Madora Frey

MaDora Frey is a cross-disciplinary artist working in New York City. Frey sees both the man-made world and natural world as sharing patterns and systems. Her kinetic sculptures, along with works on paper and other objects, bridge the territory between these seemingly disparate environments.

She has exhibited both domestically and internationally with solo shows in Seattle, Washington and New York City. Accolades include the Prince of Wales Fellowship in Normandy, France, Ford Foundation Emerging Artist Award finalist, publication in New American Paintings, and two-time grant recipient at Vermont Studio Center. Her memberships presently include NYC art collectives Future Present and MAW. Frey has instructed and lectured at Hunter College, Rutgers University, New York Academy of Art, Auburn University, LIM College and Abbey Road International Program. She studied at the Florence Academy, Florence, Italy and received her MFA, magna cum laude, from the New York Academy of Art. Her work is held in numerous private collections.

http://madorafrey.com/home.html

Margeaux Walter

Margeaux Walter is a Brooklyn-based artist working with photography, video, performance and installation.  Her current work explores how photographs inform, transform and masquerade personal identity, and specifically how advertising, consumerism and digital culture is altering that relationship.  Walter received her BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU (2006), and MFA from Hunter College (2014).  Recent exhibitions include Winston Wachter Fine Art in New York, Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, the Griffin Museum in Boston, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts.  In 2009, the Magenta Foundation chose her as a top emerging photographer in the United States; she was awarded Juror’s Choice at the Butler Institute of American Art’s National Midyear Exhibition; and she was commissioned to create a large-scale outdoor installation for the Art Omi Fields Sculpture Park in Ghent, NY.  In 2014, she was selected by the organization 14×48 to create a public billboard project in New York City.  Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, NY Daily News, Seattle Times, Boston Globe and Scene Magazine.  She has been awarded artist in residence programs at Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, China (2011), and the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA (2012).

 

http://margeauxwalter.com

Mariam Bazeed

Mariam Bazeed is a Kuwait-born Egyptian writer living in Brooklyn, NYC. She is a past book-publishing professional writing in the genres of fiction, personal essay, and prose poetry in English. Mariam thinks deeply about words as sound, and strives to bring the musicality of her native Arabic tongue into the English she makes sentences with. She has been published in Arab Spring Dreams, as well as [wherever] magazine and In the Flesh. In 2015, she has had the honor of being awarded the Hedgebrook Women Writer’s Residency in Washington.

Marina Zurkow

Zurkow is a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and culture intersections. She uses life science, materials, and technologies – including food, software, clay, animation, mycelium, and petrochemicals (when necessary) – to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include bitforms gallery in New York; the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Diverseworks, Houston; her work has also been featured at FACT, Liverpool; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wave Hill, New York; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Bennington College, Vermont; Borusan Collection, Istanbul; Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon; Marian Spore, New York; 01SJ Biennial, San Jose; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Creative Time, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Transmediale, Berlin; Eyebeam, New York; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; Rotterdam Film Festival, The Netherlands; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others.

Her public art engagements have been supported by Creative Time, New York; LACE, Los Angeles; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; The New Museum’s Ideas City, New York; Northern Lights, Minneapolis; The Artist’s Institute, New York; 01SJ Biennial, San Jose, California; Rice University, Houston; Boston University; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; and Baruch College, New York.

Zurkow is the recipient of a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She has also been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is on full time faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP) in Tisch School of the Arts, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She is represented by bitforms gallery.

http://www.o-matic.com

Maxwell Brake

Maxwell Brake is a 2011 University of Michigan graduate with a BFA and a minor in History of Art. After graduation Brake spent two and a half years in Vermont working as a stone carver and learning as much as he could about that trade, trying to satiate his curiosity for the masonry architecture that he had been exposed to during college classes. The work that he is most enthusiastic about creating has dealt with the historical idea of harmonic proportion, and how it has influenced architecture. He enjoys seeing how architects have interpreted the idea over the years, and how historians have critiqued their work. He looks forward to creating his own architectural models that deal with this idea and finding a greater understanding of space and form in the process.

http://maxwellbrake.com

Melissa Diaz

Melissa Diaz is an installation artist and art therapist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA in Painting and Sculpture from The University of Central Florida and an MPS in Art Therapy from Pratt Institute. Diaz creates fabricated environments reflecting elements of growth, transition, shared experience and coexistence. In both her art and art therapy work, Diaz considers space, relationships and holding environment. Her site-specific habitats aim to form a transitional space that welcomes play and introspection. Diaz creates interactive components that foster social engagement and highlight universalities. Her work forms a relationship with the surroundings and the viewer, paralleling my framework as an art therapist. Diaz is the founder and director of Open House BK, community arts initiative. She has directed and curated pop-up exhibitions throughout brooklyn, including: classes, workshops and exhibitions in the homespace.

http://www.melissadiazart.com

Michael Zaretsky

Michael Zaretsky is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Interior Design (SAID) in the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati. He is also a licensed Architect, a LEED Accredited Professional and the Director of the MetroLAB Design/Build Program. His research is focused around culturally, economically, technologically and environmentally responsive design for communities in need. His published work includes the book Precedents in Zero-Energy Design: Architecture and Passive Design in the 2007 Solar Decathlon (Routledge Press, 2009) and he is co-editor (with Dr. Adrian Parr) of New Directions in Sustainable Design (Routledge Press, 2010). In addition, he has had several articles published in architectural journals and presented at conferences around the world on Sustainability, Humanitarian Design and Appropriate Technologies.

Zaretsky’s recent research involves an interdisciplinary collaboration with the non-profit organization Village Life Outreach Project. Zaretsky is the director of the Roche Health Center Design Committee, who led the design and construction of a zero-energy health center in rural Tanzania. Following extensive research with the local community, with design and engineering consultants and within the University of Cincinnati, the Roche Health Center is the first-ever permanent health care facility in this region. The Roche Health Center opened April 1, 2011 and provides health care to as many as 20,000 villagers. In addition to providing health care, the building is a reproducible, low-cost, durable structure made of all local materials and techniques. It is now being studied by the district government as a precedent for rural health care through the region.

Zaretsky has led study abroad tours in Australia and Tanzania. He also engages students in community outreach work across Cincinnati.

http://www.michaelzaretsky.com

Michelle Claire Gevint

Michelle Claire Gevint is an Israeli- American visual artist who works in the medium of photography, video and installation. Her work intersects fiction and reality by exposing and defining cultural identities and collective memories. After graduating from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem she resided to NY where she received a scholarship from Parsons the New School of Design to complete her MFA. Gevint has exhibited in various group shows such as the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia, Beijing Design Festival, China, Auckland Photo Festival, Auckland, New Zealand, Ping Yao Photo Festival, China, Sotheby’s Chicago, MICA, Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore, DC, G91, New York and more. Recently she was selected by curator Elisabeth Biondi, former New Yorker photo editor to participate in a group show at Fridman gallery, NYC. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Chicago Sun Times, Recinema catalogue, Sidney College of Arts and Arts Culture Beat, online Columbia university blog.

http://www.michellegevint.com

Naomi Falk

Naomi J. Falk grew up in the wilds of Michigan and, from an early age, planned to be an archaeologist, a brain surgeon, a heart surgeon, a meteorologist, and travel the world with Jacques Cousteau. None of those worked out, but she did learn to scuba dive and studied sculpture and ceramics at Michigan State and Portland State Universities and received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She has exhibited regionally and nationally, and done residencies in Germany, Iceland, upstate New York, Vermont, and Nebraska. Currently, Falk is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Art & Art History at St. Lawrence University. She contemplates our relationships to place and investigates how physical participation engages a deeper response and a broader understanding of the materials, spaces, and relationships encountered.

http://naomijfalk.com

Orit Ben-Shitrit

Working with video, photography, performance and choreography, Orit Ben-Shitrit utilizes movement and bodies to implicate the powers that be, their mechanisms of domination and the potential for violence.

Pulling from manifold historical and literary sources, Orit addresses the personal and contemplates the national in textured imagery. She engages in three main topical themes: cycles of violence in the Middle East; abstract systems of political, religious and economic control; and conflicted beings trapped in bodies.

In her videos Ben-Shitrit places the individual in the midst of a series of events—rituals, struggles, exorcisms—addressing the complex and covert rules of power. In MEN DIE AND THEY ARE NOT HAPPY (2010) she investigates the relationship between the State and the individual; HALF TAMED BEAST (2010) analyzes the notion of control over natural resources, such as water; the unspoken ties between art and finance is the main subject of VIVE LE CAPITAL (2010-12); while a schizophrenic response to anxiety ridden cognitive capitalism is the central issue in WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES (2013-2015). The most recent of these works sees many of the artist’s concerns and motifs realized through the use of exuberant painterly colors, patterns and layered meanings. It details the collapse of a mind trapped in a modern-day technological apparatus.

Orit has recently shown at MACRO Museo d’arte contemporanea Roma; the Haifa Museum of Art; the Royal College of Art, London; Anna Kustera Gallery and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York; Mana Contemporary, Miami; Videobrasil in São Paulo (2011, 2013); The 3CL, Luxembourg; as well as in Austria, Germany, Finland, Russia, Slovenia, Spain and the US and China. Recent commissions include HALF TAMED BEAST by Artis at Zoom contemporary art from the Middle-East in 2010, a performance commission for ISCP, NY in 2012, and a film commission for Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in 2013-2015. Ben-Shitrit is a recent Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space resident, and a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Film/Video. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2010 and is based in Brooklyn.

http://orit-ben-shitrit.com

Peter Marcus

Peter Marcus’s first collection of poetry “Dark Square” was published in late 2012 by Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Antioch Review, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, The New England Review, The Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, RATTLE, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Spillway, Witness and others. His poems have also appeared in two human rights anthologies: “Before We Have Nowhere To Stand‏: Poems on Israel and Palestine, “ and “ I Go To Ruined Places: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights,” both published by Lost Horse Press. He has upcoming poems in: Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, RATTLE, UPSTREET and others. He has been a recipient of a state of Connecticut Arts Grant and a residency fellowship at Vermont Studio Center. He is the academic program coordinator and lecturer at Elms College’s Accelerated Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology Program at Mount Wachusetts Community College, in Gardner, MA.

Rachel Mason

Rachel Mason is a sculptor, songwriter and performer. She has recorded 10 full length albums, toured, exhibited sculpture, video and performance at galleries and museums internationally. She has exhibited and performed at the Whitney Museum, Queens Museum, Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Henry Gallery in Seattle, James Gallery at CUNY, University Art Museum in Buffalo, Sculpture Center, Hessel Museum of Art at Bard and Occidental College, Kunsthalle Zurich, The New Museum, Park Avenue Armory, Art in General, La Mama, Galapagos, Dixon Place, and Empac Center for Performance in Troy among other venues. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, Flash Art, Art in America, Art News, and Artforum.

http://rachelannmason.com

Rachael McClellan Leonard

Rachael McClellan Leonard was born and raised in Massachusetts and now resides on the east coast of Florida with her husband and two children.  She received her BFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah and her MFA in Dance Choreography from Jacksonville University/White Oak as a Howard Gilman Fellow.  Rachael is co-founder and Artistic Director of Surfscape Contemporary Dance Theatre in Volusia County, Florida, where she has been awarded multiple corporate and governmental grants and developed over ninety original dance works.  Rachael is a part-time Professor of Movement at Stetson University and a certified Pilates, Yoga, and wellness instructor. She is also a recurring Adjudicator for the American College Dance Festival Association (ACDFA), a Master Artist in Residence for Very Special Arts, an Artist in Residence with the National Park service, an internationally published author of dance-related articles and papers, and the Modern Dance Faculty for the United States International Ballet Competition.  Companies and colleges throughout the United States have performed her choreography and, more recently, she presented her work at Sadler’s Wells in London, England.  Her most recent projects include a choreographic and performing residency at The Great Friends Dance Festival in Newport, Rhode Island, a choreographic commission for Columbia City Ballet in Columbia, South Carolina, a Dance for Film project at Big Cypress National Preserve, the presentation of a new duet at create.DANCE.Florida in the Duncan Theatre in West Palm Beach, a re-staging of a collaborative dance/rock opera with co-director, Kristin Polizzi, at both Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and the Orlando Fringe Festival, a touring collaborative art/dance/film installation with visual artist, Bryce Hammond and digital artist, Greg Cole, and the development of new and reconfigured choreography for her company’s tenth anniversary gala performance.  Rachael is honored to reside at Marble House Project… and to use the time to slow down, breathe, meet other artists, and to delve into movement.  She will be examining how the enigmatic layers of perception, intuition, inference, coalescence, and transference that inform choreographic development also can be incorporated into movement philosophy and the physiological preparation for performative exchange.

http://www.surfscapedance.org

Rose Klabin

The theme of continuous innovation has long been a core tenet of both capitalist economies and Twentieth century art. Corporations consistently evoke the concept of innovation linking their values with those of artists. By incorporating the ideals of Nicolas Bourriauld’s Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction into her practice, Rose Klabin’s works are concerned with the constant investigation of today’s corporate culture. Upon her return to Brazil in 2007, after having lived abroad for 13 years, Klabin started photographing factories around the country and became progressively interested in Sustainable Development as a corporate trend.

For her latest series “Corporate Identity” Klabin did a two week immersion in a pulp and paper company in the south of the country, where she had the opportunity to photograph both the reforestation reserves as well as the factories at work. In these photographs, the artist works with superimposition of images – the forests and natural elements of the reforestation areas versus the man-made steel structures and machinery – in order to come up with new images which bring forth the idea of integration between man, nature and corporate development in Brazil.

Rose Klabin was born in 1977 in Brazil, lived, studied and worked in New York from 1998 until 2003, got her MA in Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins, lived and exhibited in London from 2004 until 2007 and has been living and working in Brazil since then.

http://roseklabin.com

Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Boise State University. She studied at Harvard and Cambridge University, England. She has written extensively on nineteenth-century English and American literature including a recent book entitled Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson and Nature (Edinburgh UP, 2013). She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on “Reading the Book of Nature.” On a personal note, she competed in the sport of Modern Pentathlon at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

http://www.samantha-harvey.com

Sarah Shellow

Sarah Shellow is a writer, an educator, and a yoga teacher. Her novel, Slack Tide, explores the fluidity of sexuality, love, and hope in modern-day America. In her nonfiction work, she writes about the confluence of yoga, culture, and relationships in Cuba, spanning a time period of twelve years during which many changes occurred within Cuba and within her own emotional landscape. Sarah holds a MS in Museum and Elementary Education from Bank Street College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. For eighteen years, she has taught literacy education to students of all ages, including graduate teaching fellows in Washington, D.C. through Center for Inspired Teaching’s Inspired Teacher Certification Program. Inspired by her experiences with the Cuban yoga community, she has taught yoga for the past ten years. Currently, she is working with several members of the yoga community in Cuba to continue to build a bridge between people of the United States and Cuba through the practices of yoga and meditation. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in the Pitkin Review and the Atticus Review, as well as in the on-line poetry site, As it Ought to Be. For three consecutive years, she has placed as a finalist in the Summer Literary Seminars Unified Literary Contest. In January of 2015, she was a recipient of a merit-based scholarship at the Key West Literary Seminars. She has served as an associate editor for the Potomac Review and the Pitkin Review. Presently, she is a fiction editor for Clockhouse.

http://sarahshellow.blogspot.com

Simonetta Moro

Simonetta Moro’s practice focuses on painting, drawing, psychogeography, and teaching. Her work has been exhibited in the US and Europe, including: Center for Architecture, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the American Academy in Rome, Italy; and the Harris Museum, Preston, UK. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK; MA from Winchester School of Art, UK; and BFA Painting from Accademia di Belle Arti, Bologna, Italy. Moro lives in New York City, and is the Director of The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA).

http://www.simonettamoro.com

Stephanie Seguino

Stephanie Seguino is an artist and a professor of economics at the University of Vermont. Her current artistic work visually explores racial stereotypes of black men through photography. As young men of color grow up, there emerges a stark abyss between the humanity that their families see in them and the negative stereotypes broader society burdens them with.

http://www.stephanieseguino.com

Sun You

Sun You is a Seoul born, New York based artist. You has exhibited her work in galleries and museums internationally. Recent exhibition venues include Queens Museum, New York, The Korean Cultural Center, Berlin and New York, Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Seoul Arts Center, Seoul, Wagner College, New York and The Suburban, Chicago. You was an artist in residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts, Triangle Arts Association, and Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Bad Ems, Germany. She had a solo exhibition at l’space 71 in Seoul, Korea, a two person exhibition at Underdonk, Brooklyn NY and 5 group exhibitions in New York and Dallas in 2016.

You also heads President Clinton Projects, a curatorial project and runs an artist collective space, Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York.

sunyou.us