WEEK 1: May 9-May 15
Khonsu Ra
Khonsu Ra is a Feelosopher from North America who shares Wizdom through stories, music, poetry, playwriting, asana and Psycho-Magic.
Daniel Meredith
Spiritually minded creative kid from Akron, OH. Sometimes it feels like I'm not from earth though, but idk if I'll ever confirm that. I freestyle and write songs and paint on my clothes. Went to school for computer science for a little bit, but that wasn't for me. I still don't know what I am, bruh.
Alexandra Velasco
Alexandra Velasco is a multimedia artist, performer, and filmmaker born in Mexico City, presently residing in Los Angeles. Alexandra's work centers around the political and performative body, she explores formation and role of individual identities and how these interact with different environments. Her interest in dualities, in seeing the light in the dark, and vice versa, has moved her to explore the outlined idea of gender and oneness. Her voice, mind, and body serve to tell non-linear stories, create time-warped moments and challenge the point of our collective existence. Oftentimes a sense of the surreal, the uncomfortable, and the erotic incorporates itself in her created realities, be it in her films, collages, or performances. She is currently working on various film and art projects. Her work tell stories about women that either live in her head oe who can't tell their own stories.
Sidney Stretz
Sidney Stretz is an artist and educator originally from Columbia, MO. Stretz makes work about everyday struggles, strange social situations, and failure. As an artist she works to highlight and improve circumstances and situations that others may not feel are valid or important. Through attempts to build community and mutual benefit, she develops a sense of engagement with a wide variety of groups of people that are looking for creative solutions to their community-based dreams.
Mary Clark
I’m a poet that lives in Los Angeles. I write poetry, essays and short stories. I take care of kids for a living. I went to UCLA and got a B.A. in Comparative Literature. I see so many movies! I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Last year, SOTA changed all of my feelings about writing and making art.
Bailey Knight
Bailey is an original, and independent deisgner who expresses empathy and patience through handwork with fabric, thread, and dye. She finds and reinterprets natural awe and beauty through her work in forms of wearables, wall pieces, garments, and soft produts. She is ethical, ambitious, creative, and colorful. Bailey is a warm and friendly person, and is not only a loyal friend to people. but also to the projects that she values herself in. Being practical yet fun, bailey naturally creates work that is both quirky and respectful to the earth, and prides herself in her natural materials, natural processes, and accepting heart.
Jacki Huntington
Jacki Huntington is a filmmaker who makes short things, mostly: web-first documentaries, narrative shorts, and music videos. Since 2014 she has worked as an editorial producer at Refinery29, where she piloted the intimate, unapologetically feminist body positive video content that continues to influence the media company’s video aesthetic. She grew up in Iowa and North Carolina, and studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jacki lives between NYC and LA.
Sair Goetz
Sair Goetz is a queer time-based artist building instructions for breaking down binaries. Sair received their MFA from the Ohio State University in 2017, and has exhibited their video/performance works internationally. Supported by the 2017-2018 Dedalus Foundation fellowship, Sair is currently working on silicon masc, a performance & video piece querying the influence of technology in contemporary masculinities. While Sair’s true home is in North Carolina, they are a current and active member of CTRL+SHFT, a female/femme/non- binary art collective + non-profit gallery in Oakland, CA.
Erin Anderson-Ruddon
Erin in a Michigan based multimedia artist.
WEEK 2: May 11-May 17
Luan Joy Sherman
Luan Joy Sherman (b. 1993), is a queer, trans male artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He works with embroidery, photography, sculpture, performance, video, and sound to explore trans identity, queer bodies, trauma, and healing. Luan’s favorite food is apples and he enjoys spending time with his cat son, drinking a lot of coffee, rock climbing, and working in the studio located in the back of his car.
Michael Casseli:
It’s my story and I am sticking to it. I was born in Mentor, Ohio and grew up all over the east side of Cleveland. One thing I will always remember as a kid was from 1st grade: I got in trouble for coloring with the side of the crayon instead of the tip; it occurred to me that the side worked much better for drawing fish scales but this type of thinking was frowned upon and I was quickly reprimanded for using an alternative technique by my first grade art teacher, Mrs. Coolidge. As if this wasn’t enough questionable behavior, I also had an unhealthy access to gunpowder and explosives, as my grandfather was a gunsmith. Both of these experiences would definitely play a defining role in how I would later think about and approach my work. My exposure to the art world was accidental and somewhat mysterious—wrapped up in the bad behavior of cutting class to go see things and the group of people I started to hang out with. I was a member of the Youth International Party (Yippies) at my high school, pranking political structures and producing media that attacked the power structures there. The prankster nature of the Yippies started me on my indulgence in political action with a sense of humor. Once I started at Antioch, my worldview and art-making flourished. I was fortunate to have a wildly dynamic group of professors and meet a group of artists that I still work with today. In a state of abject poverty, we took chances and experimented with worlds that seemed endless in possibility. I designed, I performed, I directed, I built and interacted with a vibrant community that allowed me to focus on my production and my craft. Antioch is where I had my eyes opened, my fears realized, and my senses overwhelmed. I designed my own B.S. in Visual Arts and Performance Theory and then went on to earn an MFA in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
Yujin Lee:
Autobiographical storytelling is central to my work. Having lived in parts of Asia, America, and Europe, my practice embodies a cross-cultural and transnational disposition. I am inspired by family, friends and acquaintances whose lives exist beyond national borders and manifest social and political zeitgeist. The figures who appear in my work have in one way or another shattered the world I presumed to know. Such interpersonal relationship—in-yeon as Koreans call it—has long been the core of my artistic practice.
Born in South Korea, I received BFA from Cornell University, during which I studied in Rome and Shanghai. After college, I lived in Berlin for three years before moving to New York, where I received MFA in visual arts from Columbia University in 2015.
Alexandra Velasco:
Alexandra Velasco is a multimedia artist, performer and filmmaker born in Mexico City, presently residing in Los Angeles. Alexandra’s work centers around the political and performative body, she explores the formation and role of individual identities and how these interact with different environments. Her interest in dualities, in seeing the light in the dark, and vice versa, has moved her to explore the outlined idea of gender and oneness. Her voice, mind and body serve to tell non-linear stories, create time-warped moments and challenge the point of our collective existence. Oftentimes a sense of the surreal, the uncomfortable, and the erotic incorporates itself in her created realities, be it in her films, collages or performances. She is currently working on various film and art projects. Her work tells stories about women that either live in her head or who can’t tell their own stories.
Kat Demaray
Wrong side of 25, bay area resident, works in residential treatment, likes to draw, all dogs are beautiful.
John Englebrecht and David Dunlap
David Dunlap is (SO OLD HE SAYS HE DOESN’T NEED A BIO ANYMORE).
John Engelbrech is Director o ublic Space ON (PS1), an alternative arts space in Iowa City, IA. Countless local, national, and international exhibitions have happened in his tenure at PS1 along with a nearly daily program of performances, workshops, residencies and other (if succinctly-indescribable) events. His background in photography informs an everyday art practice which looks with interest and inquiry towards the social, performative, and ephemeral using text and image. Personal website: emoryintomyth.co.
David and John have collaborated in many scenarios over the last decade: as part of Free Art School, The THUGGOON Marching Band, and the SUDDEN Brick Works (Ana Mendieta Foster Child of Iowa & Thee Strawman) .
Adam Void
Adam Void has been deskilling since he found the art world. Embracing his rural weirdo roots, he uses what he has, by any means necessary.
Tina Carlisi
Tina Carlisi is an artist from Montreal, Canada. Deeply inspired by the notion of possibility, her practice is often at the intersections of print, gestures and encounters. She is interested in ways art can provide a utopian space to express an imaginary, incite action, or foster social forms. Tina is currently a doctoral candidate in Fine Arts at Concordia University. Involving case studies on intentional communities founded on squatted land in Europe, her artistic research explores the interaction between communal living, learning and artistic expression. Through art practice, she explores, imagines and expresses these ideas through poetic consideration of the social and material intimacies involved in utopic visions. Her doctoral research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Sair Goetz
Sair Goetz is a queer time-based artist building instructions for breaking down binaries. Sair received their MFA from the Ohio State Universtiy in 2017, and has exhibited their video/performance works internationally. Supported by the 2017-2018 Dedalus Foundation fellowship, sair is currently working on silicon masc, a performance & video piece querying the influence of technology in contemporary masculinities. While sair’s true home is in North Carolina, they are a current and active member of CTRL+SHFT, a female/femme/non- binary art collective + non-profit gallery in Oakland, CA.
WEEK 3: May 23-May 30
Shivani Lakshmi
Shivani Lakshmi is a figment of your imagination. She is also - in no particular order - a professional bharatanatyam dancer, a feverish autodidact, an angeleno and the daughter of immigrants. She currently runs her own consulting business helping non-profits and social justice causes with their outreach endeavors. She went on her first international trip at 8 months of age, and has quite literally never stopped. She has travelled within 26 countries, speaks 5 languages, has worked on 3 continents, and has adopted exactly 1 puppy off the streets of Hyberabad. She loves pie.
Henry Brannan
Henry Brannan is a 21-year-old student at Grinnell College in Iowa. He was born and raised in the Woodlawn neighborhood of NE Portland, OR. Academically, his focuses are gentrification, housing, education, the American partisan divide, and identity based hate and marginalization. These Focuses largely reflect his own lived experience. When not in school, he is either working with local community organizations and groups to make Portland walk the walk to match the talk it talks, working, planning a project or trip, or executing a project or trip. Brannan often uses photography and field recordings in his projects as a tool to humanize subjects.The honest and dignified portrayal of the disadvantaged, oppressed, and disenfranchised is the foundation for which Brannan's work is constructed upon. His intent with his work is to show viewers glimpses into scenes they would likely never otherwise see. These scenes humanize the subjects and foster a greater understanding of their lives, their struggles, and the inescapable commonality of our lives which demands peer respect of all and from all. Brannan's intent is based on his own experience gaining understanding of people through the constant consumption of stories, news, and photography and to an even greater extent, through face to face conversation brought on by his own work and life. Brannan believes there is objective truth and a set of facts (although he knows no one knows it and certainly doesn't claim to know it himself). He needs to straighten things out for himself and others.
Kimberly Varnadoe
Kimberly Varnadoe received her BFA in Painting from the University of South Alabama in 1983 and her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Memphis in 1994. She has worked with experimental photography techniques for more than 30 years with emphasis on photo-printmaking and Polaroid emulsion lifts, often combining the two mediums. She is currently learning the tin type process and other wet-plate photography techiniques Varnadoe has been teaching college since 1986 and is currently Professor of Art in the Art, Art History and Design Department at Salem College in Winston-Salem North Carolina. In addition to extensive exhibitions locally and regionally, Varnadoe participated in an international exhibit in Shanghai, China as an invited member of the Washington Printmakers Gallery in an exhibition titled Contemporary American Printmaking in April of 2012. In July of 2012 she was invited to Lviv, Ukraine to present her work on the Polaroid Emulsion Lift process at the 5x5 Photo Club. Varnadoe has been a member of Artworks Gallery, the longest running cooperative gallery in Winston-Salem, since 2002.
Ellen Graves
Ellen Graves holds a BA in psychology from Warren Wilson College and is enrolled in the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education MEd in Higher Education Administration. She's worked at WWC in the Work Program, facilitating the heartbeat of the community that is student learning through employment. She hopes to one day queer the ivory towers of higher education by dirtying it all with work.
Bud Ries
Bud Ries is a sign painter from Knoxville, TN. Before focussing on painting, he worked a string of jobs in silkscreen studios and sign shops that became the basis for the skills taught in this class. He finds the tedium of working with exactos calming.
Tim and Beth Kerr
Beth has been the Theatre & Dance Librarian at UT Austin for almost 15 years and a general Librarian for 20 before that; Tim is a painter and musician.
Kevin Bouton-Scott
Kevin Bouton-Scott is a west coast painter and pedestrian with a hyphenated last name. After over a decade of wandering around North America painting murals and working as a pen and ink illustrator, he returned to school and will be receiving his MFA in Fine Art at Artcenter in Los Angeles this spring. Likes: VHS tapes, brand new socks, YouTube comments, Wikipedia edits, obscure subcultures.
