Jonathan Neufeld is an Associate Professor at College of Charleston, South Carolina with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from King’s College, London, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University. In his own words:
My research interests are in philosophy and music, aesthetics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. I began university life as a viola performance major studying with Roland Vamos. After a year of hard practice and being in awe of my colleagues, I discovered the joys of political theory and U.S. constitutional law. After writing an M.A. thesis on deliberative democracy and the limits of public reason, I began to work on a Ph.D. dissertation on legal interpretation where I explored what has turned out to be a very fruitful parallel between musical performance and the interpretation of law in constitutional democracies. This led me carefully to consider the myriad relationships between the public performance of music and the political public sphere and has resulted in two book projects: Music in Public: How Performance Shapes Democracy (under contract with OUP) and Aesthetic Disobedience: Protest, Democracy and the Arts.
Music X Habitat X Art is an interdisciplinary group comprised of three artists whose medium is digital artwork. Yaoyue Huang, Amelie Jiang, and Scott Sherman work together to present classical and contemporary music in new ways to audiences, engaging them visually and aurally. They merge contemporary piano music with digital art and performance installation. Their process is intensely collaborative, working with music, photographs, and re-imagining them into a final film which is a commentary on both the music and images themselves.
Ann Warde is an experimental composer, sound artist, and independent scholar, and a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Music/Sound from The New York Foundationfor the Arts. Following her doctorate in music composition and ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois, and a Mellon Fellowship in music at Cornell University, her work with sound shifted, focusing for the next decade on applications of audio technology to the analysis of whale sounds at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology.
Subsequently, as a 2015-16 US-UK Fulbright Researcher at the University of York, she worked on music and bioacoustics projects and developed interests in American philosophy. Linking this philosophical inquiry to music led to her recent presentation at the Women in Pragmatism International Conference (Barcelona), and to her participation as co-convener and presenter at the Experience :: Music :: Experiment events sponsored by the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium. Her sound installation Hidden Encounters was featured as part of the 2019 Tone Deaf Festival in Kingston, Ontario, and last August she was an artist-in-residence with the European Interfaces project in Cyprus. zsonics.org
Born in Topeka, Kansas in a military family, Carol Rashawnna Williams is the only child of Bessie Williams & Willie C. Williams. Soon after birth Carol and her family moved to Frankfurt Germany where she grew up on a military base and went to German schools until she was 11 ½. At which time she and her mother settled in Tacoma, WA. Carol graduated from Mount Tahoma High School, went to the Evergreen State College, was an Upward Bound student of 4 years.
Carol’s mother was a certified missionary and gave her life to community service for over 25 years, feeding and sheltering those who were homeless. or re-entering society from prison. Carol’s father was a patriot and believed in American Democracy. He gave 28 years of his life to his country through military service.
After graduating from college Carol was accepted as a Vista-Americorps for 1 year in Seattle’s White Center neighborhood working with young single mothers of Head Start students get jobs and get into school. Carol had her first group exhibit at the Seattle Central Community College Gallery in 1990 when she attended Seattle Central College, it was a community college. Her second group exhibit was in 1996 at the Evergreen State College at which time her work was acquired and catalogued into The Evergreen State College’s (TESC) video art library and showcased into the TESC student anthology book.
Carol is a mother to 2 children. She currently resides in Seattle, WA and works to mentor emerging artists from various backgrounds. Carol is a musician of 21 years who plays the violin and the viola. Carol enjoys hiking in the Pacific Northwest’s numerous old growth forests. Carol was certified thru the City of Seattle Parks & Recreation Urban Forest Educator Program and loves to teach about conifers, indigenous and invasive species. You can find her walking all over Seattle.
Carol deeply believes in the power of art to build community, bridge community relationships and create authentic space for healing.
Bonnie Whiting is Chair of Percussion Studies at the University of Washington. She performs and commissions new experimental music for percussion, seeking out projects that involve non-traditional notation, interdisciplinary performance, and the speaking percussionist. Recent work includes a series of performances at the John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington DC, solo appearances with the National Orchestra of Turkmenistan, and as a soloist in Tan Dun’s “Water Passion” under the baton of the composer himself.
In 2011, she joined red fish blue fish percussion group in premiering the staged version of George Crumb’s “Winds of Destiny” directed by Peter Sellars and featuring Dawn Upshaw for Ojai Festival. Her debut album, featuring an original solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage’s “45′ for a speaker” and “27’10.554″ for a percussionist”, was released on the Mode Records label in April.
Whiting has collaborated with many of today’s leading new music groups, including the International Contemporary Ensemble (American premiere of James Dillon’s Nine Rivers at Miller Theatre), Ensemble Dal Niente (the Fromm Concerts at Harvard), Bang on a Can (Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians for the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series), and eighth blackbird (the “Tune-in” festival at the Park Avenue Armory). She received her DMA in Contemporary Music Performance from the University of California San Diego, and also holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory, the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and Interlochen Arts Academy.
Born in Los Angeles of mixed Native and European American heritage, John Feodorov grew up in the suburbs of Southern California while making annual visits to his family’s land on the Navajo Reservation. The time he spent with his grandparents on their homestead in New Mexico, near the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon, continues to inform his work.
Feodorov’s art both engages and confronts the viewer through questioning assumptions about Spirituality, Identity and Place. Lately, he has been responding to ongoing environmental exploitation and degradation by both government and corporate sources, as well as their potential effects on how we relate to and understand our sense of Place.
John’s work 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”.
He served as an Arts Commissioner for the City of Seattle and is presently an Associate Professor of Art at Fairhaven College at Western Washington University in Bellingham Washington. He currently writes and performs with his band, The Almost Faithful.
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.
