New York, NY
Charles Atlas has been a pioneering figure in the creation of time-based visual art for over four decades, extending the limits of his media and forging new territory in a far-reaching range of genres, stylistic approaches, and techniques. Over the years he has made media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television, and live electronic performances.
Throughout his career, he has consistently fostered collaborative relationships, working intimately with such artists and performers as Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, Marina Abramovic, Yvonne Rainer, Anohni, and most notably Merce Cunningham, for whom he served as filmmaker-in-residence for a decade from the early 1970s through 1983.
Since 2003, Atlas has been interested in exploring different contexts that exploit the use of live video. Instant Fame (2003–06), consisted of a series of real-time video portraits of performers and artists created live in the gallery space. Recent live video/installations include: The Pedestrians, in collaboration with Mika Tajima at The South London Gallery (2011), and Charles Atlas and Collaborators at the Tate Modern (2013).
Atlas has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, three “Bessie” (New York Dance and Performance) Awards and was the 2006 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ John Cage Award.
Manchester, NH
Vivian Beer is a furniture designer/maker based in New England. Her sleek, abstracted metal and concrete furniture combines the aesthetic sensibilities of contemporary design, craft, and sculpture to create objects that alter viewers’ expectations of and interface with the domestic landscape. With a strong foundation in contemporary furniture design, her research into the history of American industry, architecture, and transportation adds intellectual rigor and specificity to her work. Her Infrastructure, Streamline and Anchored Candy series are physical manifestations of the cultural and industrial history of her materials even as they serve as intellectual bridges for their users, bringing them to a new way of conceiving the built world through a luxurious deployment of the senses.
Her work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, MFA Boston, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Arts and Design and the cities of Portland ME, Arlington VA and Cambridge MA. She holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy and received their 2016 Alumni Achievement Award. Beer has won numerous awards and residencies including the John D. Mineck Furniture Fellowship, Penland School of Crafts Residency, Wingate Artist Residency, Museum of Glass, Pilchuck and a Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Albuquerque, NM
Raven Chacon is a composer of chamber music, a performer of experimental noise music, and an installation artist. He performs regularly as a solo artist as well as with numerous ensembles in the Southwest USA, and is also a member of the American Indian arts collective Postcommodity. As an educator, Chacon has served as composer-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP) since 2004, teaching string quartet composition to hundreds of American Indian high school students living on reservations in the Southwest U.S. Under his instruction, this project was awarded the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in 2011.
Chacon has presented his work in different contexts at Vancouver Art Gallery, ABC No Rio, REDCAT, La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Musica, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center among other traditional and non-traditional venues.
Brooklyn, NY
Michelle Dorrance is the Founder and Artistic Director of Dorrance Dance as well as a New York City-based tap dancer, performer, choreographer, teacher, and director. She is a 2014 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2013 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award winner, a 2012 Princess Grace Award Winner, a 2012 Field Dance Fund Recipient, and a 2011/2015 Bessie Award Winner. And most recently, she was awarded the prestigious 2015 MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. the “genius” grant).
Mentored by Gene Medler, Dorrance grew up dancing with the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble. She has performed with: “STOMP,” Savion Glover’s “Ti dii,” Manhattan Tap, Barbara Duffy & Co, Jazz Tap Ensemble, Rumba Tap, Ayodele Casel’s “Diary of a Tap Dancer,” Mable Lee’s “Dancing Ladies,” Harold Cromer’s original “Opus One,” Derick Grant’s “Imagine Tap,” and Jason Samuels Smith’s “Charlie’s Angels/Chasing the Bird.” She founded Dorrance Dance in 2011 and has performed with her company throughout the world. Dorrance has a true passion for teaching and regularly incorporates educational activities while on tour. Recently, Dorrance appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” bringing the art of tap dance to a global audience.
In addition, Dorrance holds a Bachelor of Arts from New York University, plays bass for Darwin Deez, serves as guest faculty at Broadway Dance Center, is a Capezio Athlete, and has been featured on the covers of both “Dance Magazine” and “Dance Teacher Magazine.”
Brooklyn, NY
FAYE DRISCOLL is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer and director whose work is rooted in an obsession with the problem of being ‘somebody’ in a world of other ‘somebodies.’ Works include: WOW MOM, WOW (2007); 837 VENICE BOULEVARD (2008; Bessie Award); THERE IS SO MUCH MAD IN ME (2010); YOU’RE ME (2012); and her current series THANK YOU FOR COMING, which implicates the audience in the work and invites the sensation of co-creation. Driscoll has been funded by The MAP Fund, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital, NYSCA, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, NEFA’ s National Dance Project, The Jerome Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, and LMCC. Her work has been commissioned by and presented at such venues as Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, ICA/Boston, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, American Dance Festival, and UCLA, and internationally in France, Croatia, Argentina, Australia, and Ireland. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center and Park Avenue Armory, and a choreographic fellow at MANCC. Driscoll is a recipient of a 2016 Doris Duke Award. Her most recent piece, THANK YOU FOR COMING: PLAY, premiered at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Fall 2016.
Brookline, MA
Janet Echelman is an artist who defies categorization. She creates billowing sculpture at the scale of buildings, choreographed by wind and light. The art shifts from being an object you look at, to a living environment you can get lost in. Using unlikely materials from netting to atomized water particles, Echelman combines ancient craft with cutting-edge engineering and material science to create focal points for urban life on five continents.
Echelman was named an Architectural Digest Innovator for “changing the very essence of urban spaces.” Her TED talk, “Taking Imagination Seriously” has been translated into 34 languages and viewed by millions. Echelman’s art ranked #1 on Oprah’s “List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!” and received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award.
Echelman’s path has been nonlinear. After graduating from Harvard, she applied to seven art schools, and was rejected by all of them. So, she decided to create a life as an artist herself. For five years, she painted in a Balinese village while studying craft traditions. But she didn’t find her full voice as an artist until her paints went missing on a Fulbright in India – which forced her to embrace an unorthodox new art material.
Portland, ME
Lauren Fensterstock creates elaborate sculptures and installations that explore the evolving history of our relationship to nature. By merging contradictory historic perspectives – spanning the Picturesque, the Baroque, Minimalism, and Earth Work – she reveals the cultural roots of our concept of nature. These intricate artworks are constructed in the material of ladies’ accomplishments, such as quilled paper and shell work, emphasizing the capacity of traditional female crafts to reflect on the complexities of the world beyond the domestic sphere. Lauren’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at The John Michael Kohler Art Center, The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Drexel University, and will be presented in an upcoming solo project at MOCA Jacksonville in 2017. Her work is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery in New York.
Outside the studio, Lauren has taught, lectured, and critiqued around the country, most recently at the Rhode Island School of Design and Virginia Commonwealth University. She previously served as Academic Program Director of the Interdisciplinary MFA in Studio Arts at Maine College of Art and as Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. Lauren holds degrees from the Parsons School of Design (BFA 1997) and SUNY New Paltz (MFA 2000).
Santa Fe, NM
Enrolled with the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, Teri Greeves began beading at eight years old. After growing up on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming where her mother ran a trading post, she eventually graduated from UC Santa Cruz. Greeves began her career as a beadwork artist after winning Best of Show at Santa Fe Indian Market in 1999. She has won awards and honors at Indian Market, the Heard Museum and in 2003, she received the Dobkin Fellow at the School of American Research. In 2009 she was featured in the PBS television series, Craft in America and her work has been exhibited in Changing Hands 2 at the Museum of Art and Design; at the Brooklyn Art Museum’s Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains, in State of the Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum, and most recently included in Native Fashion Now at the Peabody Essex Museum. Greeves’ work is also included in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the British Museum, the Heard Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design and the Portland Art Museum among others. Greeves lives with her husband and two sons in Santa Fe, NM.
New Orleans, LA
Cherice Harrison-Nelson is steeped in a West African rooted ceremonial dress art tradition, unique to African American communities in New Orleans. She is the third of five generations in her family to participate in the cultural legacy passed down from her late father, Big Chief Donald Harrison, Sr. She is the co-founder and curator of the Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame. Currently, the organization is working to protect intellectual property rights through the, “You Get Paid, I Get Paid” mutual respect and fair use campaign. The Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame has published four books and curated numerous exhibitions. She has served as a visiting scholar at Newcomb College Institute of Tulane and is the recipient of numerous honors including a Fulbright scholarship to Ghana and Senegal. Her original creations are held in the private collections of Jonathan Demme (Academy award-winning director – Silence of the Lambs), Wole Soyinka (first African Nobel Prize Laureate for literature) among others. Her production credits include: DVD documentaries, a music CD, three original plays, and the award winning narrative film, “Keeper of the Flame.” She holds a MA in education from Xavier University.
Eastport, ME
Anna Hepler is a sculptor based in Eastport, Maine. Her work, which is both hand-held and architectural in scale, overturns first impressions – wire forms flatten into drawings, clay impersonates metal, plywood coils like rope, plastic inhales and exhales. Hepler values embarrassment, uncertainty, blunder, and fragility as active agents in her studio process.
“In preferring a path of unknowns, I choose purpose over craft, awkwardness over expertise, and improvisation over procedure. I am working to loosen knots of assumption and forfeit some of my authority.”
