Jill Osier

Smallness, slowness, quiet, and stillness have always felt important to how I live and work. I've tended toward remoteness... I wonder about the connection between disappearance and observation, particularly as it relates to my experience of the natural world.

Jill Osier_The Solace Is Not the Lullaby_full-length poetry collection_2020_/Yale University Press, Winner of the 2019 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition

Jill Osier is a poet whose work includes the collection _The Solace Is Not the Lullaby_(Yale University Press, 2020) and the chapbooks _from_, _Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White_, and _Bedful of Nebraskas_. Some of her poems were recently set to music in Kevin Laskey's 2021 song cycle, _The Snow, Like Me_. She lives outside of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Gabriela Frank

My work marries visual, sonic, spoken, and tactile elements with written language. In experimenting with how literary art meets other genres and forms, I seek to create unexpected moments for the rational and poetic to collide—and push the idea of what literary art can be, where we encounter it, and how it lives within our bodies. My ultimate mission is to place literary art in the path of everyday life. I believe that the embodied experience is the gateway to self-knowledge and existential understanding; how we sense and what we feel are part of who we are. An interdisciplinary exchange between science, art, and humanities feeds two central themes running throughout my body of work: how human forge systems of belief by which we live, and how we dare to love anything in a world where everything dies.

Gabriela Denise Frank, "A Novel Performance" (live performance installation in Seattle's Central Library), 2014

Gabriela Denise Frank is an Italian American literary artist whose work expands from the page into the sonic, the visual, and the physical. Her writing contemplates identity, feminism, ancestors, and the ecotone between humans and environment. Her writing has appeared in True Story, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Hunger Mountain, Bayou, Baltimore Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her essay, “BAD DATE,” was named a Notable Essay of 2020 by Best American Essays 2021. Off the page, her installations and performances transform storytelling into experience. In Seattle’s Central Library, she staged “A Novel Performance,” a month-long performance installation in which she wrote a novel as the public watched—live. In Jack Straw’s New Media Gallery she installed “UGLY ME,” a multi-media spoken word exhibition that explored beauty and self-worth through the medium of the selfie. Gabriela’s work is supported by 4Culture, Centrum, the Civita Institute, Invoking the Pause, Jack Straw, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, and Willapa Bay. An advocate for public art and artists, Gabriela serves as a public art commissioner for the City of Burien, a 4Culture's arts advisory committee member, and as the creative nonfiction editor of Crab Creek Review.

Alec Galambos

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 expressive depth of the voice, and how to manifest it in every instrument and sonic palette. My writing is defined by harmonic density (a lot of chords and colors) and focuses on how emotional information is expressed through abstraction. I compose, curate, and conduct for the KHORIKOS ensemble, which celebrates new vocal music and performs a repertoire of heartfelt, anomalous music from across centuries.

Conducting KHORIKOS at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, May 2019

Alec Galambos is a composer, interactive audio designer, and the artistic director of the the NYC-based KHORIKOS ensemble. After growing up on a diet of piano and choral music, he studied composition and voice at Emory University and then moved to New York to pursue a M.M. degree 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 led the group through award-winning performances across the U.S. and Eastern Europe, showcasing an eclectic repertoire of early and new music in appearances at the Gotham Early Music Series, choral festivals in Serbia and Montenegro, NYC's National Sawdust and Lincoln Center, and in the group’s two latest international new music competitions, each drawing over 600 submissions from composers worldwide. His work 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 championed immersive digital media in the choral arts with *Vespers 360* and *Tavener 360*, KHORIKOS’s pioneering spatial audio projects.

Alex Sujong Laughlin

Alex Sujong Laughlin is the writer and audio producer. Her writing has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, Zora, Study Hall, Literary Hub, and more. She has created podcasts for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Defector Media, BuzzFeed, NBC, and Spotify, and she has taught journalism at New York University and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She currently writes about gender and media for The Poynter Institute and she is working on a book about the history and sociology of ghost stories in the United States. She is interested in creating work that interrogates power in relation to visibility, narrative-making, and collective memory. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut with her husband and their trash cat, Pong. You can find her on Twitter @alexlaughs.

Shayan Lotfi

My work explores the ways in which urban environments, political institutions, and shifting notions of ‘pluralism’ alter individual identities and interpersonal relationships.

Rehearsals at South Coast Repertory

Shayan Lotfi has written some plays and would like to write some more. He’s been fortunate enough that some really cool institutions – like South Coast Repertory, The Lark, Roundabout Theatre, and Boston Court – have helped develop his work, and that some really cool residencies – like SPACE at Ryder Farm and the Millay Colony – have fed and housed him as he knocked his ideas into shape. He is currently working on a play for the Elizabeth George Emerging Writers Commission. When he’s not writing he works as an urban policy consultant.

Gary Podesto

I’ve always built things—be they in my mind or with my hands. The plate and page have become my chosen mediums. One appeals to all the senses, the other makes an appeal for a world beyond our senses—a world of the imagination. The tension point between the two is where I create. Someone once said artists are born and craftsmen are made. I would agree I've become a craftsman of my trade through years of study and praxis. My career as a cook is not evidence of my artistic aspirations but proof of my commitment to quality, creativity, and hard work. Am I an artist? I can only look back at the things I’ve created and ask “have I posed worthwhile questions” and “have I endeavored to answer them?” Those answers may never come. I may find I was not born an artist. Either way, I’m grateful for my curious nature and humbled by the beauty its muse reveals to me.

www.garypodesto.net

An instructional photo montage for an original recipe I developed as part of a creative consulting project with a winery in San Luis Obispo, California.

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset

The rim of the sky takes on a tinge

Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber

When you peel it carefully. - Robert Hass

Born and raised in the Sacramento valley, Gary is steeped in California sunshine and local values. Stints traveling in Europe inspired his exploration of the foundational cuisines of the West and his trips to Asia have provided valuable context for the traditions of the East. These influences combine to yield a modern interpretation of California cuisine — a nouveau style of seasonal cooking utilizing the best ingredients available to deliver nutrient-conscious yet approachable cuisine inspired by the local environment. Gary started learning about cooking at his grandmothers’ apron strings, growing up with an appreciation for the traditions of Old World cuisine prepared with love and skill. While studying literature & publishing in college, he took a job at Spice Creek Cafe in Chico, California where he apprenticed under Chef Rebecca Stewart. There he learned the intricacies of fusion cooking by exploring the limits of many regional cuisines. He spent the next decade continuing his exploration in Northern California, developing his farm-to-table ethos managing farmers’ markets and cooking with seasonal products. In 2016 Alice Waters asked him to join the team of cooks working in the celebrated kitchen of the downstairs restaurant at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. He's been happily manning the stoves and tending the hearth there ever since.