AUBREY CALAWAY
Aubrey Calaway is an artist and curator based in Portland, Maine. Born in Houston, he maintains close ties to southeast Texas, New York City, and Los Angeles. His work focuses on how sex, reality, and the human are manufactured and performed in contemporary American culture. His practice moves between performance, visual art, and writing. He is the founding director of the Violet Institute for Contemporary Trans Culture.

Working across multimedia essaying, digital photography and photomontage, installation, ethnography, and an event-based social practice, he often engages nontraditional archives, parafiction, and virtual fieldsites. His performance practice draws on puppetry, drag, improv, stand-up, and live storytelling, and his original play This is Improv! received the Patron's Choice Award at Port Fringe 2026.  His work has been presented at the Portland Museum of Art, SPACE, and Portland Stage, and he has collaborated with institutions like ICA Miami, MIT, and Black Mountain Institute. His writing has been published in the Texas Observer, the Houston Chronicle, and Cite Magazine; his photography has appeared in The Portland Dirt, Weathered, and Transgress (Bluebasket Press, 2026). Calaway was the 2023 Salt Artist-in-Residence at Monson Arts.  

Before founding the Violet, Calaway served as the director of Foghorn, an audio documentary collective and coworking space in Portland, from 2024 to 2026. He was also on staff at TransLash Media, where his team was honored with a GLAAD Media Award, Signal Award, and Webby nomination.

He studied sociology at Brown University and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies at Maine College of Art & Design, where he later returned as a lecturer.