Abby Castillo (she/her) is a transgender Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist working primarily in music, literature, visual and video art. She currently lives and works in Portland, OR, and she grew up at the US-Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana.
As twinchicken_, she produces and performs experimental pop music. She has opened for Guerilla Toss, Car Seat Headrest, David Liebe Hart, and Spoonboy. Her most recent musical release is The Meatmachine, a post-punk album of anti-capitalist songs. (2018), which is available at twinchicken.bandcamp.com. Her music can also be found at soundcloud.com/twinchicken_.
As a writer she creates fictions, chronicles, and machine-generated poetry, which she publishes as zines and novellas. These texts trace the surreal contours of daily life during the collapse of late capitalist society. In 2020 she was awarded a Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) Catalyst grant to finish writing her novella A Diet of Worms. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC), writing, illustrating, and publishing the zine series realgirl1994. These zines include reflections from her time as a labor organizer with the Burgerville Workers Union, essays about the political and ideological nature of the fast food industry, notes on audio/visual production and sound design, and reflections on gender transition.
In 2018, Abby presented a collection of video work at the Boathouse Microcinema in 2018, and co-wrote and staged the play The Human Use of Human Fish with Lauren Lollie Nelson in 2017.