Miel Sloan

Artist Statement

My career as a writer has been one of unexpected detours leading to life-changing discoveries and new mediums. In 2021, I shifted from writing poetry (the genre that has dominated my twenty-five-year career) and plays (the art form I embarked upon over twelve years ago) to writing a memoir. Mother Matter, the manuscript in progress, begins with my son’s rapid decline starting March 2019; it narrates my obsession with saving him and learning to cope with his self-harm, suicidal tendencies, and precarious state. While this is my first memoir, my 2017 poetry collection and 2018 play both center around themes of motherhood and matriarchies. Stylistically, I have relied upon some techniques used in theater and poetry while utilizing prose and narration to reach a broader audience. The manuscript is unique in its balance between accessibility and a literary style. The research is paraphrased in layperson’s language, and the metaphors enable me to address the ineffability of grief. Readers can find images for what they have experienced and have struggled to articulate.

First page of "Mother Matter," title chapter, published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Winter/Spring 2024. This image can be used with acknowledgment of the publication

Bio

Miel Sloan is the pen name for a poet and writer who is publishing under a pseudonym to protect her son. She is currently writing a memoir about raising a son with mental illness; the title chapter “Mother Matter” is in the winter/spring 2024 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review. “Glossary for Mothers of the Suicidal (Quantum Version)” won honorable mention in the Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest,

(https://fourthgenre.org/news/2024-contest-news/). ”Letter to My Suicidal Son, Take Three” was a runner up in the 2023 WOW writing contest: https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/downloads/printable/109-FE1-Q42023EssayContest-Miel-Sloan.html

Hannah Kingsley-Ma

Artist Statement

All my work is interested in exploring the various textures of intimacy as it exists within different relationships: work allies, former lovers, codependent sisters, close friends at a crossroads in each of their lives.

Bio

Hannah Kingsley-Ma is a writer, radio producer, and former bookseller. Her work have appeared in publications including The Drift, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Kenyon Review, Joyland, Literary Hub, BOMB Magazine, and Zyzzyva. She is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program for fiction, where she was the recipient of the Jan Gabrial Fellowship; she was the 2020-21 Axinn NYU Writer-in-Residence and was awarded an honorable mention for the 2021 The Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship. She has taught creative writing at NYU, and Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn.

www.hannahkma.com

Andrea Clearfield

Artist Statement

I have long been passionate about what we are capable of as humans. I also believe that music, with its ineffable resonance can help people access the deepest parts of themselves. Over the past 40 years I have written both abstract music and socially conscious music tackling pressing human issues. My belief in the power of music to create global connection, healing and transformation is what propels me forward as an artist, and keeps a fire lit in my soul.

Andrea Clearfield improvising at the piano at her Szalon concert series, 2022

Bio

Creating deep emotive musical languages that build cultural and artistic bridges, the music of Andrea Clearfield is performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. She has written 175 works for opera, chorus, orchestra, chamber, dance and multimedia. Among her works are 17 cantatas including one for The Philadelphia Orchestra. She is currently working on "Long Live the Queen (a her-story of drag)", an hour-long cantata with librettist/drag artist Cookie Diorio, Symphony & Stix for orchestra and drumline and a classical guitar quartet for the Canadian Guitar Quartet. Documenting Tibetan music in the Nepalese Himalaya inspired a decade of new work including "Lung-Ta", presented to the Dalai Lama as an initiative for world peace, "Tse Go La" cantata on rites of passage, and "MILA, Great Sorcerer", opera to libretto by Jean-Claude van Itallie and Lois Walden based on the Tibetan saint Milarepa, presented by the NYC 2019 Prototype Festival. She was awarded a Pew Center International Residency Award, a Pew Fellowship, Leeway and Independence Foundation Fellowships and Fellowships at the Rockefeller’s Bellagio Center, American Academy in Rome, Yaddo and MacDowell among others. She is Founder/Host of the Philadelphia SALON concerts since 1986 featuring diverse programming. She is represented by Black Tea Music.

https://www.andreaclearfield.com/

Homa Sarabi

Artist Statement

Through moving image installations, non-fiction storytelling, and media arts Homa explores the spaces of physical and emotional distance and connection, history, and personal and collective memory.

Sarabi-Tan/Vatan-16mm film-2024

Bio

Homa Sarabi is a filmmaker, educator, and programmer based in Boston. She is a member of the Feminist Futurist collective, a LEF Flaherty Fellow, and a Mass Cultural Council grantee. In addition to her independent curatorial practice, she collaborates with the RPM Film Festival as a programmer and serves as the shorts program director for Salem Film Fest. She teaches 16mm filmmaking and collaborative design studios at Emerson College, where she is a faculty fellow with the Engagement Lab.

www.homasarabi.com

Cinthia Chen

Artist Statement

As an interdisciplinary artist and creative technologist, Cinthia engages in image-making, performance, and multimedia installation to explore memory, hybrid identities, and spiritual futurisms. She is interested in art-making and performance as ritual, that engages personal and collective experiences with intentionality, participation, and communion of all those involved, from collaborating artists to audiences. Cinthia approaches her art through a hybrid/borderland perspective, which is seated deeply within her experiences as a Taiwanese queer woman. All of these identifiers she considers to be “hybrid/borderland” in their manifestations, calling for a constant interrogation, negotiation, and resistance to what is considered normative, and the ability to hold multiple truths simultaneously. Cinthia is committed to a devised practice that engages in deep research and offers multiple access points to enter the work. This materializes in her artistic work as a director, video projection designer, and Theater Mitu company member.

Cinthia Chen_Waters of Oblivion_multimedia installation_2021_Theater Mitu Interactive communal altar. Audiovisual recordings/representations of memories shared with us from participants, projected on the moon gate, and displayed on the monitors. Mushrooms grew inside the tank, and side cubbies filled with offerings from audiences. 12ft tall. Photo Credt: Cinthia Chen

Bio

Cinthia Chen is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn and Taiwan. She has created and developed original work through Theater Mitu, Mabou Mines, Fault Line Theater, Corkscrew Theater Festival, and Asian American Arts Alliance. She has participated in residencies and fellowships at Mercury Store, Target Margin, Fresh Ground Pepper, Wingspace, and Pioneers Go East. She is a company member at Theater Mitu and co-facilitates their Hybrid Arts Lab fellowship, which supports women, trans, and non-binary artists working at the intersection of performance and technology. Cinthia also works as a video and projections designer and was recognized at La MaMa’s Design Fest 2020 and USITT Prague Quadrennial 2023. She has received the Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Fund and NYSCA Support for Artists for her designs. Recent projects include: “Salesman之死” (Connelly Theater), “Language City” (Little Island), “The Healing Shipment” (La Mama), “Where Are You?” (Mabou Mines), and “american (tele)visions” (NYTW, asst. designer).

www.cinthiachen.com

Amanda Yee

Artist Statement

Documentation of a Non-Dane reimagines how we engage with documentation. While governments enforce rigid systems that often disadvantage marginalized communities, BIPOC cultures document themselves through food, memories, stories, and shared practices. Chef Amanda Yee’s deportation from Copenhagen to Berlin during the rise of anti-Black and anti-Chinese sentiment shows how state systems can erase lives that don’t conform to sanctioned narratives. In contrast, this series highlights how BIPOC communities preserve their histories. Objects become artifacts, and memory, often invoked through food, transcends state-controlled records. By unpacking both literal and metaphorical baggage, Documentation of a Non-Dane explores how memory, objects, and food form a living archive, reflecting the resilience of displaced individuals. Through video, photography, and an installation built from packing materials, this work challenges the official gaze, showing that these personal acts of documentation carry cultural significance no system can erase.

The Blues Woman, 2018

Bio

Amanda Yee is chef, published author and artist originally from Oakland, California. She honed her culinary skills in acclaimed restaurants in both California and Denmark, gaining valuable experience working alongside James Beard award-winning chef Bryant Terry on the cookbook Afro Vegan. During her tenure as a creative director for the publishing company 4 Color Imprint, she contributed to award-winning cookbooks such as Black Food and Memory of Taste. Amanda's work has been featured in notable publications including Gravy, Whetstone, For The Culture, Where Women Cook, and Mad & Venner. Her culinary practice intertwines with her artistic vision, exploring themes of memory and cultural identity through food.

Yanira Castro

Artist Statement

My work is grounded in Puerto Rican experience as communal experience, Puerto Rican voices as an integral, contested part of U.S. history. A history that is tied intimately to ongoing, critical questions of how citizenship and civil rights are defined in this country currently called the U.S. In my work, I utilize government language alongside materials I grew up with–papier-mâché masks, my grandmother's Spanish lace tablecloth, Puerto Rican meals–and speculative language to insist on centering the Caribbean. I utilize participatory scores as the nexus of creation, negotiation and interpretation. The scores—a set of actions to be interpreted—take myriad forms: live performance, printed manuals, installations, meals, a podcast, online archives, video, audio, a media campaign. For me, performance is a public rehearsal for civics, for participation and choice-making. It is being in negotiation with each other: grappling with communication, with action, with discomfort and being deeply in process together. Performance is a communal act that requires us.

Yanira Castro I came here to weep (2023) Performance Premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater

Bio

Yanira Castro’s work is rooted in communal construction as a rehearsal for radical democracy. She is an interdisciplinary artist born in Borikén (Puerto Rico) and lives in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn). Castro develops performance scores and scenarios where the work unfolds in real time in response to the presence and participation of the audience. Co-creating with her collaborators and the public under the name a canary torsi, she investigates choreography as a practice of collective embodiment, grappling with agency and communal action as a body politic. The process of gathering, witnessing, and decision-making is where performance and civics merge and, for her, is the critical, challenging, and transformational work of performance. She is the recipient of awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Dance, NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist and Choreography Fellowships and has received two Bessie Awards for Outstanding Production. She has recently been in residence at LMCC, MacDowell, Yaddo, and The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. She is excited to be returning to Marble House Project.

acanarytorsi.org