Candace Hansen is a PhD candidate, drummer, educator, scholar, artist, and event producer currently studying and teaching at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies, writing for LA Times and Spin, and drumming for Alice Bag, dimber, Reckoner, and the Josie Wreck Noise Ensemble.
Hansen is passionate about accessible and equitable pedagogy and has developed and taught courses about queer punk as a method, on contemporary LGBTQ+ literature, lesbian and trans narratives and critiques in film and television, and about the history of underground queer art, music, and performance in the US from William Dorsey Swann to Homocore. Hansen holds an Associate’s degree in Women’s Studies from Santa Ana College, dual Bachelor’s degrees in History and Gender Studies from UCLA, and a Masters of Art in Musicology from UCLA, As a former community organizer, Hansen has organized events at UCLA for the Center for Musical Humanities such as Curating Resistance: Punk as Archival Method conference and the lecture series Hear/Now/Then/There: Subversion, Sound, and the Queer Underground.
Freelance journalism is a political act for Hansen, who started writing about the bands and artists they loved that other writers wouldn’t cover, often linking them to larger histories and political issues. Since covering amazing local acts and events like Chulita Vinyl Club, The Bellhaunts, Transgress Fest as a freelance writer at publications such as Tom Tom Magazine, OC Weekly, and Razorcake, they have also had the opportunity to share the stories about icons like Tig Notaro, Elvira Mistress of the Dark, Tegan Quinn, Bytch Nastee, Josie Wreck, BenDeLaCreme, Sherry Vine, Jackie Beat, Pony Lee, Amina Cruz, Daniel Sea, Maebe A Girl, RuPaul’s Drag Con, The L Word, Sister Spit, and many others for LA Times and Spin. Arts journalism is a way to contribute to the record of queer history and push conversations forward for Hansen, always routed through critical care.
Hansen is an active drummer, zinester, and member of the Los Angeles queer punk creative community. Hansen loves to collaborate, record and perform, and has been an active artist and studio and live drummer and musician since they were a teen. Currently, Hansen plays with bands like dimber, Fatty Cakes and the Puff Pastries, Jennie Cotterill, and Josie Wreck, as well as with punk legend Alice Bag; having recorded on her solo records Alice Bag, Blueprint, and Sister Dynamite, and performing in her band since 2016. Hansen’s poetry and vocal collaboration with HIRS and Alice Bag titled “Always Surviving” appeared in the FX television show Mayans.
As a co-director at the Rock n Roll Camp for Girls Orange County, Hansen ran a not-for-profit organization that worked to empower girls and gender expansive youth through music and education from 2012-2019. Currently they produce Butch Bech Presents, a queer and trans focused pop-up music and performance art event at Alex’s Bar in Long Beach. They emcee for the Gay Freedom Band Los Angeles, delivering program notes about LGBTQ classical music in ways that anyone can understand and get excited about. They self-release zines and prints, and have been a part of installations, readings, panels, talks, trainings, and workshops for organizations like Queer and Trans Poetry Night, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, LA Public Library Octavia Lab, Philosophical Research Society, Heavy Manners Library, and LA Zine Fest.
Inspired by scholars like Sara Ahmed and Jose Muñoz, Hansen is interested in the affective elements of queer music that hold those blueprints, that transmit and transmute through feeling, invoking the not-yet-conscious while embodying maps to queer futures. Hansen’s work bridges musicology, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, history, media studies, and performance studies. Hansen’s dissertation focuses on dissonant drumming and queer and trans punk as an act of critical becoming through feeling. They are interested in how queer punk music embodies queer time and hails listeners through it, creating spaces for transformation, connection, critique, and hope at multiple scales.
Hansen has received the James and Sylvia Thayer Library Special Collections Research Fellowship, Center the Study of Women / Streisand Center Travel Grant, UCLA Musicology Best Teacher Award 2022, The Carolyn D Smith Graduate Scholarship, and is a Cota Robles Scholar.