Miami, FL
Rosie Herrera is a Cuban-American dancer, choreographer and artistic director of Rosie Herrera Dance Theater in Miami. She is a graduate from New World School with a BFA in Dance Performance. She has been commissioned by The Miami Light Project, The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Dance Place, Maui Arts and Cultural Center, Ballet Hispanico, Moving Ground Dance Theater and the American Dance Festival in 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2016.
Her company has been presented by the Northrop Dance Series, Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Baryshnicov Arts Center, Texas A&M University, Duncan Theater, The Annenburg Center, Gotham Dance at Skirball, Focus Dance at the Joyce as well as by The American Dance Festival at the Joyce in 2016. She has collaborated on productions with The South Miami Dade Cultural Arts Center, New World School of the Arts, The University of Central Florida, Six Floor Ensemble, Zoetic Stage, New World Symphony and the interdisciplinary performance ensemble Circ X. Rosie is a 2010 MANCC choreographic fellow, a 2014 Bates Dance Festival Artist in residence and a 2011 Miami Dance Fellow. In 2013 she was awarded a Princess Grace Choreographic Fellowship for her work with Ballet Hispanico.
New York, NY
Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer was voted DownBeat Magazine’s Jazz Artist of the Year for 2012, 2015, and 2016. He received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and a 2011 Grammy nomination. He has released twenty-one albums, including A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) in duo with Wadada Leo Smith; Break Stuff (ECM, 2015) with the Vijay Iyer Trio; the score for the film Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi (ECM, 2014), directed by Prashant Bhargava; and Holding it Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project (Pi Recordings, 2013), with poet-performer Mike Ladd.
Iyer’s compositions have been premiered by Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Silk Road Ensemble, Ethel, Brentano Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Imani Winds, American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Chamber Orchestra Leopoldinum, Matt Haimowitz, and Jennifer Koh; his works are published by Schott Music. He has collaborated with Steve Coleman, George Lewis, Butch Morris, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Dr. L. Subramaniam, Steve Lehman, Craig Taborn, Oliver Lake, Ambrose Akinmusire, Tyshawn Sorey, Matana Roberts, Amiri Baraka, Teju Cole, and Himanshu Suri, among others.
Iyer is the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University. He is Director of The Banff Centre’s International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, and Musical Director for the 2017 Ojai Festival. He is a Steinway artist.
Los Angeles, CA
Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee are the founding partners of the architecture firm Johnston Marklee. They have taught at major universities including the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Technical University of Berlin, and ETH Zurich. They have held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry Chair at the University of Toronto.
Since its establishment in 1998 in Los Angeles, Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with awards and publications. To date, the firm has been awarded over 30 major awards, and a book on its work entitled, House Is a House Is a House Is a House Is a House, was published by Birkhauser in 2016. This followed a monograph on the firm’s work, published in 2014 by 2G.
Projects undertaken by Johnston Marklee are diverse in scale and type, spanning seven countries throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Current projects include the Menil Drawing Institute, on the campus of the Menil Collection, complete in September 2017; a renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, complete in the summer of 2017; and the new UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California.
The firm’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich. Johnston Marklee are the Artistic Directors for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Bronx, NY
Daniel Alexander Jones has cultivated a wildflower body of work since beginning his career in 1993. His performance art pieces, plays, music theatre works, and recordings reflect his deep curiosity, iconoclasm, and abiding interest in the liberatory power of intimacy and unguarded presence. Rooted in the arts of the Black American Avant-Garde, Jones explores concepts of the afromystical in theory and practice.
Daniel’s work includes Phoenix Fabrik, Blood:Shock:Boogie, and Bel Canto; the musical, Bright Now Beyond, created with composer Bobby Halvorson and director Will Davis; and the multi-chapter series of solo autobiographical performances, The Book of Daniel created with musician Walter Kitundu, and director Tea Alagić. Duat, also directed by Davis, premiered in 2016 at Soho Rep to critical acclaim. As his performance alter-ego, Jomama Jones, he has released four albums, and performed across the country in the theatrical concert shows Radiate, and Black Light.
Daniel received the prestigious Doris Duke Artist award in 2015, in recognition of his risk-taking practice. He was an inaugural Creative Capital Artist, an Alpert Award recipient, and a recent ArtMatters grantee. He is an Associate Professor of theatre at Fordham University. Daniel is a proud alumnus of New Dramatists and the Playwrights’ Center.
Norman, OK
Steven Paul Judd is Kiowa and Choctaw from Oklahoma. He is a filmmaker, director, screenwriter, writer of fiction and visual artist. He’s a member of the Writers Guild of America and served as staff writer for Disney’s XD Comedy Series, “Zeke and Luther.” Judd’s filmography is large in scope and provides a unique perspective on and from within Native American culture today. His innovative approach provides a glimpse into a world that is familiar to the underrepresented first peoples of this nation and at simultaneously brings about an fresh perspective and understanding among the non-Indian community through humor. Judd’s filmography has earned him many honors and awards and the Native American population have embraced his work with an outpour of support and encouragement to continue creating.
Known primarily as a filmmaker, he is also a prolific visual artist whose mash-ups of Native experiences and disposable American pop culture are sly and often downright funny. His creations include paintings, prints, poster art, photography, and t-shirt designs. In 2015 he designed the cover art and merchandise for the group, “A Tribe Called Red.” His mural “War Paint” can be seen at historic Indian Alley in downtown Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, CA
Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her most recent work is The First Bad Man, a novel. July’s collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; It Chooses You was her first book of non-fiction. She wrote, directed and starred in The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know — winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance. July’s participatory art works include the website Learning to Love You More (with artist Harrell Fletcher), Eleven Heavy Things (a sculpture garden created for the 2009 Venice Biennale), New Society (a performance), and Somebody (a messaging app). Raised in Berkeley, California, July lives in Los Angeles.
Torrance, CA
Born in Japan in 1948, he is an ordained Shingon Buddhist priest, a master of the art of Japanese archery, as well as the Artistic Director of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC). After graduating from the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles in 1970, he continued to study in the fields of Esoteric Buddhist art. He has been actively advocating Japanese culture and art at JACCC since 1984.
Most recently in 2012, Kosaka was commission by the J. Paul Getty Center to kickoff the Pacific Standard Time Performance (PST) and Public Art Festival by transforming the Center’s Arrival Plaza into a sculptural and performative installation with searchlights, dancers, and hundreds of spools of colorful thread – representing the Kalpa, Sanskrit for “a long period of time.” On September 2013, a survey and retrospective 1969-1974 performance work titled, “Project series 46: Hirokazu Kosaka on the verandah” was exhibited at the Pomona College Art Museum.
Poughkeepsie, NY
Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist. His books include Lunch With a Bigot listed among the “ten best books of 2015 published by academic presses;” A Matter of Rats, which the New York Times Magazine called “a clear-eyed ode to an implausible place;” A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb, adjudged the best nonfiction book of the year by the Page Turner Awards, and described in the New York Times as a “perceptive and soulful … meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions;” Husband of a Fanatic, an “Editors’ Choice” book at the New York Times; Bombay-London-New York, a literary memoir which was on the list of “Books of the Year” in the New Statesman; and Passport Photos, winner of an “Outstanding Book of the Year” award from the Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. Kumar’s essays and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, Bookforum, Kenyon Review, The Nation, NPR, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Brick, Granta, and numerous other publications. He has been awarded writing residencies by Yaddo, the Norman Mailer Writing Center, and the Lannan Foundation. He is the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for nonfiction.
Cincinnati, OH
Eddy Kwon is a composer-performer and community-based teaching artist living in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Eddy is Co-Founder and Director of MYCincinnati, a tuition-free, El Sistema-inspired youth orchestra program for children in the diverse Price Hill neighborhood of Cincinnati, where he also lives. Currently engaging over 100 children for at least 2 hours every day after school, MYCincinnati’s mission is to use ensemble-based music education as a vehicle for youth development, community engagement, and social change. He is also Director of MYCincinnati’s Ambassador Ensemble, a radical youth sextet committed to social justice through creative collaboration and avant performance.
Recent composition commissions include VIOLENCE, a performance work for electro-acoustic ensemble that explores structural violence in America, and a r c h i p e l a g o, a unison piece for electric string quartet experiencing intense sensory deprivation (Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 2014-15).
As a performer and improviser, Eddy has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, including Jens Lekman, Awadagin Pratt, Martha Colburn, and JP Bouvet. He is also a founding member of The Happy Maladies, a string quartet with roots in American folk, classical chamber music, and experimental rock.
Eddy is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music where he was a Cincinnatus Presidential Full Scholar, studying both violin performance and jazz improvisation. In 2014, he was awarded the City of Cincinnati’s Art Ambassador Fellowship.
Brooklyn, NY
Young Jean Lee is a writer, director, and filmmaker who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed ten shows in New York with Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, and toured her work to over thirty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group, Samuel French, and Dramatists Play Service. She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and has written a screenplay commission for Plan B/Paramount Pictures. Her first short film, Here Come the Girls, was presented at The Locarno International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and BAMcinemaFest, and she has released an album with her band, Future Wife.
Lee is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN Literary Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Doris Duke Artist Residency, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, and the ZKB Patronage Prize of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
