Danny O
I am an artist who works in many different media. I love collage and painting, in the summer I travel to art festivals in the winter I paint and read. I love North Adams.
Vincent Ballentine
Vincent Ballentine is a Brooklyn, NY based Mural/Graffiti artist. Born in Cleveland Ohio he has received a BFA from University of the Arts in Philadelphia. After graduating Vincent relocated to Los Angeles CA where he created designs for Fortune Fashions and Hybrid Tees. Arriving in NYC he has created community driven projects for Groundswell and Creative Art Works. Along his artistic travels Vincent has been able to create work for the NCAA Final Four, MTV, Viacom, Netflix, and Major League Baseball to name a few. His international presence has traveled to Germany for the Meeting of Styles, and plans for festivals in Brazil and Quebec. Currently Vincent is developing Matlock Studios which is home to underserved community mural projects
as well as productions for major commercial networks.
Danielle Klebes / “Outdoor Recreation” mural
Danielle Klebes has exhibited at galleries and museums in Istria, Croatia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Colorado, Vermont, and Florida. She is currently exhibiting in a two person show at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, PA, and in a solo show at Gallery 77 in Rutland, VT. She was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA from early November to early December, 2018, and will be in residence at Vermont Studio Center for the month of March 2019, and at Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder in Trondheim, Norway, for the month of February 2020. Her work has been featured in numerous print and online publications including Creative Quarterly, Into the Void, Chaleur Magazine, Creative Boom, Supersonic Art, AT Journeys, and The Esthetic Apostle. Danielle received her MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art and Design in Cambridge, MA, in 2017. She lives in North Adams, MA, with her husband Dalton James, a writer.
Survivor Love Letter
FOUNDER & DIRECTOR
Tani Ikeda is an Emmy winning director who creates narratives, documentaries, music videos, and commercial films. She was recently selected as one of Sundance’s 2018 intensive screenwriting lab’s fellows and was also named one of Film Independent’s 33 Emerging Filmmakers as a Project: Involve Directors Fellow. Ikeda was an Executive Producer and Director on the Blackpills Documentary TV Series “Resist” with Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors about the fight against LA County’s 3.5 billion dollar jail plan. At the age of 21, Tani Ikeda co-founded imMEDIAte Justice, a nonprofit that fosters the talents of young women artists working in virtual reality. She is the current executive director of imMEDIAte Justice and was named one of the “25 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World,” by the Utne Reader. Ikeda tours the country speaking at universities and national conferences about storytelling as a tool for social justice. Tani holds a Bachelors Degree in Film Production from the University of Southern California and currently resides in Los Angeles. (@taniikeda)
PUBLIC ARTIST & CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Jess X. Snow is a queer asian-canadian public artist, filmmaker, poet and educator. As a result of the rootlessness and migrations that marked her childhood, she developed a stutter which she overcame through her discovery of visual and written language. Her work explores survival, memory, joy, and our relationship to the Earth by amplifying the voices of women, queer people of color, and migrants who refuse to be defined by borders and time. Her work has been supported by the Tribeca Film Institute Migration Co/Lab, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific Center, and has appeared on PBS Newshour, The LA Times, and NBC Asian America and outdoor walls across the country. Through film, mural-making, poetry and youth art education, she is working toward a future where queer, migrant youth of color may see themselves heroic on the big screen and the city walls & then can face the possibility to grow up and create their own. (@jessxsnow)
PUBLIC ARTIST & ART DIRECTOR
Layqa Nuna Yawar is a migrant latinx artist, large scale muralist, agitator, educator and organizer born in Ecuador and based out of Newark, NJ. He migrated to the USA from Cuenca, Ecuador during one of the country’s most severe economic and political periods of instability in the late 1990’s. He works in a range of mediums, including studio painting, public murals, installation, project curation, sculpture, public art and street interventions. His work has been written about in The New York Times, The Star Ledger, The Huffington Post, NBC Latino, Fusion, Brooklyn Street Art and other publications, books and online. The artist’s practice also extends to curation, project production, mural-making workshops and educational lectures through spaces like El Museo del Barrio, Rutgers University and The Newark Museum as well as projects like Creative Art Works in New York City, City Without Walls in Newark and Conect Arte with the UN World Food Program in El Salvador. (@layqanunayawar)
https://www.survivorloveletter.com
Çağıl Harmandar
Çağıl Harmandar was born and grew up in İstanbul, Turkey. She has studied in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and graduated in 2016 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Her art and animations focus on bodily reactions to subtle emotions. Her work has been shown in international film and animation festivals.
Glass Eye Shadow Pictures
Glass Eye Shadow Pictures is a shadow theatre company based in Highland, NY. The company is founded on the collaborations of Adam Lipsky, music-director, musician and composer and Alisa Javits, creative-director, artist and fabricator. Many of their projects include collaborations with other artists and musicians. Their shadow performances are projected manually in large open spaces or on a large free-standing screen. Glass Eye Shadow Pictures creates immersive, cinematic live shadow performances that are accompanied by live score and sound design.
Since the founding of the group in 2013, Glass Eye Shadow Pictures has performed at large and small venues throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, (where they were formerly based), as well as throughout the U.S. and Canada. During recent years, they performed in the Santa Cruz Fringe Festival, Victoria (British Columbia) Fringe Festival and Calgary (Alberta) Fringe Festival. They hosted and performed at the centennial celebration of the Capawock Theater, in Tisbury, MA in 2013. In 2014, they hosted their “Spring Shadow Series” in the San Francisco Bay Area, and toured throughout the northwestern states. They are multiple-time recipients of the Zellerbach Community Arts Grant and the Bill Graham Supporting Foundation Grant. In November 2016, they were commissioned by the Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theater for a full schedule of youth performances. In May 2017, they were commissioned by the Common Grounds Festival in San Francisco to present an interactive, outdoor, public, two-day performance.
Lindsey Wolkowicz
Lindsey Wolkowicz (b.1981) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work revolves around the relationship between us and the spaces we occupy. Both the influence of her hometown of Detroit, and her decade in New York City, can be felt through the presence of grand, sometimes dilapidated, architectural lines in her work, as well as her awareness of the body in space. Though drawing is at the center of her practice, Wolkowicz’s work also moves into the realm of photography, video and performance installation through ongoing collaborative projects with her partner Dillon Paul. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She received her BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and her MFA in Painting/ Drawing from Pratt Institute. She works in international admissions. She recently moved from Brooklyn to Kingston, NY where she now works and lives with her partner and their daughter.
Bhalvin Prince
Bhalvin Prince was born in Guatemala. When he was 17 he came to the United States with his brother. He was living in Kingston, NY at a shelter for unaccompanied minors until this past November. On the morning of his 18th birthday he was taken by ICE from this home where he lived with his brother and others, and was taken to Orange County Jail in Goshen, NY. Despite no criminal record of any kind, he spent 2 months awaiting a court date of any kind, and a total of 4 months incarcerated. During this time he was able to create the pieces of art in this submission which express his frustration, his difficulties, and his understanding of perspective and patience and appreciation for what one does have. Thanks to community support from friends in the Hudson Valley, he was able to avoid deportation and be freed on bail and spend some time in the New York while awaiting processing of his asylum application. He currently resides with his brother in Nashville, TN.
Annie Poon
Annie Poon is a multimedia artist from New Canaan, Connecticut. She is the middle child of a large Mormon family of eleven and has a twin sister. Annie’s biggest artistic influence was her mother Barbara who would take her out of elementary school to explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Annie went on to earn a BFA in drawing and painting from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has created over 30 short animations in addition to painting, prints, sculpture and music. Poon’s work often addresses her childhood pass times and mental illness- in particular her diagnosis of Schizzoaffective disorder. Annie has a daily practice of illustrating one scripture per day and has created over a thousand illustrations of her favorite scriptures.
Allison Braun aka Smell the Damn Roses
Community and creativity are very important to me, it is what keeps my heart going. I started “Smell the Damn Roses” to bring art and health together. It is about creative thought for happier people.