About us

The LIVE Biennale of Performance Art has been an active part of the local and international performance art scene for over two and a half decades. 
In 1999, Glenn Alteen and Brice Canyon of grunt gallery conceived and organized LIVE at the End of the Century, an extensively collaborative festival which aimed to platform and celebrate the widely established yet often peripheralized practice of performance art in Vancouver.

After the success of this inaugural iteration, the LIVE Biennale of Performance Art Society became incorporated in 2002, and grunt gallery continued to produce it until 2005. In 2007, LIVE became independent from grunt and Randy Gledhill was hired as the Executive Director/Curator. Gledhill, in tandem with the Board of Directors and many curatorial collaborators, organized LIVE from 2007 until his retirement in 2019. In 2020, the LIVE board led an organizational restructuring and succession planning initiative which included the 2021 LIVE Assembly: Care and Repair, curated by Elham Puriya Mehr. Then in 2022, the society hired Derrick Chang, who currently holds the role of Managing Director.

The Team