​WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT is a 90-minute workshop for artists aiming to strengthen written materials about their work. Artists preparing to update their web portfolio; apply for fellowships, grants, and residences; publish critical writing about their practice; or otherwise produce supplemental media are encouraged to attend.


WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT holds that, once honed, the act of writing is a heretical means to peer into and manipulate the future. Surveying a range of genre-defying artist statements, biographies, press releases, essays, and chapbook-length publications, the workshop examines how these texts compress feral intuitions into allegories that offer potent critiques, dissolve creative blockages, and attract institutional support.


Of course, no NOR RESEARCH STUDIO workshop would be complete without a reprisal of the money-making strategies central to our investigations. Unlike other writing workshops, WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT focuses on supplementary materials that typically accompany artworks, using concepts from intellectual property law to preemptively integrate those materials into a body of work and transform them into a streamlined application- and proposal-production process.

WE BELIEVE IN WITCHCRAFT is an unrepentant evocation of bibliomancy and telekinesis. Like the imaginary poison pills that can ward off hostile corporate takeovers, the self-reflexive, didactic, and poetic texts surveyed in the workshop demonstrate how the gripping, sticky effects that statements with material consequences engender are frequently more real to the human psyche than reality itself.

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​RAINMAKER is an event series about practical skills and difficult-to-hear realities that can transform your career as an artist. Taking up wide-ranging topics like grants, fundraising campaigns, contract negotiation, and product development while exploring their taboo undersides, the series hopes to inaugurate more transparent and accurate dialogues about money, debt, labor, and financial independence.

​During these sessions, participants will learn how to embrace economic skepticism and iterative modeling as business development frameworks. Reviewing real-world examples of project grants, budgets, and contracts, they will also devise case studies meant to interrogate the myths about money and power that create disinformation in the creative economies. 

​Designed for artists seeking to diversify their income streams and lead an independent studio practice, RAINMAKER provides structure and guidance for artists who desire to work through and analyze their financial trauma and money wounds.

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​WYATT CODAY is intersex and autistic. She lives between Los Angeles and Chicago, where is a practicing financial dominatrix. Coday is the research director of NOR RESEARCH STUDIO, a research design firm that develops intellectual property for artists and creative businesses. In 2021, she received an emerging artist grant from the California Arts Council. Excerpts from her multimedia novella project, SO THAT MY BALLOON WILL TAKE ME DOWNWARD, have been published by Apogee Graphics, Nightboat Books, and Dirt. Her writing has appeared in The Avery Review, Open Space (SFMOMA), X-TRA, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

​NOR RESEARCH STUDIO is a design research studio based in Los Angeles. The studio develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, nonprofits, and creative businesses.

​NAVEL is a nonprofit arts and culture organization that provides infrastructure for projects and organizations which cultivate kinship economies. Centering the leadership of QT/BIPOC artists and cultural workers, we work together to build community wealth and cultivate more just and collaborative worlds. Operating from our shared home in Downtown Los Angeles, we leverage our resources to build capacity for and invest in cultural projects supporting economic liberation and self-determination.