2022 Fall Residencies
Bethany welcomes artists working across a variety of disciplines. Fall 2022 Resident Artist EventsBethany welcomes our 2022 Fall Artists in Residence
It is with great anticipation that we announce our fall schedule of residency artists and events, gallery shows, classes and workshops. This residency season promises to be a busy one as we welcome writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, storytellers, singers, directors, choreographers and dancers, animators, visual artists, teachers, public artists, social activists and more to Bethany for the development of new works and works in progress. We welcome twenty-one talented artists working across disciplines for our 4th annual Fall Multidisciplinary Residency.
We encourage you to register today to join these artists as they share their work in our upcoming events.
Fall 2022 Multi-disciplinary Residency Artists
Admiral Grey, Amber Ray Snyder, AriDy Nox, Ben Cuevas, Emily Bate, Francesca Montanile, Haemee Han, Jamison Curcio & Sarah Foucher, Jared Mezzocchi & Sarah Gancher, Karin Falcone, Katarina Hoeger, Kyle Marshall & Company, L Feldman, Lauren Camp, Marcie LaCerte, Margaret Liston, Monalisa Gharavi, Sandra Jackson-Opoku, Sarah Heady, Sarah Krohn, Tali Margolin
Admiral Grey
Live Performance & Video Artist
About Residency
Admiral Grey
Dates of Residency: September 9-24
Residency Plan:
I plan to continue my development of The Human Dream Project, my multimedia project recording and archiving people describing dreams they have had, and illustrating them using live puppetry, video art, and music. While at BAC, I will be making new video works using dreams I am collecting with my Human Dream Project Dream Hotline, and further developing the stage show to include new dreams, sets puppets, and music.
Bio:
Admiral Grey is an artist creating live performance and video art populated with the colorful art objects and costumes she makes from repurposed materials and other post-modern detritus. Her maximalist aesthetic adorns intimate pageantry, weaving through the tragicomedy of existence.
A committed multidisciplinary artist and writer from a young age, she performed as a trumpet player, singer and actor with regional orchestras, theaters and competitions before studying acting with Circle Repertory Theater as part of the NYSSSA program before college. After attending the acting conservatory at Boston University’s School Of Fine Arts for a year (with a course on Nietzsche thrown in), she transferred to Goddard College for a broader education where she furthered her studies in philosophy, writing, sculpture, film, and video in addition to music and theater.
After moving to New York and finding internships with experimental theater companies cost-prohibitive, she was a founding member of the art-punk band Drayton Sawyer Gang, printed zines, threw shows and festivals, and continued making dioramas and costume as she honed her unique aesthetic in the Brooklyn experimental and avant garde scene. Soon after she found her way back into modern theater, and since then Admiral has created and performed original theatrical works with Robin Frohardt Company, The Nerve Tank, The Drunkard’s Wife, Sister Sylvester, Psychic Readings, and her own Snake In The Boot Collective in various roles including: composition/ sound design, writer, director, actor, dancer, costume/props design, and video design, in New York and internationally. She has also released several albums and toured with various music projects including Cellular Chaos (Skin Graft Records) and The Simple Pleasure, and toured alongside Lydia Lunch performing spoken word in 2016 and 2017. Her video and performance art has been featured in a variety of exhibitions including a residency with Vidium at Mana Contemporary’s 777 Mall for Miami Art Week in 2019. Her current multimedia project The Human Dream Project archives and illustrates intimate recordings of people describing their dreams with puppetry, video art and live sound design.
Admiral Grey has been a residency participant at NACL, Mana Contemporary, BUOY, Chinatown Soup, and Kinosaito among others. “The Maiden”, her collaboration with The Nerve Tank, was nominated for Outstanding Performance Art Production at the New York Innovative Theater Awards. The Human Dream Project has received funding from Artists’ Relief and Indie Theater Fund.
Artist’s Social Media:
instagram.com/admiralsaintgrey
YouTube.com/admiralgrey,
@admiral_grey (twitter),
Admiral Grey on Facebook
Amber Ray Snyder
Stage Actor, Film Maker & Audio Storyteller
About Residency
Amber Ray Snyder
Dates of Residency: September 27-October 8
Residency Plan:
Amber Ray Snyder comes to BAC with microphones and sound editing software to further the audio stories library of her original podcast series, Star Stuff Stories. In an attempt to explore and give light to other voices, Amber hopes to collect more stories from the Bethany community and give amplification to experiences other than her own. While she plans to arrive with stories to potentially record she also hopes to leave with stories written and recorded by the community. All with sound effects and original music. This is a place where dreams live while you’re awake. Welcome to Star Stuff Stories!
Bio:
Amber Ray Snyder is a Chicago based artist and is the founder of The Eclipse Show (on YouTube) and Star Stuff Stories (on Spotify and Apple Podcasts). With 20 plus years’ experience as a stage actor, Amber has most recently invested her creative time into filmmaking and audio storytelling. She has written and directed five short films since 2018 including an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (EVERMORE NEVERMORE) which was rewarded “Best Adapted Film” at the Edgar Allan Poe Film Festival of West Virginia (2021) and was accepted into 7 film festivals across the United States. Filmmaking aside, her creation of Star Stuff Stories was born in 2022 and is complete with sound effects, original music, original stories and a variety of voices, all told very à la radio play style. Her goal is to use audio storytelling as a platform for voices from all walks of life. An opportunity to pass on a point of view that might be valuable to young and grown minds alike. With the modern world being full of screens, Amber hopes to be a part of creating a space for the “screens” inside of our mind, through audio. www.youtube.com/TheEclipseShow / www.TheEclipseShow.com / www.AmberSnyder.com
Artist’s Social Media:
Instagram: @eclipseandbodhi
AriDy Nox
Multi-disciplinary Storyteller & Social Activist
About Residency
AriDy Nox
Dates of Residency: October 11-23
Residency Plan:
I am currently working on a magical realism triptych that follows a black family along the matrilineal line across three generations as they work to understand motherhood in nontraditional contexts. The triptych exists in a village that is a mix of all the Southern towns I have ever lived in, on the outskirts of a Bayou. I intend to finish a detailed outline of the second play of the series, water, as well as a rough draft of the third play in the series, witchling. I am also deeply excited by the idea of pulling in other artists to possibly engage in my process in collaborative ways, especially choreographers and musicians. The triptych will have a lot of underscoring and *movement*. As a fledgling composer, I would love to get feedback on some of the rough scores that I will be composing and possible movement that comes out of those scores.
Bio:
AriDy Nox is a multi-disciplinary black femme storyteller and social activist with a variety of forward-thinking creative works under her/their belt including the historical reimagining of the life of Sally Hemmings BLACK GIRL IN PARIS (2020), the ancestral reckoning play A WALLESS CHURCH (2019), the afrofuturist ecopocalypse musical METROPOLIS (2019), and many others. AriDy creates out of the vehement belief that creating a future in which marginalized peoples are free requires a radical imagination. Their tales are offerings intended to function as small parts of an ancient, expansive, awe-inspiring tradition of world-shaping, created by and for black femmes. As a graduate of the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at Tisch School of the Performing Arts at NYU and a beneficiary of the Musical Theatre Factory Inaugural MAKERS cohort, the Emerging Writer’s Group at the Public Theatre, The Civilians’ Research and Development Group, Horizon Theatre’s Black Women Speak Cohort, and the Live and In Color June Bingham commission, they have been inordinately privileged to share the workings of her imagination among a vast array of inspiring and supportive artists of various radical backgrounds throughout the country.
Artist’s Social Media:
@aridynox on twitter and instagram.
Ben Cuevas
Artist
About Residency
Ben Cuevas
Dates of Residency: October 11-23
Residency Plan:
My most current body of work Non-binary Code investigates the fundamentally binary nature of knitting, which is at the core of my practice—and combines this with the exploration of my non-binary identity. A central part of my artwork is based around fiber-arts, and I reflect on the queer/feminist ideologies within the long and gendered history of women’s work with fiber-based materials. My goal for the BAC residency would be to dive into this series and devote my attention and body to the meditative practice of repetitive stitching with this large-scale acrylic yarn. This series of work is accumulating into an “acrylic on canvas” artwork that is subverting the heteronormative histories around abstract expressionism and inserting myself within this narrative stitch by stitch.
Bio:
Born in Southern California in 1987, Ben Cuevas is an artist whose work is rooted in concepts of otherness and intersectionality, inspired by his queer, non-binary, HIV-positive, and Latinx lived experience. As these multiple components inform his practice, identity directly influences his artwork, which is naturally interdisciplinary. Cuevas received his B.A. in mixed media, installation, and photography at Hampshire College, in 2010.
A central part of Cuevas’s artwork is based in textiles, underscoring queer/feminist ideologies within the long and gendered history of women’s work with fiber-based materials. These artworks have been shown across the US with exhibitions held at The Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, Museum of the City of New York, The Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York City, and others.
Cuevas’s work also speaks to queer histories and the idea of the archive through his photo-based works centering images of sexual minorities from past into the present. This can be seen in his piece Ghosts of the Trucks of the Westside Highway, and his ongoing photo series titled Reinserted.
Several books and publications feature Cuevas’s work, such as DUETS: Ben Cuevas & Annie Sprinkle in Conversation, published by Visual AIDS; Queer Threads: Crafting, Identity, and Community, edited by John Chaich and Todd Oldham. Acclaimed as a public speaker, Cuevas has given talks at institutions including, Brown University, Ohio State University, The Museum of Sex (NYC), and the Fire Island Artist Residency.
Artist’s Social Media:
Instagram: @BenCuevas_Art
Tali Margolin
Visual Artist
About Residency
Tali Margolin
Dates of Residency: September 9-24
Residency Plan:
I’m planning to continue working on my current series, exploring the issue of immigration and displacement and developing new body of mixed-media works.
Bio:
Tali Margolin is a visual artist working in acrylic, oil and mixed-media. In her artworks Margolin uses untraditional materials, bringing a wide range of associations and emotional and psychological moods.
Tali Margolin holds BFA from the SVA, NY and MA, Art from the Lehman College, NYC. Margolin has had solo exhibitions at Noyes Museum of Art, NJ; Delaplaine Arts Center, MD; Marks JCH, NY; Hastings on Hudson Art Gallery, NY; Workhouse Arts Center, VA; BSB Gallery, NJ, two-person show at Gallery Route One, CA. In 2022 her mixed media works will be on view in solo exhibition at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts, Reading, PA.
Margolin’s work has been part of group shows at Penn State Abington Art Gallery; Charles H. Wright Museum, Detroit; New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; Taipei Economic and Cultural Center, NY; LBI Foundation for Arts and Science, NJ; Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Gallery Aferro, NJ; Trestle Gallery, NY; Pierro Gallery, NJ; 440Gallery, NYC; West Windsor Arts Center, NJ; American Artists Professional League, NY; Philadelphia Sketch Club, PA; Governor’s Island, NYC; Target Gallery, VA; Aljira – Center for Contemporary Art, NJ; Site: Brooklyn Gallery, NYC; and others.
Artist’s Social Media:
https://www.instagram.com/margolintali/
Emily Bate
Singer, Composer & Performer
About Residency
Emily Bate
Dates of Residency: October 11-23
Residency Plan:
I am making revisions to the script and score of my WIP show Wig Wag. Wig Wag is a hybrid music-theater piece, performed by a cast of four in collaboration with the entire audience. In Wig Wag, singing together transforms everyone present into one collective body, as we explore the tensions and pleasures found in the thick tangle of our interdependence.
Bio:
Emily Bate is a singer, composer and performer interested in the transformative potential of the human voice. Emily is the founder and conductor of Trust Your Moves a 65-member queer community chorus in West Philly. She is a 2021 Pew Fellow, and her work has been supported by an Independence Foundation Fellowship, two Leeway Art & Change Awards, the MAP Fund, and more. Recent collaborations include: John Jarboe’s Rose: You Are Who You Eat, which premiered at the Guggenheim in 2022, and work with Pig Iron Theatre Company, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Third Side Records, on a collection of songs by Beverly Glenn-Copeland. More at www.emilybate.com
Artist’s Social Media:
@_emilybate_
Francesca Montanile
Director, Performer & Multi-disciplinary Artist
About Residency
Francesca Montanile
Dates of Residency: September 9-24
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).
Artist’s Social Media:
@fmldrawsbutts
Haemee Han
Public Artist, Landscape Designer & Educator
About Residency
Haemee Han
Dates of Residency: October 11-23
Residency Plan:
I would like to build a temporary installation called “Missing” which will be a combination of research, fabrication, and performance work series. I would like to research which animals and why they disappeared in east coast of the United States. The final output of the project will be a temporal installation that is inspired by the particular extinct animals. (Tentative plan : I am considering using multi colored bio degradable balloons to make a sculpture)
Bio:
Haemee is a public artist, a landscape designer and an educator. Since establishing Jaemee Studio, Haemee exhibited public art installations and garden installations in America, Europe, and Asia including Chaumont sur loire garden festival in France.
Her work explores relationship between objects and personal/collective memories. Most of her works are occupiable objects / landscape where visitors emerge themselves within the art.
Haemee is also a registered landscape architect who practices in New Jersey, She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Artist’s Social Media:
instagram : jaemeestudio
Jamison Curcio & Sarah Foucher
Interdisciplinary Artists
About Residency
Jamison Curcio and Sarah Foucher
Dates of Residency: September 9-24
Residency Plan:
We intend to build on our current work-in-progress at least for now: anthology of us, a collection of stories in the form of duets and solos. As collaborative artists we draw you into our relationship: deeply personal, deeply rooted in change and commitment to each other and to our work. Our work is about our relationship and a dialogue of active listening and seeing one another. We are exploring trust, curiosity, sensitivity, vulnerability, and playfulness. We are creating a process that centers these values, and pushes us to think about where we want to go. There are two elements that we would like to explore: our movement vocabulary, and the audience response to the work.
Bio:
Jamison and Sarah’s relationship began at Goucher College while working with choreographic mentor Loni Landon in The Last To Forgive (2019). This duet sparked an artistic collaboration between them which has developed into a strong relationship. In Fall 2020, Jamison and Sarah presented the dance-film Holding US (2020) at TEDxMC2School, engaging over twenty creatives in the discussion of isolation and what it means to be held. Now based in DC, they have been developing their process and artistic vision. Their most recent work, at least for now: anthology of us (2021) was presented at Fieldwork DC in Fall 2021 at Dance Place and the Koresh Dance Showcase in January 2022. Most recently, they were guest teachers for “Foot in the Door”, a 4-week class series at Dance Place in March of 2022.
Jamison Curcio (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and community curator. Working at the intersections of performance art, visual art, and Black Feminism, Jamison cultivates and fosters stories of liberation and reimagining through online exhibitions. As a graduate from Goucher College (’19), Jamison holds a BA in Performance Art for Social Justice and is the recipient of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Brooke Pierce Award in Fine Arts for choreography. Jamison has shown her most recent work HOW WE GET FREE at the 38th Annual Choreographers Showcase, Celebrate 845, MODArts Dance Collective: Collective Thread, the Women in Dance Leadership Conference, and the SECCA Black@Intersection Exhibition.
Sarah Foucher (she/her) is currently working in arts education at Dance Place. She is originally from New Hampshire and is a recent graduate from Goucher College in Baltimore MD (2021) where she studied Women Gender and Sexuality Studies, Creative Writing, and Dance. Sarah has worked with artists including Loni Landon, Urban Bush Women, and Iquail Shaheed. In addition to making work for her students, she and Jamison recently presented at the Koresh Artist Showcase. As an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and teacher, she is interested in finding connection through meaningful processes.
Karin Falcone
Writer, Visual Artist, Gardener, Advocate & Chef
About Residency
Karin Falcone
Dates of Residency: October 11-23
Residency Plan:
Karin Falcone Krieger is a writer working in both experimental and traditional forms. She is completing a book length manuscript of memoir in essays entitled “Rescue Attempts” and a series of visual arts & poetic works entitled “Destroyed Notebooks” She thrives on creating community through writing journalism and reviews.
Bio:
Karin Falcone Krieger is a writer, visual artist, gardener, advocate and chef. Her recent reviews, interviews, journalism, poetics and essays have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Able News, Contingent Magazine, BlazeVOX, LITPUB, The Laurel Review, The Literary Review and other publications. She holds a BA in Social Sciences from SUNY Stony Brook, and an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She taught freshman composition as an adjunct instructor at several New York area colleges from 1999-2019. These and other projects can be seen at www.karinfalconekrieger.com
Artist’s Social Media:
Katarina Hoeger
Intermedial Artist
About Residency
Katarina Hoeger
Dates of Residency: September 9-24
Residency Plan:
During her residency, Katarina Hoeger will continue exploring the possibilities arising from images reconstructed using pixel data. During this exploration she plans to collect stories and pictures of Ossining and use a sequence of computer-generated images depicting her collection to show her changing understanding of and relation to Ossining over the course of her residency. The technique Katarina uses to reconstitute images is relatively new, so the end result will provide insight into the value of choosing to use this technique.
Bio:
Katarina Hoeger is an intermedial artist whose works often heavily use code. She is currently using her practice to investigate the relations, physical, social, environmental, and more that are part of existing in a particular body in a specific space. Katarina Hoeger has recently had work exhibited in Lord Hall Gallery in Orono, Maine. She was an active board member and organizer at Music Community Lab / Monthly Music Hackathon NYC until 2019. Katarina Hoeger anticipates graduating from University of Maine in August 2022 with an MFA in Intermedia. She lives in White Plains, NY.
Artist’s Social Media:
Kyle Marshall & Company
Artistic Director & Performer
About Residency
Kyle Marshall & Company (Bree Breeden + Cal Fish + Edo Tastic)
Dates of Residency: October 11-23
Residency Plan:
For my residency, I will bring members of Kyle Marshall Choreography to collaborate on two new projects. First will be a movement/poetry collaboration with poet Edo Tastic and performer Bree Breeden to music by Alice Coltrane. This will be followed by new explorations in body rhythm and technology with sound collaboration Cal Fish.
Bio:
Kyle Marshall – Artistic Director and Performer
Kyle Marshall is a choreographer, performer, teacher and artistic director of Kyle Marshall Choreography (KMC), a dance company that sees the dancing body as a container of history, an igniter of social reform and a site of celebration. Since inception in 2014, KMC has performed at venues including: Chelsea Factory, BAM Next Wave Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Actors Fund Arts Center, NJPAC, Little Island, and Roulette. Kyle has received choreographic and dance film commissions from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, “Dance on the Lawn”, Montclair’s Dance Festival, Harlem Stage and THE SHED. Kyle is a recipient of a 2020 Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Award and 2018 NYJuried “Bessie” Award. As a teacher, Kyle has conducted masterclasses, creative workshops, set choreography at schools including; ADF, Rutgers University, Ailey/Fordham University, Sarah Lawerence College, County Prep High School, and Bloomfield College. He is currently a Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence at Princeton University and is in residence at the Center for Ballet and Arts at NYU. Additional residencies for KMC include MANA Contemporary, 92nd st Y, CPR, and Jamaica Performing Arts Center. Kyle dances with the Trisha Brown Dance Company and has also worked with doug elkins choreography etc and Tiffany Mills. Kyle graduated from Rutgers University with a BFA in Dance and resides in Jersey City.
Bree Breeden – Performer
Bree Breeden is a freelance performing and media artist. Her choreographic and performance work has been presented at Post/Future Performance Festival in 2020, Gibney Work Up program in 2019, Embodied Spaces Festival I and II in 2018, and at Earl Mosley Institute of the Arts dance talk series in 2016. She is a dancer and the Managing Director for Proteo Media + Performance, and performs with VON HOWARD PROJECT, MICHIYAYA Dance, Kyle Marshall Choreography along with other freelance projects. She is from Cheraw, S.C. and received aBFA in Dance from Montclair State University.
Cal Fish – Musician
Cal Fish is a multi-disciplinary artist from Sea Cliff, NY currently based in Brooklyn. They graduated from Bard College with a joint degree in studio art and music. Since graduation they have shared interactive works and multi-sensory performances at galleries, diy venues, festivals, community art spaces, and public parks, including; CANADA Gallery, Governor’s Island, Flux Factory, and Peace Park. Sound as a medium for communication and user-friendly kinesthetic technologies have remained at the center of Cal’s work. They have toured extensively with various music and art projects in the U.S. and have also performed in Europe and Canada. Cal currently hosts a radio show called Anthroapology, organizes interdisciplinary art events, makes clothes out of their studio at the Living Gallery, and works in collaboration with many amazingly inspiring artists and organizers.
Edo Tastic- Poet/Visual Artist
Edo Tastic was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and moved to his grandparents’ farm in the Dominican Republic at age two where he lived for the next six years. On his eighth birthday, he came to live with his parents and siblings in New York City. Harlem raised, he is a product of the concrete beauty and arts that surrounded him as a child. Poetry has been in his life since fourth grade, reading The New Kid on the Block. In 2017 he self-published Effects and He Was Here, both books available on Amazon. Bloomingdales commissioned 26 poems for their stores in Soho and permanently in the East 59th Street Store. He hopes to publish some of the other poetic memoirs in the BURPS Series. There are twelve BURPS altogether, six not yet published. He continues to seek opportunities to bring poetry to new heights, and create poetic experiences that are both visual and auditory. To date, Edo has released three auditory-visual poetics. Childhood Nuances, Star and Sayin’ Things. In October 2020, he produced his first independent poetic short film, Abducted: A Living Poet.
Artist’s Social Media:
@kmchoreo
L Feldman
Playwright
About Residency
L Feldman
Dates of Residency: September 9-24
Residency Plan:
Over the last two years, I’ve been writing a beast of a play called THE MERCURY 13 GUIDE TO GETTING OFF THE GROUND. It’s about 13 accomplished female pilots who in 1961 were being selected and tested as astronaut candidates… until NASA and the government suddenly squelched the program. And so – in the height of the Space Race, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement – a Congressional Hearing was called to determine whether the U.S. should include women as astronauts… which suddenly pitted social progress against technological speed. Congress chose technological speed, and promised to close the opportunity gap in time. The play braids together historical events, imagined scenes, fantastical moments, physical feats, and text plucked straight from the Congressional archive – as it follows these 13 female pilots, who sacrifice nearly everything for an opportunity that seems within their grasp. At BAC, I’ll finally get to dive into the significant rewrites I want to do on this play, and to emerge with a comprehensive new draft that’s workshop-ready for actors.
Bio:
L M Feldman is a queer, GNC, feminist playwright who writes theatrically adventurous, physically evocative, intimate, inquisitive, ensemble-driven plays. Plays that are dynamic, honest, brave, and the smallest bit impossible. Plays that transcend into an experience.
So far, her body of work includes THRIVE, OR WHAT YOU WILL [AN EPIC] ~ THE MERCURY 13 GUIDE TO GETTING OFF THE GROUND ~ ANOTHER KIND OF SILENCE ~ SCRIBE, OR THE SISTERS MILTON, OR ELEGY FOR THE UNWRITTEN ~ THE EGG-LAYERS ~ GRACE, OR THE ART OF CLIMBING ~ A PEOPLE [A MOSAIC PLAY] ~ TROPICAL SECRETS, OR ALL THE FLUTES IN THE SEA ~ and 7 full-length ensemble-devised works.
L has been nominated for the Wendy Wasserstein Prize, Stavis Playwright Award, New York Innovative Theatre Award, Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award, and twice for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. And she’s ongoingly grateful to have been a fellow at MacDowell, the Playwrights Realm, and the Dramatists Guild, and a core writer with InterAct Theatre, Orbiter 3, and (currently) The Playwrights’ Center.
An alum of the Yale School of Drama and the New England Center for Circus Arts, L is also a contemporary circus artist. She has performed duo trapeze at festivals around the world, and has dramaturged works of circus-theater for ensembles around the country. She loves theater that moves, and circus that tells stories.
L has lived in seven cities and is now based in Philadelphia, where she teaches both playwriting and circus, writes and devises plays, and trains handstands.
Artist’s Social Media:
https://www.instagram.com/elemfeld/
https://www.facebook.com/lauren.feldman.75
http://www.laurenfeldman.com/
Lauren Camp
Author & Editor
About Residency
Lauren Camp
Dates of Residency: Group 2 (October 11-23)
Residency Plan:
At Bethany Arts Community, Lauren anticipates being able to complete work on a manuscript that explores the spirit and art of abstract painter Agnes Martin within the context of recent politics, social upheaval, and the onset of the poet’s father’s dementia.
Bio:
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), which received the American Fiction Award in Poetry. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Housatonic Book Award, North American Book Award, and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Beloit Poetry Journal, and has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic.
An emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute, she has received support from Storyknife Writers Retreat, Denver Botanic Gardens, and the Taft-Nicholson Center. In 2018, she was a visiting scholar/poet at the Mayo Clinic, sharing poems of dementia with physicians and research scientists, and she will be Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park in 2022.
Lauren has guest edited issues of: Malpaís Review (poetry of Iraq), World Literature Today (two issues: international jazz poetry, and the intersection of contemporary visual art and poetry), About Place Journal (“Roots and Resistance”), and Ilanot Review (“Earth”).
She lives in New Mexico where she teaches creative writing to people of all ages through the state’s Poetry Out Loud program, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe Community College, and her own community workshops. She also teaches for Hugo House and Hudson Valley Writers Center. www.laurencamp.com
Artist’s Social Media:
Facebook: /LaurenMukamalCamp
Twitter: @poetlauren
Instagram: @laurencamp
Marcie LaCerte
Animator & Art Director
About Residency
Marcie LaCerte
Dates of Residency: September 27 – October 8
Residency Plan:
I will be making progress on my upcoming independent animated short titled “The Pleasure-Dome.” I am combining digital character animation with hand-drawn, colored pencil backgrounds. I will be using the facilities and the 25-acre grounds for inspiration (as much of my film is set in plant-filled landscapes) and for finishing up my film.
Bio:
Marcie LaCerte is a Chinese-American animator and art director based in New York City. She is currently a Creative Culture fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center and is working on two narrative short films.
Her clients include Vox, NPR, Great Big Story, PBS, and Quartz. Her films have been recognized by Vimeo Staff Picks, The New Yorker, Ottawa International Animation Festival, GLAS, AFI Docs, and more. She has given talks at the CalArts Experimental Animation program, the Living Room Light Exchange (New York), and the Light Grey Art Lab Residency.
She is interested in making films that use metaphor, surrealism, and comedy to examine personal experiences and feelings. Her dreamlike environments reflect the internal psychological state of her characters, and her stories are often structured around journeys through these otherworldly landscapes. Her work explores themes of isolation, creativity, obsession, and the absurdity of modern life. She is also interested in producing interactive multimedia art through game design or web-based hypertext. In her free time, she enjoys thrift shopping, listening to podcasts, and thinking about the internet.
Artist’s Social Media:
http://marslizard.net/ , https://www.instagram.com/marslizard/
Margaret Liston
Dancer, Actor & Choreographer
About Residency
Margaret Liston
Dates of Residency: October 11-23
Residency Plan:
As a dancer/actor/choreographer I plan to work on adapting my Family’s Cookbook, Basic: The Ammaccapane Family Cookbook, into a Performance piece by combining storytelling and the culinary arts. I want to explore my family’s history by cooking and baking the recipes handed down from my Italian immigrant grandparents. Instead of creating a kitchen onstage, I want to bring the audience into the kitchen of Bethany where they can smell, taste and “feel” the food from beginning to end.
Bio:
Margaret has been interested in movement and what bodies can do since the day she climbed out of her crib. She has participated in a wide range of movement from tree climbing, gymnastics and sports, to Modern Dance (MFA NYU Tisch School of the Arts; Bill T. Jones Dance Co.) mime, aerial dance (Multigravitational Aerodance Group), yoga, Thai Body Work and Pilates. The movement also brought her to her first love, the theatre (BA, Theatre, Bowling Green State University) where she got hooked on the camaraderie and “family” atmosphere created with each show. In her first theatre class “Production and Performance” she learned not only acting but also how to construct the set they would use for performance. This opened the world of Stagecraft and Technical Design which she then continued working throughout her undergraduate years building sets and all other aspects of Production – lighting, sound, props, and costumes. Throughout her theatre and dance career she has worked in Summer Stock (Ohio), Children’s Theatre Co. (New Jersey), Opera (Ohio, Saratoga, NY), Off Broadway (Ohio Theatre, NY), Festivals (Copenhagen International Dance Festival, Denmark), (Midtown International Theatre Festival, NY), (Philly Fringe Festival, PA), (SoloLab, NY) and has choreographed a Community March & Dance for Hudson River Rising – One Billion Rising V-Day event 2013-14 with a fundraiser for Hope’s Door – local Westchester women’s shelter with services for all victims of Domestic Violence. More recently Margaret has conceived, written, and performed 2 solo shows – MentalPause and A Mama Story – integrating dance, storytelling and theatre. In support of these shows, Margaret was awarded a residency at Space on Ryder Farm (Brewster, NY) and an Artist Commission from The Rivertown Artists Workshop (RAW) (Sleepy Hollow, NY).
In addition, she was honored by RAW with a “Sleepies” Art and Performance Award for her choreography and by her community as the Elizabeth Mascia Child Care Center Couple of the Year for her service in Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, NY. She continues to operate her Pilates Studio – Tappan Zee Body Works in Sleepy Hollow, NY.
Artist’s Social Media:
Monalisa Gharavi
Artist, Poet & Theorist
About Residency
Monalisa Gharavi
Dates of Residency: September 27 – October 8
Residency Plan:
The artist will produce chapters toward The Book of Disbelonging, an experimental literary volume conceptually invoking the reverse of the seal of the U.S., “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one) to pose instead, “Ex uno, plures”: out of one, many. She will also deliver a public-facing multi-genre creative/critical writing workshop.
Bio:
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist, poet, and theorist whose work explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. Solo/group exhibitions, performances, and expanded publications include Nottingham Contemporary, Pioneer Works, Parasol Unit, Serpentine Cinema, Framer Framed, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, New Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Sonic Acts, Triple Canopy, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, The Poetry Project, Women and Performance, Circumference, among others.
She completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Film & Visual Studies at Harvard University and an M.F.A. in Film/Video at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and held a postdoctoral Fulbright and Visiting Professorship at Birzeit University. She was a Lecturer at New York University and Northeastern University from 2019 to 2021; at Harvard University from 2012 to 2017; and has served as visiting faculty/studio artist at Valand Academy, Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, Bard Microcollege, among others.
Book publications include a translation of Waly Salomão’s Algaravias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse), nominated for a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; The Distancing Effect (BlazeVOX); and Bio (Inventory Press). Artist books/chapbooks include Apparent Horizon 2 (Bonington Gallery); Alphabet of an Unknown City (Belladonna*), Secret Catalan Poem (The Elephants), Mohammad Wikipedia Book (Recess), and Dictionary of Night, co-authored with Mirene Arsanios (Ashkal Alwan). She was editor at The New Inquiry between 2012 and 2017, and is author of the open text South/South. She founded Oil Research Group (ORG) as a one-woman artist collective exploring the relationship between oil and data.
She lives and works in New York.
Artist’s Social Media:
Sandra Jackson-Opoku
Author & Teacher
About Residency
Sandra Jackson-Opoku
Dates of Residency: September 9-24
Residency Plan:
BLACK RICE is a historical novel exploring centuries-old connections between China and people of African descent. In this family saga sprawling across five novella-length chapters, a chorus of voices speak in the dramatic, interior, and epistolary monologue as the narrators tell their life stories aloud, in thought, or in writing. These encounters begin with an East African woman sold into concubinage in Ming Dynasty Guangzhou. A Cantonese descendant is later transported to Cuba in the 19th-century “coolie” trade to the Americas, where he meets and marries an African-American woman. Additional generations flow from this descent: a boxer, a blues singer, and a descendant teaching in modern China. I will use a Bethany Arts residency to incorporate research findings and polish final revisions to prepare Black Rice for submission.
Bio:
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of the award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny (and the Women Whom Loved Him), an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. She also co-edited the anthology, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic works are widely published and produced, appearing in such outlets as Secrets, An Oddsized Coffin, eMerge Magazine, Both Sides: Stories from the Border, the Anthology of Appalachian Heritage, storySouth, Another Chicago Magazine, New Daughters of Africa, Ms. Magazine, Ocotillo Review, Obsidian, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Lifeline Theatre, and many others.
Professional recognition includes a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the General Electric-Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Award for Younger Writers, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Fiction, Ragdale Foundation US/Africa Writers Fellowship, a William Randolph Hearst Research Visiting Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, a listing in Newcity Lit50: Who Really Books in Chicago, and an inaugural Esteemed Literary Artist Award from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Fiction.
Jackson-Opoku has been a resident fellow at many national and international arts communities. She teaches literature and writing at workshops, conferences, colleges, and universities across the country and around the world.
Artist’s Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/sandra.jacksonopoku/
https://twitter.com/jacksonopoku
instagram.com/sjacksonopoku
Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi
Playwright / Multimedia Artist
About Residency
Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi
Dates of Residency: Sep 9 – Sep 24
Residency Plan:
We will use our residency at Bethany Arts to brainstorm, draft, and begin work on the creation of our new piece, UNTITLED RED HOOK HISTORY, a co-commission from the Vineyard Theatre and En Garde Arts. UNTITLED RED HOOK HISTORY will unite in-person theatrical performance with live online performance, via projections in a single space and, simultaneously, an online performance portal.
Bio:
Sarah Gancher’s writing has been seen on stages worldwide including London’s National Theatre, Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, The Public Theatre, New York Theater Workshop, Steppenwolf, Berkeley Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, Hartford Stage, RoundHouse (DC), Seattle Rep, and Ars Nova. (Upcoming: Playwrights Horizons Soundstage, Geva Theater, and Vineyard Theatre/En Garde Arts.) Recently, the online production of her play Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy (dir. Jared Mezzocchi & Elizabeth Williamson, Theaterworks Hartford/Theatre Squared/The Civilians) was included in the New York Times’ Top 10 Theater of 2020 list. Other honors include the Richard Rodgers Award, New York Stage and Film Founders’ Award, The Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, the James Stevenson Prize for Comedy, the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Award, a Toulmin Foundation commission, several Lortel, Drama Desk, and Drama League nominations, and the AR Gurney Prize. An alumna of Ars Nova Play Group, WP Lab, P73 and The Playwrights’ Realm, she is a current resident at New Dramatists. She also plays jazz violin. MFA: NYU.
Jared Mezzocchi is an Obie award winning director and multimedia designer. Mezzocchi’s work has been seen throughout the United States at notable theaters such as: The Kennedy Center (How To Catch A Star), The Geffen Playhouse (Someone Else’s House), Vineyard Theater (On The Beauty of Loss), Arena Stage (Intelligence), Woolly Mammoth (The Nether, Women Laughing Alone with Salad, Chad Deity), and many more. In 2016, he received The Lucille Lortel and Henry Hewes Award for his work in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone at the Manhattan Theatre Club. In 2021, The New York Times highlighted his multimedia work during the pandemic, alongside four artists including Paula Vogel and Andrew Lloyd Webber. His work was celebrated as a New York Times Critic Pick on Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm (Co-Director & Multimedia Designer) where it was praised for being one of the first digitally native successes for virtual theater. He is a two-time Macdowell Artist Fellow, a 2012 Princess Grace Award winner, and spends his summers as Producing Artistic Director of Andy’s Summer Playhouse. Jared is an Associate Professor at The University of Maryland, leading the MFA Design Program for the Projection and Multimedia Track. Over the pandemic, Jared founded Virtual Design Collective (ViDCo), aiding in the development of over 50 new digital and hybrid works over the last 2 years including the current season of Paula Vogel’s Bard At The Gate, co-produced by McCarter Theater. MFA: Brooklyn College.
Artist’s Social Media:
Sarah Heady
Poet and Essayist
About Residency
Sarah Heady
Dates of Residency: October 11-23
Residency Plan:
I intend to use my time at BAC to develop a collection of linked lyric essays entitled “Holdings.” Rooted in my obsessions with place, history, and architecture, this project circles around issues of landscape, class, and power in my home-place of the Hudson River Valley.
Bio:
Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of Comfort (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), Corduroy Road (dancing girl, 2021), and Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013). She is also the librettist of Halcyon, a new opera about the death and life of a women’s college. Sarah is the recipient of residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, In Cahoots, Bethany Arts Community, and Art Farm. Raised in New York’s Hudson Valley, she lives in San Francisco, where she co-edits Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective. More at www.sarahheady.com
Artist’s Social Media:
IG: @headylines
www.facebook.com/sarah.heady1
Sarah Krohn
Playwright and Director
About Residency
Sarah Krohn
Dates of Residency: September 27-October 8
Residency Plan:
During her BAC residency, Sarah Krohn will research and write TMI: A Play for Eight Actors and a High School Orchestra. Set in a contemporary high school, TMI builds on the tradition of theatrical farce, using stream-of-consciousness speech as the primary storytelling vehicle. The spaces in the play—physical, digital, psychological—are entirely constructed from language. The play considers how the immediacy and abundance of information in the digital era intersects with age-old human dilemmas.
Bio:
Sarah Krohn is a New York City-based playwright and director who hails from the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania. For her first full-length play, Escape Velocity, she received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship at the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her directing credits include Veil’d by Monet Hurst-Mendoza (Women’s Project), Jenny Rachel Weiner’s Horse Girls (the cell), The Pits by Joshua Harmon (Williamstown Theater Festival), Letters to Guantanamo (New Georges/The Culture Project) and Victor Frange Presents Gas, which she co-conceived with Dan O’Neil (Incubator Arts). She has directed and developed work with numerous institutions including New Dramatists, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, WP Theatre, The Playwright’s Realm, NYTW, Soho Rep, The Flea Theater, Williamstown Theater Festival, Dixon Place, JACK, Incubator Arts, The Builders Association, Boston Center for the Arts, New Repertory Theater, Yale, Fordham, Rutgers, and Columbia University. She is a past Time Warner Foundation Fellow at the Women’s Project; a Sagal Fellow at Williamstown Theater Festival; an Audrey Resident at New Georges; and a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab and the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab. From 2014 -18 she co-led the New Georges Jam writer/director group. She has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in English and MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon, where she received the NYDAC / Henry Boettcher award.
Artist’s Social Media:
https://www.instagram.com/sckrohn
https://www.facebook.com/sarah.krohn
Bethany Arts Community’s signature residency attracts artists at different stages of their careers from around the world for the development of both new works and works in progress. The spirit of the program is to provide a collective environment for artists of all disciplines where they can engage in meaningful interaction and stimulating discussions with their peers, while pursuing individual or group projects. It is an ideal setting for the exchange of ideas, the inspiration for new work, and the harmonious cross-fertilization of disciplines.
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, Humanities NY and numerous individual donors.