Amanda Davidson writes, draws, and makes performances in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Her prose chapbooks include Arcanagrams: A Reckoning (Little Red Leaves 2014), The Space (Belladonna 2014), and Apprenticeship (New Herring Press 2013), and she is the founding editor of Occasional Remarks: Prose Chaps and Audio Tracks. Davidson’s fiction, reviews, and comics appear in the Brooklyn Rail, the Believer, and Weird Sister, where she’s serializing a graphic novel called The Conditions of Our Togetherness. She’s been a writer-in-residence at MacDowell, Art Farm Nebraska, Millay, and I-Park, and received a 2014-2015 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, and a 2014 NYFA Fellowship in poetry.
Common Place (Ugly Duckling Presse 2015) is Rob Halpern‘s most recent book of poetry. Other titles include Music for Porn (Nightboat 2013), Disaster Suites (Palm Press 2009), and Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2006). Together with Taylor Brady, he also co-authored the book-length poem, Snow Sensitive Skin, which has been reissued by Displaced Press. Recent essays and translations appear in Chicago Review, Journal of Narrative Theory, and The Claudius App. Rob currently splits his time between San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Women’s Huron Valley Prison.
Jovencio de la Paz is an artist, writer, and educator working at the intersection of contemporary art, craft, and textile. His work, which is committed to the ancient technologies and processes of textile, engages notions of identity, immigration, and the terrain of thought around human interaction with the landscape. Working with a range of materials, including indigo dye, traditional batik, textile printing, and multimedia strategies, Jovencio seeks to work in an expansive way, engaging highly specific materials and processes as sites to confront larger concerns of human migration and the narratives associated with such movement.
Jovencio was born in Singapore, and became a citizen of the United States in 1994. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008, and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Department of Fiber, in 2012. Recent solo and group exhibitions include shows at ThreeWalls, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; 4th Ward Projects, Chicago, IL; PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH; SOIL Gallery, Seattle, WA; Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, Chicago; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; MessHall, Chicago; Uri Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, among others. He regularly teaches at schools of art, craft, and design throughout the country, including the Ox Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI and the Arrowmont School of Craft in Tennessee. Jovencio de la Paz is Assistant Professor and Curricular Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon. He is also a co-founder of the collaborative group Craft Mystery Cult, established in 2010.
Julia Heineccius studied art and medical history at the University of Washington, and graduated in 2012 with an MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has worked as an artisan and artist assistant, curator and teacher. Her own work has been in recent exhibitions at SOIL Gallery in Seattle, and in a bowling alley in Munich. Julia is currently teaching 3D metals in Thinking Through Craft at Evergreen.
Melissa Buzzeowrites a literature of encounter, but also: descent, healing, refusal. She is the author of four full-length books: The Devastation (Nightboat 2015), For Want and Sound (Les Figues, 2013), Face (Bookthug, 2009) and What Began Us (Leon Works, 2007). She teaches creative writing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and maintains a radical palm reading practice. At one time, she went to Cornell and then to Iowa. Currently she is working on a specific kind of memoir simply called Writing.
Steve Davis is a documentary portrait and landscape photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in American Photo, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Russian Esquire, and is in many collections, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Seattle Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the George Eastman House. He is a former 1st place recipient of the Santa Fe CENTER Project Competition, and two time winner of Washington Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowships. Davis is the Coordinator of Photography, media curator and adjunct faculty member of The Evergreen State College. He is represented by the James Harris Gallery, Seattle.
Seattle-based choreographer Pat Graney‘s interest in working with incarcerated women began in 1992 after a conversation with Rebecca Terrell, then head of Florida Dance Festival. This conversation later morphed into what has become Keeping the Faith/The Prison Project. KTF is an arts-based residency program that features dance, expository writing and visual arts, and culminates in performances. This project has been conducted at FCI Lowell & FCI Broward in Florida, MCI Framingham in Massachusetts, Excelsior Girls School in Denver, Houston City Jail, Echo Glen Children’s Center & King County Juvenile Detention in Washington, Red Rock Juvenile Center in Maricopa County, AZ, Shakopee Women’s Prison in Minnesota, Estrella Jail in Phoenix, AZ, River City Correctional Center in Cincinnati, OH, Tokyo Girls Detention in Japan, Bahia Women’s Prison in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, Munich City Jail in Munich, Germany, the Dochas Centre/MountJoy Prison in Dublin, Ireland and Washington State Corrections Center for Women and Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women in Washington State.
Keeping the Faith/The Prison Project is one of the longest-running prison arts programs in the US.
Ms. Graney’s latest work, a peformance/installation project called girl gods, will premiere at On the Boards in Seattle in 2015. With National Dance Project Production and Touring support, the work will tour nationally and internationally through 2016.
LAURA SHERBO
Laura Sherbo received her MLS from Western Michigan University in 1978 and has dedicated her career to providing library services to the incarcerated by working with inmates and prison administrators to uphold the Library Bill of Rights. She is currently the Branch Library Services Manager for the Washington State Library, overseeing nine (minimum and maximum security) prison library branches and two mental state hospital branches throughout the state. Laura headed the McNeil Island Corrections Center library for 20 years, 13 of which she spent living on the island. In 2012, she was awarded the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA) Leadership and Professional Achievement Award from the American Library Association.
NEAL VANDERVOORN
Neal Vandervoorn taught high school for twelve years before he switched course to pursue librarianship. He received an MLS from Emporia State University in Kansas and was employed with the Washington State Library as Branch Manager/Senior Librarian at Eastern State Hospital, Lakeland Village in Medical Lake and Western State Hospital for a combined twenty-two years. He provided library services to the mentally ill, the developmentally delayed, hospital staff and extensive outreach services to locked wards at Western State Hospital. He retired as a medical librarian from MultiCare Health System in Tacoma in 2009.
Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003). Jemison uses time-based, photographic, and discursive platforms to examine “progress” and its alternatives.
Jemison’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Brooklyn Museum; the Drawing Center; LAXART; the New Museum; the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Laurel Gitlen; Team Gallery; and other venues. Her publishing project, Future Plan and Program, commissions literary work by artists of color and has published books by Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and Harold Mendez, among others. She has participated in artist residencies at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn; Project Row Houses, Houston; the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Jemison has served as a visiting critic in the graduate art programs at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Illinois-Chicago. She was a 2013 Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awardee and a 2014 Art Matters Grantee. In 2015, she presented her new multipart commission Promise Machine at the Museum of Modern Art.
Jemison is currently an artist-in-residence in the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program. She teaches at Parsons The New School for Design, the Cooper Union, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Wendy Red Star is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. Red Star received her B.F.A. from Montana State University-Bozeman and her M.F.A from UCLA in 2006. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her exhibitions include shows at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Hallie Ford Museum, The Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2009, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Missoula Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, National Museum of the American Indian-New York, Portland Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bockley Gallery, and Haw Contemporary gallery. She has been a visiting lecturer at a range of respected institutions, including The Banff Centre, CalArts, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Portland State University, Dartmouth Hood Museum, Figge Art Museum, Fairhaven College, Fine Artworks Center-Provincetown, and I.D.E.A. Space-Colorado College.
JOHN FEODOROV
Born in Los Angeles of mixed Navajo (Diné) and Euro-American heritage, John Feodorov grew up in the suburbs of Southern California while making annual visits to his family’s land near Whitehorse, NM. The time he spent with his mother and grandparents on their homestead near the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon continues to inform and impact his work.
John has been called a conceptual artist, a political artist, as well as a Native American artist, but he is still not sure how to define what he does. His work includes painting, drawing, assemblage, installation, video, music and songwriting. He also has engaged in experimental performance in the past, but not lately. Currently, he writes and performs with his art/pop band, The Almost Faithful.
John’s work as been widely exhibited and has been featured in several publications; most recently in Time and Time Again, by Lucy R. Lippard, and Manifestations, edited by Dr. Nancy Marie Mithlo. He was also featured in the first season of the PBS series, “Art 21: Art for the 21st Century”.
John has also worked with the Seattle-based afterschool arts program, Artscorps, and served as an Arts Commissioner for the City of Seattle. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Fairhaven College.
SARA SIESTREEM
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos and American, 1976-) is from the Umpqua River Valley in South Western Oregon. She grew up in Portland, Oregon. She is a Master Artist and Educator. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators and her training in both fields began in the home. Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. Siestreem is the weaving student of Greg Archuleta, Greg Robinson, and Nan MacDonald. She is represented by Augen Gallery in Portland and her work has been shown in museums and figures in prestigious private and public collections nationally.
Her studio work is multi-disciplinary. Her primary language is painting, but she also works in photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, and traditional weaving.
She teaches Foundations in Studio Arts and Indigenous Studies at PSU and Traditional Weaving Practices for The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. She works as a consultant and free lance educator for museums and cultural groups regionally. Siestreem also serves various youth organizations and individuals in the role of mentor, workshop leader, promoter, public speaker and volunteer.
She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon.
CORWIN CLAIRMONT
Corwin (Corky) Clairmont is a contemporary artist and enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Living in Los Angeles, Corky pursued a contemporary exhibiting artist career as well as teaching and becoming department head of printmaking at the Otis/Parsons Art Institute located in Los Angeles, Ca. Upon his return to Montana in 1984, Corky began administrative work at the newly credited Salish Kootenai College located in Pablo, Montana on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Reservation. This included the creation of the SKC Fine Arts Department and art degree program. Through work as a printmaker, conceptual and installation artist, Corky’s images discuss and explore situations or issues that effect tribal people such as sovereignty, colonization, giving a cultural and historical perspective. Corky’s artwork has been exhibited through out the United States and in several Countries including Germany Norway, New Zealand, France, and most recently at the US Embassy located in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa. Awards have included Ford and National Endowment of the Arts, the Eiteljorg Fellowship Award, and the 2008 Montana Governors Award for Visual Arts. He currently serves on the State Board of the Montana Arts Council.
Lisa Blas is a visual artist of Guamanian / Italian-American descent working in painting, collage, photography, and installation. Based in New York, she draws from art history, nature, and current events to reflect on specific cultural and political legacies, past and present. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, while living and working in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Lille, France and Brussels, Belgium during the years of 2001 – 2012. Concurrent with exhibiting her work, Blas has taught across disciplines in Fine Art and Art History at the undergraduate and graduate level, with a special focus on the museum and historical archives. Recent solo exhibitions are LISA BLAS / Still Lifes, Sometimes Repeated at Rossicontemporary, Brussels, LISA BLAS / As if pruning a tree, after Matisse at Musée Matisse, Cateau-Cambrésis, France, and group exhibitions A Particular Kind of Solitude: An exhibition inspired by the writings of Robert Walser at the Elizabeth Street Garden, New York, and Sensations That Announce The Future at Evergreen College Gallery, Olympia, Washington. She is currently working on a project for the forthcoming issue of Public Art Dialogue: The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence, to be published in winter 2016. B.A. 1996 University of Southern California / Political Science M.F.A. 2001 Claremont Graduate University / Painting
