Alec Galambos

Artist Statement

I’m Alec, a composer and interactive audio designer, and I direct the NYC-based KHORIKOS ensemble. In all my work, I’m interested in the dynamic range of the voice, the expressive potential of abstract communication, and the ability of virtual and physical spaces to shape and contextualize sound. In my writing, I care a lot about harmony and density, and I often write about emotional language, collective ideals, and doubt. I conduct, compose, arrange, curate, and commission for the KHORIKOS ensemble, which celebrates new vocal music and performs a repertoire of heartfelt, anomalous music from across centuries.

Directing the KHORIKOS ensemble at the Dimenna Center for Classical Music, 2019

Bio

Alec Galambos is a composer, interactive audio designer, and the artistic director of the the NYC-based KHORIKOS ensemble. After growing up on piano and choral music, he studied composition and voice at Emory University and then moved to New York to pursue a M.M. in Composition and Film Scoring at NYU. His career in music and audio design for visual, interactive, and immersive media has led him to present at GameSoundCon, MAGfest, and NYC Game Audio on novel music propagation techniques for virtual environments. Since taking on the role of Artistic Director of the KHORIKOS ensemble in 2016, Alec has focused on commissioning and showcasing underperformed works from living composers around the world, in appearances at NYC’s National Sawdust, (le) poisson rouge, Lincoln Center, DC’s Smithssonian Hirshhorn, and in choral festivals in Serbia and Montenegro. His programming with KHORIKOS has been supported by the Brooklyn Arts Fund, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the U.S. State Department. In collaboration with audio engineer Dan Dzula, Alec is leading KHORIKOS through new practices in immersive recording and live performance, culminating in the 2025 release of Across the Open Spaces, the ensemble’s first surround-sound album.

alecgalambos.com

Ellen Adams

Artist Statement

Writer and singer-songwriter Ellen Orme Adams is particularly interested in the unexpected doorways between kinship and estrangement. Her creative practice draws on extensive interviews, visual arts, language learning, monastic experience, and movement. She really loves to read. Orme Adams is currently revising a novel. In it, a chaotic, closeted lesbian arrives to a Buddhist nunnery in search of escape. When conflicts and secrets emerge, the nunnery's women must confront troubling histories of misconduct, control, and addiction—and the latent potential in each of us to reclaim our dignity.

Ellen Orme Adams_Novel Outline in the Studio

Bio

Ellen Orme Adams is a Canadian-American writer of essays, fiction, and songs. Her writing appears in Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review Online, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays, shortlisted for CBC’s Nonfiction Prize, and supported by grants and fellowships from Lambda Literary, Elizabeth George Foundation, Artist Trust, and Canada Council for the Arts. As a musician working in folk and country traditions, she's played shows throughout North America. Originally from Washington State, she now lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal).

www.ellenadams.net

Jenie Gao

Artist Statement

In my recent series, The Negotiation Table, I take hand-carved woodblocks and transform them into sites of negotiation, in response to the history of print’s indoctrination in the fine arts and in contrast to its uses in community activation. To assimilate into the fine arts, print needed to become artificially rare. It is best practice to destroy one’s plates to limit the edition. I have always been uncomfortable with destroying evidence of the labor to rarify the asset. I reflect on this tension in print, as a Taiwanese-Chinese American who has been made artificially rare in white dominant spaces. Via these installations, I reclaim the history of objects that fueled Europeans’ obsession with subduing Asia and that—in their search for a shorter route to Asia—they used to justify their westward expansion and colonization of Turtle Island. By creating a record, remembering becomes a key function in long-term justice.

Title: The Negotiation Table: Cycle | Breaking and Making Medium: hand-carved woodblocks embedded in reclaimed Chippendale table, woodblock prints on canvas, vermilion red wall paint Year: 2023 Dimensions: 30 x 13 ft Photo Credit: Khim Hipol

Bio

Jenie Gao (they/she) is a full-time artist, creative director, and entrepreneur. They run an anti-gentrification arts business, specializing in printmaking, public art, social practice, and storytelling. She consults for cultural organizations and the public sector on equity and ethics. They live and work on the lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh (Vancouver, BC) and out of Teejop, land of the Ho-Chunk (Madison, WI). Jenie pulls from experiences as a second-generation Taiwanese-Chinese American and descendant of working class immigrants. Prior to founding their business, Jenie worked in the museum industry, public education, and manufacturing sectors. Through their cross section of experiences, Jenie has become attuned to issues of artists’ labor, cultural power, and institutional accountability. They run a paid apprenticeship program and have mentored 25 emerging artists. Jenie has a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Jenie’s work has been exhibited, collected, and published in the US, Canada, UK, Argentina, Germany, and more. Recent exhibits include Museum of Wisconsin Art, South Bend Museum of Art, and Trout Museum of Art. Recent publications include PBS, Fête Chinoise, and Shoutout LA. They are a former TEDx Madison speaker.

https://jenie.org

Capucine Bourcart

Artist Statement

My artistic practice involves collecting materials such as sand, lint, cat fur, and human hair from urban environments, rural travels, or domestic surroundings. I am drawn to materials that carry traces of life—natural, animal, and human—because they resonate with impermanence and transformation. Each material carries meaning. My work is inspired by my own family history. My paternal ancestors thrived in the textile industry in France, while my maternal grandparents came from more modest backgrounds. My Vietnamese grandfather was a ‘Cong Binh’ (soldier-worker) forcibly recruited by France during WWII. His story, like many others, remained invisible. Through my work, I aim to harmonize both sides of my family's disparate background, erasing boundaries between craft and fine art. Playfully exploring materials that have a voice and influence the process to determine which techniques, like felting, embroidery, or collage, best suit them is central to my approach. My artistic practice involves collecting materials such as sand, lint, cat fur, and human hair from urban environments, rural travels, or domestic surroundings. I am drawn to materials that carry traces of life—natural, animal, and human—because they resonate with impermanence and transformation. Each material carries meaning. My work is inspired by my own family history. My paternal ancestors thrived in the textile industry in France, while my maternal grandparents came from more modest backgrounds. My Vietnamese grandfather was a ‘Cong Binh’ (soldier-worker) forcibly recruited by France during WWII. His story, like many others, remained invisible. Through my work, I aim to harmonize both sides of my family's disparate background, erasing boundaries between craft and fine art. Playfully exploring materials that have a voice and influence the process to determine which techniques, like felting, embroidery, or collage, best suit them is central to my approach.

Abyssal Crescendo embodies the music the ocean can create, with its form resembling that of a guitar, thanks to the arrangement of seashells, thread made from sand, and wood—all natural elements derived from the sea. The red and cream-colored sand threads also evoke the angel of the sea, a creature from the abyss, while the deep blue color suggests the mysterious depths where many species remain undiscovered.

Bio

Capucine Bourcart, a French-Vietnamese artist based in New York City since 2006, has exhibited in galleries across the U.S. and Europe. Her work is in the collections of The Theodore Deck Museum in Colmar, France, and New York’s Museum of Motherhood. Bourcart’s work has been presented in Art on Paper and Art Wynwood, and large scale public art installations in New York City. She co-founded the collective Art Forms Us in 2020 and is a member of Art Lives Here Inc. Recent residencies, at Kino Saito, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center.

www.capucinebourcart.com

Katherine Maxwell

Artist Statement

I believe that all humans are inextricably interconnected and in listening to the body from the inside out. Using these foundational beliefs, I connect with my intuitive center: calling upon internal triggers and impulses - a thought, a flavor, an emotion - to spurn motion throughout the body. I believe in creating work that allows the viewer to travel into the artist's world, creating dimension, depth, and expansive world-building. I stand by the notion that dance can encourage and display vulnerability, empathy, joy, and difficulty, embodied through refined fluidity, strong athleticism, and a clear sense of honesty. Through these efforts, I believe that we can become softer creatures - more capable of accessing compassion, humanity, and understanding. The stories I tell through movement are an invitation to experience, feel, and be - embodying a broader bandwidth of what it means to be alive.

‘with your sweet fragrance’ draws a parallel between human relationships and plant and animal wisdom by anthropomorphizing different species within natural environments. The work sample is an excerpt of a developmental film study created in residence at Shawbrook Creative Space, Ireland. Credit: Taylor Antisdel

Bio

Creating work for the mainstage, alternative spaces, and film, Katherine Maxwell is a director, choreographer, herbalist, and the founding Artistic Director of Hivewild. Maxwell’s 27+ choreographic projects have been presented at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, CPR- Center for Performance Research, the Ace Hotel, Dinner Gallery, Atlantic Terminal-Barclays Center, and the Actors Fund Art Center, among others. Maxwell has been featured by online platforms such as Nowness, VICE, and on Vimeo as a Staff Pick and her film works have screened at 14 international festivals including Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the TanzFilmFestival, and the San Francisco Dance Film Festival. Maxwell’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Dance Informa, Lomography Magazine, Art Zealous, and selected for residencies including the Downtown Brooklyn Rehearsal Residency Initiative, BAC’s AccessArt, Carroll Hall Artist-in-Residence Program (Brooklyn) and Shawbrook Dance (Ireland). Maxwell holds a B.A. in Dance from Kennesaw State University and is a proud founding member of The Choreographers Guild. www.katherine-maxwell.com

www.katherine-maxwell.com

David Cote

Artist Statement

In my plays and opera libretti I’ve written about issues that are deeply personal as well as subjects that emerge from research. So it’s a mix: adoption, body dysmorphia, grief and survivor guilt, glacier loss due to climate change, wrongful conviction, and music therapy. Heavy topics, but I’m drawn to humor and the line between offensive and liberating. You might say the operas are expressions of global and moral responsibility, and the plays are where I exorcise demons. Still, nothing’s fixed.

Soprano Lucy Shelton as Lili in Lucidity, a new opera which will premiere at On Site Opera in New York City, then travel to Seattle Opera. Composed by Laura Kaminsky (As One), the opera will also be produced in Houston and Ithaca, NY in 2025. Lucidity explores the mysterious connection between music and memory through a music-therapy trial.

Bio

David Cote is a playwright, opera librettist, and critic based in New York City. Plays include The Müch, Saint Joe, and Otherland (O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference finalist). Recent opera: Lucidity by On Site Opera in NYC, Northwest premiere at Seattle Opera; Blind Injustice at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater; and Meltdown, a solo opera about climate change at National Sawdust. Previous operas include Blind Injustice at Cincinnati Opera and Peak Performances; Three Way at Nashville Opera and BAM; and The Scarlet Ibis at Prototype festival. David wrote the text for Nkeiru Okoye’s Black Lives Matter monodrama, Invitation to a Die-In. Other vocal pieces: Cocoa Cantata (a sequel to Bach’s Coffee Cantata) and online dating song cycles In Real Life, both with Robert Paterson. Recordings: Blind Injustice (NAXOS), Three Way (American Modern Recordings) and In Real Life (AMR). As a journalist, David’s TV and theater writing appears in The A.V. Club, Observer, 4 Columns, American Theatre and elsewhere. He was the longest serving theater editor and chief drama critic of Time Out New York. He’s the author of companion books about the Broadway hits Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Wicked, Jersey Boys and Spring Awakening.

https://davidcote.com/

Cee Lavery

Artist Statement

On a cold March evening in Montreal, Cesario Lavery was walking home from a shift in an unfamiliar part of town when he stumbled across an old, discarded book of early literary criticism on the great Franz Kafka. Cracking it open, Cesario was amazed to discover not only an extraordinary book, but a portal to the life of an extraordinary man - the book's previous owner, Dr Chaim Fischel Shatan, the (relatively unknown) founder of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis. DER EYDES (Yiddish: The Witness) is Cesario’s ongoing serialized comic about the treasure he found and the treasures it led to.

Two-page sequence from DER EYDES VOLUME III, 2022.

Bio

Cesario (Cee) Lavery is a research-driven writer and comics maker working in graphic non-fiction. His current project is DER EYDES, an ongoing serialized graphic work about an old Kafka book, a state-suppressed psychiatrist, and a family mystery. Cesario’s work has been supported by a Canada Council for the Arts Research & Creation Grant, a Microgrant for Cultural and Creative Exploration from the Museum of Jewish Montreal, and a MacDowell Fellowship. He lives and works on the island of Tiohtià:ke, or Montréal.

ceelavery.com