About
We are a design research studio that develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, nonprofits, and creative businesses.
Book free 15-minute consultation
Book sliding-scale hourly consultation
Staff
Wyatt Coday
Senior Researcher
wye@nor.la
Evan Kleekamp
Operations and Development
evan@nor.la
Client Services
Product and Publication Development for digital, print, and subscription products.
Ghostwriting for business plans, grant proposals, fundraising and emial marketing campaigns.
Business Management including lead generation, coaching and consulting, triage and austerity audits, strategic communications, web portfolio development, and competitive research.
Statement of Purpose
We pride ourselves on the quality and thoroughness of the investigations we develop for artists and creative businesses who seek to grow their enterprise and repair their relationships to money, power, labor, and personal identity.
Unlike many art professionals, we encourage artists to develop fully integrated businesses that hold no illusory distinctions between artistic expression, studio practice, commercial labor, and business administration.
This means conducting audits, interrogating financial objectives, setting measurable goals, and preparing our clients to advocate for themselves — and their businesses — with confidence while also supporting the development, production, distribution, and sale of their artwork.
In our view, this integrated approach represents a movement toward transparency and financial stability in an industry that is widely disingenuous, opaque, and exploitative.
It is also an optimistic gesture that demonstrates our commitment to advocating for artists who seek to make an independent living through their creative practices.
Statement of Method
We describe ourselves as a design research studio because we use research methodologies to define and counter the structural inequity and economic disenfranchisement that plague the arts.
Our artworks extend our research practice. To date, they have taken the form of grant proposals, photographs, sculptures, catalogue essays, legal interventions, lecture performances, and recorded conversations. We also advocate for what we described as “post-institutional” business models that allow artists to diversify their sales portfolios.
Rooted in the core of our approach is our belief that artists must reconcile their relationship to money if they want to have uninterrupted time to produce their work.
Statement of Equity
Artists with nontraditional backgrounds are encouraged to contact us for specialized consultations. We proudly work with and support neurodivergent, queer, disabled, and otherwise economically marginalized groups.
studio@nor.la
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About
We are a design research studio that develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, creatives, startups, media companies, small businesses, and nonprofits.
Staff
Wye Coday
Senior Researcher
wye@nor.la
Evan Kleekamp
Operations and Development
evan@nor.la
Book free 15-minute consultation
Book sliding-scale hourly consultation
Services
Biographical Information
WYATT CODAY is intersex and autistic. She lives in Los Angeles, where she founded NOR RESEARCH STUDIO with Evan Kleekamp in 2017. She named herself its sole Research Director in 2023 and absorbed the DBA entity as one of her several aliases. Her work spans legal interventions, essays and contemporary folk tales, unorthodox disability accommodations, lecture-performances, and photography.
In 2020, Coday was named as a columnist-in-residence at Open Space, SFMOMA's online writing platform. In 2021, Coday received an emerging artist grant from the California Arts Council and published 4 INSTRUMENTS, an excerpt from her unpublished novella, with Apogee Graphics. Nightboat Books anthologized another excerpt in WE WANT IT ALL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF RADICAL TRANS POETICS (2021). Dirt published a third installment, RESEARCH, of the novella in 2023. Her writing has appeared in Into, The Avery Review, Open Space (SFMOMA), X-TRA, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her sculpture and photography were included in Red Wedding at Ruschman in Chicago. Her research interests include: disability, psychoanalysis, common law, transitive painting, the lecture-performance, and kitty cats.
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NOR RESEARCH STUDIO, BLOUSE, 2023. Performance still of TWO INTERIORS (2018) taken by artist Miranda Friedman.
WYATT CODAY is intersex and autistic. She lives in Los Angeles, where she founded NOR RESEARCH STUDIO with Evan Kleekamp in 2017. She named herself its sole Research Director in 2023 and absorbed the DBA entity as one of her several aliases. Her work spans legal interventions, essays and contemporary folk tales, unorthodox disability accommodations, lecture-performances, and photography.
In 2020, Coday was named as a columnist-in-residence at Open Space, SFMOMA's online writing platform. In 2021, Coday received an emerging artist grant from the California Arts Council and published 4 INSTRUMENTS, an excerpt from her unpublished novella, with Apogee Graphics. Nightboat Books anthologized another excerpt in WE WANT IT ALL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF RADICAL TRANS POETICS (2021). Dirt published a third installment, RESEARCH, of the novella in 2023. Her writing has appeared in Into, The Avery Review, Open Space (SFMOMA), X-TRA, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her sculpture and photography were included in Red Wedding at Ruschman in Chicago. Her research interests include: disability, psychoanalysis, common law, transitive painting, the lecture-performance, and kitty cats.
NOR RESEARCH STUDIO, BLOUSE, 2023. Performance still of TWO INTERIORS (2018) taken by artist Miranda Friedman.
NOR RESEARCH STUDIO, AND FROM YOU I DEPART, 2022. SCAN OF LST FILM PHOTOGRAPHY TAKEN BY EVAN KLEEKAMP.EVAN KLEEKAMP founded NOR RESEARCH STUDIO with Wye Coday in 2017 and was its senior director and lead researcher until December 2022, when she developed an autoimmune condition that led her to discover she was born female. After a short investigation into the matter, she disappeared in February 2023, leaving behind an unfinished collection of essays on the subject of soul murder and family alienation, which will be published by the studio’s literary imprint autoBio in 2027.