Amy Parker

Amy Parker was born in Okinawa, Japan, and spent most of her childhood on diplomatic and military compounds overseas. She returned to the United States after her high school graduation and attended Indiana University, where she studied comparative literature. She won a Michener fellowship in fiction from the University of Texas, Austin. Afterward, she spent four years doing intensive monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Soto Zen monastery in the United States, and at Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center in Mill Valley, California. She received lay ordination in the Soto Zen lineage in 2007. She left the monastery for the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she graduated in 2012. She currently lives in Wichita with her son.

http://www.amyeparker.com

Andrea Clearfield

Andrea Clearfield is an award-winning full-time composer of music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, dance, and multimedia collaborations. She has been praised by the New York Times for her “graceful tracery and lively, rhythmically vital writing”, the Philadelphia Inquirer for her “compositional wizardry” and “mastery with large choral and instrumental forces”, the L.A. Times for her “fluid and glistening orchestration” and by Opera News for her “vivid and galvanizing” music of “timeless beauty”. Her works are performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. Among her 125 works are ten cantatas including one for The Philadelphia Orchestra. Dr. Clearfield is a recipient of the 2014 Copland House Residency Award and has held fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, The MacDowell Colony, Ucross and Yaddo among others. She is the founder and host of the renowned Philadelphia Salon concerts featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, and world music since 1986 and winner of Philadelphia Magazine’s 2008 “Best of Philadelphia” award. Dr. Clearfield is currently writing an opera on the life of the Tibetan yogi, Milarepa, to libretto by Jean-Claude van Itallie and Lois Walden commissioned by Gene Kaufman and Terry Eder for NYC premiere with development assistance from American Lyric Theater.

Anna Brown Massey

Anna is a second-year MFA Graduate Fellow in Dance at The Ohio State University, and researches intermedia performance, community arts development, and pedagogical practice. She has received numerous grants for her projects, including from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Times Square Alliance, The Work Office, NTHCCC, and the Ohio State University. Intermedia, improvisation, and live music are germane to her work, for which she has received multiple commissions throughout the United States. Anna is Co-Director of NACHMO (National Choreography Month) and The Moves Project, and is the Artistic Director of her eponymous dance company. In addition to communicating in barefeet, on film, and within class, Anna is a Cape Breton Step dancer and a Scottish Highland dancer.

http://annabrownmassey.com

Carin Clevidence

Carin Clevidence is the author of the novel The House on Salt Hay (FSG). Her short fiction has appeared in Story, the Indiana Review, fivechapters and elsewhere, and her nonfiction in O Magazine, OZY, Grand Tour, Fiction Writers Review, Asahi Weekly of Japan, and the anthologies First Antarctic Reader, and Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture. Her piece “November on Cape Cod” was read by BD Wong at Symphony Space in New York. She serves as Contributing Writer for the forthcoming journal Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, and on the juries for Sustainable Arts, and the Sozopol Fiction Seminar.

A graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Michigan, she has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, and Sustainable Arts, and residencies at Yaddo, VCCA, the Hermitage Artists’ Retreat, Ledig House, and Willapa Bay AiR. She grew up in a family of naturalists and travelers, and her past jobs include deckhand in Baja, California, and assistant expedition leader in Antarctica. She lives in Northampton, MA, with her two children.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/carinclevidence

Céline Lastennet

Céline Lastennet’s work deals with question of space and time by experimentation. Her sculptures interrogate our relationship with ourselves, the other, and our environment. Born in 1989, in Paris (FR), Céline Lastennet studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, in the workshop of the sculptor Vincent Barré, where she obtained a Master degree in 2013. Since then she has worked as an independent artist, receiving residency fellowships to realize projects in France and abroad including Marble House Project, Triangle summer workshop, Vermont Studio Center, Casa de Velazquez and Sancy Artense Communauté. Her travels have taken her to Japan to photograph the Japanese dry garden and several times to stay at the last Shaker Community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. She has exhibited in solo exhibition and group exhibitions which include Incubate Art (ES), Plasticiens du Puy de Dôme (FR), Parcours d’Artistes (FR), Eau(x) Voyageuse(s) (FR). Her works were finalists in Contemporary Talent 2015, fondation Schneider. In 2013 she was awarded the Aurige Finance Award. Celine Lastennet works and lives in France.

http://www.celinelastennet.com

Christina Milletti

Christina Milletti’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as The Master’s Review, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, and Harcourt’s Best New American Voices (among other places). Her collection of short stories, The Religious & Other Fictions, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She has just finished a novel called Choke Box: a mem-noir (an excerpt appears in the Akashic Books anthology Buffalo Noir), and is now at work on a new collection of stories called Erratics. She teaches at the University at Buffalo where she curates the Exhibit X Fiction Series and helped to found UB’s new MA in English/Innovative Writing program.

http://americanbookreview.org/editor.asp?id=42

Christopher McNulty

Christopher McNulty is a visual artist who creates sculptural objects, video, and works on paper. His work has explored the limitations of human thought and performance, and the tensions that exist between our ideals and everyday lives. His current work explores how environmental space penetrates the body, creating relationships among individuals, species, and objects. He has exhibited work in galleries and museums throughout the U.S., including the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, Rochester Art Center, and Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta. His diverse art practice has been featured in many publications including Art Papers, New American Paintings, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and The Week.

McNulty has received many grants and awards including an Alabama State Council on the Arts Grant for 2005-2006 and Madison CitiARTS grant in 2001. He has completed artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. A dual citizen of France and the US, McNulty holds an MFA degree from the University of Wisconsin and is currently Professor of Art at Auburn University. McNulty lives in Opelika, Alabama.

www.christophermcnulty.com

Coco Karol

Coco Karol is a New York based dancer, teacher, and artist who makes cross-disciplinary performance work. She holds a BFA in Dance from Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA from Hollins University. As a dancer, Karol has had the privilege of working for Misnomer Dance Theater, Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance Company, and Christopher Williams, as well as being a part of projects by Christy O’Harris, Bill Young, Jose Navas, and Steven Petronio.

Karol has created work with musicians including Bjork, Ryan Lott (Son Lux), Koh Ohtera, Luna Cholong Kang, Daniel Carter, Minna Rhee Choi, and Ear to Mind collective; and visual artists including photographer Steven Sebring, sculptor Eve Laroche-Joubert (aka Bailey), architect Marcos Zotes, stereoscopic artist Gerald Marks, videographer Azmi Mert Erdem, and designer Louda Larrain.

Her work has been shown internationally as well as across New York at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, BAX, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Ibeam, Spectrum, D.U.M.B.O Under the Bridge Arts Festival, New York Studio Gallery, Galapagos, Death By Audio, and curated by AUNTS. She has taught movement workshops in San Francisco to musicians of the Magik*Magik Orchestra, in Istanbul about movement and social movement, and in Roanoke investigating non-verbal communication and gestures of care.

Karol is a dedicated teacher of movement, yoga, and qi gong. Her work is informed by her studies and practice in improvisation, butoh, authentic movement, meditation, and the belief that we move to move, and to be moved.

She founded Red Sole Productions, a small production company for dance-based media and movement installations.

http://findingcoco.net

Cris Beam

Cris Beam is an author and professor in New York City. Her most recent book, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, 2013), was named a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Award, shortlisted for the William Saroyan Prize and the and was a best book on several year-end lists including NPR, New York Magazine and The Boston Globe. She is also the author of Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers (Harcourt 2007), which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a Stonewall Honor book. Her young adult novel, I am J, was released by Little, Brown in 2011 and was named a Kirkus Best Book and Library Guild Selection, and is the first book with a transgender character to land on the state of California’s recommended reading list for public high schools. Her short memoir, Mother, Stranger, was published by The Atavist in 2012 and quickly reached the top ten on Kindle Singles. Cris’ work has also been featured in the New York Times, The Awl, The Huffington Post, The Guardian and on This American Life.

Cris teaches creative writing at Columbia University and New York University. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University and has received fellowships from the Point Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Corporation of Yaddo. She’s currently working on a book about philosophies of empathy.

http://www.crisbeam.com

Cynthia Gallaher

Cynthia Gallaher, a Chicago-based poet, playwright and nonfiction writer, is author of three full poetry collections, Earth Elegance, Swimmer’s Prayer and Night Ribbons. Her most recent chapbook is Omnivore Odes: Poems About Food, Herbs and Spices. The Chicago Public Library lists her among its “Top Ten Requested Chicago Poets.” Most recently, she has been certified as an RYT 200 yoga instructor.

http://journaltips.blogspot.com

Dana Hemes

Dana Hemes constructs system-based, visual experiments with human and nonhuman participants to explore interspecies dialogues. She uses functioning, complex systems to challenge anthropocentric thinking and to examine how interspecies interactions can change the meaning of communication. Born in 1986, she grew up in Lafayette, LA. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts from Montclair State University, and a BFA from NYU in Photography and Imaging and Studio Arts. She has been artist-in-residence at Whitecliffe College in Auckland, New Zealand, with the School of Making Thinking, in New York City, and with the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY; and has exhibited at Whitecliffe College, Cardiff School of Art and Design in Wales, and at MagnanMetz Gallery in New York. She has lectured at SVA and at MSU, and lives and works in New York.

http://www.danamichelehemes.com

David Clay Mettens

David Clay Mettens is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic concert music. His recent work seeks to distill the strange and sublime from the familiar. He explores moments of elemental beauty and wonder in music marked by detailed engagement with instrumental color, from rich and sonorous to bright and crystalline. He seeks expressive immediacy in lucid forms and dramatic shapes.

He has been commissioned and performed by ensembles across the United States and as part of the Ritsos Project in Samos, Greece. Recently, his works have been performed at the North American Saxophone Alliance Region 2 Conference, by OSSIA on the Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players series, and on the Café MoMus new music series at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. At Eastman, his works have been featured on OSSIA, Composers’ Forum, Graduate Composers’ Sinfonietta, and Computer Music Center concerts. His compositions for large ensemble have been performed or read by the Eastman Philharmonia Chamber Orchestra and Wind Orchestra, the Elon University Wind Ensemble, the Brevard Sinfonia, and the University of South Carolina Symphonic Winds.

His orchestra piece “Sleeping I am carried…” was selected for the 24th Annual Underwood New Music Readings with the American Composers Orchestra. The piece was also the winner of Eastman’s 2014 Wayne Brewster Barlow Composition Prize, and received a premiere with the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra in October 2014. He was a finalist for the 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and a regional finalist for the 2012 SCI/ASCAP Student Commission Competition. In the summer of 2013, he studied composition at the Brevard Music Center with Robert Aldridge and David Dzubay, and attended the 2014 New Music on the Point Chamber Music Festival.

In the fall of 2015, he will enter the PhD composition program at the University of Chicago. He earned his masters degree at the Eastman School of Music, where he studied composition with Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, David Liptak, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Robert Morris, and computer music with Allan Schindler. A native of Covington, KY, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of South Carolina with a degree in music composition and a clarinet performance certificate. He was a recipient of the McNair Scholarship, the top award USC gives to out-of-state students, and the 2013 Arthur M. Fraser Award from the School of Music. There, his composition teachers were John Fitz Rogers and Fang Man.

He has presented his research on the music of Thomas Adès at the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition 30th Anniversary Conference hosted by the University of Louisville and the first annual THEMUS graduate-student music theory and musicology conference at Temple University. In 2012, he was awarded a USC Magellan Scholar Grant for a research project involving pipe organs, spectral music, and computer music under the guidance of faculty mentor Reginald Bain.  

https://mettensmusic.com

Dempsey Rice

Dempsey Rice is the daughter of a therapist and an avid amateur photographer. Her parents taught her the power of listening and observing, recording and documenting. Through her work as a still photographer and filmmaker, she explores themes of connection, personal story, relationship and identity. Her current photographs are influenced by her own experience of motherhood. This body of work is tentatively titled: “We come from life. We are the conduit to other life.” She photographs with intent; making images that are about the mother-child relationship on the surface but that are also about seeing herself as a child again. Through these images she explores the family bond without shrinking from its darker elements: emotional uncertainty, physical discomfort and fear of abandonment. The process of making these images is about the integration and synthesis of family and work, past and present, childhood and motherhood. In addition, these photographs are a channel through which she can examine her interest in the family album as a historical form and as a psychological document. What role do family photographs play in our lives? What stories do we choose to preserve when we make an image and how do these images inform our memories? Is the family album a true representation of our personal histories? In the same way that her photographs are connected to the family album, her films are connected to family film and video. Her first documentary film, “Daughter of Suicide” (2000, 72 minutes, HBO), is a personal film about her mother’s life long struggle with depression, her eventual suicide and the impact of that suicide on her life. Making “Daughter of Suicide” introduced her to the power of using personal story to examine universal truths about the human experience.

http://dempseyricephotography.com

Emma Piper-Burket

Emma Piper-Burket is a filmmaker, writer and researcher based between New York City and Oregon. Her work focuses on non-fiction, experimental and collected media. She frequently mixes analog forms such as Super8 and 16mm film with digital media, exploring the margins of what is familiar and calling attention to subtle details that contribute to the whole. Her documentary work has brought her extensive experience in the Middle East, specifically Iraqi Kurdistan, where she has taught workshops and conducted independent research in agriculture, archaeology, food culture and the local film industry. She holds an MFA in Cinema and Digital Media from FAMU in Prague, and a BA in Arabic and Classical Studies from Georgetown University.

http://emmapiperburket.com

Erin Gilbert

Erin Morgan Gilbert is a writer, translator, and teacher. She holds an MFA in Fiction and Literature from Bennington College, though she is a belletrist at heart who writes across discipline and genre. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she grew up memorizing birdsong, eating berries, and learning the scientific names of evergreen trees in the forest that surrounded her childhood home. Today she lives in Seattle where she teaches college courses and community writing workshops, dances tango, and practices aerial arts. Her creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and poetry appear in a range of publications including AGNI, the Ilanot Review, and The Rumpus.

http://www.erinmorgangilbert.com

Fatima Mirza

Fatima Farheen Mirza is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing-Fellow. She has taught creative writing and fiction courses at the University of Iowa and at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. In 2013 she was awarded The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research/ Creative Achievement from The University of California, Riverside. She will be working on her first novel while at Marble House.

Galen Bremer

Galen Bremer is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work focuses on experimentation using noise, modular synthesis, improvisation, and elements of performance art. Bremer’s original compositions have accompanied film and dance works in collaboration with artists such as Nancy Allison, Emma Hoette, The Lovelies, Zoe Rabinowitz and Anne Zuerner, at venues including the West End Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Hunter College, Invisible Dog Art Center, Dance Theatre of Harlem, New York City Center, Lincoln Center, and the Great Friends Dance Festival in Newport, RI. Bremer regularly contributes to the Holidays For the Future, an experimental music series in New York. He appears on FatCat Records with New York based art rock band, Forest Fire. His music has been described as “ominous” (The New York Times), “mesmerizing” (Off Off Off Dance), and “addictive, hypnotic” (Pitchfork Media). He was recently a composer-in-residence at Fleet Moves Dance Festival in Wellfleet, MA. Bremer earned his B.A. in Music: Jazz Studies from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where he focused on contemporary music, keyboard harmony, and improvisation under Tom Coppola (Air, Googie & Coppola, Saturday Night Live), and music theory, composition, and semiotics under Horace Maxile (Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago), among others. Bremer is the Associate Director of Dance Films Association and Producer of the Dance on Camera Festival co-presented by Dance Films Association and Film Society of Lincoln Center.

http://www.galenbremer.com

Gary Whitehead

Gary J. Whitehead’s third collection of poems, A Glossary of Chickens, was published by Princeton University Press in 2013. His writing awards include, among others, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University, and the PEN Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency Award. He has also conducted residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Mesa Refuge, and the Heinrich Boll Cottage. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad, most notably in The New Yorker. He has been a featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Princeton Poetry Festival. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Tenafly High School in New Jersey and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Gioia Kuss

Gioia Kuss is a photographer, printmaker, and land-use planner from Weybridge Vermont, USA. The combination of art and science in her academic background informs her images of natural and man-made structures and processes. Her photojournalistic style and sensibility is strengthened by her work as a counselor in Vermont communities, which were damaged by severe flooding after Tropical Storm Irene. These experiences drove home how important and vulnerable society is from the effects of climate change and environmental degradation. While firmly rooted in Vermont, she has lived in Paris, the Swiss Alps, and several states across the US. Speaking other languages has helped in her quest to understand different cultural and natural environments while traveling widely. She works for clients on commercial and private editorial projects. Her personal projects explore the way we as humans live on and with the earth, working with themes related to climate change and the environment. Gioia received a BA from Middlebury College and an MA from the Conway School of Landscape Design. In addition, she has taught art, math, and science at the high school level and Printmaking at Green Mountain College. 

http://gkphotovt.com

Gowri Savoor

Gowri Savoor is a visual artist who creates environmental sculpture, works on paper and performs the Indian art of Rangoli. Born in Manchester, England, she was educated in Manchester and Leeds, and moved to the United States in 2007. Savoor has exhibited in the U.S., the U.K., and internationally. She has work in several public collections, including the Manchester Dental Hospital (UK), The Children’s Center in Flowery Field (UK), Johnson State College (US) and Housing Vermont (US). Grants include Arts Council England Professional Development Grants, Creative Industries Awards, the Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and the Vermont Community Foundation. Recent projects include exhibits at the Shelburne Museum, VT, the McLean Project for the Arts, VA, and the Bank of America Plaza, Charlotte, NC. Savoor also works towards bringing art to the community, and believes passionately in the power of participatory, community art events. She has been a teaching artist for over 15 years and is the co-organizer and artistic director of Vermont’s River of Light Lantern Parade.

http://www.gowrisavoor.com