Phoebe Tran

Artist Statement

I make food to remember—to imagine new futures rooted in ancestral knowledge. Drawing from my Vietnamese lineage, folk medicine, and years working on farms, my practice, Bé Bếp, uses seasonal ingredients as both material and metaphor. I’ve long observed how industrialized ingredients have replaced generations of time‑honored techniques, separating us from the true vitality of plants. In response, I grow and cook with seasonal and foraged ingredients, experimenting to reassemble flavors that predate colonial and industrial forces. My performances and gatherings invite participants into this ongoing homecoming. In the absence of my mother, Vietnam is the motherland that guides me: each return to her soil is both an act of study and healing. Through Bé Bếp, I honor the strength of those who came before me, forging a living bridge between past and future, land and table.

Grief ephemeral, grief eternal culinary performance at Mews, 2025

Bio

Phoebe Tran is a Vietnamese-American chef and artist whose evolving food practice, Bé Bếp, traces the pathways between ancestral memory, land, and lineage. Rooted in Vietnamese folk medicine, intergenerational storytelling, and her background in farming, her work uses food as both material and metaphor—an entry point into ritual, sensory installation, and collective world-building. Tran’s practice explores the ways cooking can become a site of preservation, grief tending, and cultural futurism. Whether through culinary performances, altar installations, or guided meditations, she creates spaces where nourishment becomes a form of remembrance and imagination. Her work has been presented with Jane Lombard Gallery, Field Meridians, Ace Hotel Brooklyn, and other community-driven arts organizations. She has collaborated with chefs, artists, and local farms to build projects that center care, ecology, and embodied knowledge. Bé Bếp continues to expand as both a kitchen and a creative research practice—one that investigates Vietnamese diasporic memory, herbal traditions, and the politics of food. Tran is currently developing new work at the intersection of ritual, performance, and culinary storytelling.


www.bebepkitchen.com



James Moore

Artist Statement

I am a composer, guitarist, and bandleader committed to an integrated musical practice that encompasses composition, performance, improvisation, and collaborative work. In addition to writing concert music, I lead my own ensembles and perform as a solo, chamber, and orchestral musician. I also contribute to an array of contemporary theater, dance, and multimedia projects. Drawing from my experiences as a performer, in my own compositions I aim to give agency to the players involved and to cultivate a collaborative development process. I enjoy assembling unique ensembles that combine artists across genres, carefully considering each musician’s skillset and employing a range of strategies using notation, improvisation, and learned music.

ames Moore performs his guitar concerto "Sleep is Shattered" with Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNOW, 5.23.22

Bio

James Moore is a guitarist, composer, and bandleader who has earned the titles of “local electric guitar hero” by Time Out New York and "model new music citizen" by The New York Times. James enjoys an active career as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral performer, and collaborates with an eclectic community of artists in a range of music, theater, dance, and multimedia projects. He is a founding member of the raucous electric guitar quartet Dither, the whimsical acoustic group The Hands Free, and the sloppy-math/avant-grunge rock band Forever House.


www.jamesmoore.com



DaEun Jung

Artist Statement

My work interlaces the forms, principles, and methods of folk and classical Korean dance and interdisciplinary performance practices. I rearrange, reinterpret, and transmute codified dance movements—their stylized forms, gestural essences, and somatic principles—to invite spontaneous grooves of the contemporary body. Chance procedure, Hangul (Korean alphabets), numeric patterns, irregular folk rhythms, and minimalist composition methods are my inspirations for algorithmic sequences which take shape on graph paper, Excel sheets, and floor grids for solo or ensemble. In my work, Pansori (Korean folk opera) vocals, Janggu (hourglass-shaped drum) rhythms, electronic beats, and groovy sound patterns are layered with the dancing body(ies) under the rigorous and playful rules in self-constructed systems. Where the past and present, self and other, system and play, and rigor and spontaneity coexist, the female Asian body, rooted in a non-western dance practice, claims singular authorship in contemporary choreography.

DaEun Jung Jakdu (in progress, dance, solo) Headlands Artist Residency (2025) Photo by Arthur Alvarez

Bio

DaEun Jung is a Korean-born choreographer currently based in Los Angeles. She interlaces forms, principles, and methods of her ancestral and contemporary performance practices within her self-constructed system. Jung’s work has been supported by New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), Jacob’s Pillow, Los Angeles Performance Practice (LAPP), Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA), Movement Research at Judson Church, Korea Foundation, and New Music USA. Her residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), Loghaven Artist Residency, UCROSS, L.A. Dance Project (LADP), and Santa Monica Cultural Affairs at Camera Obscura. In Korea, Jung toured Asia and Europe as a full-time dancer with the Gyeonggido Dance Company. Having six years of early conservatory training at the National Gugak School as a recipient of the National Theater of Korea Award, she completed a BA in dance and minor in Korean literature from Ewha Womans University. In the US, Jung holds her MFA in dance at UCLA where she was recognized as a Westfield Emerging Artist. She has taught at Santa Monica College, Loyola Marymount University, University of Nevada Reno, and Indiana University and currently is an assistance professor at UC Riverside.


daeunjung.com

Sarah Matsui

Artist Statement

Writing is often how I’m able to pay attention, and how I come to better understand myself and the world around me. My work explores the tensions between mine, yours, and ours; the mutual relationship between a situation and its story; agency and powerlessness; immigrantness; and Asian Americanness.

SarahMatsui_FifthGraderMandarinProficiency_TheSewaneeReview https://www.thesewaneereview.com/articles/fifth-grader-mandarin

Bio

Sarah Matsui is an interdisciplinary writer and the winner of the Sewanee Review Nonfiction Contest, the Fractured Lit Contest, and the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Pleiades, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, NPR Code Switch, Jacobin Magazine, and the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. She is the recipient of a 2024-2025 Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Residency, a 2025 San Francisco Foundation / Nomadic Literary Award in Poetry, a 2025 Periplus Fellowship, the 2025 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Christina Chiu AAPI Writers Fellowship, and a 2025 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. She is currently a 2025-2026 Steinbeck Fellow and working on her debut essay collection on collectivity and storytelling.


www.sarahkmatsui.com

Magdalena Bermudez

Artist Statement

My practice examines the intricate relations between humans, nonhuman animals, plants, and technologies through essayistic film and video works. My work is research-based, recontextualizing scientific or operational images to interrogate their formal and political implications, drawing out the aesthetics of machine learning experiments, or the poetics of dissection. Zagging across scientific and artistic histories, I find unlikely echoes, precedents, accidental art movements buried inside technical reports or paintings purporting to be data. I read science history as science fiction, re-interpreting theories for their poetry, or culling past experiments for their formal and political expressions. My work integrates techniques of re-photography and re-enactment to intervene on these histories, teasing out layered interpretations and troubling their original meanings.

Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.

Bio

Magdalena Bermudez is a filmmaker and educator whose practice examines relations between humans, nonhuman animals, plants, and technologies through essayistic film and video works. Her work has screened internationally at film festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Athens International Film + Video Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Laussanne Underground Film & Music Festival, Kasseler DokFest, İstanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, and Science New Wave Festival. She has received awards such as the “Audience Award” at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, “Best Experimental Film” from Mannheim Arts and Film Festival, the “Golden Badger Award” from the Wisconsin Film Festival, and an “Honorable Mention” at Iowa City Documentary Film Festival. She is an Assistant Professor of Cinema at Binghamton University.

www.magdalenabermudez.com

Yura Adams

Artist Statement

My work is inspired by the natural landscapes surrounding my studio. Each piece reflects my perception of nature, developed through a stream-of-consciousness approach. I work intuitively, embracing the freedom to invent form. I am very interested in coming up with something that has not existed before, and in that pursuit, I use a lot of mediums and frequently include photography deeply camouflaged in the work. Visually, the works explore movement, compositional balance, and color expression. Personal themes—memory, loss, mystery, beauty, and humor—emerge throughout the creative process. The imagery is of abstracted forms, totem-like in their loose relationship to figuration. I make my work out of a desire and drive to decipher what is mysterious and fascinating to me in the world I encounter. Making art reveals thought, discovery and process and its satisfying engagement keeps me in the studio to find out what else will happen there.

Forest Walker acrylic, ink, fabric, mylar 102x66.5 inches first shown at Woodstock Art Museum Jan, 2026

Bio

In the work world of Yura Adams, weeds have become native plants, bugs have become insects, birds have become much more interesting and weather is something to watch carefully and her art communicates her relationship with the act of observing. She was fortunate to land in the Bay Area and the Lower East Side in her beginnings and today lives and works on a farm in Western Massachusetts where nature feeds her and her work. Her most recent solo show was at Olympia in New York May 2025, and she is preparing for a solo at the Woodstock Art Museum January 2026. Her awards include Tree of Life Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Peter S. Reed Foundation, Drawing Center Viewing Program, Berkshire Taconic Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts Mark Program, and National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant.


www.yuraadams.com

Irina Patkanian

Artist Statement

In my work, I confront film with theater, documentary with animation, history with poetry. Lately, I have been making a series of “fairy-docs” - experimental films that fold timeless universal fairytales into today’s violent reality. Every short film features live actors and 2D hand painted figures - all shot in stop motion against the documentary background and focuses on violence committed against women and girls often under the pretext of love and care. I believe something uncannily similar lies at the foundation of intimate violence and international aggression, conquering land and conquering women, adulation of fathers and fatherlands. Fairytales have been with us for ages, wrapping a violence-torn reality in the long bandages of simple, repetitive sentences that even a child could understand and tuck into her heart. Warmongers and malefactors are as old as time itself—but so, too, are the tales of overcoming them.

Still from Little Fiel, a documentary with stop motion animation that I wrote/directed/animated with 2 other animators and produced

Bio

Irina Patkanian is an award-winning filmmaker, a Fulbright scholar, a professor of film & media arts at Brooklyn College/CUNY and Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, and the co-founder and artistic director of In Parentheses, Inc. a NYC based nonprofit film, theater & media arts company that supports artists since 1995. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Irina Patkanian was awarded an American Association of University Women Fellowship to pursue the MFA degree in Film. Irina’s films have screened at 150+ film festivals worldwide, incl. DOC NYC, Ann Arbor, STARZ Denver, Palm Springs, and many others, winning 30+ awards. Irina’s work has been supported by production grants from NYSCA, NYFA, FACE, Jerome, Blaustein, Troy and Puffin Foundations; as well as artist residencies at MacDowell, The Marble House, the Millay Arts, Ucross Foundation, VCCA, the Art Studios of Key West and others. 


www.inparentheses.org



Julie Choffel

Artist Statement

As a poet and educator, I focus on environmental engagement, community studies, and the intersections between creative labor and the politics of care. My poems often highlight the strange and profound nature of common experiences. Sometimes this means looking for wildness in the mundane. Sometimes it means creating a shortcut to wonder – using methods like collage and juxtaposition, pattern and interruption – to defamiliarize our routines and open them up to new possibilities. In this way my work is also ecological. Everything in the poem is in relationship to each other part, and each part is in relation to the world it came from. As an artist influenced by ecology and the natural sciences, I deeply value this relationship between familiarity and discovery.

Julie Choffel, Dear Wallace (The Backwaters Press, 2024).

Bio

Julie Choffel is a poet and educator. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, before moving to Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut, she studied geography at Texas State University and later graduated from the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst. Her most recent book, Dear Wallace, won the Backwaters Prize in Poetry and was published in 2024 from The Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including New England Review, ORION, Conduit, New American Writing, Posit, Denver Quarterly, and the tiny. From 2017 to 2020, she served as the Poet Laureate of West Hartford, Connecticut, where she continues to curate readings and literary events for the Greater Hartford area. Julie teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, and lives near Hartford with her partner and their three children.


https://www.juliechoffel.com/

Jowita Wyszomirska

Artist Statement

Every artwork I create emerges from a state of wild growth. I study local plants and gather leaves for eco-printing and dyeing, processes that unveil hidden colors and textures when heated and steamed onto paper. Pigments from native species such as Sumac, Virginia Creeper, Sweetgum, and Red Maple shift with the seasons and environment, grounding each piece in a specific place and moment. I approach each artwork as a gardener, nurturing its growth and shaping its evolution through painting, drawing, and collage. Nature itself transforms through interconnected processes shaped by randomness and pattern, and my work mirrors this by embracing materials and methods that invite unpredictability. This body of work highlights plants as living beings with awareness, resilience, and the capacity to communicate and move. In this process, the plants' energy becomes an active force shaping each artwork.

Jowita Wyszomirska, Abundance of Cosmos 1, 2025, Cyanotype (Lake Michigan), Echo print with Smoketree, Bald cypress, Maple, Catalpa, monoprint collage, ink, markers, color pencils, graphite on Arches En-Tout-Cas, 37 x 52”

Bio

Jowita Wyszomirska is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing and large-scale installations. Deeply influenced by walking, cycling, and cultivating plants, she explores the interplay between representation and abstraction to reimagine landscapes through both aesthetic and ecological lenses. Wyszomirska earned her BFA from Illinois State University and MFA from the University of Maryland. She has exhibited widely in solo and two-person exhibitions across the United States, and her work is represented by Neptune & Brown in Washington, DC. Her honors include fellowships at the Good Hart Artist Residency (MI), Andy Warhol Preserve Artist Residency (NY), Wrangell Artist Residency (AK), Jentel Foundation (WY), Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (NE), and the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture (Italy). Her work is held in numerous private, corporate, and institutional collections, with recent acquisitions by the Baltimore Museum of Art.