London), Art at the Cave gallery and Colour Into Focus.

Amelia Hillery is a Portland-based performer. She holds a dual degree in Theatre Arts and Conflict Resolution from Portland State University, and dedicates much of her work to the use of performance as a method of community building, conflict resolution and peaceful resistance. Her most recent roles include #8 in The Wolves, Rev in Unmediated (Northwest Theatre Alliance), and Daphne in Business Card (icryluckproductions). 

Noah Mannix (they/them) is a playwright, theatermaker, and teaching artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Recent projects include The AV Club, a weekly horror theatre collective, and “Noah Mannix lives at the Theatre”, a daily live performance journal. Their poetic ethnography Everybody’s Hometown was presented as a staged reading in November 2024. They were a New Strides commissioned playwright (The Strides Collective, 2024), where they wrote the first act of their play 3 Women. They are a member of Azuka Theatre’s Rising Writers program. They studied as a playwright at the National Theatre Institute’s Summer Theatermakers Intensive program, where they were awarded a Miranda Family Fellowship.

noahmannix.com

Charlotte Ruiz (she/they) is a sculptor and performer based in the Bay Area. Inspired by living on a boat and her routine of pulling trash from the water, she explores how discarded material and found objects inform her mixture of sculpture and performance .  

Charlotte can often be found creeping and crawling in search of objects, trash, and special human/animal encounters that spark inquiries and vision for their evolving creative practice.  

Dominique Smith

Emma Stephens is a world builder and movement-based creator, specifically interested in immersive and site-specific storytelling. She is fascinated by the reflective nature of performative art, and hopes to create work that invites others to look inward as a way to better understand the world around us. 

Emma’s past professional credits include Sleep No More, The New City Ballet, and Broadway's Lyric Theater.  

Cy X is a professional girl making perverted sculptures and performances in their endless quest to unfuck // hack // top(ple) unjust systems. They are grounded in the gooey stew of diva culture, glamour magic, DIY aesthetics, erotic excess, filth, and eco-eroticism. After a hotcrazysexy New York moment followed by a two-year stint studying performance art in Germany, they are excited to continue developing their work with PETE and the Portland community. They have previously been a resident, taught, and/or had work featured in: Brussels Porn Film Festival, Center for Art Research and Alliances, Culture Hub, New York University, Performance Space New York, Pioneer Works, Rewire Festival, and other spaces, both digital and physical.