Laurel Jenkins

My choreography emerges from rigorous experimentation and interdisciplinary dialogues in the realms of contemporary dance, opera, music, theater, and visual art. I engage with the choreographic process as a radical space for reimagining our collective human experience. I experience dancing body as an imagining body. I am captivated by shifts of weight, the spiral of a bone, an exhale. The dancer has embodied knowledge that is specifically relevant to this historical moment where adaptation and transformation are necessary for our survival and evolution. When I make dances, I center on the raw human body in action as the main agent of transmogrification. I am interested in slippage: how forms subtly slip and generate a multiplicity of meanings. As I make performances, I am interested in writing new mythologies that utilize dance as a methodology for shapeshifting the present and future.

In 2017, a new version of Leonard Bernstein's MASS was coproduced by the LA Phil and Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. The piece was directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer and choreographed by Laurel Jenkins. Photo by Richard Termine.

Laurel Jenkins’ choreography emerges from rigorous experimentation and interdisciplinary dialogues in the realms of contemporary dance, opera, music, theater, and visual art. She engages with the choreographic process as a radical space for reimagining our collective human experience. Her work has been presented by Lincoln Center, Disney Hall, REDCAT, Automata, the Getty Center, Show Box LA, Danspace, Berlin’s Performing Presence Festival, and Tokyo’s Sezane Gallery. She choreographed Bernstein’s MASS with the LA Phil and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. In addition, she has choreographed for LA Contemporary Dance Company, The Wooden Floor, California State University, Long Beach, University of Vermont, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Jenkins was a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company from 2007-2012, and developed original roles in Brown’s final works. Jenkins also danced in New York with Vicky Shick and Sara Rudner. She performed the role of Ismene in Peter Sellars’ staging of Oedipus Rex conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. She performed solos by Merce Cunningham in Los Angeles as a part of the Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event. Jenkins is the recipient of a Vermont Arts Council Grant, an Asian Cultural Council Grant, a French Institute Residency, holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence, and an MFA from UCLA. She is a certified in the Skinner Releasing Technique and is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Sara Heise Graybeal

As a white single mom in the South, stories are my tool for sorting through a world at constant odds with itself. I read Facebook debates about immigration, then worry about undocumented family and friends getting pulled over without a license. I proclaim my feminist ideals while shouldering the emotional and financial weight of raising a child. Stories give me a way to peer inside these juxtapositions. My close relationships blur “typical” boundaries of race and class privilege, and I write from this vantage point, disentangling what I perceive to be under-reported nuances of power, injustice, and connection across difference. I am at work on a collection of hybrid nonfiction pieces, in which I frame semi-reported, issue-oriented writing in a lyric essay format

SaraHeiseGraybeal_ChasetheGold_spokenword_2016_SpotlightonJazz&PoetryPhiladelphiaPA

Sara Heise Graybeal is a writer, performer, and teaching artist from rural North Carolina. She is particularly interested in hybrid forms of creative nonfiction and the use of ethnography and oral history methods in producing nonfiction for the general public. Sara has taught poetry and spoken word in Philadelphia public schools, coached multiple slam poetry teams, and taught creative writing at numerous Philadelphia and North Carolina summer programs. She also taught fiction and playwriting to female middle school students at Centro del Muchacho Trabajador (Center for Working Children) for nine months in Quito, Ecuador. Sara was the co-founder and artistic director of The Poeticians, a spoken-word and Hip-Hop performance group in the neighborhood of Point Breeze, Philadelphia. Her work has been published in Hobart, The Rumpus, Beloit Fiction Journal, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a National College Board Award for the Teaching of Creative Writing, the Jan-Ai Scholarship, the Randall Jarrell Fellowship, the Sterling Watson Fellowship, and more, and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she currently teaches in the English department.

Eliza Hittman

To date, I have made a trilogy of unsentimental feature films about youth. I have always been fascinated with coming-of-age films, not as a narrative of transformation but rather as a process of disillusionment. I investigate taboos around sexuality and identity. I show audiences experiences they wouldn’t see in other coming-of-age films: the lonely moments, the surges of false confidence, and small humiliating details that are often buried in our collective memories and journeys to adulthood. With each film, I expand my method and style, but am perpetually drawn to the “in-between”. My cinema is liminal; emotionally, dramatically, spatially. It Felt Like Love mines the painful distance between childhood and the adult world, as an adolescent girl realizes her value hinges on her sexual appeal to men. In Beach Rats, a teenager living a double life spends the summer playing handball with neighborhood boys and nights meeting men on a dark beach. …. Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a teenager realizes her body is not her own when she becomes pregnant and is forced to travel to New York City for an abortion. The writing process is driven by anthropological fieldwork; documenting places and interviewing relevant subjects to help craft a story that is emotionally and dramatically credible. In directing, my work explores a subjective, more poetic form of realism and hews to the main character’s perceptions. Resisting the conventions of verité, I strive for a more poised camera that erases the presence of the filmmaker.

Harris Dickinson as Frankie (centre), surrounded by his posse in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats (2017)

Eliza Hittman is an award-winning filmmaker, born and based in Brooklyn, NY. Her most recent feature Never Rarely Sometimes Always premiered in the International Competition at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival where it won the Silver Bear. It premiered in the US Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival. It was nominated for 7 Independent Spirit Awards, and won a New York Critics Circle Award for Best Screenplay and Best Actress. Her film Beach Rats premiered in the US Dramatic Competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, where she won the Directing Award. It premiered internationally at Locarno in the Golden Leopard Competition and was the Centerpiece Film at New Directors / New Films. It was the winner of the Artios Award for Outstanding Achievement in Casting, Outstanding Screenwriting in a U.S. Feature at Outfest, and the London Critics’ Circle Film Award for Young British/Irish Performer of the Year. She earned an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is currently an Assistant Professor of Film/Video at Pratt Institute. She was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Amy Lee Ketchum

Amy Lee Ketchum integrates drawing, sculpture, dance, and mythology in her animated films which revel in materiality and explore the unknowable aspects of life and death. Currently she is applying research on philosophies of time to her animated works.

Amy Lee Ketchum creates poetic narratives and abstract worlds in her animations which draw from personal and collective memory, metaphysical narratives, and dance. She was raised by first-generation Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles and studied art and architecture at UC Berkeley. Upon returning to Los Angeles, and frequenting independent theaters, she discovered her passion for film. Inspired by the visions of phantasmagoria on screen, she went on to pursue a Masters of Fine Art in Animation at the University of Southern California. Her work has been shown on broadcast independent television, various international film festivals, and on the Centre Pompidou web channel. Currently she is working on an experimental stop-animation with cardboard objects and teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Johnaye Kendrick

My music making is a spiritual experience. Preparation for my performance practice includes grounding myself to the center of the earth, bringing up earth energy and balancing my energy field before making a sound. I am intentional with each sound that I make and I strive to bring goodness into the world with every note that I sing and every story that I tell. I tell these stories with many instruments: harmonium, violin, viola as well as traditional jazz instruments. While a deep classical and jazz education serve as my foundation, my musical identity is also informed by other important Black music: blues, r&b, Neo-soul, and hip-hop. I use the stage as a space to invite reflection and introspection of my audience. I compose works that address social issues and I find myself deeply influenced by the human condition. I am speaking directly to our world with each new composition. My piece, Never You Mind, a tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement, speaks to the oppressed, reminding us that we are resilient and WE MATTER. The piece culminates with my reciting the names of Black men and women murdered by the police. When introducing the piece, I take the opportunity to encourage those with privilege to consider how their love and appreciation for Black Music and Black culture is reflected in their willingness to protect Black people. This work is what I was born to do.

Grammy® nominated vocalist, composer, orchestrator and multi-instrumentalist, Johnaye Kendrick received a Bachelor of Music from Western Michigan University, a Master of Music from Loyola University and an Artist Diploma from the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute. Johnaye performs original compositions as well as fresh interpretations of beloved jazz and contemporary works. A dedicated educator, Johnaye serves as Professor of Music at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. She is a recipient of the Seattle Women In Jazz Educator of the Year award. In 2014, she founded her johnygirl record label in efforts to release honest music representative of her world, removed from the superficial constructs surrounding contemporary music in today’s recording industry. On this label she recorded, produced and released two albums: HERE, a collection of heartfelt originals and FLYING which was nominated for Earshot Jazz’s NW Recording of the Year. Johnaye received the Chamber Music America 2020 Performance Plus Grant and was voted Earshot Jazz's 2020 Northwest Vocalist of the Year.

Monica Ong

Planetaria is a series of visual poems by Monica Ong that leverage the language of astronomy to explore the precarious territories of motherhood, women in science, and diaspora identity. Playfully taking poetry off the page as light box assemblages and handheld volvelle poems, this series seeks to imagine the sky from a female perspective, examining the power struggles that myth-making elicits. Her “lost astronomy” prints made from diagrams remix scientific syntax as lyrical meditations on working motherhood and contemporary life. In her Insomnia Poems, audio collages are created in the style of sleep tapes about the things keeping us up at night. Letterpress & foil stamped Chinese constellation maps are designed into poems that depart from gendered hierarchies towards new mythologies of the night sky. If poetry and astronomy were to throw an art party, this one invites audiences across disciplines and cultures to imagine new cosmographies where everyone belongs.

"Star Gazer" is a planisphere poem based on the Chinese night sky, written and designed by Monica Ong, produced as a letterpress and gold foil literary object, 2021. Thumbnail - "The Way of Karma" was first published in Scientific American, November 2021. The poem is designed into a map of the Milky Way and archival image.

Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (2015), selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry. A Kundiman poetry fellow and graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong innovates on text+image to surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora, blurring the boundaries of art and literature. Planetaria, a new exhibition of astronomy-inspired visual poetry, debuted last summer at the Institute Library of New Haven and opens at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago during the spring of 2022. In 2021 Monica founded Proxima Vera, a micropress specializing in fine press poetry broadsides, literary objects, and digital editions. Her work has been acquired by institutional collections nationwide, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, as well as the special collections at Yale, Brown, Stanford, SUNY Buffalo, University of Iowa, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and UC Berkeley to name a few. You can find her work published most recently in Tab Journal, Scientific American, Poetry Magazine, Redivider, Breakwater Review, Waxwing Magazine and ctrl+v.

Shruti Swamy

At the center of my work is a desire to write about what is often termed the “unthinkable,” to mine the wells of secrets and shames that ordinary people carry and bring them to light. Unthinkable, we call the death of a child, unspeakable grief. But there are smaller things too: that first confusing fizz of desire, the functions of the female body. Ambition. Wanting kids. Wanting things you're not supposed to want: wanting them desperately. Before I can write anything, I must listen for this; un-named, un-spoken, un-thought, a kind of listening that takes many forms. Writing is not exactly an act of healing for me—it is a different art—but is something akin to it: an act of understanding.

Shruti Swamy is the author The Archer, a novel, and the story collection A House Is a Body, both from Algonquin Books. The winner of two O. Henry Awards, her work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeny's, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fiction Fellow, and lives in San Francisco.