Bibliography, publications, bio

Tobaron Waxman is a visual artist who sings. Tobaron composes performances for photograph, video and site specific installation, and is also a trained vocalist in Jewish liturgical music. As a curator, Tobaron’s curatorial projects have included ‘Watch me Work:Women, Labour and Queer Economies” at BBK Köln, Germany; ‘Object Body: Unexpectedly Ecstatic’ at Studio Maya, Brooklyn: ‘Radical Drag/Transformative Performance’ in collaboration with Stefan St-Laurent at GalerieSAWGallery, Ottawa; and the internationally touring video program ‘Topographixx: Trans in the Landscape’. In 2013, Tobaron founded The Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency, as a combined curatorial, relational/live art, and sociopolitical praxis. Since 2017 Tobaron has developed the Trans Collections at Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, as part of a collaborative team at the largest independent LGBTQ archive in the world.

Tobaron has been exhibited at such venues as Palais de Tokio, Videotage Hong Kong, Kunsthalle Vienna, FestivAlt Krakow, Montréal Arts Interculturels, CEPA Buffalo, New Museum NYC, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New Museum NYC and Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music. As a vocalist, Tobaron has sung liturgy in hospitals, memorials and weddings, as well as site-specific endurance performances for a cappella transsexual voice in such resonant sites as a brutalist church, a mosque, an abbatoir, a hammam, at Kampnagel Festival of Choreography and Protest Hamburg, Kulturlabor ICI Berlin, Donau Festival, and Dixon Place NYC.  Tobaron has taught live art, collaboration and vocal techniques at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of the Art Institute Chicago and at the Hollins MFA Dance Program, and has lectured at Parsons, SOAS University of London, Concordia University, OCADU, SMFA Boston, UC Irvine, Goldsmiths, NYU Tisch, SAIC, Bilgi Istanbul and others.

Tobaron is a grateful recipient of grants from Franklin Furnace for Performance Art; Canada, Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils; and Ontario Ministry of Education and Training Technology Grant for Students with Disabilities.  Tobaron has been artist in residence at Atlantic Centre for the Arts, Smack Mellon, Canada Council International Artist Residency at La Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, Marble House Vermont, and Toronto People with AIDS Foundation.  Tobaron was Van Leir Fellow at Harvestworks NYC,  artist fellow at Kulturlabor ICI Berlin, Fellow at the Akademie der Künst der Welt/Köln (2014 – 15). In 2010 Tobaron was honoured with the first ever Audience Award of the Jewish Museum of New York for the 8-hour endurance performance Opshernish.

Tobaron’s writing and photography have been published internationally, including in Carte Blanche (Magenta, 2006), Post Porn Politics (bbooks, 2010), Fast Feminism (Autonomedia, 2010), Trans Bodies Trans Selves (Oxford University Press, 2014), Entangled Memories (Winter, 2016), Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects (2024, Hirmer) and featured in such publications as Missy, C Magazine, Fuse, Canadian Dimension, Canadian Theatre Review, Lillith, Women & Performance, GLQ, TSQ, and LTTR.