For the past twenty years, I have worked as a conceptual artist in the fields of sculpture, drawing, and painting. As time reforms my relationship with making, I have come to understand creating art as the sacred act of someone who reaches their hand into a resting sky and pulls the lightning from it. I draw from the field of everything, in an act both creative and divine.
www.kathleen-griffin.com
Tona Wilson works mostly in video, painting and book arts. Her video work includes a four-channel stop-motion animated video, Crossing Paths, as well as several installations using projected video, both in collaboration with others and on her own. One of her early stop-motion animated videos, Money Talks, was included in O+ 2011, and a participatory video piece, in collaboration with sculptor Kate Hamilton, was included in O+ 2015. In her recent video work, she is currently using still images and footage from 8 and super-8 film. She has produced two handmade artist’s books at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, both relating to her previous day job as a Spanish interpreter in courts, prisons and jails. She continues to paint, and has been studying printmaking. She now lives and works in the Hudson Valley, and has shown her work locally, as well as in other parts of this country and in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she lived for many years.
tonawilson.com
vimeo.com/tonawilson
Emily (she/they) is an experimental filmmaker and editor with an interest in geography and hybrid formats. Their directorial work has been screened at film festivals and theaters across the country, including at Anthology Film Archives, BlackStar, DOCNYC, and others. Emily’s short film By Way of Canarsie, which she co-directed with Lesley Steele, is streaming on the Criterion Channel and was a part of POV Shorts Season 6. Her archival film Too Long Here, which Criterioncast called “a fascinating, important work” about the inauguration of an international park, has been used as an advocacy tool for its preservation. As an editor, Emily’s work has been featured in the New Yorker (The Victorias by Ethan Fuirst), on PBS (When I’m Her by Emily Schuman), and on Vimeo Staffpicks. Her feature film editorial experience spans indie narrative (Newfest darling Summer Solstice by Noah Schamus), experimental nonfiction (Catalina Jordan Alvarez’s forthcoming Sound Spring), historical arthouse fiction (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s upcoming devotional film to a woman of color left at the margins of Surrealism), and personal essay film (a hybrid feature by Lynne Sachs currently in development). In addition to her editing and directing work, Emily serves on programming committees for film festivals in New York City and guest-curated the Coastal Knowledge series for the Rockaway Film Festival in 2021. They were a fellow in the 2018 Collaborative Studio at UnionDocs in Brooklyn, and are a proud alumna of the anomalous Hampshire College. Emily collects voicemails for future use; consider yourself notified.
www.holdingbackthetidefilm.com
Carmen Lizardo was born in the Dominican Republic. She is a multidisciplinary artist combining experimental processes, printmaking, and drawing, using digital media, video, and non-silver photography as foundational tools. Her artwork explores themes of metamorphosis and hybridization. She holds a BFA and an MFA from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, New York). She has received fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Academy of Arts and Letters, En Foco, Arts Mid-Hudson, Women’s Studio Workshop, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Lizardo has exhibited nationally and abroad at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Samuel Dorsky Museum, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University, NARS Foundation, BRIC, and ArtsBridge. Her work has been published in academic books such as” Gum Printing: Highlighting Artists and Their Creative Practice” and “The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes” and has been featured in Hyperallergic “Contemporary Art Underground.” Her work extends to public art projects commissioned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority at 181st Street Station in New York City.
www.carmenlizardostudio.com
inkBoat researches the interplay of multiple artistic disciplines and viewpoints, drawing primarily from the Japanese performing and martial arts, improvisational arts, and Daoist internal arts. inkBoat stage works border dance, performance art and theater, and inhabit theaters, museums, streets and abandoned spaces.
Founded by Shinichi Iova-Koga in 1998, members are based in San Francisco, Luzern, New York, Paris and Berlin, performing throughout North America, Europe, South Korea and Japan.
InkBoat’s performances often explore themes of transformation, impermanence, and the human condition, drawing inspiration from diverse cultural traditions and artistic influences. The company collaborates with a wide range of artists, including dancers, musicians, visual artists, and designers, to create immersive and visually stunning productions that push the boundaries of traditional performance genres.
In addition to its performance work, InkBoat also offers workshops, classes, mentorship and training programs in movement, improvisation, and interdisciplinary performance, sharing its unique approach to creativity and collaboration with students and artists of all levels.
https://www.inkboat.com/
Preetika Rajgariah (b. 1985) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works examine the complicated intersections of cultural + queer identity, belonging + otherness, and capitalist consumption + erasure while referencing her nuanced upbringing as an Indian born American. Notable residencies attended include the Golden Foundation, the Momentary at Crystal Bridges, Oxbow School of Art, and the Vermont Studio Center. Performances at the Asia Society Texas and Untitled Art Fair Miami, installations at Women & Their Work and Art League Houston, and a large scale public art commission at Rice University have all shaped her multimedia practice. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and currently lives and works in Houston, TX.
www.prajgariah.com
PUGG (a.k.a. Pop-Up Gallery Group) is the youth workforce training program of the Department of Regional Art Workers (The D.R.A.W.). It is a paid, work-study program providing job training in art/non-profit management, arts education, leadership and entrepreneurship for young people 15 to 23.
https://www.drawkingston.org/special-event-drawathon2023
Shani Richards was born and raised in Akron, Ohio. She received a BFA in metalsmithing at the University of Akron and MFA in metal from the State University of New York, New Paltz. Afterwards Shani returned to her hometown Akron, Ohio. In 2018 she was awarded a Community Fellowship with The League of Creative Interventionists. With the year-long fellowship Shani developed a youth project called Akron’s Growing Chefs and partnered with non-profit community organization The W.O.M.B. In 2020 Shani was awarded art residency with The Akron Soul Train. Shani was one of six artists selected to be a part of The Sculpture Center 2022 Emerging Artists Solo Exhibition Series in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2023 Shani was a visiting craft fellow at SUNY New Paltz and was selected for a six month fellowship at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY. In 2024 Shani was awarded a New York Council of the Arts Grant.
http://www.shani-richards.com/
Amy Trompetter is a puppeteer, trumpeter, World Theater historian, teacher & community organizer. She founded Redwing Blackbird Theater in the late 90’s as a workshop and performance space in the Hudson Valley. Her roots are in Bread & Puppet Theater in the 1960’s in NYC. She has taught, directed & performed all over the globe. She is the driving force behind the theater’s drive to invent new forms, connect with the broad range of world theater traditions & address the urgency of local and global issues. Amy taught as an Assistant Professor of Theater at Antioch (tenure), Bates, Bard & Barnard Colleges. For several years she taught as part of the Bard Prison Initiative.
https://www.redwingblackbirdtheater.com/
