Ellen Adams

Ellen Adams writes essays, fiction and songs. As a teenager in Eastern Washington, one of her earliest jobs included Spanish interpretation at a cardiology clinic. Ferrying the conditions of patients’ figurative and anatomical hearts between languages confirmed for her the urgent necessity—and, often, devastating absence—of language as a bridge. Linguistic fluency became pillar and propeller for her work, leading to years-long academic and artistic engagement overseas. She is revising a novel, as well as developing a nonfiction manuscript about the windfalls and collateral damages of adult language acquisition. A Lambda Literary Fellow and Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer in Nonfiction, her work appears in Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Singapore Art Museum, and elsewhere. As a singer-songwriter in Americana traditions, she has played in folk festivals and major cities throughout North America; she is at work on her next album. Adams is a former Fulbright grantee, researching politically engaged Thai contemporary art. Her current projects are supported by grants from Elizabeth George Foundation and Artist Trust. She completed her undergraduate studies in Comparative Literature at Princeton University and holds an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College, where she received the Lainoff Prize.

www.ellenadams.net

Lara Mimosa Montes

Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016). She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her poems and essays have appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, BOMB, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow and CantoMundo Fellow. Currently, she works as a senior editor of Triple Canopy and lives in the Twin Cities. She was born in the Bronx.

https://opencuny.org/lararossana/

Emily Moran

Emily Moran (b. July 14, 1994) is a songwriter, arranger, producer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performer. Born and raised in Chicago, Emily spent her early adulthood in Boston, MA studying at Berklee College of Music. While a student of the school's rigorous Contemporary Writing & Production program, Emily supplemented her studies in arranging, orchestration, and production with additional focus on songwriting and old-time music, thanks to Berklee's American Roots Music program. With an eye to both the eternal lineage of song and the unsung tradition of arrangers, Emily developed Aurora Birch, her singer/songwriter act. Through Aurora Birch, Emily became a fixture in Boston's thriving folk community, performing frequently at venues in town (Club Passim, Juliet, Lizard Lounge) while still immersed in her schoolwork. Shortly after graduating in December 2016, Emily was awarded an Iguana Grant to fund the creation of Brightness, her first record as Aurora Birch. Brightness, recorded in March 2017 and released December of the same year, is a stunning display of Emily's skill as a writer and performer, and features a formidable co-production between her and Dan Cardinal (The Western Den, Lula Wiles, Darlingside). Emily lives in southwestern Michigan, where she teaches and creates music & art on her family's farm. In October 2019 Emily will be an artist in residence at the Marble House Project, where she will be completing arrangements and pre-production for her second Aurora Birch record.

http://www.aurorabirch.com/

Elissa Osterland

Elissa Osterland is a Chicago-based artist currently exploring material, place and memory through site-specific methods of sourcing and firing clay. Elissa is a 2019 fellow at Theaster Gates Studio and a Center Program 8 artist at Hyde Park Art Center.

www.elissaosterland.com

Céline Pelcé

Maison Paris was a series of 5 edible structures, created for a private event in Paris.

Based in Paris, Céline Pelcé works as a food artist. She began working with food while working as interior designer : she considers both food and architecture as elements built on a same action : ingestion, extraction of matter and techniques, in different transformation processes. And this, in order to respond to basic human needs : housing and eating. She now uses food as a material to build artistic experiences : food enables her to express the poetic of territories, culinary rituals, and craft techniques. Her research grows in collaboration with chefs and craftsmen, with their codes, and rules. The researches are then staged and proposed to the public, as guests.

These experiences consist in food installations, performances, or orchestrated meals. In each of these format, Céline uses food to convey a story, and the guest is invited to embed it, by the act of eating. The experience ends in the disapperance. These situations include a dimension of hospitality : as the piece starts to be shared and eaten, each guest has the room to be a part of it, and to make the piece his own.

https://www.celinepelce.fr

Owyn Ruck

Owyn Ruck is a weaver and an unweaver. Her choice of medium lies in seeking liberation – moments where order lives within chaos, joy in pain, birth in death. Passing the shuttle, she is on a journey inside, attempting to return with language the body and spirit knowing. Her motivation for art is the same as healing or teaching -- to unweave, imbuing a love for humanity into the questioning of how things have come to be.

www.succurro.co  

Anna Sperber

Anna Sperber is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer. Her work has been described by The New York Times as “immediately compelling” and “wonderfully strange” with “moments of theatrical magic” and “a tension between formality and chaotic wildness.” Her performances are rooted in the poetic potency of choreography and its potential for perceptual transformation. Sperber’s work has been presented and commissioned by The Kitchen, The Joyce Theater’s UNLEASHED Series at New York Live Arts, Gibney Dance, The Chocolate Factory, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and Dance Theater Workshop in New York City, as well as by the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC. She has been an artist in residence at The Bogliasco Foundation, Dance The Yard, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance (Dance in Process), Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Movement Research. Sperber was a co-founder of classclassclass, and was a co-curator of the 2008 Movement Research Spring Festival. She has taught as a guest artist at American Dance Festival, Movement Research, Gibney Dance, Hunter College, George Washington University, and Wayne State University. Sperber founded and ran BRAZIL, a studio and intimate performance space in Bushwick, Brooklyn from 2004 to 2014.

annasperber.com

Marente van der Valk

Marente van der Valk is a Dutch-born, London based chef, (food) designer and food stylist. She graduated in 2012 from a MA Design and Environment at Goldsmiths University of London, and has since then been focusing on projects and events with an emphasis on environmental awareness and community mindedness. Her work is often a multi-sensory experience where a love for bringing people together results in a wealth of flavours and colours and a feel-good atmosphere. Currently, Marente is six months into a year-long culinary residency at the Jan van Eyck Academy’s Food Lab in Maastricht. Founding the Food lab at JvE and running it on a day-to-day basis has enabled her to investigate new approaches and angles to her cooking processes and the interactive properties of food and the act of eating. By focusing on the wealth of the edible plant world - using organic, seasonal produce straight from local farmers- and the use of the whole vegetable where possible, as well as considering meat to be a treat, she strives to have a minimal impact on the environment.

www.marentevandervalk.com