Eli Nixon (they/them) builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist, or exist but call for creative intervention. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. They’re a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land.

Eli is the author and illustrator of BLOODTIDE- A New Holiday In Homage To Horseshoe Crabs; 2nd edition, available through The 3rd Thing Press. Eli has been celebrating this new/primordial holiday in a wide range of ways including through leading a massive public sculpture installation at The Providence Public Library. Eli and 300 Modern Humans (ages 0.3-83) built a 450-million-year timeline of flora and fauna (mostly out of recyclables) over 9 months of asynchronous but collaborative organism building workshops. Their installation is on view until December, 2024. Now Eli is basking in intertidal naturedrag, flotilla scheming and DIY festoonery. Eli organizes with Showing Up for Racial Justice-RI and is a supporting member of DARE’s (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) Behind The Walls committee. They are a New Georges affiliated artist, a member of the 2023-2024 cohort of The Public’s Devised Theater Working Group, and part of the clown collective, ‘brotherdykes unlimited.’ Eli parents a 14-year-old human and tends a small menagerie of succulents and moss balls.