Artist in Residence: Francesca Montanile Self(ie) Workshop

This workshop will use artmaking as a catalyst for storytelling and connection between participants around the themes of pleasure and sensuality, and connection to self-image. Selfies taken with a phone are a super common way of representing ourselves these days, and this workshop asks us to get back to the tactile and create a selfie using traditional mediums: pencil, pen, paper, maybe paint. The medium of creation will be up to participants, and all are welcome to bring their own supplies if they have a practice they’d like to work within. In my art-making, much of my work deals with sensuality, intimacy and relationships, and unlearning shame. Creating art around those topics- not just on my own- but in community with other artists, has done more than anything else in helping me define my own values around how I see myself and others, the way I approach communication of all kinds, and how I move through the world. This workshop aims to bring that experience to everyone who attends. All levels of art-making experience welcome! 

Residency Plan:
Francesca will be creating work toward a multi-disciplinary show, hey you up?, exploring modern intimacy and connection. She will be making work around her central questions across several mediums: creating drawings of digital artifacts, like texts message chains, making touchable rugs depicting selfies, and exploring text and movement for a performance. This project revolves around the tension between digital/tactile, private/public, distance/connection, & alienation/intimacy. 

Bio:
Francesca Montanile Lyons is a Philadelphia-based director, performer, and multi-disciplinary artist (drawing, embroidery, and most recently, animation!). Her work across mediums seeks to disempower shame through playful honesty and voyeuristic delight. Her illustrations have been published in Prickly Pear Printing’s “Rescued” issue (2022) and Sought magazine’s Holiday Issue (2021). Francesca is Co-Artistic Director of Antigravity Performance Project, a tristate devising company that makes original performance with non-theatrical texts. She conceived of, wrote, and directed Dear Diary LOL- a play made with the words of real-life diaries of teenage girls in the late 90s/early 2000s- premiered in the 2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, followed by a run at FringeArts and two runs at the New Ohio in NYC in 2018. She is a member of Girl Poop, a “delightfully weird” femme foursome specializing in Pussy Pop Rock: short, high-octane ditties inspired by first-person experience set to simple and catchy beats. Other credits include directing Legal Tender by poet Kyle Dacuyan (Antigravity at AntFest 2019 and FringeArts 2020), All 100 Fires by Donna Oblongata (2019 National Tour), Fourth Quarter (First Person Arts Festival 2018), and Rough & Tumble (2018), as well as performing/co-creating The Hopefuls (a satirical punk-clown band, 2016), Slaughter/ette (2015), and Nellie/Nellie (2014). MFA in Devised Performance from UArts/Pig Iron School (2016). BA in Theatre Arts & Performance Studies from Brown U (2011).

Residencies and programs at Bethany Arts Community are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor’s office and the New York State Legislature, the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Westchester, and numerous individual donors.