Bren (project lead, minigolf frankenstein) is an assistant professor in psychology and neuroscience directing the Imagination & Moral Cognition Lab at SUNY Albany, a member of the Purpose Co-operative makerspace, and apprentices and works closely with Processional Arts Workshop (e.g., puppeteering a butterfly for the Great Pollinator Ramble at Thomas Cole, serving as a tech marshal for the NYC Halloween Parade and Rhinebeck’s SinterKlaas Parade).
Liam (project co-lead, mingolf igor) and his wife have built and operate two businesses in Catskill – Hilo, a cafe/art gallery, and The Avalon Lounge, a Korean restaurant/performance venue – which has given him several years of real-world experience in executing projects and bringing wild ideas alive while keeping an eye on the pragmatic fundamentals.
Ben Pinder is an interdisciplinary artist who creates a surreal visual mythology and cosmology that subverts traditional American masculinity. Pinder’s imagery draws from early woodcuts, medieval iconography and children’s drawings to create a playful, funny and yet sharp critique of American myth-making. Pinder’s drawings, sculptures, and videos operate at the intersection of high art traditions and low-brow Americana, piercing through the pride and fantasies of a hyper-masculine society and creating alternative realms to inhabit. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Ben was raised in Vermont, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania and is currently in New York. Among other venues Ben’s work has been exhibited at Brooklyn Arts Council, the Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, Smack Mellon, Wassaic Projects, and The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. He received his Masters in Fine Art from Pratt Institute and now lives in the Hudson Valley.
B.A. Miale is a prolific video creator and live projection artist. She has directed and edited over 50 music videos and in 2007 began performing custom live projection art shows at concerts and events. To this date, she has created over 500 unique visual sets around the country and beyond. B.A. lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband Gregory Stovetop and beloved super mutt, Swayze.
Amanda E Gross is a multi-disciplinary artist, university educational designer, and re-wilding gardener. Gross’s work in various media is united by a love of play, an intuitive process, and a sacred, radically inclusive worldview, informed by social activism, contemporary and folk art and music, eco-feminism and the re-wilding movement, and since 2017, the biodiversity of the Hudson Valley. Gross’s paintings and illustrations have been featured in contexts ranging from The Salmagundi Club to The Field Museum to The Stranger, and her/their public art experience includes environmental sculpture installations for Compass Arts and Fuller Moon Arts Fest in 2022, with previous experience assisting on installations at Morris Arboretum and O’Hare International Airport. Gross earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a Master of Arts in Teaching from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
Robert Burke Warren is a writer, performer, teacher, and musician, author of novel Perfectly Broken and one-man show Redheaded Friend, and editor of Cash on Cash: Interviews & Encounters with Johnny Cash. His work appears in Longreads, Salon, Texas Music, Brooklyn Parent, The Woodstock Times, Paste, The Rumpus, The Bitter Southerner, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, among others. You can find his music on albums by RuPaul, Rosanne Cash, and rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson; The Roots used his tune “The Elephant In the Room” as John McCain’s entrance theme on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. In the 90s, he performed the lead in the West End musical Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story. Prior to that he was a globetrotting bass player. He lives in Phoenicia, NY.
Street Heroines is a feature-length documentary celebrating the courage and creativity of women who despite their lack of recognition have been an integral part of the graffiti and street art movement since the beginning. Authentic vérité storytelling woven between an interview-driven narrative, Street Heroines juxtaposes the personal experiences of three emerging Latina artists from New York City, Mexico City, and São Paulo as they navigate a male-dominated subculture to establish artistic identities within chaotic urban landscapes.
Punctuated by historical anecdotes from pioneering artists Lady Pink, Claw Money, Nina Pandolfo, Swoon, Lady Aiko, iconic graffiti photographer Martha Cooper, and others, Street Heroines is the first-of-its-kind documentary to capture the collective outcry of female street artists from around the world, shining a light on their mission for creative expression and their endeavors overcome sexism through art.
While numerous graffiti genre documentaries feature familiar names such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey, Street Heroines infiltrates this masculine space by legitimizing women’s voices within an unquestionably important movement that symbolizes far more than the sum of its parts. Now, in the wake of #MeToo and Time’s Up, which have had astounding repercussions for women’s justice, there is no time more relevant for a film that exposes the struggles of female artists worldwide and situates them within the global conversation. Street Heroines is fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts and was funded through a combination of crowdfunding and private donations.
Director | Producer // Alexandra Henry is an award-winning creative producer and director based in New York City. Her personal and commercial work in film and branded content production has taken her to over 15 countries across four continents. Focused on making impactful and culturally relevant work, Alexandra believes that visual communication is the most effective tool in amplifying messages that inspire social change. Her passion for art, music, and language is evident in her photography, music videos, and documentaries. Alexandra has been twice recognized as a CurateNYC Emerging Artist and she was recently selected as one of 32 filmmakers by SHOOT Magazine for their New Directors Showcase 2019.
Executive Producer // Zahra Sherzad is the founder of Noorvision LLC, an NYC-based independent production company, and has been involved in the contemporary art world for 20+ years curating and producing art shows with recognized artists, musicians, DJs, filmmakers, and creatives who have gone on to define street culture as a whole. Currently, Zahra is the Head of Visual Art and an Impact Producer for Level Forward, an entertainment company that develops, produces, and finances entertainment with Oscar, Emmy, and Tony-winning producers. Clients have included: Zappos, Amazon Music, Rockstar Games, AK Worldwide, No Commission Art Fair (Swizz Beats), Moniker Art Fair, Times Square Arts Alliance, and Creative Time.
Producer // Jordan Noël Hawkes has produced documentaries, cultural events, and art-based education programs, and worked on feature film and commercial crews in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and the US. For Street Heroines, Jordan started as a conceptual advisor and fundraiser helping to lead the successful Kickstarter campaign, and then traveled on shoots to record sound in Mexico City and São Paulo. She is the former Director of Treefort Music Fest’s Filmfort and former Director of Education for The Family of Woman Film Festival. Jordan lives in New York City where she manages award-winning documentary company Lovett Stories + Strategies, and non-profit A Closer Look, promoting awareness on matters of health and social justice through the production of film and outreach campaigns.
Editor // Simone Cassas is an award-winning, Brazilian-born and New York City-based film and video editor with a strong background in motion graphics and post-production, and over two decades of experience in various formats, genres, and styles including television promos, PSA’s, commercials, corporate videos, documentaries, and broadcast news. Her work has screened in festivals internationally, and she directed and edited two feature documentaries – Everything is Brazil and Trilogy of the Body – which both aired on Brazil’s TV Cultura and Canal Brasil.
Director of Photography // Diana Eliazov is rooted in New York City photojournalism yet broke from photography for five years while photo editor at Sports Illustrated before returning to the camera. Her strong visual sensibilities evolved into commercial, narrative, and documentary filmmaking. Her desire to create social change through art has led her to worldwide projects on immigration, women in art, and maternal healthcare.
The D.R.A.W. (The Department of Regional Art Workers) is the arts education program of Kingston Midtown Arts District. The D.R.A.W. provides arts education programs for people of all ages, professional and creative development for local artists and a well-established youth workforce development program based in the arts called PUGG. The D.R.A.W. and PUGG were founded by and are led by Education Director Lara Giordano.
Lara Giordano, Founder/Education Director is an arts advocate, teacher, artist and community member. A retired Kingston High School teacher, she was instrumental in the design and implementation of arts driven interdisciplinary curriculum. As the Founder of the Dept. of Regional Art Workers (The D.R.A.W.) and of PUGG, she is at the center of expanding access to arts education for all in Kingston. Giordano has served on the Board of Women’s Studio Workshop, the City of Kingston Arts Commission and more and is on the Kingston Midtown Arts District Board of Directors.
Advanced Painting and Mythology classes at Kingston High School (KHS) worked collaboratively to consider and create art informed by each other for this year’s O+ Festival. Using mythology and oxygen to help generate and build on ideas, our sophomores, juniors, and seniors created original art and writing pieces that communicate this essential element’s role in everything from the origin of the world to the air that sustains us. Instructors: Jenn Brannigan-Tyler and Sarah Shomo
Marilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years, and has presented her work in thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally. Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and often created in response to specific sites, engaging with the immediate landscape and materiality of the location, its history, use or politics. Arsem was the 2015 recipient of the Maud Morgan Prize at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she presented 100 Ways to Consider Time, 100 different 6-hour performances on the nature of time, over 100 consecutive days from November 9, 2015 to February 19 2016. She is the founder and a member of Mobius Artists Group of Boston. A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was recently published by Intellect Books of the UK.
The body is a breathing reservoir of sensation and movement, memory and dream. Movement is the body’s language and voice. Breath is the body’s anchor. Earth is the body’s support.
This class asks how we can release efforting in the body and the mind. How can the possibility of letting the breath BREATHE YOU shift your experience of the body-mind? How does the rhythm of the breath support the rhythmicity of the heart, and an embodied sense of heartfulness? Where is our support in this breathful dance between earth and sky, above and below?
We will explore these questions in the moving practice of breathing in, breathing out, resting the heart, moving together. These guided, mindful movement practices help to calm and steady us, using conscious movement and stillness, breath, self-touch, and imagery. As we move with an improvisational spirit of exploration, we find greater expression, expansion, and resilience.
A recipe for entering the body: Attention: because the body is precise. Listening: because the body is subtle. Kindness: because the body is tender.
Performance: THE TRAVELER (terra incognita)
“I say to my breath once again, little breath come in from in front of me, go away behind me, row me quietly now, as far as you can, for I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.” W.S. Merwin, The Book of Fables
The Traveler explores how unpredictable and volatile life changes can fracture and reshape our psyches, change our bodies, and disrupt our sense of self in relation to the world. It asks what it means to be lost, to find oneself in terra incognita, not once or twice, but throughout our lives. Set to a sound score created by Paula Josa-Jones, the traveler – a Chaplinesque character – navigates perilous topographies, finding and losing balance as the physical and dream terrains shift and buckle.
PAULA JOSA-JONES, MA, CLMA, RSMET, SEP is a dance artist, choreographer, author, visual artist and movement educator and therapist known for her visually rich, emotionally charged dance theater. Her work includes choreography for humans, inter-species work with horses, dancers and riders, film and video. Josa-Jones has been called “one of the country’s leading choreographic conceptualists” by the Boston Globe and the Village Voice describes her work as “powerful, eccentric, and surreal”. Much of Josa-Jones’s solo work in particular arises from her own experience of being gender non-conforming, and movement explorations of the deeply complex architecture of identity and expression.
Her background includes deep research into theater, somatics, improvisation, film, Deep Listening, Laban Movement Analysis, Body-Mind CenteringⒸ, interspecies relationships, equine studies, Authentic Movement, embodied psychology, and eco-performance.
