2020 Residencies at BAC

Julia Forrest
Photographer
About Residency
Bio
Julia Forrest is a Brooklyn based artist. She works strictly in film and prints in a darkroom she built within her apartment. Her own art has always been her top priority in life and in this digital world, she will continue to work with old processing. Anything can simply be done in photoshop, she prefers to take the camera, a tool of showing reality, and experiment with what she can do in front of the lens.
Julia is currently working as a teaching artist at the Brooklyn Museum, USDAN Art Center, and Abrons Art Center. As an instructor, she thinks it is important to understand that a person can constantly stretch and push the boundaries of their ideas with whatever medium of art they choose. Her goal is for her audience to not only enjoy learning about photography, but to see the world in an entirely new way and continue to develop a future interest in the arts.

Kyle Marshall
Choreographer
About Residency
During the residency, Kyle Marshall is developing Jah, a solo tapping into of his Jamaican heritage. As a member of the diaspora Kyle has felt distant from my maternal homeland. With Jah, he is interested in examining and reclaiming his Jamaican body, diving into questions surrounding hyper-masculinity, queerness and redemption.
Bio
Named “New to Watch” by Dance Europe Magazine, Kyle Marshall Choreography (KMC) is a dance company that sees the dancing body as a container of history, an igniter of social reform and a site of celebration. Kyle Marshall Choreography has performed at venues including: Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, Roulette, Actors Fund Arts Center, NYC Summerstage, Wassaic Arts Project and Conduit Dance in Portland, OR. KMC has received residencies from Center of Performance Research, DanceNow at Silo, Jamaica Performing Arts Center and CoLab Arts. Commissions have included: “Dance on the Lawn” Montclair Dance Festival, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and Harlem Stage. Artistic Director and dancer Kyle Marshall, is a 2018 New York Juried “Bessie” Award recipient and a 2017 NJ State Council of the Arts Fellow.

Sarah Heady
Poet
About Residency
Sarah will be working on her book-length serial poem “The Hudson Lines”, a poetic engagement with the Metro-North Railroad.
Bio
Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of Corduroy Road (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2020), Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013), and Tatted Insertion, a letterpress chapbook with artist Leah Virsik. Her manuscript “Comfort” was a finalist for the 2019 Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the 2017 National Poetry Series. She is also the librettist of Halcyon, a new opera about the death and life of Bennett College in Millbrook, NY, with composer Joshua Groffman and producer Vital Opera. Currently at work on a book of linked lyric essays about landscape and class in the Hudson Valley, Sarah spent her childhood in Beacon (before it was cool) and her adolescence up the river in Rhinebeck. She is a co-editor of Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective.

Cherie Lee
Visual Artist
About Residency
Cherie is happy to have the “much needed, unencumbered (and unapologetic) studio time” to “shamelessly dissolve[e], for hours-on-end, into sculpting the first in a three-part-series titled, “Grinding”, an exploration of the boundaries of stress on subject and substance.”
Bio
Cherie Lee is a self-taught, Philadelphia-born artist, who utilizes high speed rotary equipment to reduce genuine Ostrich Eggshells to small-scale, subtractive-sculpture commentaries appreciating, and testing, the limits of faculty and frailty. Whether her subject matter be ecological, sociological or anthropological, she unites substance and subject, gingerly evoking one basic concept: what you have is fragile, no matter it’s strength.
Having grown up suburban-poor, her earliest materials were found objects in nature and readily available household items, predominantly paper. These early works resulted most often in two distinct forms: elaborate dimensional paper sculptures that are white-on-white plays of light and shadow, or intricately detailed, flat black paper-cuts. Both styles notable for what they lack, or what’s been taken away; a concept she hopes might foster a more solid appreciation for what is there.
Shortly after recognizing the humble chicken egg as a perfect 4-dimensional ‘canvas’, one of her first pieces was admitted to the United States White House Permanent Collection. By 2018, she acquired the tools necessary that would allow her to focus solely on her preferred medium, the thick and sturdy ostrich eggshell. Her current body of work explores how much can be taken away from something, be it natural, man-made or conceptual, without removing it’s integrity. “However,” she cautions, “if the strength of an eggshell allows me to push it to it’s furthest limits, it’s fragility reminds me not to.”

Santina Amato
Visual Artist
About Residency
Santina is looking forward to being able to create her ephemeral nature sculptures using a new method of cotton soaked in beeswax. Designed to decompose in the environment, Santina will capture the decomposition over the residency in photographs.
Bio
Santina Amato incorporates video, sculpture, installation, painting and photography to explore the notion of the intimate body, especially the female body. Her practice and is deeply rooted in attempting to translate the complexities of her own female sexuality, desire and erotica. Amato was born in Australia to Italian immigrants, and has lived and worked in the USA since 2010. She received an MFA (Photography) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017) and has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events and the Australian Council for the Arts. Exhibitions and screenings include The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Here Arts Center, NYC, Governors Island Art Fair, NYC and Detroit International Videonale, Kuntshalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, MI. Amato has held positions as Fellow and Artist-in-Residence at MOCA Tucson supported by the Illinois Arts Council Agency (IACA), MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA supported by the City of Chicago’s DCASE, 2018 IAP Grant, Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN, Process Park, Artslant & Chashama, Pine Plains, NY, Filed/Work Program, Chicago Artist Coalition, Chicago, IL. Amato Founded and Directed Moving_Image_00:00, a biannual festival in Chicago of moving image works by Chicago-based artists between 2016-2019. Her work is part of a collective photographic portfolio at The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and The Art Institute of Chicago and video collection at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia.

Lisa Rothe
Playwright
About Residency
While at Bethany, Composer Kim Sherman, Librettist Margaret Vandenburg, Music Director Kimberly Grigsby, and Director Lisa Rothe are reworking “Ada” a music theater work based on the life of Ada Byron (1815-1852), daughter of Lord Byron and early pioneer in computer history. As a crossover work, “Ada” has been a challenge to place. Is it a musical? Is it an opera? What is the best way to tell this story? They will use the residency to comb through the script and score, steer the work towards a music-theatre vocabulary, and discover the aesthetic of their storytelling, finding a way to take it out of its historical context and find contemporary hooks to engage a modern audience.
Bio
Lisa Rothe is a NYC-based freelance theater director, coach and educator. She was nominated for SDC’s Joe A. Callaway Award for Direction for Hold These Truths by Jeanne Sakata, starring Joel De La Fuente. This production has toured the country and won Theatre Bay Area Awards for Outstanding Direction, Performer and Production. Recent directing work has been seen at The Guthrie Theatre, Kansas City Repertory Theater, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Irish Repertory Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Theatreworks/Silicon Valley (nominated for 8 Bay Area Critics Circle Awards), Two River Theater, People’s Light and Playmakers Repertory Theatre. Most recent productions: Steel Magnolias at the Guthrie Theatre; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Fun Home at Kansas City Repertory Theatre. Lisa is the Director of New Works at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, co-Artistic Director of The Actor’s Center in NYC, a recent co-President of the League of Professional Theatre Women, a Usual Suspect with New York Theatre Workshop, member of the National Theater Conference, an Artistic Affiliate and former Audrey Fellow with New Georges, and a Drama League and Fox Fellow alum. She was also the Director of Global Exchange at The Lark for over five years, providing expanded opportunities for playwrights, aimed at advancing new work to production, both nationally and globally.

Chigozie Obi
Visual Artist
About Residency
During her residency, Chigozie will be working on a piece from her ongoing series “Coming up for air” which presents women in opposition to what they have been frequently told to change about themselves.
Bio
Chigozie Obi (b. 1997) is a multi-dimensional visual artist who obtained a bachelors degree of Visual Arts from the Creative Arts department, University of Lagos in 2017. Her work is consistent in the use of vibrant colors and figures to portray emotions and stories formed from personal experiences and focuses on the representation of Black/African people in their diversity. Her work has been featured in several group exhibitions and sales, which include, MoCada Museum’s silent auction (2019), Collective Renditions, African Artists Foundation, Lagos (2019), Rele in Lekki, Lagos (2018), The Studio Scout, Omenka Gallery, Lagos (2018), The First Ibadan Affordable Art Fair (2018), Rasheed Gbadamosi Eko Art Expo (2017). She was selected as Arthouse Contemporary’s Artist of the month – July 2018 and one of the recipients of the inaugural Tilga Fund for Arts Grant (2020)
Her work authenticates her keen interest for the human aspect of life, the body, beauty standards and the strive for self-acceptance. She aims to create sustained conversations about people and society – the cultural narratives adopted and how it affects people in it, especially women.

Brice Garrett
Visual Artist, Jewelry
About Residency
Brice is using his residency to develop ideas of community and participatory artworks. He will be developing “Object Stories” which is a community-sourced art project that documents people’s relationships to personal objects that shape our everyday lives.
Bio
Brice Garrett uses the position of adornment as a source to think through ideas of body, production, labor, value, and memory. Working across disciplines, he utilizes a variety of materials and methods that culminate into wearables, sculptures, installations, and participatory projects. Brice received his MFA from Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden and a BA from San Diego State University. He has been the recipient of awards and residencies from the Museum of Arts and Design, Queens Council on the Arts, The Center for Craft, Manhattan Graphic Center, Tides Institute & Museum of Art and most recently Teton ArtLab. His work has been exhibited across Europe and the United States. He currently teaches jewelry and metal fabrication at Westchester Community College, the 92nd Street Y, and Brooklyn Metal Works.
For more information visit:
www.bricegarrett.com
Instagram:
@Bricegarrett

Anna Mayta
Choreographer
About Residency
While at Bethany, Anna will be choreographing a dance celebrating women and showcasing ideas, themes and concepts of resilience and struggle.
Bio
Anna Mayta grew up in Chile and is a dance improviser, choreographer, and instructor. She graduated from Empire State College in June 2001 with a BA in Dance in Education. In November 2008, she received a certificate to teach yoga from Svyasa Swami Vivekananda Yoga University in Bangalore, India. In 2006, she was awarded a dissemination award from the Dutchess County Arts Council in Poughkeepsie, New York. Ms. Mayta has been teaching, performing, and choreographing for over 15 years. She has developed two programs throughout this time period. One is teaching the Spanish language through movement, and the other is fusion dance, which centers on the incorporation of African, Classical Indian, Flamenco, Modern and Latin dance styles. She has traveled for her work to Bangalore, Pune, Lucknow, and Bombay in India. Additionally, she has taught for The National Ballet of Zimbabwe in Africa, in England, and in the greater Boston Area. She is currently working in the Mid-Hudson Valley and directing her dance company called Mayta fusion dance based in Poughkeepsie NY.Her choreographed solos, such as “Fusion,” “Flamenco Fusion,” and “Veiled” (a metaphor for the plight of women in Afghanistan) have been performed in New York City, the Mid-Hudson Valley, Boston, and India. She has collaborated for many years with artists Gigi Oppenheimer and Jazz singer Maiko Hata. Recently Mayta performed in NYC a piece in collaboration with pianist O Zotique.
Please contact Anna Mayta for information and opportunities at maytafusiondance@gmail.com

Mario Moroni
Poet
About Residency
While at Bethany, Mario will be revising and finalizing a long poem devoted to the myth of Prometheus, as treated in Aeschylus’s tragedy, reimagining it in modern day Manhattan. He will also work on translating from Italian (his native tongue) a series of new poems, in order to work at a later date on arrangements for voice. music, and media in collaboration with composer James Glasgow.
Bio
Mario Moroni has taught at Yale University, the Colby College, and Binghamton University, in the state of New York. He has published eight volumes of poetry and one of poetic prose. In 1989 he was awarded the Lorenzo Montano prize for poetry. His poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. As a critic, Mario Moroni has published Essere e fare (1991), La presenza complessa (1998), and Al limite (2007). He has co-edited three collections of essays: Italian Modernism with L. Somigli, From Eugenio Montale to Amelia Rossellii, with J. Butcher, and Neoavanguardia, with P. Chirumbolo and L.Somigli. In 2006 he released Reflections on Icarus’ Lands, a DVD of poetry, electronic music, and images. In 2016 he released Reciting the Ashes, a CD/DVD for reciting voice, piano, and soprano. In 2018 he has released Recitativi, a CD of music and poetry created with composer James Glasgow of Strange Fangs Song Factory. Moroni has performed his work in dozens of events in Italy, the UK, Spain, France, Brazil, and across the United States.

Daniel Fergus Tamulonis
Writer
About Residency
Daniel will be using the “luxury” of residency time, to work on his young adult fantasy novels. Daniel has two writing projects he is working on. One is the revision of a young adult fantasy novel which he has worked through with two peer critique groups, from which he have gathered so much helpful feedback. He is anticipating additional feedback from a professional editor. Daniel will devote himself to mapping out and digging in to a wholesale revision. At the same time, he has begun a second novel, also young adult but set during a specific six-year period in pre-revolutionary Russia. He will use the time at BAC for some dedicated time to the research. .
Bio
Daniel Fergus Tamulonis has been many things in his life: puppeteer, teacher; Peace Corps Volunteer. Writing marionette plays from a very early age were his first essays into the world of what pen and paper could create. Re-inventing the world as a much more gay-friendly place actively occupies his mind, rejoicing in Madeline Miller’s retelling of The Iliad in her The Song of Achilles and breathing a sigh of relief and recognition at Matthew Bourne’s reinterpretation of Swan Lake. Fleshing out and recasting the fairy tales of Grimm and Andersen inspired his earliest puppet shows. Reimagining those stories occupied many of his solitary, early morning hikes as a paperboy. He credits those hours alone in the dark, freezing or sweating, with his huge bundle of newspapers, walking the silent streets of small town Pennsylvania, as his best times for thinking, creating, becoming.
Tamulonis lives in New York City with his family and teaches at an elementary school in the Bronx. He published his first short story (a long one!), Slung Mugs, about a young American finding himself – and meeting Benjamin Britten – while spending his senior/sixth form year in a British boarding school. His most recent story (and a much shorter one), Verona … after appeared in the new journal Paper Lanterns, created by and for young people (and former young people). His young adult fantasy novel is out on submission and he is working on his next, a historical fiction.

Karen Allen
Visual Artist
About Residency
Karen is looking forward to sharing her artistic process and artwork with the Bethany artist community and sees it as an opportunity for inspiration for her work.
Bio
Karen Allen paintings and drawings in acrylic, oils and pastels are figurative abstractions. The inner feeling and meaning of what has inspired me visually is more important for me than careful rendering. I am
looking for both balance and contrast: to preserve the initial figurative trigger that inspired the work and to visually refine an essence of the feeling or “inner tug” that led me to that image. More and more I seem to be moving closer toward total abstraction. But I don’t feel that I will ever abandon my love of what I can see in the world around me with my eyes. It’s a fine balance …
The various collage elements which I sometimes use introduce an exploration of visual texture and personal historical intimacy. I look for balance and contrast between playfulness and considered graphic call and response during my painting process. Sometimes my working surfaces are 3 dimensional objects whose functionality becomes changed into an allegory or a metaphor. This is a clue of how and what the painting tells me about my interior life. Creating art is for me a contemplative process as well as a physical one.
In my work I am looking for visual paradoxes, a crossing into an immensity of space that may have no relationship to the actual size of things. I am becoming even more interested in how change in physical scale changes a painting’s feelings and intentions. Aesthetically, I am very interested in how pure painting ideas can be scaled to mural sized works in public spaces both to enhance architectural space and express something personal. Underlying all this is what I call my “second truth”. That is, the positive and regenerative life force that I believe lies in the universe we inhabit. A universe so beautiful, yet so full of tragedy, disappointment and darwinian struggle. I am a very flawed and imperfect idealist who actually believes the act of creation by artists has something to do with our deepest calling to be whole.

Erika Meitner
Author
About Residency
Erika will be using her time in the virtual residency to draft 4-5 poems for the new collection she is working on that combines current events with ecopoetics – writing on climate change and racial injustice.
Bio
Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her sixth book of poems, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2022. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Tin House. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and Blue Mountain Center. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Meitner is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech.

Cheryl Moskowitz and Team
Poet / Author / Composer / Sound Artist
About Residency
Cheryl, a poet, along with her collaborators, electronic composer/sound artist, Alastair Gavin (London, UK) and film maker George Gavin, (Brooklyn, NY) will be working on a 7-10 min film which will reference a form of lockdown, albeit metaphorical, producing a joint piece which reflects on individual isolation and particularly the opposing yet compatible states of sensory deprivation and heightened senses
Bio
All Saints Sessions (www.allsaintssessions.uk) was launched in October 2017 as a bi-monthly performance series in a 15th century North London church. The events are curated by UK-based poet and author Cheryl Moskowitz, and composer and sound artist Alastair Gavin, who create, in collaboration with guest artists, one-off evenings of spoken word, music and electronic textures in a quadrophonic sound system for a uniquely immersive live experience. Cheryl has been published in all the major UK poetry journals and has two published collections to her name, and two forthcoming in 2021. Alastair had an 11-year tenure as assistant musical director on Mamma Mia! in London’s West End and is now focussed on electronic composition and 360º field recording. The third member of the team for this Bethany Arts commission is New York-based filmmaker and video designer George Gavin who has previously collaborated with Cheryl and Alastair on their poetry & electronics London show City On Fire (2016); Eternal Mother, a film poem for artist Hayoon Jay-Lee’s 2019 exhibition in the 456 Gallery, NYC; and the recent All Saints Session Milk Opera, produced in lockdown and streamed online Apr 9 this year. His work encompasses award-winning short films and video design for the theatre, inc. The Itch at the New Ohio Theater, NYC (2017).
www.cherylmoskowitz.com
www.alastairgavin.com
www.allsaintssessions.uk

Catherine Weingarten
Playwright
About Residency
Catherine will be working on her brand-new play, “I’m so Hot,” an adaptation of “La Dispute” by Marivaux.
Bio
Catherine Weingarten is a friendly jewish chick from an obscure area of Pennsylvania! Her plays use comedy to expose the societal pressures on young women to be impossibly good looking as well as ridiculously intellectual, humble, kind as can be, but also sexy. Catherine’s summer camp play “Are You Ready to Get PAMPERED!?” had a reading at 59E59 with Less than Rent and also was part of Dixon Place’s Bingo Lounge. Some of her other plays include: Pineapple Upside Down Cake (KCACTF:national semi-finalist), Janis and the Big BAD World (Semi-finalist at Wide Eyed Productions), A Roller Rink Temptation (NOLA Fringe), and Love Potion Number Slut (Tiny Rhino). Her humor writing has been published by McSweeney’s and elsewhere.
BA: Bennington College
MFA: Ohio University

Christine Shaw
Playwright
About Residency
Bio
Christine Octavia Shaw is a devised theater artist dedicated to making work that asks her audiences impossible questions. Past and current provocations include: How do we wrap our heads around the immensity of natural disasters and our climate? (Sheet Metal Soup, 2019); How to we reckon with the absurdity of death? (The Usual, 2019); What does “surviving” sexual assault actually look like and how does a person heal? (The Aftermath, 2020); and how do women navigate the complex choices around motherhood? (The Motherhood Project, 2020-2030). Georgia-born and raised, she attended Yale University where she studied theater and dance. Since then, she has performed and created original works in Chicago (The Home for Wayward Artists), New York (The Araca Project), and Philadelphia. Now Philadelphia-based, she recently received her MFA from the UArts/Pig Iron program in devised theater..

Anantha Krishnan
Film Maker
About Residency
Bio
Anantha Krishnan involved in transcending cinematographic narratives. Worked as cinematographer for Tehelka music project and Magic lantern movies in New Delhi. He moved to Portugal to pursue the Doc Nomads Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree 2017-2020 (EMJMD) in Documentary Filmmaking delivered by a consortium of the University of Lusofona in Portugal, University of Theatre and Film Arts in Hungary and St. Lucas School of Arts in Belgium. Currently working as Camera trainee under different Belgian cinematographers.

Tacie Jones
Visual Artist
About Residency
During her virtual residency, Tacie will be spending time in the hundred wooded acres next to her home, mentally sketching, taking videos and photographs for small series of fabric-based, projection-mapped sculptures.
Bio
Tacie Jones is an artist working in video, media installation, sculpture, photography and socially-engaged practice. Her recent work explores ancestral embodiment by way of probing the juxtaposition between impermanence and materiality in the sensorial reconciliation of trauma. Her combined background in new media and studio art, social practice and non-profit community work engage creativity and interconnection as catalysts for understanding the individual’s part in community resilience. Tacie holds a BFA in Studio Art from George Mason University, an MRes (Master of Research) in Creative Practices from the Glasgow School of Art, and an MFA in Creative Technologies from Virginia Tech. She is currently working toward an interdisciplinary PhD at Virginia Tech. She lives with her foodsmith partner, tending their two pups and gardens in the mountainous countryside of Blacksburg, Virginia.

Susan Jennifer Polese
Playwright
About Residency
As a playwright inspired by different forms of writing, visual arts, dance, music, and social activism, Susan plans to use her time at Bethany to develop a theatrical piece with music and video installations.
Bio
Susan Jennifer Polese is an American, journalist, editor and award-winning playwright whose work is seen regionally and at such venues as La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, HERE Performing Arts Center, The Midtown International Theatre Festival, and Planet Connections Festivity in Manhattan, NY. Trained in New York at The Wonderhorse Theatre, Herbert Berghof Studio, and Hunter College she has taught playwriting through Purchase College, Axial Theatre Collaborative and is facilitating “Playwriting in Paradise” at Key West Fringe Theatre, Key West Florida. Her work is fueled through social justice and is often performed as fundraisers/awareness enhancers for nonprofits. Susan is a member of The International Centre for Women Playwrights and Theatre Without Borders. She attended La Mama’s International Playwright Retreat in Umbria, Italy and is a member of The Dramatists Guild of America. www.susanjenniferpolese.com

Andrea Vonbujoss
Visual Artist
About Residency
Andrea will be expanding her visual vocabulary of complex patterns and typography, and also creating new three-dimensional versions of her two-dimensional explorations of composition and form. While much of her work will be prepared before arriving at Bethany, she will use her time here to explore weather-proof materials and experiment with installations.
Bio
Andrea von Bujdoss (AKA “Queen Andrea”) is a NYC-based fine artist, graffiti artist, typographer and graphic designer. A die-hard native New Yorker raised in downtown Manhattan, Andrea has been deeply inspired by the urban landscape from an early age. Her style is consistently marked by a bold use of color, design and advanced typography. As a young teen part of a newer generation of early 1990’s graffiti writers, she befriended some of the most prolific old school subway graffiti writers and diligently taught herself the complicated artform of graffiti by consistently practicing her letters and eventually developing her own unique style. She earned a BFA in Graphic Design and began a successful career, working for worldwide brands who appreciate her versatile and passionate knowledge of typography, branding and visual communication. Her work has directly impacted graffiti, streetwear and urban culture. Andrea has spent nearly 20 years perfecting her graffiti and typography skillsets and she is now an internationally notable female graffiti artist and muralist.
The excitement, color, diversity and crazy energy of city life, and especially graffiti, is where Andrea finds her creative inspiration. Renegade cutting-edge artforms, brash sub-cultures and lifestyles that have sprang forth from an ever-changing urban metropolis give her the visual stimulus, the guts, and the urge to create and innovate. Her artistic style is influenced by an endless appreciation of typography, as well as themes of urban life, song lyrics, the advertising age, pop culture, geometry, symbolism, signpainter lettering and super bright color palettes. Andrea’s newest paintings are intricate and intense explorations of geometry, color and form which create fantastical, bright worlds of abstraction. Her new 3-dimensional works are exciting and tactile versions of her lively style, in various sizes. Back in the streets, Andrea has developed a reputation for her oversized typography murals. She has been featured in major art shows, solo shows, magazines, books, fashion lines, brand collaborations and has curated and exhibited in numerous art shows around the world.

David Baer
Photographer
About Residency
David will be experimenting with building techniques to create sculptures from recyclable materials that can be built incrementally or ‘added onto’ as the materials are accumulated.
Bio
David R. Baer is a photographer, inventor and multi-media artist whose work explores the convergence of art and technology. After a career as an advertising photographer, he became one of the first professors of digital imaging in higher education. As an arts instructor he developed curriculum in STEAM education for both children and adults. David is currently working on sculptural projects that involve repurposing recyclable materials, and/or that make statements about health, privacy, and waste in our society.
Kimberly Grigsby
Composer
About Residency
While at Bethany, Composer Kim Sherman, Librettist Margaret Vandenburg, Music Director Kimberly Grigsby, and Director Lisa Rothe are reworking “Ada” a music theater work based on the life of Ada Byron (1815-1852), daughter of Lord Byron and early pioneer in computer history. As a crossover work, “Ada” has been a challenge to place. Is it a musical? Is it an opera? What is the best way to tell this story? They will use the residency to comb through the script and score, steer the work towards a music-theatre vocabulary, and discover the aesthetic of their storytelling, finding a way to take it out of its historical context and find contemporary hooks to engage a modern audience.
Bio
Kimberly Grigsby
Kim Sherman
Composer
About Residency
While at Bethany, Composer Kim Sherman, Librettist Margaret Vandenburg, Music Director Kimberly Grigsby, and Director Lisa Rothe are reworking “Ada” a music theater work based on the life of Ada Byron (1815-1852), daughter of Lord Byron and early pioneer in computer history. As a crossover work, “Ada” has been a challenge to place. Is it a musical? Is it an opera? What is the best way to tell this story? They will use the residency to comb through the script and score, steer the work towards a music-theatre vocabulary, and discover the aesthetic of their storytelling, finding a way to take it out of its historical context and find contemporary hooks to engage a modern audience.
Bio
“When I was a young composer, it took me a long time to say that I was a composer. At that time, we didn’t learn about women composers in music history. There was no reference in my mind for who I was and how I fit in. My early composing years were fueled by a sense of rebellion and peppered with “I’ll show them” gestures. In many ways, I did not take myself seriously. Despite that, I took every opportunity I found to create music. A great many of the opportunities in my early days of music making were in the theater. And the theater asked me to write in different styles and modes. It asked me to do a lot with one or two instruments. It asked my to explore the relationship between text and soundscape. It asked me to create an emotional and dramaturgical transition in less than ten seconds. It taught me to rewrite my ideas to fit with a scene shift. It led me to writing for the voice, and to tell a story with sound. To this day, I consider every piece of music I write to be a story. A story worth telling. And finally, I take myself and my creative work seriously. Sometimes I wonder how differently I might have expressed myself if I had been born in a different world. A world that valued and embraced female voices. And yet, this strange-turning journey has led me to here. Still writing, still striving, still willing to try a new thing.”
Kim Sherman composes for the theater as well as opera, the concert stage, and film. Her music has been described as “rhapsodic and lush” as well as “craggy and leap-about.” She embraces lyricism and dissonance as equal partners in conveying dramatic musical landscapes.
In 2019, THE CLARA CYCLE, for Soprano, Violin and Piano premiered at Steinway Hall in NYC. SUMMER, 1976 a song cycle for lyric baritone and string quartet was premiered at The Opera Center in New York City in 2016. SONG OF SONGS, for strings, harp and soprano was premiered in 2004 by San José Chamber Orchestra and soprano Allison Charney. GRAVESIDE, her a cappella choral work, was recorded by Musica Sacra and has been performed throughout the US and Europe.
On Broadway, she wrote incidental music for I HATE HAMLET. Her music-theater works include LOVE’S COMEDY (a chamber opera based on the play by Henrik Ibsen,) and several musicals, among them: HEARTLAND (TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Goodspeed, Milwaukee Rep, Dallas Summer Musicals.) O PIONEERS! (Huntington Theatre Company, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Baltimore Center Stage, The Acting Company,) HONOR SONG FOR CRAZY HORSE (TheatreWorks Silicon Valley,) THE BOXCAR CHILDREN (Theatreworks USA,) and THE TWO ORPHANS (Brandeis University.) She has written incidental music for many plays in regional theaters throughout the United States.
Currently under construction is a through-composed music-theatre work: ADA, the spectacular story of computer pioneer Ada Lovelace. Also in development is a musical theatre work based on a letter written by Samuel Clemens to his daughter Susy.
Ms. Sherman studied piano and composition at Lawrence University, and composition and orchestration with composer Thea Musgrave. Her career started in Minneapolis, where she was awarded two Kudos Awards for her work in the theatre. She has enjoyed residencies at The MacDowell Colony and The Banff Centre. A New Yorker since 1983, she is a regular volunteer composer and mentor for The 52nd Street Project.
During their time on site, these artists developed new works while engaging with local artists and the public.
Resident Artists
Santina Amato, Julia Forrest, Brice Garrett, Kimberly Grisby, Kyle Marshall, Anna Mayta, Mario Moroni, Kim Sherman, Susan Polese, Lisa Rothe, Kim Sherman, Daniel Fergus Tamulonis, Andrea Vonbujoss
Virtual Resident Artists
Karen Allen, David Baer, Sarah Heady, Tacie Jones, Anantha Krishnan, Cherie Lee, Erika Meitner, Cheryl Moskowitz and Team, Chigozie Obi, Christine Shaw, Catherine Weingarten
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. Our resident artists this year include visual artists in any medium, writers, playwrights, choreographers, musicians, composers, performance artists, filmmakers, and lighting, projection, costume and sound designers. 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.