Flowers in the Basement (FITB) is the name of both a project and a group of artists that has consisted of Kite, Tsedaye Makonnen, Alisha B. Wormsley, Mel Elberg, Frances Ines Rodriguez and Amy Ruhl (Artistic Director) formed to create new original performance work, and to radically reimagine family structures and reproductive labor away from colonial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal imperatives. Bringing together a group of core collaborators working in vast fields of inquiry, their mode of collaboration forges collectivity while respecting the autonomy of each artists’ individual praxis. FITB borrows aspects of devised theater as a strategy to connect a group of individual artists and flesh out both their political affinities and differences, creating a kaleidoscopic point of view through diverse forms such as film, poetry, noise, video art, monolog, dance, and sculpture.

Mel Elberg is a genderqueer poet and artist working across print, performance, memory games, and long-term surrealist collaborative endeavors.

Dr. Suzanne Kite (aka “Kite”) (Oglála Lakȟóta) is a performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and a PhD in Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montreal. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakȟóta ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. She has published the award-winning article “Making Kin with Machines in The Journal of Design and Science” (MIT Press). Kite is a 2023 Creative Capital Award Winner, 2023 USA Fellow, and a 2022–2023 Creative Time Open Call artist with Alisha B. Wormsley. She is Director of Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe.

Amy Ruhl is an interdisciplinary artist working across fields of performance, new media, moving image, installation, and experimental theater. Her practice spawns long-term projects that flesh out complex narrative and conceptual worlds, create embodied fictions, and continually branch off into correlative work and collaborations. In 2021, she organized the rotating feminist performance ensemble Flowers in the Basement, which has thus far included Kite, Alisha B. Wormsley, Mel Elberg, Frances Ines Rodriguez, and Tsedaye Makonnen. She has exhibited her visual art and films at galleries and venues such as KAJE, Participant Inc, Lubov, Essex Flowers, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives (New York), Kansas City Art Institute Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice (KC, Missouri) Vitrine Gallery (London), Public Fiction (Los Angeles), and Pleasure Dome (Toronto, Ontario). Ruhl has performed at NYU Skirball Center, Roulette Intermedium and Irondale Theater (Brooklyn, NY), The Broad Museum and REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) and the Live Arts Biennial at Bard Fisher Center (Red Hook, NY).