San Diego, CA
Architect Teddy Cruz’s work dwells at the bi-cultural border between San Diego, CA, and Tijuana, Mexico, and is influenced by the informal structures that emerge from a community’s need for housing. Cruz began studying architecture in Guatemala. After immigrating to the United States, he studied at California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Cruz established estudio teddy cruz in 2000 in La Jolla. He is a professor of public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego.
Manufactured Sites: Housing urbanism made of waste, 2008; photo credit estudio teddy cruz
New York, NY
Cherien Dabis is a director, producer, and screenwriter, whose work is informed by her Palestinian American immigrant experiences. She attended the University of Cincinnati and Columbia University. Dabis has written and directed a feature and two short films, including Make a Wish (2006), about a Palestinian girl who faces enormous obstacles to buy a birthday cake, which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and won several awards. In her feature, Amreeka (2009), a Palestinian woman immigrates to the U.S. in search of a better future for her son. That film won several awards and was named one of the Top Ten Independent Films of 2009 by the National Board of Review. Dabis has also worked as a television screenwriter.
Amreeka, 2009; photo credit National Geographic
Amherst, MA
Poet, essayist, translator, and editor Martín Espada has been called “the Latino poet of his generation.” After attending the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Northeastern University, Espada worked as a tenant and legal services lawyer for many years. The experience of representing “those without an opportunity to be heard” informs his writings, exemplified by Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 (2002), a poem about the 43 immigrant food service workers killed on 9/11 while working at Windows on the World restaurant. Espada has published 13 books of poems, edited two poetry anthologies, and written three collections of essays. His book, The Republic of Poetry (2006), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and he has received many other honors. He is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
The Republic of Poetry, 2006; photo credit W. W. Norton
Emeryville, CA
Influenced by her Peruvian-Jewish-Chinese-Lithuanian heritage, pianist and composer Gabriela Lena Frank combines her studies of Latino/Latin American mythology, poetry, and folk music with Western classical forms. She attended Rice University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Frank composes for solo instrumentalists, singers, chamber ensembles, and orchestras, utilizing Western and non-Western instruments. She has composed works for the King’s Singers, the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma, and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra.
Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout, 2007; photo copyright Chiara String Quartet
Princeton, ME
Jeremy Frey is a Passamaquoddy basketmaker who learned weaving from his mother and apprenticed at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance (of which he is now a board member). Frey learned the traditional techniques of weaving brown ash and sweetgrass into baskets and now introduces new styles and techniques such as unique shapes and very fine weaves. He is dedicated to serving as a model to younger Native artists and to passing the tradition of basketmaking onto the next generation.
Point curl barrel basket with quill feathers, brown ash, sweet grass, porcupine quills, and birch bark, 2003, 9″ w x 13″ h: photo credit the artist
Bozeman, MT
Barrett Golding has been an independent audio producer since 1983. His works—including The Pledge (1997), in which people of various ethnicities remember the Pledge of Allegiance, and John & Nippy (2006) about the life and dog of rancher John Hoiland—have been broadcast by NPR, CBS Radio, American Public Media, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, PRI, Voice of America, and the BBC. Golding is the founder and Executive Producer of Hearing Voices from NPR, which was launched in March 2008 and is now radio’s largest independent producer consortium. Crossing Borders, its series of stories by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, won a Peabody Award in 2007. Golding is also the Executive Director of HearingVoices.com, which pioneered the multimedia presentation of audio-based work.
HearingVoices.com; illustration credit Eli 5 Stone
San Francisco, CA
Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. She attended Wesleyan University. Green creates complex installations, which present and examine ideas, histories, cultural artifacts, and her own photographs and films, in environments that invite viewers to participate as producers of meaning. In her work, she exposes hidden connections in order to provoke new ways of thinking. In Import/Export Funk Office, she investigates the transcultural flow of hip-hop music between New York, Los Angeles, and Germany. Green is also an educator who has served as Dean of Graduate Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and Director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology.
Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, 2010, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; photo credit Phocasso/J. W. White
Brooklyn, NY
Dancer and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez creates solo and group works with a variety of dancers, music, and visual artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. He attended Brown University and New York University. Gutierrez’s work has been presented in various American venues, including Dance Theater Workshop and The Kitchen in New York, DiverseWorks in Houston, and the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, Vermont, as well as at international festivals. He has received three Bessie Awards and was the curator of the Dance and Process series at The Kitchen from 2005–06.
Last Meadow, 2009, L to R: Tarek Halaby, Miguel Gutierrez, Michelle Boulé; photo credit Ian Douglas
Seattle, WA
Dancer, choreographer, musician, and dance filmmaker Dayna Hanson originally studied writing, but started dancing in 1987. From 1994–2006, she was the co-artistic director of 33 Fainting Spells, a dance theater company that toured through the U.S. and internationally. She has also created many award-winning dance films and, from 1999–2003, was the co-curator of New Dance Cinema, an international dance film festival in Seattle. She has been working in Seattle for 20 years and now works independently.
We Never Like Talking About The End, 2006; photo credit Benjamin Kasulke
Austin, TX
Dancer and choreographer Deborah Hay has been working in the field of dance for over 40 years. She was a member of the highly influential Judson Dance Theater, whose members are considered the founders of postmodern dance and who advocated for interdisciplinary collaboration. In 1970, she moved to Vermont, where she wrote the first of three books. In 1976, Hay moved to Austin, where she started a yearly, four-month-long workshop with trained and untrained dancers that culminates in a public performance. She created the duet Single Duet for herself and Mikhail Baryshnikov, which toured in 2000. Hay won a Bessie Award in 2004, and her latest solo, No Time To Fly, premiered at Danspace Project, New York City, in March 2010. She was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Dance by the Theater Academy in Helsinki in 2009.
No Time To Fly, 2009; photo credit Rino Pizzi