Robert ashley
and alex waterman

Please note: All bios are written by the performers.

Nikolai Antonie
Projectionist
Alexandra Rosenberg is a multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Since graduating from Carnegie Mellon University (BFA ‘06), Antonie has developed a unique multidisciplinary practice with a focus on video. Antonie’s interests in Installation and Sculpture influence his wide range of collaborative video works. Collaboration aligns with his core belief that the basis for creativity is communication. Antonie’s experience as a visual effects artist in film and television has informed his ability to articulate his wide range of artistic interests. His work often places narrative concerns on equal footing with the visual, weaving these elements together to create affecting stories. Antonie co-founded the creative collective Satan’s Pearl Horses (SPH). The collective’s collaborations have centered around contemporary composers based in New York City. The group created an eclectic range of music videos and short films inspired by the work of a variety of composers. These collaborations include Matt Marks’ The Little Death Vol.1, Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads, David T. Little’s group Newspeak, and Bryan Senti’s From The Margins, This, Unmentioned. SPH also worked closely with the group TRANSIT’s experimental multimedia collaboration Corps Exquis. The collective’s work reflects Antonie’s belief in the collaborative process strengthening art’s ability to communicate. Antonie’s work has screened at a variety of NYC-based venues, including Incubator Arts Project, Le Poisson Rouge, Galapagos Art Space, Public Assembly, and Glasslands, among others.

Gelsey Bell
Performer
Gelsey Bell is a singer, songwriter, and scholar. She has released two studio albums, Under A Piano (2005) and In Place of Arms (2010), two experimental albums, February (2008) and Love Is Just a Crack In the Space of You (2009), and the digital album SCALING live at Roulette (2012). Her work has been presented internationally in the Vital Vox festival, the BEAT festival, the LUMEN festival, the SITE festival, and Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques in France, and most recently, Voice – Creature of Transition in Amsterdam. Gelsey is a core member of thingNY and Varispeed. In addition, she has worked with numerous composers, choreographers, and performance creators including Robert Ashley, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, Kimberly Bartosik, Yasuko Yokoshi, Dave Malloy, Rachel Chavkin, Alec Duffy, John King, Chris Cochrane and Fast Forward (as the Chutneys), Kate Soper, Miguel Frasconi, Panoply Performance Laboratory, No Collective, Tom Swafford, and Jay Vilnai. Gelsey is a Doctoral Candidate in Performance Studies at NYU, where she is completing a dissertation on twentieth-century experimental vocal music. She is also TDR/The Drama Reviews’s Critical Acts Editor with T. Nikki Cesare.

David Gutkin
Projectionist
David Gutkin is a Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology at Columbia University. He has published on graphic notation in Perspectives of New Music and Robert Ashley’s operas in Opera Quarterly (forthcoming), and has served as editor-in-chief of Current Musicology. Last year David was an artist in residence at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. At the moment he is writing a dissertation on postwar American opera and experimental music theater.

Amirtha Kidambi
Performer
Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the performance and creation of exploratory musics, ranging from South Indian Carnatic, Improvisation, Weirdo rock, and the Avant-Garde. As a performer, songwriter, educator, and curator, she strives to draw connections between seemingly disparate musical disciplines and communities. As a soloist, collaborator and ensemble member in groups such as, the Early Music influenced band Seaven Teares, the percussion and analog electronics outfit Ashcan Orchestra, and vocal quartet Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, Amirtha has performed in a variety of venues from DIY spaces to concert halls including ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, Clocktower Gallery, 285 Kent, Death by Audio, Silent Barn, Le Poisson Rouge, and The Kitchen. Her band Seaven Teares released their debut album Power Ballads in 2013 on Northern Spy Records. Recent projects include Apollo’s Accidental Answer a chamber opera with the Ashcan Orchestra, the premiere of Muhal Richard Abrams’ Dialogue Social, and The Oversoul Manual by Darius Jones with a forthcoming album on Aum Fidelity Records in Fall 2014. Amirtha is lucky to have the baffling honor of working with Robert Ashley since 2011 in That Morning Thing and the premiere of WWW III (Just the Highlights). He taught her a lot of things. Amirtha earned a B.F.A. from Loyola Marymount University and a M.M. from CUNY Brooklyn College. In 2012, Amirtha joined the staff at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn as the Director of Operations. Amirtha is concerned with punk ideology, anti-racist and inclusionary practices, and community building.

Brian McCorkle
Performer
Brian McCorkle is a composer, musician, and performer. In addition to his work as What Color is Your Machine Gun? and with the composer’s collective Varispeed, he is the Co-Director of the Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) with Esther Neff. PPL makes large scale performance art operas in addition to duo and small group performances around the world. PPL also operates a space for experimental music and performance in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Their next opera, Any Size Mirror is a Dictator, made in collaboration with Drearysomebody (Lindsey Drury) will be published and premiered September 2014.

Paul Pinto
Performer
Paul Pinto creates and produces experimental music and theatrical works in traditional and non-traditional spaces, and is the founder and co-director of ensembles thingNY and Varispeed. His own compositions blend chamber music with theatre with a focus on total performativity. Paul has chosen to work equally with traditional instruments, lo-fi electronics, unconventional sound-makers and amateur musicians, creating one-minute opera, concert length chamber music, and durational performance art. Paul has focused on new experimental opera. In addition to his new collaboration with Rick Burkhardt and Joan La Barbara, Thomas Paine in Violence, Paul has co-written and performed the operas ADDDDDDDDD, TIME: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts, and Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment. He is also composing an ongoing series of mini[atures] for vocalizing instrumentalists. Paul has performed in The Kitchen’s recent remounting of Robert Ashley’s 1967 opera That Morning Thing, in the New York premiere of Vinko Globokar’s Un Jour Comme Un Autre, and in new works presented by Dave Malloy, Rachel Chavkin, Experiments in Opera, the Panoply Performance Laboratory, and Performa. Upcoming engagements include the performances at the Whitney Biennial, the New Dischord Festival in Chattanooga, Perfect Lives at the Hear/Now Festival in Pittsburgh, and the development of Thomas Paine in Violence with the ensemble Ne(x)tworks and as part of the HERE Artist Residency Program through 2017.

Dave Ruder
Performer
Dave Ruder is a Brooklyn-based vocalist, clarinetist, guitarist, electronicist, composer, songwriter, writer/librettist, interdisciplinary collaborator, etc. Dave is a key member of the band Why Lie?, the ensembles Varispeed and thingNY, and the storytelling project Dave & Woody’s Chicken Slaughtering LLC. He has worked extensively with composer Robert Ashley, premiering his opera Crash (2013) and the vocal work World War III: Just the Highlights (2010) in addition to interpreting his pieces Perfect Lives, That Morning Thing, Trios (White on White), and Public Opinion Descends Upon the Demonstrators. Additionally, Dave has worked with Anthony Braxton, Aaron Siegel, Andrew Lafkas (Eidolon), Kimberly Bartosik, Abigail Levine, Joanna Kotze, Dušan Týnek, and Panoply Performance Laboratory. For two years, Dave curated and ran the Flowering Inconsistencies performance series in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Since 2013, Dave has been the driving force behind Gold Bolus Recordings. As a composer, his work has been featured in Experiments in Opera and his WHY LIE? project, 100+ open scores, is available online. Dave holds degrees from Wesleyan University and Brooklyn College. 

Aliza Simons
Performer
Aliza Simons is a musician, transmission artist and ceramicist based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a member of the composer-performer collective Varispeed, and the experimental-pop band Why Lie?. She was honored to work with Robert Ashley in That Morning Thing and World War III: Just the Highlights (2010), and she will be performing a site-specific version of Ashley’s Perfect Lives with Varispeed in Pittsburgh on May 22. She is currently at work on The Tip of The Crest of The Bridge, an interactive sculptural installation using FM transmitters, a piece she developed as an artist-in-residence at the Wave Farm in 2013. Simons is also the co-founder of Henry Street Studio, a line of handcrafted tabletop ceramics designed and created in New York City.

Andrea Springer
Projectionist
Andrea Springer is a native of Fairbanks, Alaska and currently based in Brooklyn, and is a violinist specializing in contemporary music. A founder and co-director of new music ensembles TRANSIT and Redshift, Springer is also a member of Hotel Elefant and has performed and recorded with such bands as Redhooker, Arturo en el Barco, Phthia, Pearl and the Beard and The Threefifty Duo. Springer has also had the pleasure of performing with David Byrne, Victoire, Ensemble de Sade, Anti-Social Music, Wordless Music Orchestra, Argento Ensemble, and American Opera Projects. She is a member the New York City Players and tours with their production of Richard Maxwell’s theater piece, Neutral Hero. As a soloist, Springer has premiered and commissioned numerous works for violin including For Andie Springer by Robert Ashley, Dandelion by Mary Kouyoumdjian, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Leaha Villareal, Mixtape for the Summer of 1963 by Matt Marks, and Stealing an Image, by Bryan Jacobs. Springer has also worked closely with Chinary Ung, Anthony Braxton, Robert Rowe, Tristan Perich, Richard Carrick, Jad Abumrad, and members of Bang on a Can and eighth blackbird. Andie earned her BFA at Carnegie Mellon University with Professor Andres Cardenes, and her MFA at New York University with Professor Arturo Delmoni. She has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Strings Festival Orchestra in Steamboat Springs, the Orchestra for a New Century and the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra, and her playing has been broadcast on stations WQED FM, KUAC FM, WBGO FM, WBAI FM and WFMU FM. She enjoys teaching and is currently on the faculty the Larchmont Music Academy.

Please note: All bios are written by the performers.

Raul De Nieves
Will, Ed, The Captain of the Football Team
Raul De Nieves combines an emphasis on hand-made craftsmanship and creative uses of (dys)functional language in his explorations of excess and identity. His body of work encompasses narrative painting, decadent multimedia performance, large-scale figurative sculpture, live music, and ornamental self-crafted shoes and garments to engage his audience. His personal mythology ranges in scope and complexity in the form of childish tantrum or cosmic interplays of manifestation and dissolution.

Elisa Santiago
Isolde, Gwyn, Ida; Costumes, Vidas Perfectas
Elisa Santiago is a dancer and performance artist. Originally from Spain, she moved to Amsterdam to pursue studies in choreography at SNDO. There she met Alex Waterman, and they began collaborating on dance-theater pieces. With Voin de Voin she presented performance installations at Ellen de Bruijne Gallery (Amsterdam), Frascati Theater (Amsterdam), France Fiction Gallery (Paris), Museum Quarter (Vienna), Arnhem Mode Biennale, La Fabrica Gallery (Madrid), and many other European venues, and in Tokyo (1999-2005). After moving to NYC, she shifted her practice to costuming for theater and film. Occasional collaborations as a dancer include The K Sound with Michael Portnoy at The Kitchen (2006) and, with dancer Felicia Ballos, a series of improvisations informed by Anna Craycroft’s Sequential Bodies at Tracy Williams Gallery (2011) and Roulette (2012).

Ned Sublette
Raoul de Noget
Ned Sublette is known for his work integrating musical, cultural, and political history. As a singer-songwriter, his albums include Kiss You Down South (Postmambo); Cowboy Rumba (Palm Pictures); and Monsters from the Deep (with Lawrence Weiner) and Ships at Sea, Sailors and Shoes (with Lawrence Weiner and the Persuasions) (Excellent). His song Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (1981) was released by Willie Nelson in 2006. In the 1990s he co-founded the record label Qbadisc, which pioneered the marketing of contemporary Cuban music in the United States in the early 90s. He produced many episodes of the public radio program Afropop Worldwide and co-founded their Hip Deep series. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Tulane Rockefeller Humanities Fellow, and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. He is the author of The Year Before the Flood (2009); The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (2008); and Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (2004), and with Constance Sublette, of the forthcoming The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (2015).

Elio Villafranca
Buddy, “The World’s Greatest Piano Player”
Elio Villafranca was born in the Pinar del Río province of Cuba. A Steinway Artist pianist and composer, Mr. Villafranca was classically trained in percussion and composition at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba. Since his arrival in the U.S. in mid-1995, Elio Villafranca has been at the forefront of the latest generation of remarkable pianists, composers and bandleaders. Last year, Mr. Villafranca was among the five pianists hand selected by Chick Corea to perform at the first Chick Corea Jazz Festival, curated by Chick himself at JALC. He also received a 2010 Grammy Nomination in the Best Latin Jazz Album of the Year category. Over the years, Villafranca has recorded and performed nationally and internationally as a leader, featuring jazz master artists such as Pat Martino, Terell Stafford and Billy Hart, among others. As a sideman he has collaborated with leading jazz and Latin jazz artists including: Wynton Marsalis; Jon Faddis and Billy Harper, among others. He is based in New York City, and is currently resident professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.

Please note: All bios are written by the performers.

Alisa Besher
Proxy
Alisa Besher is Film Production graduate from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has worked at the intersection of film and cultural events programming and museum education at institutions such as The Filmmaker’s Coop, The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of the Moving Image and CEC ArtsLink. Alisa was born in Moscow, Russia, where she still spends most summers. She has also lived in Rennes, France and Prague, Czech Republic. She writes and illustrates for the drawer.

Barbara Bloom
On Trial: Thursday, April 23
Barbara Bloom is an artist who lives in New York. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including the Getty Research Institute Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, The Venice Biennale Due Mille prize, and DAAD Berlin Fellowship.Her work has been shown internationally including exhibitions at MoMA, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London; MoCA, Los Angeles; and The Metropolitan Museum, New York. Her quasi-retrospective exhibition The Collections of Barbara Bloom, was shown at ICP, New York and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. Her exhibition As it were … So to Speak was shown last year at the Jewish Museum, New York.

Wayne Koestenbaum
On Trial: Saturday, April 26
Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, and artist. He has published nine books of nonfiction, on such subjects as hotels, Harpo Marx, humiliation, Jackie Onassis, opera, and Andy Warhol. His latest book of prose is My 1980s & Other Essays (FSG, 2013). His six books of poetry include Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (Turtle Point, 2012) and Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (Turtle Point, 2006). He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes (Soft Skull, 2004). His first solo exhibition of paintings was at White Columns gallery in New York in Fall 2012. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Mary Farley
On Trial: Sunday, April 27
Mary Farley lives and works in Marfa, TX, and Peconic, NY. She has worked collaboratively with various artists and as a forensic therapist. Most recently, she acted in and consulted on Larry Clark’s film, Marfa Girl.
 
Amy Sillman
On Trial: Thursday, April 24
Amy Sillman is a painter whose work proposes conversations between abstraction and figuration, humor and seriousness. Her work has been written about and exhibited widely in the US and more recently in Europe, including participation in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Sillman’s work is in many public collections, including The Whitney Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tate Museum, London. She has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Tiffany, and NEA grants, and many Fellowships including The American Academy in Berlin and The Radcliffe Institute. Her mid-career survey show and monograph one lump or two, which originated at ICA/Boston, is on view this spring at the Aspen Art Museum, and will travel this summer to The Hessel Museum at Bard College. Sillman lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Kendra Sullivan
Proxy
Kendra Sullivan is a writer, artist, curator, and boatmaker living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, F.R.DAVID, and Martha Rosler’s Gar(b)age Sale Standard. Her artwork has been presented at: Bureau for Open Culture, Mass MoCA; Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts; and tenletters, Glasgow. She co-curated Private Line (2011-13), Sea Worthy (2011), and Which is Friendship (2015). Her engagement in water-born art practices has lead to the production of exhibitions, a film, and numerous community-driven environmental interventions. She works at the Center for the Humanities and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Archive Initiative at The Graduate Center, CUNY

Please note: All bios are written by members of the production team.

Annie Arthur
Assistant Lighting Designer; Stage Manager, Vidas Perfectas
Annie Arthur is happy to have the opportunity to be working on the Robert Ashley/Alex Waterman operas at the Whitney Biennial as David Moodey’s assistant and Stage Manager for Vidas Perfectas. This is her first time working on a piece by Robert Ashley and she is proud to be a part of this exciting work. Other theatrical work includes set and lighting design for professional and educational theater. She is also the founder of Annie’s Shakespeare Shakedown, an interactive and immersive theater company in the New York area.

Adam Bach
Sound Engineer, Vidas Perfectas and The Trial
Tatyana Tenenbaum’s Private Country at The Chocolate Factory (2013), Object Collection’s No Hotel at Incubator Arts Space (2013), Yoshiko Chuma’s Love Story: Palestine at La Mama (2012), and Universe’s Ameriville (2009-2011). From 2012-13 Adam was the Sound Supervisor for the ongoing immersive theater piece, Sleep No More by the British theatre company Punchdrunk. His original music compositions and sound installations have been performed and shown at the Marianne Boesky Gallery NYC, John Graham & Sons, at Pine Box, and at Vaudeville Park in Brooklyn. adambach.com

Sarah Crowner
Backdrops and Set Pieces, Vidas Perfectas 
Sarah Crowner lives and works in New York City. Employing both original and appropriated compositions as patterns or templates, Crowner’s canvases and sculptures exist as hand-built objects that evoke the hard-edge paintings of the Modernist movement. These objects, constructed by sewing together painted panels of canvas, raw linen and monochromatic fabrics, introduce a human element to Modernist aesthetics which often championed the removal of the artist’s hand. Materiality, gestural brushstrokes and the irregularity of her sewn lines all act in sync to transform and challenge the legacy of hard-edged abstraction. Recently the artist has begun to engage the performative aspects of painting and sculpture, creating large scale painted backdrops, and curved platforms and stage sets for theater, for example in Vidas Perfectas, which also appeared (in part) at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2012, and will travel to El Paso and Marfa, TX in July 2014. Crowner received her BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA from Hunter College in 2002. Crowner has participated in major institutional exhibitions worldwide, including: 2010 Whitney Biennial; Painter, Painter, Walker Art Center; Abstract Generation: Now in Print, MoMA, New York; Splendor Tkaniny, Zacheta National Museum of Art, Warsaw; Excursus IV, ICA Philadelphia; and ExistenZ, Wiels, Brussels, all in 2013. Crowner has also recently shown at Nordenhake, Stockholm; Catherine Bastide, Brussels; and Helena Papadopoulos, Athens.

Sean Daly
Production Design, Vidas Perfectas and The Trial
Sean Daly lives in Los Angeles, California. His work as a production designer has appeared in film and television, as well as in printed formats for advertising. Daly explores the objective ability to create a psychology out of inanimate objects and spaces, and to wordlessly narrate a greater visual story. He has a keen awareness of the minutiae required to build controlled worlds filled with emotional information and visual history. He pays particular attention to character choices, and weighs the cumulative effects of their decisions while controlling the impact that they paint into an overall landscape. A broad knowledge of art history, and the constant study of high and low culture, inform the highly controlled material environments, and performative spaces that Daly constructs. As a set designer, Daly works on fashion advertising campaigns, and editorial stories with some of the industry’s leading photographers, for worldwide print and periodical publication. He has served as an artistic advisor to the leading role actors of critically acclaimed motion picture titles (The Soloist, Seven Psychopaths) and Academy Award Nominated (Sherlock Holmes). Daly received a BA in Comparative Literature from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1998. Daly was in residence at Watermill Center in 2013, with artist Laleh Khorramian. Daly also designed and executed immersive environments for Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, JC Penney, and Barclay’s Wealth

Peter Gordon
Music Producer, Vidas Perfectas
Peter Gordon studied composition with Robert Ashley at Mills College and was the music producer for the original Perfect Lives. A seminal figure in the downtown New York music community, Gordon is a composer, saxophonist and keyboard player whose work is noted for its original blend of lyricism, wit, and drama – often with a funky beat. Gordon is best known for his Love of Life Orchestra, which integrates experimentalism with pop grooves. He has composed music for theater and performance works, earning him OBIE and Bessie Awards and has an ongoing collaboration with video artist Kit Fitzgerald. Peter Gordon’s recordings have been released on the Lovely Music, Lust-Unlust, CBS Masterworks, Warner Brothers, Bridge Records, Newtone and DFA labels. Recent releases include the James Murphy/Pat Mahoney remix on Fabriclive 36; his opera with Lawrence Weiner, The Society Architect Ponders the Golden Gate Bridge, on the Crosstalk anthology (Bridge Records); the anthology Love of Life Orchestra (DFA Records); Gordon’s collaboration with Factory Floor, Beachcombing (Optimo Music); and he produced and arranged Tim Burgess’ new single Oh Men, to be released on Record Store Day. Gordon’s Symphony #5, recorded last year at Roulette in Brooklyn will be released by Foom Music (UK) in May.

Victoria Keddie
Live Video Composition, Vidas Perfectas and The Trial 
Victoria Keddie is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She works in varying media involving audio / visual signal generation, magnetic field recording, and broadcast. Keddie has programmed events internationally, with a focus on experimental sound, live cinema, and transmission-based arts. As an archivist, she focuses on preserving analog experimental sound and radio collections. She is the co-director of E.S.P. TV, a nomadic organization that programs analog-based live broadcast events and exhibitions, as well as a series on MNN cable access. She is the founder of Optics O:O, an archival film program that investigates hybrid filmmaking techniques with early video and software systems. She is a founding member of the film-based collective, Optipus. She holds a BFA from University of the Arts with a Senior Mobility Fellowship at California College of Arts, and an MA in Museum Studies from NYU, with a concentration on Ephemeral Media collections. She has exhibited and performed at such venues as New Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Museum of Arts and Design, The Kitchen, Canada Gallery (New York City), Museum of the Moving Image (Queens), Microscope Gallery, Spectacle, Silent Barn (Brooklyn), Liminal Space (Oakland), Pallas Projects (Dublin), and General Public, (Berlin).

Scott Kiernan
Live Video Composition, Vidas Perfectas and The Trial
Scott Kiernan is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in New York City. He was a founder and director of Louis V E.S.P., a not-for-profit gallery and performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2010-2012) and co-founder/director of E.S.P. TV, a nomadic curatorial platform for performance/video which takes the form of a live television show. He has exhibited work internationally in venues such as New Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Storefront for Art and Architecture, NurtureArt, PS122, Mixed Greens (NYC), Southern Exposure and Baer Ridgway Projects (San Francisco) Centro Internazionale Per L’Arte Contemporanea (Rome), KT&G Sangsangmadang (Seoul) and the Third Guangzhou Triennial (China), amongst others. Kiernan received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2007.

ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann
Associate Producer
Thomas O. Kriegsmann is a producer, manager and curator who founded ArKtype in 2006 toward the long-term development, production and touring of new internationally based performance work on various scales. ArKtype’s work has been seen worldwide, including projects with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yael Farber, Peter Brook, Jay Scheib, Julie Taymor, Yaron Lifschitz, Dmitry Krymov, and Victoria Thiérrée-Chaplin. Recent premieres include Big Dance Theater / Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Man In A Case and the off-Broadway run of Nalaga’at Deaf-Blind Theater’s Not By Bread Alone. Additional projects include Theatre for a New Audience & Julie Taymor; Rude Mechs (Austin); Big Dance Theater; Baryshnikov Productions; Lisa Peterson & Denis O’Hare / Homer’s Coat; Soho Rep.; Aurélia Thiérrée & Victoria Thiérrée-Chaplin (France); Andrew Ondrejcak / Shara Worden; En Garde Productions / Basetrack; Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis (Seattle/New Haven); Young Vic / Kafka’s Monkey (London); CHRISTEENE / Paul Soileau (Austin); Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen; Circa (Brisbane); Compagnia T.P.O. (Italy); Erth (Sydney); Sam Green / Yo La Tengo & yMusic; Arcane Collective (Dublin); Joshua Light Show; and World/Inferno Friendship Society. Upcoming premieres include Sam Green’s The Great Heart of Humanity with yMusic, and Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen’s How to Be A Rock Critic.

Philip Makanna
Photographs, Crash
Philip Makanna is a painter / sculptor / photographer, originally from New York, who received his B.A. from Brown University and M.A. from the University of California, Berkley. He has lived in San Francisco since the 1960s. Since 1977, Makanna has had twelve one-man exhibitions of his photography. Examples can be found in the Sam Wagstaff Collection at the Getty Museum and in the Permanent Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art. Makanna’s work in photography was represented by the Witkin Gallery in New York and by the Hansen Fuller Goldeen Gallery in San Francisco. Makanna’s photographs were exhibited in a one-man show organized by the United States Information Agency that toured worldwide to 20 countries. Makanna has exhibited widely as a painter and as a sculptor. His sculpture was shown in the Whitney Annual exhibition in 1966. His work in painting and sculpture was represented by The Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. He has made five major films and received major film awards. He was the founder and director of the Fine Arts Video Center at CCA. His video work was has been sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and exhibited at the Whitney Museum. Robert Ashley provided music for Makanna’s films, Battery Davis and Shoot The Whale and Makanna collaborated with Ashley on the 14-hour video opera/documentary, Music with Roots in the Aether (artistic direction and video camera). Five books of Makanna’s aviation photography have been published. Since 1980 his photographs of lovingly restored and maintained WWI and WWII aircraft (in flight) have been featured annually in the calendars, Ghosts, A Time Remembered and Ghosts of The Great War.

David Moodey
Lighting Designer
David Moodey has been collaborating with Robert Ashley for 15 years, most recently designing lights for That Morning Thing at The Kitchen in NYC. Other highlights include designing sets and lights for Dust, Celestial Excursions and Concrete, presented in repertory at La MaMa, NYC and numerous European tours. David is also the principle lighting designer for Molissa Fenley, choreographer. For over 25 years he has designed and toured with Molissa worldwide, winning a Bessie award for Lighting Design for her State of Darkness. Other recent works include La Boheme, The Gift of the Magi and Phillip Glass’s Days and Nights Festival at Hidden Valley Music Institute, Carmel, CA, The Nutcracker for the Joffrey Ballet Concert Group at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, NYC, Pericles, directed by David Schwitzer at NYU, and Authors Direct Authors at La MaMa, with authors and directors Marco Calvani and Neil LaBute. Other collaborations include David Neumann’s Advanced Beginner Group, Big Dance Theater, and choreographer Helen Heinemen. David also spent 29 years at the Metropolitan Opera House, designing and engineering mechanical and moving effects. He received his MFA at NYU for theater design (sets and lights). He is also a member of both the United Scenic Artist Union, #829 and the NY Stagehands Union, Local One.

Tom Hamilton
Music Director and Sound Engineer, Crash
Tom Hamilton maintains overlapping careers in both audio production and music composition. Since 1990, Hamilton has been a member of composer Robert Ashley’s touring opera ensemble, performing sound processing and mixing in both recordings and concerts. His audio production can be found in over 60 CD releases of new and experimental music, including recordings by Muhal Richard Abrams, David Behrman, Thomas Buckner, Bernard Hoffer, George Lewis, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny. Hamilton has composed and performed electronic music for over 40 years, and his work with electronic music originated in the late-60s era of analog synthesis. Hamilton is a Fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and participated in a residency at their center in Umbria in 2005. His performing and recording colleagues include Peter Zummo, Bruce Gremo, Bruce Eisenbeil, Rich O’Donnell, Jonathan Haas, Jacqueline Martelle, Thomas Buckner, Al Margolis and id m theft able. He has been a collaborator with visual artists, including filmmaker Fred Worden, video artists Van McElwee and Morey Gers, and the late photographer Ernst Haas. Hamilton has released 15 CDs of his music; his CD London Fix received an award in the Prix Ars Electronica, and a 2-CD set of his electronic music of the 1970s was named one of The Wire’s Top 50 Reissues of 2010. Hamilton was the co-director of the 2004 Sounds Like Now festival, and he co-produced the Cooler in the Shade/Warmer by the Stove new music series for 14 years.

Alexandra Rosenberg
Producer
Alexandra Rosenberg is an independent producer and artist manager, supporting multidisciplinary performance projects. She currently works with Annie Dorsen, Faye Driscoll, Arturo Vidich, Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble, and Alex Waterman. Previously, she was the Associate Producer at ArKtype with Thomas O. Kriegsmann, and has also worked with Beth Morrison Projects, Ping Chong & Co., New York City Arts Coalition, and proudly started her career at The Chocolate Factory. Recent and upcoming premieres include Robert Ashley and Alex Waterman at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Attendance at Danspace Project, Annie Dorsen’s Yesterday/Tomorrow, a site-specific production of Vidas Perfectas with Ballroom Marfa, and producing the inaugural Taste of Bushwick to benefit The Bushwick Starr. Born and raised in Queens, she currently lives and works in Brooklyn, and is a graduate of Bennington College.