Banna Desta

Artist Statement

As a child of Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants, stories of my history and cultural experiences were verbally shared, but our written history has been sabotaged by neglect from scholars, lost records and the African dependency on oral tradition. Writing plays is a way of mending broken history. I write plays because I want to ask questions about the history of my ancestors, confronted with a new cultural code in the United States, in a way that can effectively instruct and delight an audience. There are simply too few stories that center African life in American theater. It must be said that African history is American history. It is imperative to give it the same value granted to theater in the rest of the world. I am pleased to tell new stories with a fresh perspective through drama.

A flyer from my 2024 immersive theater piece, Midnight in Abyssinia featuring traditional Ge'ez script.

Bio

Banna Desta is an Eritrean and Ethiopian-American writer for the screen and stage who crafts stories about and for the African diaspora. She is the author of The Abyssinians (Audible), Midnight in Abyssinia currently in development with La MaMa’s CultureHub and The Africa Center, Red Taxi, Bygone Fruit which premiered at the 2024 Women in Theater Festival and Pining which premiered at Rattlestick Theater and was published in Samuel French in 2019. Her work for the stage has been supported and workshopped by Atlantic Theater Company, National Black Theatre, The New Group and the Dramatists Guild Foundation. She has held residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Art Omi and Tofte Lake Center. She was a staff writer for the BET+ series First Wives Club (Netflix Top Ten). She has assisted multiple television series in both the writers room and on set, including FOX’s Filthy Rich, NBC’s This Is Us, and AMAZON’s Harlem. She has held fellowships with Sun Valley Writers Conference, Marcie Bloom Fellowship in Film and The Gotham Film and Media Institute. She was awarded the John Golden Prize for excellence in playwriting at NYU, where received her MFA in Dramatic Writing where she currently teaches undergraduate students.

Annita Sawyer

Artist Statement

I became a writer to pass on essential understandings I gained from re-living childhood trauma triggered when as a fifty-eight year old practicing clinical psychologist I read my adolescent psych hospital records. Watching myself regress and slowly recover while I treated others struggling with their own trauma recovery proved profoundly humbling and enlightening. I attended my first writers conference in 2003. Outstanding writers conferences, a skilled local writers’ group, and generous fellows at impressive residencies provided my literary education. I developed skill to write a prize-winning memoir. I’m working on a collection of narrative essays that center on pivotal moments of insight on my life’s journey toward becoming whole. I’m also working on a collection of short stories centered on a family in family therapy. These stories reflect diverse points of view as they follow the participants, including the therapist, into relationships beyond the therapy room, illuminating how psychotherapy heals.

Annita Sawyer_cover: Smoking Cigarettes, Eating Glass_2015

Bio

Annita Sawyer is a clinical psychologist with a BA and a PhD from Yale, recently retired after more than forty years in practice. For much of her adult life, Sawyer hid her adolescence spent in psychiatric hospitals and her missing childhood memories due to massive shock treatment. In 2001, after twenty years in successful practice, she read her hospital records, triggering a dramatic return of devastating early symptoms. Once she knew she’d recover, she vowed to share what she learned. She became a writer. Her work has appeared in both professional and literary journals, in three anthologies and a Psychology Today blog. Essays have won prizes, a Pushcart nomination, and Notable listings in Best American Essays. Her memoir, Smoking Cigarettes, Eating Glass, won the 2013 Santa Fe Writers Project Nonfiction Grand Prize, published by SFWP in 2015. A Chinese edition was published in 2019. Sawyer’s talks, essays, and stories speak to lifetime consequences of childhood trauma, harmful effects of fads in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, the enduring impact of stigma and shame, and the power of human connection to heal.

www.smokingcigaretteseatingglass.com

Kate Eminger

Artist Statement

My little motto: Food is theater. Theater is food. I create artist-inspired meals with curated performances throughout the meal and around the dinner table. Each dinner table becomes its own ecosystem of connection, curiosity, and collaboration.

"9 to 5" Hoecakes, Bacon Jam, Soft Boiled Quail Egg

Bio

Kate Eminger is a creative professional, culinary artist, and director specializing in new play development. Currently, she is the Associate Artistic Director for Rattlestick Theater in NYC. Before joining Rattlestick, she served as the Creative Director for SPACE on Ryder Farm, a non-profit artist residency and organic farm in the Hudson Valley. At SPACE she also served as a chef and kitchen manager for seven years, where she expanded the resident kitchen program and developed hundreds of recipes in collaboration with organic farmers. She currently cooks with two Supper Clubs in NYC, Stagionarsi and Choose Your Own Adventure. In 2021, she was a Culinary Resident at Marble House Project, where she created a nine-course tasting menu inspired by her fellow resident artists. Kate has developed and directed theater with institutions such as La Jolla Playhouse, Clubbed Thumb, Ars Nova, NYU, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and University of Rochester, among others. Kate holds an MFA in directing from The New School, where she was awarded the Doug Hughes Directing Scholarship. She is also a founding member of Tiedyen4biden (VOGUE, LATimes), a grassroots movement that raised $170,000 for Democratic campaigns during the 2020 election cycle.

www.keminger.com

Juliet Hinely

Artist Statement

My creative practice is based in documentary arts. I work predominantly in audio, braiding sound and story to explore narratives of place, history, inheritance, and relationships. My work exists as site-specific audio walks, sound and sculpture installations, audio poems, and currently as long-form audio documentary. In my projects I’m looking for ripple effects across time, trying to get at why we are the way we are, why things happened the way they did, why a place is the way it is, how we fit together. Inspired by participatory documentary, memoir, archeology, and collage, I create through interview, archival research, field recording, found tape, and music composition. My work is also influenced by 10 years of freelance work in radio, podcast, and audio tour production and a background in visual arts. I love sound as a visual medium. It is the closest thing I have found to time travel.

Portrait made on a research trip, in the era of the story. Tintype made by Craig Murphy, Glens Falls NY, 2024.

Bio

Juliet Hinely works in documentary arts, specializing in podcasts and hybrid media projects as a freelance story producer, sound designer, and radio storytelling teacher. She has produced audio stories and podcasts for Audible, Detour, and National Public Radio, including as Senior Producer on the Peabody Award-winning podcast Believed. Juliet is a co-founder and co-host of the 10-years-running community listening event series Radio Campfire, and a co-producer of the annual Independent Film Fest Ypsilanti. For her own creative work she has been awarded artist residencies at Monson Arts, Tofte Lake Center, Elsewhere Museum, and Kala Arts. In 2024 she was a Visiting Fellow at the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative at Skidmore College and a Visiting Professor and Libra Scholar at the University of Maine Farmington. Juliet earned her BFA in Fiber Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and her MFA at the University of Michigan Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. Juliet is based in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

juliethinely.xyz

Young Grace Cho

My practice spans embroidery, mending, food and transcription; it is a daily and lifelong practice attuned to the changes that come with repetition: with moving the hand up and down; cooking a meal again and again; repairing a hole that grew from rubbing, rubbing. This practice is essential because of our changing climate and because of the distance between eating a meal and the labor of producing it (the same distance can be found between garment and fiber). By necessity, I ask how we (people, plants, and animals) relate to our worlds in the context of displacement, catastrophe, the passage of time, and our slippery, shifting memories.

Young Grace Cho, Revolutionary Letter/Quilt Bloc, Hand-embroidered full-cloth tied quilt, 2024, 30inx30in Hand-quilted embroidery; transcription of Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letter #111

Young Grace Cho is an artist interested in history-, world-, and identity-making. They graduated from Williams College with a degree in Psychology and Neuroscience, and currently live and work in NYC as a pastry chef and artist. Their work has been covered in MOLD Magazine and Maake Magazine and they have been featured in recent exhibitions at WCMA, Williamstown, MA; All Street, NYC; Kannski, Reykjavik; and Field Projects, NYC

younggracecho.com

Ivy Baldwin

Artist Statement

I began choreographing dances in the late ‘70s, as a child in the woods of North Florida. It was then, perhaps influenced by my hippy artist parents, that I first focused my imagination on the constant tension between the man-made and the raw, the wild, the natural. That focus has stayed true for 25 years of making dances in NYC. My work eschews literal meaning and instead embraces the abstract—intentionally leaving space for the viewer's imagination to fill in and influence their interpretation of the work. These experimental dances integrate the moving, sounding body with music, visual design, place (whether in traditional theaters or site-specific to unexpected environments) and are created through deeply considered collaborations with other artists and institutions. My process involves recognizing the constellations of these elements and then connecting and collaging, to reveal a provocative world with both resonant familiarities and dream-like illogic. While my dances are very intentionally not “about” other things, I’m inspired by the world and invite daily life into the process, a process that can span multiple years. I’m constantly pushing to invite seemingly disparate influences to sit side-by-side—even merge—in a work. I’m searching for the inexplicable offshoots of their cross-pollination in an effort to draw allusions to the darker, complicated, beautiful, funny and tragic aspects of human existence.

Ivy Baldwin, Folds, Performance, 2022, Chocolate Factory Theater. Photo by Maria Baranova

Bio

Ivy Baldwin is a choreographer based in NY since 1999 and a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Dance / NYC, Gibney DiP, among others. Commissions for new work include BAM / Next Wave Festival; The Joyce Theater; New York Live Arts; Abrons Arts Center; Dance Theater Workshop; The Philip Johnson Glass House (New Canaan, CT); Manitoga/Russel Wright Design Center (Garrison, NY); Dixon Place; LaMaMa; E.T.C.; and multiple commissions from The Chocolate Factory Theater. Baldwin has toured nationally and internationally including Tanz im August (Germany); Dans Contemporan International Dance Festival (Romania); REDCAT (CA); Irvine Barclay Theater (CA); American Dance Institute (MD); and Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago (IL). Baldwin has been an AIR with BAM and Movement Research, among others and received residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, MASS MoCA. Baldwin teaches in colleges and universities across the U.S, including recently, Bard College.

ivybaldwindance.org