Eliot Feenstra, MA, Oregon's Kitchen Table Project Manager
feen@pdx.edu | (503) 725-3420
Eliot Feenstra (he/him or they/them ) joined Oregon's Kitchen Table as a project manager in August 2023. He is interested in how opportunities for public engagement can be meaningful, joyful, and liberating experiences of civic belonging and collective imagination.
Before joining Oregon's Kitchen Table, Eliot worked with the Rogue Action Center to develop the LGBTQ+ Listening Project, a community organizing hub for rural LGBTQIA2S+ folks in Josephine and Jackson counties. Since 2012, he has lived in southern Josephine County and has co-founded multiple collaborative projects including Versailles (a queer land project in Hugo), Whirlwind (24-hour play festivals), and RiverStars (a school-based devised theater initiative in the Illinois Valley). He is currently the co-artistic director of Beyond Boom & Bust, an incubator for community-based arts projects that use theater to explore economic and social issues in rural southwestern Oregon. He continues to lead facilitation trainings with Oregon Humanities and serves as the co-chair of the governance committee for the Queer Data Project, an emergent statewide research project with the LGBTQIA2S+ community in Oregon.
Eliot holds an MA in performance studies from York University and a BA in interdisciplinary studies from the University of Chicago. He lives on a collective land project in Takilma, Oregon, with his partner and their cat, Antigonick. He loves to read, hike, swim in the Illinois River, and dream up epic multi-day bike tours and backpacking trips. He hosts a radio show called Behind the Fence on KXCJ-LP, his local community radio station.