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Mark Jeffery

Professor

Contact

Bio

Mark Jeffery (B. 1973, UK) (he/him) is a performance artist, choreographer, community organizer, collaborator, and curator. He is a full professor in the performance department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1994 Mark has developed unconventional collaborations with visual artists, video artists, sound artists, writers, code artists, dancers, and cows.

Since 2019 he has collaborated with UK artist Lucy Cash on their film and installation project Winterage: Last Milk. A new multi-year project A Show is a Living… (NO PERFORMANCES TODAY) will begin in 2025 onwards.  

In 2012, he co-founded the language, performance, and technology collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) with Judd Morrissey. ATOM-r premiered its first work The Operature in 2014 at the National Museum of Health and Science, Chicago. In 2017 ATOM-r premiered Kjell Theøry at The Graham Foundation, Chicago. In 2018, ATOM-r presented Rhinestone Cowboy, performed with cows at 606, Chicago. ATOM-r presented I Love The Dead at Gallery 400, Chicago in February 2023.

Mark was a former member of the internationally renowned Goat Island Performance Group from 1996–2009. Goat Island toured and taught extensively across North America and Europe. In 2019, The Chicago Cultural Center presented an exhibition dedicated to the work of Goat Island. The Goat Island Archive is now housed at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in their library collection.

Recent performances, exhibits, and film screenings include: Winterage: Last Milk Film, 2023 onwards, a collaboration between Lucy Cash and I. Screenings include: Light Moves Festival, Ireland; Inbetween Time Festival, UK; Fine Arts Festival, NYC, USA; Rencontres International Paris / Berlin; LGBTQ Unbordered International Film Festival (Award Winner), USA; Artists’s Forum Festival, NYC; Sentient Performativities, UK; Graham Foundation, Chicago; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Chisenhale Dance Space, London; Alfred De Vrove, Prague; International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; Performance Arcade, Wellington, NZ; 606 Trail, Chicago; Gallery 400, Chicago; SAIC Galleries, Chicago; West Shore Community College and Ludington Arts Centre, Michigan; Arnolfini, Bristol, UK; Co-Prosperity Space, Chicago; Dartington Arts, UK; Kibla, Slovenia; Chicago Court Theatre, Chicago; Nexus Conference, Glasgow, UK; International Film Festival (Award Winner), USA; Artists’s Forum Festival, NYC; Sentient Performativities, UK.

He is organizer of IN>TIME triannual performance festival in Chicago. The next edition is scheduled for winter 2027.

Since summer 2019, Mark has collaborated with Kelly Kaczynski on a long-form residency project at The Poor Farm Experiment, Manawa, Wisconsin. NIDO LIVING IN THE PLAY, an annual sister residency program, takes place in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy. There have been NIDOs in 2023, 2024, 2025 and NIDO V will take place in 2026. Each residency works with artists across all forms and is intergenerational and creating community and fellowship.

Since summer of 2018, Mark has created a performance space in his home, called Ohklahomo. The space allows for emerging and established artists to connect, make new work, and always includes a dinner. 

Work

 

Video

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey, I <3 The Dead, 2023, Performance

Mark Jeffery, Judd Morrissey, and Julia Pello, KJELL ØR THEY, 2017, Film

Mark Jeffery and Lucy Cash, Winterage: Last Milk, 2022, Film
 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

How do we perform acts of kindness for our communities and ourselves? What does and can, kindness and care look like as an act and actions of expanded performance. How do we create and cultivate practices of everyday life that shift and transform? What inspires a stranger to be kind to another? What motivates someone to step out of their bubble and go out of their way to help a person they don¿t know? This Capstone class will create unconventional collaborations inside and outside of SAIC, considering careful and caring ways to work with each other and other members of our community in the city of Chicago.
People we will look at in this course include William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, Carrie Mae Weems. Michael Landy, Christine Sun Kim, Tania Bruguera, Catherine Sullivan. Podcasts On Being, Hidden Brain, and writings of Katherine May, Sharon Brous, Lisa Samuels and Early AIDS Epidemic Nurses Ellen Matzer and Valery Hughes. We will also work with AIDS Foundation Chicago and Howard Brown Health Centre.
Coursework will include:
1. Present a proposal with your CAPSTONE intentions that considers models of kindness and actions of self and others in the community
2. Complete a focused body of work that is presented at Howard Brown Health Centre or AIDS Foundation Chicago
3. Develop exit strategies for how to sustain a practice outside of the institute through public community engagements.

Class Number

2352

Credits

3

Description

This seminar consists of weekly studio visits, discussions, and small group critiques. Students are expected to arrive with completed and semi-completed works and be prepared to make and re-make new works throughout the summer sessions. A wide variety of readings chosen by faculty will guide discussions that concentrate on problems concerning methods of artmaking, distribution, and interpretation. Readings will include examples drawn from the emerging category of conceptual writing as well as crucial art historical texts, literature, and poetry.

Class Number

1234

Credits

3

Description

Over the course of each six-week summer residency period, all students in the Low- Res MFA program engage with a series of world renowned artists and scholars to expand our collective conceptual frameworks and discourses. Invited speakers participate in our Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series. They deliver a public lecture open to the entire SAIC and Chicago community and the general public, and then participate in a Colloquium the next day exclusively for Low-Res MFA students. Each Colloquium takes place with the artist present, and is a space where the artist¿s work and concepts (direct or adjacent) are discussed, questions are raised, and topics are debated. Colloquium asks for consensus, but rather a dynamic and in depth discursive exploration of ideas. This form allows for a multiplicity of voices to build on concepts through questioning, contributing, challenging, and listening to each other. The colloquium is considered a Gift anchored with the presence of the visiting artist. This Gift is generated by enacting full attention to the concepts present in the artist or scholar¿s work. In the spirit of Lewis Hyde, the Gift is an exchange which generates or propagates further attention and exchange in culture. Thus, the Colloquium is a Gift meant to propagate further exchange in the world, as artists and citizens.

Class Number

1315

Credits

1.5

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

2344

Credits

3 - 6

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

1992

Credits

3 - 6

Description

This course examines an artist?s professional practice tactically, within the context of a contemporary networked international art world in which online presence rivals real-world gallery and museums, and media documentation of works can be as significant as physical versions in their impact. In relation to these transformations, traditional museum curation has morphed into a hybrid practice - museumology - in which curators work in teams with education and media departments and museums consider ?community outreach? rather than archiving or connoisseurship their primary missions. The art world is, like most others, a shifting ground post ubiquitous media. Students will consider the Internet, the possibility of tactical virality and their own artistic identities in relation to such transformations through site visits and active discussion with members of the Chicago gallery and museum community. These will be augmented by online Skype meetings with organizers and art professionals outside of Chicago in both the national and international context.

Class Number

1312

Credits

1.5

Description

The Graduate Projects course allows students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work and research from their home studio or mobile platforms. The continued development of ideas and approaches initiated during the summer Graduate Studio Seminar will be supported through in-person and online conversation with SAIC Program Mentors. These liaisons are intended to support the off-campus development of work while also providing personal connections to SAIC's vast global network of distinguished alumni. Open to Low Residency MFA students only.

Class Number

2485

Credits

3