Heather M. O’Brien
Heather M. O’Brien is an artist and film-maker based in Beirut, Lebanon. Her work explores how capitalist desire and militaristic legacy construct our ideas about home. In working with photographs, film, video and writing, her projects seek to build encounters around the illusion of accurate memory, familial archives and the fallacies of the American Dream.
O’Brien’s work has been exhibited in venues across the United States including The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The International Center of Photography, Parsons/The New School, The Photographic Center Northwest, The Bronx River Art Center, Baxter St., Purchase College at SUNY and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her projects have been featured in a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Conveyor Magazine. O’Brien received an MFA from CalArts and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at The American University of Beirut in Lebanon.
http://www.heathermobrien.com
Janée J. Baugher
Janée J. Baugher is the author of two ekphrastic poetry collections, The Body’s Physics (Tebot Bach, 2013) and Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010). She holds degrees from Boston University and Eastern Washington University, and her nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and criticism have been published in nearly 100 journals and anthologies, including The Writer’s Chronicle, The Portland Review, NANO Fiction, and Nimrod. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Bread Loaf Conference participant, Baugher has received grants/awards from Humanities Washington, Richard Hugo House, Jack Straw Foundation, and The Lerman Trust. She’s currently on the editorial staff of Boulevard magazine.
Baugher’s interdisciplinary collaborations include work with visual artists, composers, and choreographers. Over the years she has had poems adapted for the stage and set to music at University of Cincinnati-Conservatory of Music, Contemporary Dance Theatre in Ohio, Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, and Dance Now! Ensemble in Florida. Baugher has presented her poetry at the Library of Congress, and she has been awarded nonfiction fellowships at the Island Institute of Sitka in Alaska and Silver Creek Residency in Idaho. Baugher’s current project is a memoir-in-progress, Who by Water, Who by Sword?: How a Suicide Saved Her Own life, which treats themes of aquaphobia, nature, and mental illness.
https://janeejbaugher.wordpress.com
Jette Ellgaard
Jette Ellgaard is Based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2007. Her practice is rooted in an investigation of the shifting cultural identities of the rural area of Denmark where she grew up. Using mostly video, sound, text and photography Ellgaards practice pictures her own mix of biographical attachments to this region, which are complicated through her estrangement from the prevailing economic and political developments in the region since she has moved to Copenhagen. The ambivalence of feeling attached to and alienated from a place at the same time is pictured with great clarity in her work. At the same time the presentation is neither prosaic or overly self-referential – Ellgaards work has a strong sense of it’s audience, often using colloquial language, and at times referencing contemporary events to lend an immediacy to her references. Her interests and investigations mostly centre around everyday life, human relations, family structures and generations related stuff, which perspective universal subjects, as history, time, identity, the human existence, the cultural and social background and the relation between the individual and the surrounding society.
http://jetteellgaard.dk/english.html
Joanna Kotze
Joanna Kotze received the 2013 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer. Her choreography has been presented at The National Arts Centre (Ottawa), Baryshnikov Arts Center, American Dance Institute, Danspace Project, Bard College, Jacob’s Pillow, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Movement Research at Judson, Roulette, Dixon Place, 92nd St. Y, WAXworks, Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts (WI), and Lu Magnus, Soho20, Show Room Gowanus, and Industry City galleries. Joanna recently created new works on Toronto Dance Theatre, Zenon Dance, Ririe-Woodbury, and James Sewell Ballet as well as on students at The New School, Barnard, Purchase College, Southern Utah University and Miami University (OH).
Joanna has received support from the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Jerome Foundation, NYFA BUILD, Brooklyn Arts Council, Yellowhouse, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. She was a 2013-2015 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and a recipient of a 2014 Process Space residency through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). She has had residencies at The Camargo Foundation, Jacob’s Pillow, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Djerassi and the Bogliasco Foundation. Joanna was a 2012 Fellow for Ailey’s New Directions Choreography Lab, a 2011 LMCC Swing Space resident and has worked in residence at Mount Tremper Arts.
She danced with Wally Cardona from 2000-2010 and currently dances with Kimberly Bartosik/daela. She has also danced for Netta Yerushalmy, Sam Kim, Daniel Charon, Sarah Skaggs, Christopher Williams, the Metropolitan Opera ballet, and others.
Joanna is on faculty at Movement Research and Gibney Dance in New York City. She has taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Eugene Lang College at The New School, Long Island University and the American Dance Festival. She has studied Klein technique with Barbara Mahler since 2003, is originally from South Africa and has a BA in Architecture from Miami University.
http://www.joannakotze.com
