Yasmine Diaz

Yasmine Nasser Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity. Her recent work includes fiber etchings, immersive installation and mixed media collage on paper using personal archives as well as found imagery. Born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated from the highlands of southern Yemen, her mixed media work often reflects personal histories of the contrasting cultures she was raised within. She has exhibited and performed at spaces including the Brava Theater in San Francisco, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, and the Torrance Art Museum. Diaz is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship (2019) with works included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The University of California Los Angeles, and The Poetry Project Space in Berlin. She lives and works in Los Angeles. 

www.yasminediaz.com

Royals, 2017, collage and glitter on paper, 17 X 13”

Siobhan McBride

Siobhan McBride was born in Seoul and adopted to the U.S. as an infant. She grew up in Bayside, Queens and currently lives in Staten Island. She received her MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. She was an artist in residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program, Jentel, the Vermont Studio Center, the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, Yaddo and the Sam and Adele Artist in Residency Program. Her work has been exhibited at Standard Space (Sharon, CT), Tai Modern (Santa Fe, NM), DC Moore (NYC), NurtureArt (Brooklyn, NY), Roswell Museum and Art Center and the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, ME.

www.siobhanmcbride.com

Kitchen, 2019, Matte Acrylics, 18 x 24 inches

Moira Smiley

Singer / Composer, Moira Smiley travels the world creating new works for voices and accompanying her performances with her banjo, accordion, piano, and percussive movement. Her recordings feature spare, vocally-driven collections of warped traditional songs and original polyphony. A vocal polyglot, her voice and compositions have been featured in TED conferences, on BBC Radio and TV, NPR, ABC Australia, and live at countless venues from Lincoln Center to Royal Festival Hall. When she’s not leading her own vocal group, moira smiley & VOCO, Moira has toured with pop artist, tUnE-yArDs; Irish super-group, SOLAS; The Lomax and Folklife Projects; and Billy Childs’ “Laura Nyro Re-Imagined”. Moira premiered her solo album ‘Unzip The Horizon’ at the Savannah Music Festival in 2018, and published it’s companion choral Songbook in 2019.

Recent recording video and session with Tune-Yards for Jimmy Kimmel Live TV show - with Tune-Yards

David Thomson

David Thomson is a creator and collaborative artist. He has worked with a wide range of artists including Trisha Brown, Bebe Miller, Ralph Lemon, Sekou Sundiata, Tracie Morris, Meg Stuart, Marina Abramović, Yvonne Rainer, David Bowie, Maria Hassabi, Deborah Hay, Alain Buffard and Kaneza Schaal among many others. His work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project at St Mark’s Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research, Baryshnikov Arts Center, BAM’s Next Wave Fesitival, Gibney Dance Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Invisible Dog, Mt Tremper Arts, PSNY and The Yard. Thomson has been recognized for his own work with awards and fellowships from US Artist, LMCC, Yaddo, MacDowell and Rauschenberg. He is currently a LMCC Extended Life | Lifeline Fellow (2018-21). He has served on the faculties of Movement Research, NYU/Experimental Theater Wing, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, Barnard, Pratt and Bennington. Thomson has served as an artist advocate, board member, arts administrator and mentor. In 2017, he initiated The Sustainability Project in collaboration with Kate Watson-Wallace, which serves as a platform and practice for research that seeks to expand the discourse surrounding ideas of financial, artistic, and personal empowerment within the arts community. Thomson began dancing at Haverford/Bryn Mawr Colleges and later received his BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Purchase.

www.davidhamiltonthomson.com

David Thomson_he his own mythical beast_performance_2018premier_PSNY

Nia Witherspoon

Nia Ostrow Witherspoon is a Black Queer theatre maker, vocalist and composer, and cultural worker investigating the metaphysics of Black liberation, desire, and diaspora. Witherspoon is the Multimedia Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, a Creative Capital Awardee, a Jerome New Artist Fellow, an artist in residence at HERE Arts Center, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and was a 2017-18 2050 Playwriting/Directing Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop. Her works, MESSIAH, YOU MINE, THE DARK GIRL CHRONICLES, and PRIESTESS OF TWERK have been or will be featured by The Shed, JACK, La Mama ETC, Playwright’s Realm, BRIC, HERE, National Black Theatre, BAAD, Movement Research, BAX, Dixon Place, Painted Bride, 651 Arts, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Smith College and a PhD from Stanford University in Theatre and Performance Studies, and her writing is published in the Journal of Popular Culture; Imagined Theatres; Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance; and IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands. Witherspoon has held tenure-track professorships at Florida State University and Arizona State University, and, is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled NATION IN THE DARK: A Black femme spell for justice.

Chronicle Y _Theatre_2019_Workshop at Brooklyn Arts Exchange