Multi-disciplinary artist and Guildhall tutor Paula Varjack curates and hosts the third series of conversations in collaboration with students from the School’s BA Performance and Creative Enterprise (PACE).

In this informal conversation, streamed via Instagram Live, Paula Varjack is joined by Stacy Makishi who discusses her practice and shares advice, experience and ideas with the next generation.

Stacy Makishi is a transplant from Hawaii who found paradise in Dalston, London in 1994. Like a bonsai plant, Stacy is small but old. She has been making art for over 30 years. A cross-fertilization of live art, theatre, comedy, film and visual art, her work is as complex as it is accessible; humorous as it is challenging; visual as it is literate. It ranges across solo performances for stage, large-scale outdoor participatory projects and intimate one-to-ones. Also a teacher, life coach, director and mentor in international demand, Makishi believes in art’s transformative power and strives to share her creative process with others in order to put more aloha into the world.

Stacy’s solo performances include the trilogy Vesper Time, The Falsettos and Making Bull: The True Story, all of which have toured extensively in the UK including presentations at the O2 Academy in Kentish Town, Southbank Centre for Yoko Ono’s Meltdown, Royal Albert Hall, Bristol’s International Festival In Between Time, the Traverse Edinburgh and BRUT, Vienna, Tainan Taiwan. Stacy also directs participatory works, notably with Contact Manchester Young Company and Wellcome Trust’s Young Company and facilitates many workshops including regular DIYs with Live Art Development Agency.

Recent commissions made in response to COVID-19 include three intimate, one-to-one, live ritual performances to be experienced over the phone. The Promise was commissioned by The Yard in April 2020, Homeward (house) Bound by Yellow Earth Theatre and HOME, and the third (as yet unnamed) will be commissioned by Creative Folkestone in 2021. Queen Mary University, London, have also commissioned a comic book, made in response to a conversation with academic, Rhodri Hayward, as part of a project called Queen Mary Conversations in September 2020.

Awards and accolades for Stacy include Live Art Development Agency’s Arthole 2019–20 Award, ICA Attached Artist Award, a Millennium Fellowship Award, and the Franklin Furnace Award. Her work is produced by Artsadmin.