Christopher Pelham is Director and co-founder with Yasuko Kasaki of CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing), a healing and art center grounded in the study and practice of A Course in Miracles and meditation. He is also a healer, writer, photographer, filmmaker, occasionally an performer, and a curator/producer of music, dance, theater, film and visual arts events, as well as the organizer of a Sufi Dance Community.
His photographs have appeared in publications such as Downbeat, The Wire, and I Care If You Listen. His photography can also be found on only love ART along with some of his writing on the arts.
With musician and curator gamin, he conceived and produces the Crossing Boundaries and Paradise Laboratory concert series.
Since he began producing live performance events in 1997, he has had the privilege of presenting dozens and dozens of wonderful artists from all over the world, such as musical artists Morio Agata (top 10 hit “Red Colored Elegy”), shakuhachi masters Ralph Samuelson and James Nyoraku Schlefer, Steinway artist and Guggenheim fellow Jen Shyu, composer and flutist Elsa Nilsson, former US jazz ambassador Scott Robinson, and choreographers Alexandra Beller, Jennifer Nugent, and Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks, among many others.
From a young age, Christopher immersed himself in the study of various Utopian and Marxist texts and philosophies. While attending Harvard Summer School in 1986, he took a class in “Revolution & Society” and participated in various public participatory art projects in Harvard Square led by artist/writer/computer scientist Richard Gardner, who had lived for a time at the FH art commune outside Vienna founded by Actionist artist Otto Muehl. These two experiences and his later residency during his undergraduate years at Duke University in Epworth/SHARE (Student Housing for Academic and Residential Experimentation), fostered his commitment to the exploration and development of creative communities.
Christopher studied theatre, 20th century/post-colonial literature and literary theory at Duke University, most memorably with Frank Lentricchia, Michael Moses, Thomas Ferraro, Jody McAuliffe and Doris Duke Impact Award Winner Johnny Simons. After a semester studying American Lit in the graduate English program at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, he returned to the theatre to play the role of the Policeman in Rodrigo Dorfman‘s production of Fassbinder’s Blood on the Cat’s Neck. He then appeared for four seasons with Johnny Simons’ Hip Pocket Theatre in productions at Duke University and at the Hip Pocket’s idyllic Oak Acres Amphitheatre in Fort Worth, Texas, appearing in a number of world premieres including Dabloids by Leonid Tishkov and dogman by Lake Simons. His personal career highlight as an actor was creating the role of the Snoid in Robert Crumb’s R. Crumb Comix III.
As a member of MadWomanoftheWoods Productions, he co-produced five Off Off Broadway productions and performed in and helped to create Antigone Through Time and An Absolute Mystery. Antigone Through Time was the first production of the New York International Fringe Festival to be reviewed by the New York Times. The show was created from the poems and stories of the many Greek women who were imprisoned, some for decades, and executed on secret island concentration camps by the Greek fascist government following WWII. MadWoman also presented a staged reading of Christopher’s play American Spirits at the Miranda Theatre in 2000. With Lake Simons and Herald Lehmann, Christopher performed in and helped to create The Nose, Two and Two, and Imagining Cain in the American Living Room Series at HERE.