Fuoco & Demo

• Fuoco began her rope journey as a bottom in Phoenix in 2012 and shortly thereafter moved to London, where much of her early rope learning happened. Upon moving back to the US, she began presenting at conferences and intensives around the country, while regularly returning to Europe to further her education. Her career as a bondage practitioner, teacher, and performer grew alongside her career as a professional acrobat and movement specialist. She's trained extensively in partner acrobatics, contortion, and hair hanging, and through these disciplines has developed a keen sense of how to explore intensity in sustainable ways and what it means for two bodies to be in conversation with one another. In 2023 she joined Shibari Study as Director of Education and has been thinking about shibari education full time ever since.

She believes that kink is inherently political, and strives to bring her politics, values, and an accountability for those values into her teaching spaces. She offers private lessons and sessions out of Imprint Studio in downtown Northampton, MA.

• Demo (he/him) is a queer and trans Western MA based artist, harm reductionist, and kinkster. His kink practice exists in a political space where the boundary project of relating to others and their bodies in expansive ways takes shape. Demo frames his kink and his work through an anti carceral lens; liberating his own body through mixed mediums and pushing for the collective power and autonomy of all criminalized peoples and communities. He has been practicing rope for 6 year and is most interested in how rope can engage in dialogue with bodies through exposure, suffering, and tenderness. His focus in kink and art is on the body and its capacity to absorb/create/transform. Outside of rope, Demo works in harm reduction and health justice in queer communities, expanding access to networks of care.