Bio Highlights

A San Francisco native, writer/activist Canyon Sam began doing performance art in 1991. Her first work, TAXI KARMA/THE DISSIDENT grew out of her activism in the Tibet support movement which began in the mid-1980's during her year-long solo journey through Central Asia. Ms. Sam is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, beginning with a National Endowment for the Arts Scholarship at the age of eighteen, and including a New York Franklin Furnace Grant, and grants from the San Francisco Foundation. Her most recent artist's residencies include Djerassi Resident Artists Program (1999) and a Poets and Writers, Inc, On Site Residency (1998). She was a finalist for the Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, and the California Arts Council's Artist's Fellowship in New Genre. She currently serves as as Arts Expert for the San Francisco Commission on the Arts. TAXI KARMA and THE DISSIDENT toured twelve cities across the U.S. and Canada in 1992-94, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Asia Society, New York; Women in View Festival, Vancouver; Solo Mio Festival, San Francisco; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Cleveland Performance Art Festival; and in Boston (with Bill T. Jones), Toronto, Santa Monica, and Washington, D.C. Ms. Sam has also performed at colleges and universities, including Columbia University, U.C.L.A., U.C. Santa Cruz, Pomona College, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. THE  DISSIDENT is available on film. See Film Release! CAPACITY TO ENTER has been performed at Yale University, Smith College, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the White House Commission on Asian Pacific Islanders, the Edmonton Fringe Festival (Alberta, Canada), California State University at Humboldt, Columbia College (Chicago), the Philadelphia Gay/Lesbian Theater Festival, Dell’Arte Theater (Arcata, CA), College of the Redwoods, the Asian Pacific Islander American Cultural Center (S.F.), Theater of Yugen, Santa Ana College, CA; the Queer Cultural Center Festival, (S.F.); and Josie's Cabaret. Ms. Sam has published over two dozen works of fiction and nonfiction in magazines and anthologies. Her work appears in Shambhala Sun magazine, The Seattle Review, San Jose Mercury News, and Callboard Magazine. All her one-woman plays have been published. Her short memoir, "Sapphire" appears in InvASIAN, edited by Elaine Kim, published in 2003 by Asian Women United. Ms. Sam teaches Writing for Performance in the M.F.A. program in the Arts and Consciousness Program at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley.  She has also taught at the California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University.