Performance Art Lab of Iowa is designed as a "laboratory"--a space for folks to meet up, brainstorm, play, and plan for performance art pieces. We like to play improv-, music-, and movement-based games to inspire creativity and facilitate the organic discussion of new ideas. All are welcome to join! 

Please feel free (and encouraged) to bring instruments, props, toys, food, friends (old or new), questions (practical or existential), funny/weird stories, ideas for games, or half-baked plans for performance art pieces to any meeting.

Meets first and third Sundays of the month from 2:30-4:30pm in the Dance Hall at PS1 Close House. Please enter through the east (ramp) door.

Dorian Wood (she/they) is an anti-disciplinary artist based in the US. Her intent of “infecting” spaces and ideologies with her creative practice is born from a desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people.

Her work has been showcased in concert halls and performance spaces around the world, including at institutions like The Broad (Los Angeles), Brown University (Providence), Museo Nacional Del Prado (Madrid), the City Hall of Madrid and Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris (Mexico City). Wood is a recipient of an FCA Grants for Artists Award, a Creative Capital Award, a NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, a COLA Individual Master Artist Project Grant, an LA County Performing Arts Recovery Grant and an Art Matters Foundation Grant. In 2023, Wood premiered Canto de Todes, a touring twelve-hour chamber music composition and installation that emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a conduit for social change. In 2024, Wood toured her piano-and-voice interpretation of Sinéad O'Connor's album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, honoring the late artist on the anniversary of her passing. Wood has released over a dozen recordings, most recently the albums You are clearly in perversion (2023, Astral Editions), in collaboration with Thor Harris; and Excesiva (Dragon's Eye Recordings, 2023).

Tommy Santee Klaws is an ever-evolving musical project known for its hauntingly cinematic soundscapes, drawing from folk, chamber pop, and experimental rock. While the band once emerged from the hazy sprawl of Southern California, it resists being rooted in any singular geography. Southern California may bear the name of certain bittersweet fruits, but it cannot claim the origin of this music—not literally, not figuratively. The songs of Tommy Santee Klaws are not of that soil. They are nourishing fruits born of something older, deeper—ghost(s), god(s), and loss(es) materializing from every corner of the country and beyond.

Formed in the early 2000s, the project has physically relocated multiple times, from California to Iowa to New York and back again. Yet its essence remains unchanged. The spirit that feeds TSK's music is omnipresent, drawing collaborators across decades to explore universal themes—love, grief, reverence, the haunting weight of existence, and the piercing joys that fracture and heal in equal measure.

More than a band, Tommy Santee Klaws is a locus of shared human experience, a conduit for instinctual, metaphysical truths made musical. Across a diverse discography and countless shifting lineups, it remains fiercely independent and impossible to pin down—except by those whose ears are attuned to the aching beauty it carries.