Location: East Bay, CA
Medium: Performance, Film, Video, Photography
Website: chanibockwinkel.com
Chani Bockwinkel is a performer, filmmaker, and photographer based in the East Bay. Bringing what she calls her midwestern sensibilities to the Bay Area, she makes interdisciplinary, collaborative, feminist imagery for the stage, the gallery, and the internet. She holds a B.A. in Performance and Media Production from Hampshire College.
Bockwinkel is a founding member of SALTA, an Oakland-based feminist dance collective formed in 2012 that has curated more than 30 events at venues including SOMArts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, and AUNTS; the collective holds a Goldie Award. Her own work has been shown at BAMPFA, SOMArts, ODC Theater, the SF Dance Film Festival, BRIC in New York, and Dock 11 in Berlin, among other venues. In 2022 she was one of the featured installation artists in Fierce as Death: Queer as the Song of Songs, a day-long celebration of the late musician Jewlia Eisenberg at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. More recent San Francisco performance works include a piece commissioned by Jess Curtis/Gravity (2024) and a site-specific performance made for the offices of the San Francisco Arts Commission (2025).
With longtime collaborator Tyler Burdenski, whom she met in the Bay Area, she co-directed Those Who Wait, their first feature film, developed over more than seven years beginning with a 2017 residency at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine. She also leads SAPPHO and SWEAT, an internationally roving queer feminist dance class, and works as a director of photography for dance films, music videos, and performance documentation.
Bockwinkel’s work centers the body, non-linear history, and what she describes as “the grand tradition of camp.” Across live performance, dance film, and photography, she treats collaboration as integral to the work itself, with a long list of Bay Area collaborators including Keith Hennessey, Indira Allegra, Brontez Purnell, Leila Weefur, and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo. Her photographic Sappho Project frames portrait-making as a shared, feminist practice, giving agency to the people on both sides of the camera.
Her performance and film work often restages history through a queer lens. Those Who Wait retells the 1840s Millerite doomsday movement in tableau and parable, relying on sound, movement, and slow shots rather than dialogue, and asks what happens “when abolition is abandoned for apocalypse.” Her stage works range from community ritual (Queer As Song of Songs) to site-specific comedy and a murder-mystery dance (Stu is Dead).
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