Asher Hartman (b. 1951, San Francisco) is a visual artist, writer, director, and maker of live performances. His works, which combine strategies of theater and performance art, grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. His works are dense, visual, poetic embodied texts, infused with clown and cringe humor, evidence of trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit strong feeling. Asher Hartman is the director and founder of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of visual artists, actors, and performance artists with whom he has created since 2010.

Recent projects include “The Mommy Leaks the Floor,” New Theater Hollywood (2025); “Blessed with Switch” with Jasmine Orpilla (The TBA Festival at PICA, 2025; Centre Pompidou, Paris; UCI and The Art of Performance, 2024); “It’s Better to Start Out Ugly” at JOAN (Los Angeles, 2023) and The Lab, (San Francisco, 2023) and “After I seen that figure I don’t have no consciousness about it” (Alto Beta, Los Angeles, 2023). Recent publications include “Blessed with Switch (with an introduction by Martin Harries,” Georgia Review, 2025; “About Blessed with Switch: Another Way of Feeling It,” Mimesis: Film as Performance (2025); “Lifes” at the Hammer Museum (2022); Hartman’s book of plays, Mad Clot on a Holy Bone: Memories of a Psychic Theater” (X Artists’ Books, 2020); “Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers" is his novel in progress and upcoming film with Gawdafful National Theater.

Jasmine Orpilla (b. New York City) is a transdisciplinary Ilokana-American multi-voiced performance artist and polylingual operatic composer of singing sound installations carved by her lifelong study of inherited Filipino combat and occult systems, sacred chant, folk dance and ancient percussive gong-chime music of Northern and Southern Philippines. In Orpilla’s solo operatic process, she simultaneously wields each role of: musician, dancer, singer, sound designer, installation artist and writer, in order to exemplify/amplify an independent economy of care that may prioritize compassionately sourcing from/for the direct support of Indigenous Pilipino artisans’ living cultural practices, her elders singlehandedly carrying legacy throughout the diaspora. Evolving alongside accountable independent research centering the lived experience of the systemically silenced, Orpilla’s voice, whether wielded in its multiplicity as sung, scribed or danced, remains committed to honoring the complex intersectionality of the Fil-Am body in her full agency.

Jasmine Orpilla is the recipient of the 2023 Creative Capital award, the 2022/2023 City of Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Project grant, the California Arts Council Creative Partners Fellowship, with support from Alliance for California Traditional Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Art and more. Orpilla has performed at the MOCA, Los Angeles, Hau Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, REDCAT, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, MAK Center, LA Philharmonic and the Ford Theatre, Théâtre de la Villette, Centre Pompidou, Paris, among many others.