Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade are interdisciplinary artists whose collaborations span performance, video, music, theatre, installation and writing. Recent projects include site- specific science fiction operas, Moon Mine (2025), commissioned for the Getty Center’s PST ART: Science and Art Collide and performed at James Turrell’s Skyspace at Pomona College; and Star Choir (2023), produced by experimental opera company The Industry, performed at the Mount Wilson Observatory, Los Angeles. A film of Star Choir (2024) has been screened at MoMA, NY, and the UCLA Hammer Museum, LA, among other venues.
Gaines and Segade co-founded the performance art collective My Barbarian in 2000 with performer Jade Gordon. Exhibiting internationally for over two decades, My Barbarian’s multi-media survey, curated by Adrienne Edwards, was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2021) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022); a monograph published by Yale University Press accompanied the exhibition. My Barbarian has received awards from the Foundation For Contemporary Art, United States Artists and Creative Capital, and has been written about by scholars including Jose Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o and Shannon Jackson.
Gaines and Segade have individually published numerous articles and essays on contemporary art in magazines and catalogs. Gaines’s book, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible, (NYU Press, 2017), illustrates the black political ideas that radicalized the artistic endeavors of musicians, playwrights, and actors beginning in the 1960s. Segade is the artist and writer of the graphic novel, The Context (Primary Information, 2020), a queer parable of belonging; and recently presented his short film, Anoche (Last Night, 2025) at the 15th Havana Biennial, in Cuba.
Gaines is a Professor in Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego. Segade is Associate Professor Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego.
