Grisha Coleman

Image from performance of treadmilldreamtimerunninginplace at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2016

Grisha Coleman is a composer and choreographer in performance and experiential media, her work explores relationships among our physiological, technological and ecological systems. She works as an Associate Professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering [AME] and the School of Dance at Arizona State University. Her recent art and scholarly work echo::system is a springboard for re-imagining the environment, environmental change, and environmental justice. Coleman is a New York City native with an M.F.A. in Composition and Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts, following which she was awarded a fellowship at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally including a 2012 National Endowment Arts in Media Grant [NEA], the 2014 Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University, and grants from the Rockefeller Fund, and The Creative Capital Foundation.

http://echo-system.net

Brian Harnetty

Brian Harnetty_Shawnee, Ohio_2016_Premiered at the Wexner Center for the Arts

Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary artist who works closely with sound archives and communities connected to them. His work contends that the simple act of listening –– to people, place, and their pasts –– can transform our futures. His current projects –– supported by a 2018 A Blade of Grass Fellowship and the 2016 Creative Capital Performance Award –– are deeply involved with ecology, extraction, and economy in Appalachian Ohio, informed in part by his family's roots in the region. Harnetty received a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University, an M.Mus. in Music Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and a B.Mus. in Music Composition from The Ohio State University. Harnetty has released five internationally acclaimed albums. His 2013 release, The Star-Faced One: from the Sun Ra/El Saturn Archives was MOJO Magazine’s Underground Album of the Year. He has performed throughout the US and Europe, and has written in-depth articles on sound, extraction, and Appalachia. Past collaborators include Will Oldham, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Anna Roberts-Gevalt (Anna & Elizabeth), and Paul De Jong (The Books). Harnetty is currently an AmeriCorps Volunteer, telling the stories of people in Appalachian Ohio. 

http://www.brianharnetty.com

Leslie McCleave

Still from the feature documentary 'How Sweet the Sound – The Blind Boys of Alabama (2015)

Leslie McCleave produced and directed the feature documentary, How Sweet the Sound – The Blind Boys of Alabama, the first film about this legendary gospel group. How Sweet the Sound premiered at the Nashville Film Festival and has screened across the U.S. including stops at the Margaret Mead Film Festival and as the closing night film at the ReelAbilities NY Disabilities Film Festival. Other work includes the supernatural, environmental-awareness fiction feature ROAD, (Outstanding Performance Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival) and acquired by Showtime, iTunes and Snag Films. Her narrative shorts have won top awards at Sundance, SXSW, Locarno, and San Francisco International Film Festivals. She created the documentary/experimental hybrid sound and video installation, cedarliberty (with Elena del Rivero) which addressed personal and public remediation work at the World Trade Center site and was presented at the International Center of Photography and the New York State Museum. Leslie is an alumnus of the NYU Graduate Film Program, the Sundance Institute Writers and Directors Labs and has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Arts Council, IFP Radziwill Documentary Fund and the Irish Film Board.

Stefanie Sacks

What The Fork Are You Eating: An Action Plan for Your Pantry and Plate

Stefanie Sacks, MS, CNS, CDN is a nationally recognized Culinary Nutritionist and leading authority on eating to prevent and manage illness. For over two decades, she has helped transform the way people eat using hands on experiences to inspire, educate and offer practical tools for food lifestyle change. She has her Masters of Science in Nutrition from Teachers College, Columbia University, is a Certified Nutrition Specialist, Certified Dietitian Nutritionist and is a graduate of the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts. As a chef, nutritionist and innate healer she uses food as a conduit to deep transformation. She inspires, educates and empowers people to eat and live to their full potential. Her book What The Fork Are You Eating is a must-read guide for anyone looking to improve food choice! In addition to being a frequent print, radio and television media guest expert, in 2017 Stefanie was inducted into Les Dames D'Escoffier, an international philanthropic organization of women leaders in the field of food, fine beverage and hospitality. She is a member of the International Association for Culinary Professionals and sits on the advisory board of the Natural Gourmet Institute, A Greener World and Amagansett Food Institute. A native New Yorker, Stefanie lives on the East End of Long Island with her husband, two very active boys and Blossom, the family dog. When she is not in her kitchen creating new recipes or feeding her family, she is swimming in the bay or hiking with her dog.

www.stefaniesacks.com

Niki Segnit

Niki Segnit is an award-winning food writer. Her first book, The Flavour Thesaurus, won the André Simon Award for best food book, the Guild of Food Writers Award for best first book, and was shortlisted for the Galaxy National Book Awards. It has been translated into fourteen languages. Her follow-up, Lateral Cooking, was published in the UK last year, and shortlisted for the André Simon Award. On BBC Radio 4, she has contributed to The Food Programme, The Kitchen Cabinet, Woman’s Hour and Word of Mouth, and her columns, features and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times and 1843 and Prospect magazines. She lives in central London with her husband and two children.

Nat Segnit

Nat Segnit is a novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He holds a first-class degree in English from Oxford University. His first novel, Pub Walks in Underhill Country, was published by Penguin in 2012 and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize. He is currently working on a full-length, non-fiction study of retreat, to be published by Penguin Random House in 2020. His long-form non-fiction, short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper’s, The New Yorker, 1843 and the TLS. He regularly writes and broadcasts for BBC Radio 4, and has recently scripted two episodes of a new Tang-dynasty detective series for Chinese TV. He lives in central London with his wife and two children.

Brooke Singer

Brooke Singer engages technoscience as an artist, educator, nonspecialist and collaborator. Her work lives "on" and "off" line in the form of websites, workshops, photographs, maps, installations and performances that frequently involves public participation in pursuit of social change. She is Associate Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, Designer in Residence at the New York Hall of Science (2018-2019), co-founder of the art, technology and activist group Preemptive Media (2002-2008) and co-founder of La Casita Verde (2013-). She is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Microsoft and Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy. Brooke has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at MoMA/PS1, Warhol Museum of Art, The Banff Centre, Neuberger Museum of Art, Matadero Madrid, Diverseworks and The Whitney Artport. She has received awards from the Open Society Foundations, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Helsinki International Artist Program, Headlands Center for Arts, Patagonia, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, among others.

www.brookesinger.net

Jina Valentine

Memoranda (NYSE:GEO) 2018 iron gall ink, oxidant on handmade paper (from hand sewn quilt) 3 panels 30x22 inches each This work examines the government memo as a seemingly innocuous missive, and reproduces three such memoranda issued by the current administration. One of the works in this series reproduces Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ memo written to the Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons on February 21, 2017, raising a painful issue that disproportionately affects people of color--incarceration. The memo reversed the Obama administration’s plan to phase out federal use of private prisons, a plan that responded to an audit finding more safety and security problems in privately versus publicly run institutions.

Based in Chicago, Jina Valentine is an Associate Professor of Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her interdisciplinary practice is informed by the intuitive strategies of American folk artists and traditional craft techniques, and interweaves histories latent within found texts, objects, narratives, and spaces. She has exhibited at venues including The Drawing Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the CUE Foundation, MCA Chicago, the DiRosa Preserve, Southern Exposure, and Marlborough Gallery. She has participated in residencies which include the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, and Banff Centre in Alberta. Her work has received recognition and support from the North Carolina Arts Council, Art Matters Foundation, and the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC. Jina is also a cofounder of The Black Lunch Table (BLT), which is an ongoing collaboration with New York-based artist, Heather Hart. The project was first staged in 2005 at the artist residency Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The BLT has since taken the form of oral archiving sessions, salons, peer teaching workshops, meet-ups and Wikipedia edit-a-thons. BLT has been hosted by cultural and academic institutions around the country and internationally, and has received support from Creative Capital, the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC Chapel Hill, and the Rema Hort Foundation, and has been featured in Art21 Magazine, Artsy.net, and Hyperallergic. Jina received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Stanford University.www.jinavalentine.com

Amanda Burr Xido

Amanda Burr Xido is a writer and film producer. A recent graduate of Spalding University’s MFA in Creative Writing program, she is at work on her novel The Dig and a collection of short stories. She is currently the creative producer and co-writer of "Sons of Detroit," a film mixing documentary, performance, and fiction, directed by Jeremy Xido. The two are also collaborating on a narrative film set in Detroit, currently in development. Other recent producing credits include the series FILMS BYKIDS for PBS, the documentaries "Death Metal Angola" and "Man Shot Dead," and the short doc/fiction hybrid "Solitary/Release." She was previously the creative director for the digital learning company Nomadic Learning, where she wrote, directed, and produced over 50 animated short films. She has also worked as an associate programmer for the Tribeca Film Festival, a consultant with the Screenwriters Colony, a programmer for the Chicago Humanities Festival, and as a theater director. She holds a BS in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. She was born in Nashville, raised in Florida, New Jersey, and Texas, and has spent time in over twenty countries on five continents. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Jeremy Xido

Originally from Detroit, Jeremy graduated cum laude in Painting and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, NY and trained at the Actor's Studio. A Fulbright and Guggenheim recipient, he’s artistic co-director of performance/film company CABULA6, voted “company of the year 2009” by Ballettanz, and awarded “Outstanding Artist of the Year 2010” by the Austrian Ministry of the Arts. Jeremy's film directing credits include award winning feature documentary “Death Metal Angola”, six part “Crime Europe” series, and the short documentary “Macondo” in addition to several short fiction films. He’s known in Europe as a performance artist with a unique artistic voice and approach to stage and film, blending emotionally gripping personal stories with the larger social contexts within which they emerge - including the trilogy “The Angola Project” (premiere: Impulstanz, Vienna and PS122, NYC). Working as a dancer, actor and filmmaker, he has performed and presented work around the world on stage, TV and in Cinema. In addition to his work on SONS OF DETROIT, he is currently in development on a limited documentary series called THE BONES about the international dinosaur bone trade and is writing a feature film script set in Detroit amid the housing crisis of 2010.

www.xido.org