Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

My writing is wide-ranging and concerns the malleability of language and forms. I am interested in the intersections of the innovative and experimental with aspects race, gender, and the more-than-human world. My work is ground in inquiry, ways of knowing, and how language can (and cannot) communicate experiences felt in body and mind. Even at its most cerebral my work is centered in notions of embodiment and the lived experience of seeing and being seen. My practice and process includes photographic and video work and mixed media composition. Current projects include computational poetics and emerging technologies.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Travesty Generator book jacket, print, 6x9. Cover art by Adam Pendleton.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their fifth book, Negative Money, is slated for publication in 2023. As of this writing, they are an Associate Professor in the English Department at UMass Boston where they direct the MFA in Creative Writing program. They also direct the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Festival.

Dominic Finocchiaro

Art, to me, is about radical empathy. It is about bringing you so close to me that I can smell your breath, that you can see my sweat. It’s about the welding of individuals into something connected, into an orbit, a massive weave of lives and minds and souls and hurt and joy. In my work I am interested in finding methods of crystalizing emotional truth in ways that fosters connection, that reveals humanity, that are openhearted in their honesty. Art is a working through of the questions and concerns that make up a life, a creative unpacking that, at its best, can better both the creator and the recipient of the creation. I am interested in writing plays that, by writing them, I better understand myself and my place in the world. I am interested in writing plays that will touch strangers and make them understand themselves better, make them understand that they are not alone, that none of us is alone. I want to slip inside the skins of an audience for ninety minutes, and I want them to slip inside of my skin, and I want us to feel safer for having done so. I think that is the salutary power of art.

Dominic Finocchiaro, The Found Dog Ribbon Dance, play, 2017, premiered at the Echo Theater in Los Angeles, California and published by Broadway Play Publishing

Dominic Finocchiaro is a Brooklyn based playwright and educator. His work has been developed and produced across the country, including with the Roundabout Theatre, the New Group, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Clubbed Thumb, the National New Play Network, and the Kennedy Center. His play The Found Dog Ribbon Dance is published by Broadway Play Publishing and is available on Amazon. Dominic has been afforded residencies from MacDowell and UCross. He teaches at the Pierrepont School in Westport, Connecticut, through the Playwrights Studio at the Echo Theater, and at Quinnipiac University. He has a Bachelor's in Literature and Theatre from Reed College, a Master's in Playwriting from Columbia University, and he was a Lila Acheson Wallace Fellow at the Juilliard School.

Evan Hanczor

Tables of Contents is a home for significant, surprising, joyful, honest, and delicious gatherings and conversations at the intersections of food, arts, and culture. We open new entry points for discussions that matter, catalyze connections between individuals via the vulnerability of the table, and help create and champion art and media that is grounded, diverse, and visionary.

A dish from Tables of Contents Reading Series inspired by Katie Kitamura's INTIMACIES, October 2021

Evan Hanczor is the founder of Tables of Contents (TOC), a home for significant, surprising, joyful, honest, and delicious gatherings and conversations at the intersections of food, arts, and culture. As the longtime chef of Brooklyn’s Egg restaurant, Evan is a leading voice in the American culinary landscape, exemplifying that restaurants can and should put equity, employees, sustainability, community, and advocacy at the center of their work. A former poet constantly struggling to remain “a writer”, Evan is also a co-director of FIG and is constantly engaged in food and social justice issues with organizations ranging from One Fair Wage to OXFAM. He is the co-author of the cookbook Breakfast: Recipes to Wake Up For with Egg founder George Weld, and is the editor of the Tables of Contents Community Cookbook, named one of the best cookbooks of 2021 by The New Yorker and Vanity Fair

Kyoung eun Kang

My work focuses on the simple everyday gestures and rituals that we perceive as mundane practices that, in actuality, bear great significance to our human experience. I capture subtle human interactions and behaviors to better understand human nature and the bonds between us—bonds that bridge time and space to connect us to our partners, families, communities, strangers and even the deceased. I work in a wide range of media, including live performance, video, painting, photography, installation, text and sound pieces. Since immigrating to New York City from Korea, I have continuously tried to overcome my sense of cultural displacement. This has led me to engage others, from strangers to family members, in collaborative and performative processes. By creating an open exchange of interests, curiosity and empathy at the micro- and macro-level of my communities, I traverse invisible personal boundaries in human relationships and generate bonding moments through my work.

Kyoung eun Kang, Omaha Diary I, Three-channel video installation, 2016, 60 min, BRIC project room, Brooklyn, NY This three-channel installation observes the rituals of a 90-year-old couple living in Omaha, Nebraska and reveals the growing interpersonal relationship between the couple and the artist.

Kyoung eun Kang is a New York-based artist born in South Korea. She received a BFA and MFA in painting from Hong-ik University in Seoul, South Korea, and an MFA from Parsons, The New School for Design, New York. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including A.I.R. gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Collar Works, Troy, NY; NURTUREart, Brooklyn, NY; BRIC Project Room, Brooklyn, NY; Soho 20 Project Room, Brooklyn, NY; Here Arts Center, New York, NY; The Korean Cultural Center, Washington, D.C; Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth; Museum of Imperial City, China, and the National Museum of Modern Art, South Korea. Kang has participated in multiple residencies, including at Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Washington County, NY (2019); I-Park Foundation, East Haddam, CT (2019); ChaNorth, Pine Plains, NY (2018): NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2017, 2013); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE (2012); Lower East Side Rotating Studio Program, New York, NY (2011); and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, ME (2009). She is a recipient of fellowships at New York Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY (2010); BRIC Media Arts, Brooklyn, NY (2015); and A.I.R Gallery Fellowship Program, Brooklyn, NY (2020-21).

Joanna Kotze

I create highly physical dance performances through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary process, presenting ways to look at effort, labor, humor, violence, unpredictability, and beauty through movement as well as the body’s relationship to sound, light, and space. The subject matter of my work emerges from the persistent questions that guide my choreographic process: How do we inhabit space together? And how do we continue to create change? These principles occupy all of my work but what shifts in each piece is who is in the room and how we respond to the current moment. I expose the work to be experienced with the viewer, not separate from them. This process leads me to discover how the personal, social, and political environment of the present day filters through each person’s body to create a critical dialogue with the viewer that is reflective of the times we are living in now.

Joanna Kotze_What will we be like when we get there_2018_New York Live Arts_photo by Maria Baranova

Joanna Kotze is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, dancer and educator. She received the 2013 Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and her evening-length work, What will we be like when we get there, was nominated for a 2018 Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition by collaborator Ryan Seaton. Her work has been supported by the City Artists Corps Grant, New Music USA, the Jerome Foundation, Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, NYFA BUILD, Brooklyn Arts Council, Yellowhouse, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Her choreography has been presented throughout the U.S. and Canada and she has been an artist-in-residence at many renowned residency programs in the U.S. and Europe. She has created new works on professional and student companies and has taught throughout New York City and the U.S. at Universities, Colleges, and dance festivals. As a dancer she has worked with many prominent choreographers including Wally Cardona, Kimberly Bartosik, and Kota Yamazaki, among others. She is originally from South Africa and has a BA in Architecture from Miami University.

Amanda Choo Quan

Amanda Choo Quan's writing charts the future of social justice movements — while acknowledging their genesis in the Caribbean. Her preferred subtopics are displacement, migration, cruelty, and examining the ways white supremacy has successfully divided Black and Brown populations. She is curious about reparations meaning far more than money, and wonders what a Black transnational state could look like. She is interested in uncovering the ways the United States helped to transform the English-speaking Caribbean from socialist intellectual hotbed into tourist backyard. Her most recent work focuses on telling the stories of Maroons in the Caribbean and their present fight for Indigenous recognition. She is interested in Marronage as a philosophy to counter the flimsiness of this political moment.

Essay by Amanda Choo Quan for Harper's Bazaar.

Amanda Choo Quan is a writer, artist and essayist who is both Trinidadian and Jamaican. Winner of the 2020 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers' Prize, one of the most significant for emerging writers from the region, she is also a Truman Capote, Callaloo, Juniper, REEF Residency and Cropper Foundation fellow. Writing about race, class, and Caribbean culture, she's been published in Harper's Bazaar, Teen Vogue, NYLON, the Huffington Post, LitHub, and Caribbean Beat, among others. She's a graduate of both the California Institute of the Arts and the University of the West Indies. These days, she's either in Trinidad or on an even smaller island off its coast (no, not Tobago). Or maybe elsewhere, chasing a story. She tweets @amandacq.

Jules Rosskam

Questions are critical to my artistic process. “What does it mean to tell the truth?” “How do I engage others in a process that opens a space for transformation?” Predominantly working in film and video, I aim to induce a perceptual shift in our understanding of how and what bodies mean, toward an apprehension of multiplicities. I am consistently drawn to the rich discursive space of the liminal: the space between male and female, between documentary and fiction, between motion and stasis. I am particularly interested in the intersections of queer, feminist, and decolonial theories with avant-garde filmmaking practices because of the interventions these meetings produce in discourses of power and representation. I am working from, and within, a history of artists whose cultural productions work in tandem with political movements. My films cross cinematic boundaries through experimentation with hybrid forms in order to highlight the fact that boundaries—of identity, discipline, geography— are porous

Still from Desire Lines, video, work-in-progress

Jules Rosskam is an internationally award-winning filmmaker, educator and 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. His interdisciplinary practice works to induce a perceptual shift in our understanding of how and what bodies mean, toward an apprehension of multiplicities. His most recent feature-length documentary, Paternal Rites (2018), premiered at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight and went on to win several festival awards. He is also the director of Dance, Dance, Evolution (2019), Something to Cry About (2018), Thick Relations (2012), against a trans narrative (2009), and transparent (2005). His work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, the British Film Institute, Arsenal Berlin, Anthology Film Archives, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the Queens Museum of Art, the Museum of Moving Images, and hundreds of film festivals worldwide. He has participated in residencies at Yaddo, ISSUE Project Room, Marble House, PLAYA and ACRE. He is currently Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at University of Maryland Baltimore County

Allison Wiese

I am a sculptor. I create poetry out of common things, repurposing and repositioning materials to make new meanings. I use firewood, fruit, standard highway signage, basic construction techniques, a commercial awning, or a whistled song. I'm just as likely to drag ideas through time. I'm fascinated by the way we look at our surroundings through invisible cultural and political lenses, and my work attempts to subvert inert objects and signs by remixing them, often employing shards of common language (both literal texts like slogans, lyrics, or exhortations and symbolic language such as flags or "fight" songs). Beyond the immediate symbolic culture I draw on and alter, some of the essential questions of my work are: can we have community? Share language? Or is our communication so contingent that we’re alone? My projects often locate themselves outside the walls of traditional art venues, and confront broad publics with these questions.

A gradual accretion of stolen wooden doorstops is a concrete and compulsive “trophy” collection gathered from institutions.

Allison Wiese is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, installations, sound works, performances and architectural interventions. Her work is often created for public spaces at the boundaries, or outside of, institutions, and has been exhibited throughout the United States, among other venues at Machine Project in L.A., the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. She's the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and has received grants from Art Matters, Creative Capital and the Cultural Arts Council of Houston. Wiese is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was a Core Fellow of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She learned to walk and talk in Brooklyn, drive in Southern California and everything else important in Texas. Wiese currently lives in San Diego, where she teaches sculpture and associated topics at the University of San Diego.