Elioa Steffen

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.