The Ephemeral Garden is an installation and community art project sponsored by Half Moon Books. Books will fill the space like flora while festival goers are invited to explore the texts in the garden, pick a book to give to someone else and even contribute their own text to the environment.
Directed by Ed Sanchez and starring Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, & Joshua Leonard
Co-presented by Upstate Films and the Woodstock Film Festival
25th-anniversary screening of the legendary indie horror film The Blair Witch Project. Considered one of the first films to go “viral,” the film’s realism and found footage technique blurred the lines between reality and fiction and changed the horror genre forever. The Blair Witch Project remains one of the most profitable independent films ever made.
The Blair Witch Project Panel Discussion
Moderated by actress and musician Amanda Seyfried.
Featuring Director Ed Sanchez and actors Joshua Leonard & Michael C. Williams.
Co-presented by Upstate Films and the Woodstock Film Festival
This impressionist hybrid documentary traces the oyster through its many life cycles in New York, once the world’s oyster capital. Now their specter haunts the city through queer characters embodying ancient myth, discovering the overlooked history and biology of the bivalve that built the city. As environmentalists restore them to the harbor, Holding Back The Tide looks to the oyster as a queer icon, entangled with nature, with much to teach about our continued survival.
Director: Emily Packer
Producer: Emily Packer, Trey Tetreault, Ben Still, Josh Margolis, Liz Beeson, Julia Lewis (Associate Producer)
Cinematographer: John Marty
Editor: Lindsey Phillips, Ben Still
Living Letters Collective is a group of Hudson Valley based artists who work in various styles of graffiti writing as their form of expression and often work outside the realms of the public eye. Working alongside one another, in a shared location, they share their work, which is often unaccessible and/or uncelebrated.
Lovie Olivia is an American Artist born, living and making in Houston, TX who creates paintings, collages and sculptures that are an assembly of found and manipulated objects. Their work mines the scarce archives of Black, Queer and Womanist personifications and imagines meliorism through memory, gesture, and speculation. Inspired by the historical excavation work of writers like Christina Sharpe, Saadiya Hartman, Audre Lorde and Zora Neale Hurston. Olivia’s work hangs in numerous private and public collections including the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institute, Intercontinental Airport Houston TX, University of Texas Austin, and Brooklyn Museum. She is a recipient of three Individual Artist Awards, which are funded by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance. She has exhibited at Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Frist Museum Nashville TN, The Phillips Collection, DC, Corridor Gallery, Brooklyn NY, 1969 Gallery Manhattan NY, Jam Gallery Brooklyn NY, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago IL, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC), Houston TX, Art Pace, San Antonio TX The Station Museum, Houston TX, Project Row Houses, Houston TX, TSU University Museum, Houston TX, Arthello Beck Gallery in Dallas TX, and more.
Described as “thoughtful and eccentric” by All Music, Benedict Kupstas is a writer, artist, activist, and musician from the post-industrial wasteland of northeastern Pennsylvania, currently residing in Kingston, NY. He has written songs and played instruments in a number of bands over the last two decades, with deep roots in the DIY community and notable appearances including BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! and 24-Hour Drone at Basilica Hudson.
For several years he toured internationally with Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company in the critically acclaimed show We’re Gonna Die, including performances at Lincoln Center, the Melbourne Festival, Festival d’Automne à Paris, and the 2015 Meltdown Festival, at which he shared the stage with his hero, David Byrne. His own project, Field Guides, has released three full-length albums, most recently Ginkgo on Whatever’s Clever Records.
As a designer and visual artist, he has created album artwork, posters, and apparel for dozens of international clients, primarily musicians and record labels. His writing has been published by McGraw Hill, L Magazine, Rockpile, and in other outlets. Kuspas has co-run the label Whatever’s Clever since 2019, and works for the food sovereignty nonprofit Catskills Agrarian Alliance.
Kerosene Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores extended vocal technique, queer hauntologies, and ritualized erotic transcendence. Utilizing counter-archival impulse and experimental research procedures, Jones endeavors to provide both sonic and ceremonial sanctuary for ghosts with unfinished business. His work across mediums has been supported by Anthology Film Archives, Art Omi, BBC Radio 4, Black Mountain College Museum, Center For Performance Research, Montez Press Radio, Onaissis USA, The Poetry Project, and Wave Farm. His arts & culture writing has appeared in X-TRA, MUBI Notebook, Screen Slate, The Brooklyn Rail, and LAMBDA Literary. He was a founding member of the poetry and performance collective The Anchoress Syndicate, and the host of the podcast “Pure Garbage: An Oral Examination of John Waters.” He is the current arts editor of WUSSY Magazine.
https://linktr.ee/KamikazeJones
https://vimeo.com/user103625318
London-based Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre’s work has been performed throughout the US as well as in Paris, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Berlin and London. Originally based in San Francisco, the company won a SF Cable Car Award for Waltzes for the Dayroom and was nominated three times for the Isadora Duncan Awards, including a nomination for Best Choreography for and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me in 2010. The company has created several works in collaboration with playwright Brian Thorstenson including Sugarfoot Stomp and Tuesday—a play for dancers. Pelton’s solo works The Hurdy-gurdy Man and A Hundred Miles as well as his most recent group work End without Days have all been presented at Dance Base in Edinburgh during the Fringe. Artistic Director Stephen Pelton began his dance training at SUNY Purchase, began choreographing at Connecticut College before dancing in Boston for four years with Gerri Houlihan’s Boston Dance Project and Susan Rose’s Danceworks. In 1989 he moved to San Francisco where he danced with Della Davidson and in 1993 formed Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre. In 2015, Pelton’s Lauda Adrianna received its world premiere in Glasgow performed in collaboration with the Gavin Bryars Ensemble. Pelton is also associate director for Yorke Dance Project and the Cohan Collective. He is one of Europe’s most sought-after teachers of Limon-inspired dance technique. In London, he’s taught at Laban, Central School of Ballet and The Place and teaches company class for DV8, Random and New Adventures.
stephenpeltondance.com
Hisayasu Takashio was born in Tokyo, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Design School of Tokyo and later a Fine Arts certificate in Sculpture and Printmaking from the Art Students League of New York. He has been actively creating and exhibiting his work since 1991. Takashio’s work ranges from paintings, large scale prints and mixed media drawings to wood sculpture, installation and collaborative performance. Takashio has worked extensively on the subject of the human hands. His renderings of these are a combined symphony of nature and human anatomy.
shiotakashio.com
Vimeo.com/HisayasuTakashio
I’m Adam Brinn. I’m a painter I’m here to create and inspire other creative minds to do their thing.
