Maxi Hawkeye Canion (she/they) is a Brooklyn based Performance Artist. As a Black Trans/Queer artist, they distill their life experiences through movement focused installations, experimenting with text, format, sculpture, sound, and garment. With an emphasis on improvisation, she creates low-stakes, high-integrity containers that prioritize research, play, and spontaneity. Their works illustrate nuances of intimacy, failure, femininity, the grotesque, ephemerality, and domesticity within metaphysical dystopias.
GUT PUNCH is a collaboration between Maxi Hawkeye Canion and Hisham Akira Bharoocha. They began collaborating in 2025 on hybrid performance works merging movement, theater, sound, and technology. Maxi directs movement, theatrical vignettes, and text-driven inquiry, while Hisham develops sonic and technical frameworks that propel each piece. Both Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artists, their practices bridge performance, installation, and public art.
Maxi is a Black Trans/Queer performance artist, is a 2025–26 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, former 2024-2025 Fresh Tracks artist at New York Live Arts and has had residencies through Chocolate Factory Theater (‘25) Leimay (‘24) Art Omi (‘23) Gallim Moving Artist Residency (‘23) Otion Front (‘22) and BOFFO (‘22) among others. She has presented at Performance Space NY, HOLE PICS, Play Me Techno, SQUIRTS at LaMama Experimental Theater, Les Urbaines Festival in Lausanne, Switzerland, SFX Festival, and Black Aesthetics at Judson Memorial Church.
Hisham has realized large-scale murals and multimedia installations—from NYCHA housing developments with ArtBridge, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Knockdown Center, Deitch Projects, The Hole NYC, De Vleeshal (NL), Galerie Frank Elbaz (FR)—and presented large scale performance work at MoMA, MoMA PS1, Rockefeller Center, the Sydney Opera House (OZ), and the Barbican Centre (UK). He is a 2026 Pioneer Works Music Resident. Together, they create immersive, process-driven environments that approach public space as a site of experimentation, civic encounter, and embodied exchange. Collectively, they have presented at Pageant, Danspace, and the event Naughty or Noise.
