Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (Solid Objects, 2021); The Instead, a book-length dialogue with Emily Abendroth (Carville Annex, 2016); The Quarry (Trafficker Press, 2013); The Spokes (Solid Objects, 2012); None of This Is Real (Sidebrow Press, 2012); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2009); and The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007).
Her stories and essays have appeared in various publications including Harper’s, The Believer, Conjunctions, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to The Believer. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony. She was a co-founding editor of The Encyclopedia Project with Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz and currently teaches at The Evergreen State College.
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the US, who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She currently lives and works in Thunder Bay, Canada. She refers to herself as a feminist economist, a title that frames her work as that of a social scientist actively preparing for the economics of a future society that produces health and life without the tools that reproduce oppression— like money, police or prisons. She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social centre at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. Her new book The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future is available from Pluto Press.
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, “Someone’s Dead Already” was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His forthcoming book “Blood On The Fog” is being released this fall in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
Simone Savannah is a writer, performer and teacher, born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of Uses of My Body (Barrow Street 2020) and Like Kansas (Big Lucks 2018). Simone earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas, her M.Ed. and B.A. from Ohio University.
Use this link to join Simone’s Zoom talk – https://zoom.us/j/92320967393
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” James Baldwin
Gilda Sheppard is currently a member of the faculty in Sociology, Cultural and Media Studies at Evergreen State College in Tacoma, Washington. From 1995-96 Sheppard was a visiting lecturer at University of Cape Coast in the Sociology, Anthropology and Demography Department, and in 2018 she was a visiting lecturer at Ashesi University in Ghana, West Africa.
Sheppard is an award-winning filmmaker who has screened her documentaries throughout the United States, and internationally in Ghana, West Africa, at the Festival Afrique 360 in Cannes, France, and in Berlin Germany at the International Black Film Festival. Sheppard is a 2017 Hedgebrook Fellow for documentary film and a 2019 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship.
Her documentaries include stories of resilience of Liberian women and children refugees in Ghana; three generations of Black families in an urban neighborhood in Buffalo, New York; and a film ethnography of stories from folklore started by Zora Neale Hurston in Alabama’s AfricaTown.
She currently completed her documentary Since I Been Down on education, organizing and healing developed and led by incarcerated women and men in Washington State’s prisons. Since I Been Down has been accepted at over10 film festivals in USA and Canada and won the Gold Prize at the Social Justice Film Festival and recognized among “Best of the Fest” at DOC NYC the largest documentary film festival in USA. Since I Been Down has been praised by Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of CA, Santa Cruz Angela Davis, at a DOCNYC 2020 Facebook Live Event with Director Gilda Sheppard, King County (WA) Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, and Executive Director of Abolitionist Law Center Robert Saleem Holbrook. Seattle Met named Since I Been Down as “What to Watch” in 2020.
For over a decade Sheppard has taught sociology classes in Washington State prisons, Sheppard is a sponsor for the Black Prisoner’s Caucus in Washington State, and is a co-founder and faculty for FEPPS- Freedom Education for Puget Sound an organization offering college credited courses at Washington Correctional Center for Women.
Sheppard is the author of several publications including Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way Out of No Way (2013)
SINCE I BEEN DOWN streaming 2/5-2/10
You are invited one and all to a rare opportunity to watch our Evergreen-Tacoma colleague Dr. Gilda Sheppard’s long-awaited new documentary film SINCE I BEEN DOWN
This timely work of art has been accumulating an avalanche of accolades: DOCNYC 2020 Audience Favorite. Winner of the 2020 Social Justice Film Feature Documentary Gold Prize. One of Seattle Met’s top movies not to miss. Seattle Times feature by Evergreen alumn Naomi Ishisaka. Please see below for a poster with a lovely quote from Gilda.
Starting this Friday 2/5 at noon and ending Wednesday 2/10 at 5pm, the film will be exclusively available to the Evergreen community for asynchronous streaming in the “virtual screening room” that we have created for “Reimagining Community Safety.” (Please note: no recording of any type will be allowed.)
Patte Loper is an interdisciplinary artist based in painting who experiments with sculpture and video to explore a range of subject matter including feminist utopianism, new materialism, and the ecological imaginary. She was born in Colorado and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, a subtropical college town where she first developed an appreciation for the ways nature and culture can overlap. She currently lives and works in New York City and Boston, MA where she is on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Her practice began exclusively with conceptually based figurative painting and the work morphed over time into an experimental practice that utilizes painting, drawing, video, installation, and performance. Her early work involved re-creating masterworks with an eye towards feminist re-interpretation. Deeply rooted in painting’s discourse, her current practice uses painterly logic to create three dimensional structures that evoke landscape and still life and link mid century formalism, architectural theory and utopian idealism. Recent exhibitions have considered the ethics of architecture, the relationship between social justice and climate change, sustainable energy technology, and intersectionality in Arab and Western identity.
She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Drawing Center (New York, NY), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (New York, NY), the Bronx Museum (Bronx, NY), the Licini Museum (Ascoli Piceno, Italy), LMCC’s Art Center on Governors Island (New York, NY), the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences (Charleston, WV), the PalaentologicalMuseum (Cortina, Italy), the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Suyama Space (Seattle, WA), and the Zuckerman Museum (Atlanta, GA). Her work has been reviewed in the Italian edition of Flash Art, Artnet, Time Out, Chicago, and the Boston Globe, and is in the collections of the Rene diRosa Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and the Hirshhorn Museum.
She has participated in residency fellowships at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, and was a participant in the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program 2014-2016. She is currently a member artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program.
Thea Quiray Tagle, is a curator, writer, and an assistant professor of ethnic studies and gender & sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Throughout her various research and creative projects, Thea remains interested in the following questions: how can socially engaged art and performance move us, collectively and individually, to inhabit the world and relate to each other in ways that are non-extractive, anti-capitalist, and queer? Her exhibition AFTER LIFE (we survive) at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which Dr. Quiray Tagle will be discussing for the Evergreen lecture, is the second of a series of research-based curatorial projects about creative modes of surviving climate collapse and political violence practiced by LGBTQ and BIPOC peoples; the first, AFTER LIFE (what remains), ran from June-July 2018 at The Alice, an independent gallery in Seattle run by a collective of femme and queer artists that Thea was proud to be a member of from 2018 through its closure in 2019. Thea’s writing on Filipinx American contemporary art, visual cultures of violence, urban redevelopment in the Bay Area, and grassroots activism and speculative futures in the expanded Pacific Rim can be found in scholarly and popular venues including ASAP/J, American Quarterly, and Hyperallergic. During the COVID-19 crisis, Thea is a visitor on occupied Ohlone territory. For more about her writing, teaching, and curatorial projects, visit her website: www.theaquiraytagle.com
Dahlia Elsayed is an artist and writer who makes text and image-based work that synthesizes an internal and external experience of place, connecting the ephemeral to the concrete. She writes short fictions for created landscapes that take the form of narrative paintings, print and installation. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions throughout the United States and internationally, including the 12th Cairo Biennale, Robert Miller Gallery, BravinLee Programs, The New Jersey State Museum and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is in the public collections of the Newark Museum, the Zimmerli Museum, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, the US Department of State, amongst others. Dahlia has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, Visual Studies Workshop, the MacDowell Colony, Women’s Studio Workshop, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the NJ State Council on the Arts. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and lives and works in New Jersey. Ms. Elsayed is a Professor of Humanities at CUNY LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, NY.
Andrew Demirjian is an interdisciplinary artist who works with remix, rhythm and ritual. He creates environments for critical reflection through scraping and recombining popular culture, making intricate collages of sound and language. His work is often presented in non-traditional exhibition spaces and takes the form of interactive installations, generative art, multi-channel videos and live performances. He is currently a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where he is working on a computational text analysis project for linguistic remixing of vast quantities of video files. Andrew’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of the Moving Image, Eyebeam, Fridman Gallery, Rush Arts, the White Box gallery, Cyberfest, Fieldgate Gallery, the Center for Book Arts, The Newark Museum and many other galleries, festivals and museums. He is the author of Pan- terrestrial People’s Anthem, a book of poetry and collection of music that remixes the lyrics and songs of 195 national anthems. The MacDowell Colony, Puffin Foundation, Artslink, Harvestworks, Diapason, The Experimental Television Center, The Bemis Center, LMCC Swing Space, The Visual Studies Workshop and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts are among some of the organizations that have supported his work. Andrew teaches theory and production courses in emerging media in the Film and Media Department and the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College.
Anne de Marcken, former Greener! is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her credits include durational writing projects, hybrid narratives, short and feature-length films and site-specific installations. She approaches creative work as a process of critical inquiry, centering questions of impermanence, invisibility and the abject. She is author of the lyric novella The Accident: An Account (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), and her writing has appeared in Best New American Voices, Ploughshares, Narrative, Entropy, on NPR’s Selected Shorts and elsewhere. Recent process-based installations include Hinterlands of Paris (2020), Paris Chopped & Screwed (2019), Invisible Ink: Homeless (2018), Invisible Ink: Reparations (2017) and The Redaction Project (2016). She is also known for the gender-queer experimental feature Group (2002). Anne is editor and publisher of The 3rd Thing, an independent press dedicated to intersectional, interdisciplinary work. You can see more about The 3rd Thing at https://the3rdthing.press.
Note: Anna Joy Springer will be rescheduled TBA
Anna Joy Springer is the author of “The Vicious Red Relic, Love” (Jaded Ibis, 2011), an illustrated fabulist memoir with soundscape by Rachel Carns and Tara Jane O’neil “Your Metaforest Guidebook”, as well as “The Birdwisher, A Murder Mystery for Very Old Young Adults” (Birds of Lace, 2009). Her work appears in zines, journals, anthologies, and recordings. An Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, Springer teaches experimental writing, feminist literature & graphic texts and also leads public meditation groups focusing on sensation, emotion, and imagination. She’s performed in punk and queercore bands Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow and toured the U.S. with the writers of Sister Spit.
