Mary Bichner is a classical-meets-pop composer with the bizarre musical superpowers of perfect pitch (the ability to recognize notes and chords by name upon hearing them played) and synesthesia (a neurological condition that causes Mary to “see” splashes of specific colors when she hears their corresponding pitches sounded). Called a “musical genius” by CBS News, and invited to Harvard University’s prestigious neuroscience lab to be studied for her brain’s unusual wiring, Mary creates richly-colored compositions that delight classical enthusiasts and indie-pop rockers alike
5/10/2016: Readings by Nicole Kempskieand Lisa Fliegel
Nicole Kempskie is a multidisciplinary writer, theater artist, librettist and lyricist. As a librettist and lyricist, she has explored her passion for writing about complex and interesting women of all ages with her musicals The Order of Things (Eugene O’Neill NMTC Semi-finalist), Mother of the Year (The York), It’s About Time (The Duplex; Off-Broadway Alliance Mentorship Project), and Helen on 86th St.; all with composer Robby Stamper.
Lisa Fliegel is a writer and International Trauma Specialist, who served as a journalist covering the Middle East Peace Process.Lisa’s award-winning non-fiction has appeared in The Times of London, The Jerusalem Post Magazine, Response, Midstream, ARC, and The Tel-Aviv Review, among other journals. Her academic publications include New Directions in Youth Development, and The American Journal of Art Therapy. Lisa has her undergraduate degree in Hebrew Literature from the Tel-Aviv Teacher’s Seminary; and her writing is richly informed by a bi-lingual, multi-cultural perspective.
5/17/2016: Dance Performance by Keisha Turner
Performer and educator, Keisha Turner, has Chicago and Brooklyn roots, and is based in Oakland, CA. She is a former touring company member and current teaching artist and BOLD (Builders, Organizers, and Leaders through Dance) Facilitator with critically acclaimed dance company Urban Bush Women. Keisha is a creative change-maker with growing ties to the many resistance movements taking place in the Bay Area.
5/24/2016: Talks and Open Studios by Visual Artists Leslie Fry, Hamra Abbas, Celine Lastennet, Sumru Tekin.
Hamra Abbas has a versatile artistic practice that straddles a wide range of media, from paper collage and painting to sculptures and photography. Her works often take a humorous look towards widely accepted traditions, appropriating culturally loaded imagery and religious iconography.
Sumru Tekin is an interdisciplinary artist born in Turkey, currently living in Vermont. Working with a variety of media, she re-contextualizes found and constructed drawings, texts, photographs, films, video, and audio to create inconclusive narratives within the contexts of historiography and story telling.
Céline Lastennet’s work deals with question of space and time by experimentation. Her sculptures interrogate our relationship with ourselves, the other, and our environment. Born in 1989, in Paris (FR), Céline Lastennet studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, in the workshop of the sculptor Vincent Barré, where she obtained a Master degree in 2013.
Leslie Fry’s sculptures and works on paper are inspired by basic human needs: food, shelter, clothing, love, and consciousness. Her art has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the globe.
5/31/2016: Dance Performance by Rosie Trump
Trump is a choreographer and dance filmmaker with a hybrid practice in performance and video media. Her creative work stems from an interest in representations of femininity, domesticity, and identity. Her work is nostalgic in style, feminist, and deliberately understated. She plays with the tension between the ordinary and the absurd in search of movement that is mutually comedic and political.
6/7/2016: Poetry Readings by Gary J Whitehead and Peter Kline
Gary J. Whitehead’s third collection of poems, A Glossary of Chickens, was published by Princeton University Press in 2013. His writing awards include, among others, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University, and the PEN Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency Award. He has also conducted residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Mesa Refuge, and the Heinrich Boll Cottage.
Peter Kline teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and at Stanford University. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House and James Merrill House, as well as First Prize in the River Styx International Poetry Contest and the Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, Poetry, Tin House, The Antioch Review, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series and the 2015 Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure.
6/14/2016: Talk and musical performance by Andrea Clearfield
Andrea Clearfield is an award-winning full-time composer of music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, dance, and multimedia collaborations. She has been praised by the New York Times for her “graceful tracery and lively, rhythmically vital writing”, the Philadelphia Inquirer for her “compositional wizardry” and “mastery with large choral and instrumental forces”, the L.A. Times for her “fluid and glistening orchestration” and by Opera News for her “vivid and galvanizing” music of “timeless beauty”. Her works are performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. Among her 125 works are ten cantatas including one for The Philadelphia Orchestra.
6/21/2016: Readings by Judith Torrea and Janée J. Baugher
Judith Torrea, is an award-winning independent investigative blogger, journalist and author based in Ciudad Juárez, México. Torrea´s work spotlights some of the most dire human rights cases in Ciudad Juárez, and analyzes the impact that the war against drugs has on marginalized and poor communities. Her book “Juárez en la sombra” (Aguilar) was already released in Latin America and Spain. Torrea has spent most of her two decades career covering the México/USA Border, with a special emphasis on women rights issues, such as femicides, human trafficking and missing girls.
Janée J. Baugher is the author of two ekphrastic poetry collections, The Body’s Physics (Tebot Bach, 2013) and Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010). She holds degrees from Boston University and Eastern Washington University, and her nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and criticism have been published in nearly 100 journals and anthologies, including The Writer’s Chronicle, The Portland Review, NANO Fiction, and Nimrod. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Bread Loaf Conference participant, Baugher has received grants/awards from Humanities Washington, Richard Hugo House, Jack Straw Foundation, and The Lerman Trust. She’s currently on the editorial staff of Boulevard magazine.
6/28/2016: Dance Performance Anna Brown Massey
Anna is a second-year MFA Graduate Fellow in Dance at The Ohio State University, and researches intermedia performance, community arts development, and pedagogical practice. She has received numerous grants for her projects, including from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Times Square Alliance, The Work Office, NTHCCC, and the Ohio State University. Intermedia, improvisation, and live music are germane to her work, for which she has received multiple commissions throughout the United States. Anna is Co-Director of NACHMO (National Choreography Month) and The Moves Project, and is the Artistic Director of her eponymous dance company. In addition to communicating in barefeet, on film, and within class, Anna is a Cape Breton Step dancer and a Scottish Highland dancer.
7/5/2016: Talk and musical performance by Matthew Kennedy
Matthew Kennedy is an emerging, New England-based composer of engaging solo, chamber, and orchestral music that has been performed across North America and Europe. Matthew’s work has received critical acclaim including honors and commissions from ASCAP, BMI, Society of Composers Inc, Hartford Opera Theater, Dynamic Music Festival at New York University, the Greater Hartford Arts Council, bassist Robert Black, Performance 20/20 Ensemble, La’Ventus Quartet, Foot-in-the-Door, as well as residencies at the Crosshatch Center for Art and Ecology’s Hill House Artist Residency (MI), Finger Lakes Chamber Music Festival (NY), Horned Dorset Artist Colony, Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat, and the Mayapple Center for the Arts and Humanities.
7/11/2016: Reading by Martyna Majok
Martyna Majok* was born in Bytom, Poland, and aged in Jersey and Chicago. Her plays have been performed and developed at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, Marin Theatre Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, Women’s Project Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Round House Theatre, LAByrinth Theatre Company, The John F. Kennedy Center, Dorset Theatre Festival, New York Stage & Film, Yale Cabaret, The Playwright and Director Center of Moscow, Satori Group, Red Tape Theatre, and The LIDA Project, among others. Awards include the Helen Hayes Award's Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding Original New Play or Musical, the inaugural Women’s Invitational Prize at Ashland New Play Festival, The Kennedy Center's Jean Kennedy Smith Award, Marin Theatre’s David Calicchio Emerging American Playwright Prize, New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, Aurora Theatre’s Global Age Project Prize, National New Play Network’s Smith Prize for Political Playwriting, Jane Chambers Student Feminist Playwriting Prize, and The Merage Fellowship for the American Dream. Commissions from The Geffen, South Coast Rep, Manhattan Theatre Club, Marin Theatre Company, "The New Yorker" website, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and The Foundry Theatre. Publications by Dramatists Play Service, Samuel French, TCG, and Smith & Kraus. Residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Fuller Road, Marble House Project, and Ragdale. BA: University of Chicago; MFA: Yale School of Drama. Martyna is currently part of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwright Program at The Juilliard School. She has taught playwriting at Williams College, Wesleyan University, SUNY Purchase, and as an assistant to Paula Vogel at Yale. Alumna of EST's Youngblood. Member of Women's Project Lab, The Dramatist Guild, and New York Theatre Workshop’s Usual Suspects. Martyna was the 2012-2013 NNPN playwright-in-residence. he is the 2015-2016 PoNY Fellow at the Lark Play Development Center.
7/12/2016: vocal Performance by Rebecca Ringle
Rebecca Ringle debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013 as Rossweisse in Wagner’s Die Walküre and has been on the Met roster since 2010. Her performance of Berlioz’sLes nuits d’été with LoftOpera was listed as one of the New York Times’ Top Classical performances of 2015. She has sung opera, concert and art song repertoire with New York City Opera, Washington National Opera, Cleveland Orchestra, the American Symphony, Boston Symphony, Oratorio Society of New York, Macau International Opera Festival, Bard, Ravinia, Tanglewood and Marlboro music festivals, and with Marlboro Musicians on Tour at Carnegie Hall in 2015.
7/19/2016: Reading by poet Michael Broek and Erin Morgan Gilbert
Michael Broek is the author of Refuge/es, winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award for poetry, forthcoming in 2015 from Alice James Books, and two chapbooks, The Logic of Yoo, from Beloit Poetry Journal, which has been adapted to a staged reading, and The Amputation Artist, from ELJ Publications. His poetry and essays have appeared widely in places such as The American Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Drunken Boat, Literary Imagination, Blackbird, Fourteen Hills, and others.
Erin Morgan Gilbert is a writer, translator, and teacher. She holds an MFA in Fiction and Literature from Bennington College, though she is a belletrist at heart who writes across discipline and genre. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she grew up memorizing birdsong, eating berries, and learning the scientific names of evergreen trees in the forest that surrounded her childhood home. Today she lives in Seattle where she teaches college courses and community writing workshops, dances tango, and practices aerial arts. Her creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and poetry appear in a range of publications including AGNI, the Ilanot Review, and The Rumpus.
7/26/2016: Readings by Karen Weiser and Amy Parker
Karen Weiser is the author of two full length collections of poetry: the recently released Or, The Ambiguities and To Light Out (UDP), as well as chapbooks Dear Pierre (Well Greased Press), Placefullness (UDP), and Pitching Woo (Cy Press). She was recently awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, a Process Space residency through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She is currently working on the libretto for an opera (“You Who Made the Heavens Incline”) in collaboration with composer Peter Gilbert. It is about one of the first great composers, Kassia, a 9th century Byzantine nun/ She lives in New York City where she teaches and writes on 19th century American Literature.
Amy Parker was born in Okinawa, Japan, and spent most of her childhood on diplomatic and military compounds overseas. She returned to the United States after her high school graduation and attended Indiana University, where she studied comparative literature. She won a Michener fellowship in fiction from the University of Texas, Austin. Afterward, she spent four years doing intensive monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Soto Zen monastery in the United States, and at Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center in Mill Valley, California.
8/2/2016: Talks followed by open studios with visual artists Christopher McNulty, Lien Truong and Dempsey Rice
Christopher McNulty is a visual artist who creates sculptural objects, video, and works on paper. His work has explored the limitations of human thought and performance, and the tensions that exist between our ideals and everyday lives. His current work explores how environmental space penetrates the body, creating relationships among individuals, species, and objects.
Lien Truong’s paintings examine social, cultural, and political history, exploring the influences that bind the formation of contemporary identity and belief systems in a transcultural context.
Dempsey Rice is a still photographer and filmmaker, who explores themes of connection, personal story, relationship and identity.
8/9/2016:Dance Performance by Wendy Rein and Ryan Smith of RAWdance
Ryan Smith and Wendy Rein have been dancing together and collaborating since 1998, when they met as students at Brown University. Since 2004, they have co-directed RAWdance, an award-winning company known for transforming theaters and public spaces with intellectually and emotionally layered performances.
The duo have been supported through residencies at Djerassi, Zaccho Dance Theatre, Ucross, and CounterPULSE. They are current resident artists at 836M Gallery in SF, creating a new work in the gallery’s windows over the course of three months. RAWdance is a resident company of ODC Theater. Smith and Rein are recipients of an SF Bay Guardian GOLDIE award, Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME) award, and have been named SF Weekly Mastermind finalists. Their work has been supported by the NEA, SF Arts Commission, SF Grants for the Arts, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and others.
RAWdance has performed in Singapore, China, and across the US, and its 2013 short dance film “since you went” has toured the international festival circuit. Rein and Smith have been commissioned to set work on St. Louis’ Madco, the Bay Area’s Zi-Ru Productions, and schools such as Webster University, Williams College, Brown University, and Marin School of the Arts.
8/16/2016: Talk and musical performance by Zach Sheets
Zach Sheets enjoys a diverse musical life as a flutist, composer, and chamber musician. As a composer, his works have been performed by such groups as the Ensemble InterContemporain, the Talea Ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, the Juventas New Music Ensemble, the Brattle Street Chamber Players, the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, and many others. In the summer of 2015, he was featured in a performance of his own solo flute work, that colors the stone, at the 2015 Spoleto Festival USA, and completed a new work as part of the 2015 ManiFest Academy at IRCAM in Paris.
8/23/2016: Readings by writers Cris Beam and Farima Mirza
Cris Beam is an author and professor in New York City who’s most recent book, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care was named a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Award, shortlisted for the William Saroyan Prize and the and was a best book on several year-end lists including NPR, New York Magazine and The Boston Globe. She is also the author of Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers (Harcourt 2007), which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a Stonewall Honor book.
Fatima Farheen Mirza is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing-Fellow. She has taught creative writing and fiction courses at the University of Iowa and at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. In 2013 she was awarded The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research/ Creative Achievement from The University of California, Riverside. She will be working on her first novel while at Marble House.
8/30/2016: Dance Performance by Coco Karol and reading with Cynthia Gallagher followed by open studios with visual artists Kyle Peets, Samantha Holmes and Gowry Savoor
Coco Karol is a New York based dancer, teacher, and artist who makes cross-disciplinary performance work. She holds a BFA in Dance from Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA from Hollins University. As a dancer, Karol has had the privilege of working for Misnomer Dance Theater, Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance Company, and Christopher Williams, as well as being a part of projects by Christy O’Harris, Bill Young, Jose Navas, and Steven Petronio. Karol has created work with musicians including Bjork, Ryan Lott (Son Lux), Koh Ohtera, Luna Cholong Kang, Daniel Carter, Minna Rhee Choi, and Ear to Mind collective; and visual artists including photographer Steven Sebring, sculptor Eve Laroche-Joubert (aka Bailey), architect Marcos Zotes, stereoscopic artist Gerald Marks, videographer Azmi Mert Erdem, and designer Louda Larrain.
Cynthia Gallaher, a Chicago-based poet, playwright and nonfiction writer, is author of three full poetry collections, Earth Elegance, Swimmer’s Prayer and Night Ribbons. Her most recent chapbook is Omnivore Odes: Poems About Food, Herbs and Spices. The Chicago Public Library lists her among its “Top Ten Requested Chicago Poets.”
Kyle Peets is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is centered on the narratives we create to cope will feeling small in the face of things that are bigger than us like failure, the unknown, and the sublime.
Samantha Holmes is an artist based in New York and Ravenna, Italy who focuses on conceptual and material experimentation in the medium of mosaic. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Palazzo Fortuny (Venice), in conjunction with the 2015 Venice Biennale, the Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York), and the ARTPLAY Design Center (Moscow).
Gowri Savoor is a visual artist who creates environmental sculpture, works on paper and performs the Indian art of Rangoli. Born in Manchester, England, she was educated in Manchester and Leeds, and moved to the United States in 2007.
9/6/2016: Talk and musical performance by David Clay Mettens
David Clay Mettens is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic concert music. His recent work seeks to distill the strange and sublime from the familiar. He explores moments of elemental beauty and wonder in music marked by detailed engagement with instrumental color, from rich and sonorous to bright and crystalline. He seeks expressive immediacy in lucid forms and dramatic shapes.
He has been commissioned and performed by ensembles across the United States and as part of the Ritsos Project in Samos, Greece. Recently, his works have been performed at the North American Saxophone Alliance Region 2 Conference, by OSSIA on the Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players series, and on the Café MoMus new music series at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. At Eastman, his works have been featured on OSSIA, Composers’ Forum, Graduate Composers’ Sinfonietta, and Computer Music Center concerts. His compositions for large ensemble have been performed or read by the Eastman Philharmonia Chamber Orchestra and Wind Orchestra, the Elon University Wind Ensemble, the Brevard Sinfonia, and the University of South Carolina Symphonic Winds.
9/13/2016: Performance by Galen Bremer (composer) and Zoe Rabinowitz (choreographer)
Galen and Zoe will present the development of a new collaborative work entitled Weft, which weaves together sound, movement, and textiles.
Zoe Rabinowitz is an independent dance artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her choreography has been presented throughout New York City at venues such as Lincoln Center, New York Theatre Workshop, and West End Theatre, and supported by a grant from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund. Galen Bremer is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work focuses on experimentation using noise, modular synthesis, improvisation, and elements of performance art. Bremer’s original compositions have accompanied film and dance works in collaboration with artists such as Nancy Allison, Emma Hoette, The Lovelies, Zoe Rabinowitz and Anne Zuerner, at venues including the West End Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Hunter College, Invisible Dog Art Center, Dance Theatre of Harlem, New York City Center, Lincoln Center, and the Great Friends Dance Festival in Newport, RI.
9/20/2016: Readings by Marisa Smith and Judith Hertogfollowed by an Open Studios with visual artists Nell Nicholas, Juan Fontanive, Gioia Kuss and Maureen McQuillan
In January/February of 2016 Marisa’s comedy, Mad Love, was the first new play produced at the brand new Northern Stage/Barrette Center in White River Junction, Vermont. Directed by Maggie Burrows. Mad Love was an O’Neill Playwright’s Conference semi-finalist and won Best Play (2012) from NH in Portland Stages’ (Maine) Clauder Competition and was developed and had readings at the Lark Play Development Center in NYC, The Dorset Theater Festival, The University of Delaware’s professional resident theater company (one-week workshop and reading) and at Dartmouth College and Urban Stages in NYC.
Judith Hertog was born in Amsterdam and moved to Israel as a teenager. She livedin China, Tibet, and Taiwan, and ended up settling in Vermont with her Israeli husband and children. Judith can communicate in six languages but lost track of who or where she is. She writes to find out. Judith teaches creative writing and works as a freelance writer. Her essays have appeared in Zone 3, Indiana Review, The Southampton Review, Tin House, The Common, and many other publications. In addition to being a writer, Judith also loves photography. She recently completed an interview/photography project portraying people in Israel: Views from a Real Place. Currently, Judith is working on a memoir about her experience teaching English in Tibet.
Juan Fontanive grew up climbing the rusted iron bridges of downtown Cleveland. He drew machines at Montessori school and made claymations in high school. At Syracuse University he majored in English and Textual Studies while making 16mm experimental films. He moved to New York City in 1999. In 2004, while at the Royal College of Art, London, he invented machines that breathe spirits into Victorian clocks. Currently his studio is in a buzzing factory in Bushwick, NYC.
Maureen McQuillan explores aspects of growth and unpredictability, repetition, replication and imperfection in the process and activity of drawing itself. Her work over the last two decades has ranged over many diverse mediums including printer’s ink and resin on paper, cameraless photography and installation. “Currently, I am making drawings that flout the traditional separation between line and color in Western aesthetics and explore the possibilities inherent in my own incredibly flawed system of color investigation.”
9/27/2016: Readings by Carin Clevidence and Virginia Zimmerman
Carin Clevidence is the author of the novel The House on Salt Hay (FSG). Her short fiction has appeared in Story, the Indiana Review, fivechapters and elsewhere, and her nonfiction in O Magazine, OZY, Grand Tour, Fiction Writers Review, Asahi Weekly of Japan, and the anthologies First Antarctic Reader, and Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture. Her piece “November on Cape Cod” was read by BD Wong at Symphony Space in New York. She serves as Contributing Writer for the forthcoming journal Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, and on the juries for Sustainable Arts, and the Sozopol Fiction Seminar.
In December 2015, Virginia Zimmerman published her debut American novel, The Rosemary Spell (HMH/Clarion Books), a fantastical mystery for middle-grade readers. Kirkus calls the book “spellbinding,” and ALA Booklist describes it as a “wonderful blend of literary puzzles, adventure, and musings over memory and identity.” In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls the novel “enthralling” and “deftly plotted.” Publishers Weekly also selected The Rosemary Spell as a “pick of the week” on November 30, 2015. In 2012, Zimmerman published La Finestra del Temps (Cruilla) in Barcelona. Translated from English into Catalan, this novel, also for middle-grade readers, was published as part of the highly respected “red steamboat” series.
10/04/2016: Performances by Sam Moss and LeVan Hawkins
Sam Moss is a Boston based songwriter and string player. His work rambles through various offshoots of Americana, from original and interpreted folk songs, to pastoral and occasionally jagged instrumental guitar. In May 2016 he will release Fable, his ninth solo album. Moss has released two albums with the old-time group, The Howling Kettles, and compiled Imaginational Anthem Volume Five for Tompkins Square Records. He is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and his work has been featured in No Depression, Pitchfork, The FADER, Paste, and Daytrotter, among others.
LeVan D. Hawkins is a poet, essayist, & performance artist who has performed his published work at venues such as Links Hall, Highways Performance Space, USC, UCLA Hammer Museum, Disney Hall Redcat Theater, Henry Miller Library, Dixon Place Theater (NYC), New York International Fringe Festival, & Dartmouth College.
10/11/16: Dance Performance by Laura Peterson followed by Open Studios with Jette Ellgaards, Maureen Nollette and Emma Piper Burkett
Laura Peterson is a Brooklyn-based dance artist creating work that challenges the limits physicality and redefines performance spaces. Laura’s work is influenced by the visual art of the 1970’s and since 2007, has included visually stunning installations that are developed simultaneously with the choreography. Laura Peterson has had residencies and commissions throughout New York and other cities. She has been presented at US venues including Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Inside/Out, and other festivals and performed in Europe and South America. She is a Visiting Artist at Bowdoin College spring 2016. In 2014 Laura was a Fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy.
Jette Ellgaard is Based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2007. Her practice is rooted in an investigation of the shifting cultural identities of the rural area of Denmark where she grew up. Using mostly video, sound, text and photography Ellgaards practice pictures her own mix of biographical attachments to this region, which are complicated through her estrangement from the prevailing economic and political developments in the region since she has moved to Copenhagen.
Maureen Nollette’s work amalgams divergent philosophies regarding gender and labor. This deconstruction of societal norms, which examines the allocation of labels and ascribing labor’s worth, has been instrumental in shaping her work. Nollette’s material choices shift sinuously based upon the desired outcome; permanence is juxtaposed with temporal to deliver a thought, as frivolous is positioned with cherished to instigate more intimate, careful consideration. Installations, drawings and sculpture all connect to a larger framework which questions social constructs that insinuate debased gender and labor stereotypes.
Emma Piper-Burket is a filmmaker, writer and researcher based between New York City and Oregon. Her work focuses on non-fiction, experimental and collected media. She frequently mixes analog forms such as Super8 and 16mm film with digital media, exploring the margins of what is familiar and calling attention to subtle details that contribute to the whole. Her documentary work has brought her extensive experience in the Middle East, specifically Iraqi Kurdistan, where she has taught workshops and conducted independent research in agriculture, archaeology, food culture and the local film industry.
