Being Contemporary

Babette Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker who has lived in New York City since 1970. She is known for her photo archives covering experimental theatre, dance, and performance from the 1970s and 1980s. Recently, she created a complex architectural photo/film installation for the Whitney Biennale 2010 entitled how to look … and is now finishing a film Roof Piece on the High Line, with choreography by Trisha Brown, shot in June 2011.

Joan Jonas is a visual artist and performer who was one of the early experimenters in video. Her work is shown in galleries and museums around the world. She teaches at MIT.

Claire Bishop is associate professor in the PhD Program in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her next book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, will be published later this year by Verso.

Helen Shaw currently writes about theatre for Time Out New York magazine. Previously, she was a senior theatre critic for the New York Sun and has written for the New York Theater Review, TheatreForum, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, and Playbill, and also contributed the forward for Mac Wellman's anthology of plays, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. She has an MFA in dramaturgy from the American Repertory Theater Institute at Harvard University and a BA in Anthropology from Harvard.

Herbert Blau is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington. He has also had a parallel career in the theatre, as co-founder and co-director of The Actor's Workshop of San Francisco, then co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York, and as artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN. Among his recent books are The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion, and Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. He has just published As If: An Autobiography (Volume 1) and Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual.

Han Ong is a novelist and playwright. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for his plays and a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin for his fiction, Ong has been a guest teacher at Columbia University Long Island University and The New School.

Abigail Child is an award-winning media artist and poet whose original montage pushes the envelope of sound-image relations. Along with her kino-eye, she is keen of ear, currently completing her sixth book of poetry and her first full-length feature, shot in Italy while on a Rome Prize at the American Academy, A Shape of Error, Scenes from the life of Percy and Mary Shelley in the form of “imaginary” home movies.

Martha Wilson is founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive, an artist-run organization that produces and presents time-based art in all forms: artist books, installation art, visual art performance, and Internet works. As a performance artist she has collaborated with DISBAND, the punk conceptual band of women artists who impersonated political figures such as Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Tipper Gore. In 2008, she had her first solo exhibition in New York at Mitchell Algus Gallery. Wilson has recently joined P.P.O.W Gallery.

Elaine Summers has worked in a variety of forms, including dance, film, and intermedia. She was one of the original members of Judson Dance Theater and the founder of Experimental Intermedia Foundation. http://www.elainesummersdance.com and http://www.kineticawarenesscenter.org

Zach Layton is a guitarist, composer, curator, improviser, teacher, and new media artist based in Brooklyn, with an interest in biofeedback, generative algorithms, free improvisation, and the unconscious. He has performed and exhibited in many spaces in New York, South America, and Europe. He is also founder of the experimental music series, “Darmstadt: Classics of the Avant Garde,” former co-curator of the PS1 Warm Up music series, and curator at Issue Project Room.

Morgan Jenness has spent a good portion of her life in the theatre committing various dramaturgical acts, from a decade at the Public Theater with Joseph Papp to working at various theatrical and educational venues across the country. She is currently an agent and creative consultant at Abrams Artists Agency.

Ping Chong is an internationally acclaimed theatre director, playwright, video, and installation artist. Since 1972, he has created more than seventy multidisciplinary works for the stage at major museums, festivals, and theatres around the world.

Joseph V. Melillo, executive producer since 1999, is responsible for the Brooklyn Academic of Music's artistic direction, overseeing programming for the Howard Gilman Opera House, Harvey Theater, Rose Cinemas, and BAMcafé Live, and previously served as BAM's producing director after six years as founding director of the Next Wave Festival. Melillo has fostered the work of emerging and established artists, has forged international partnerships such as The Bridge Project, and has received numerous honors, including France's Chevalier and Great Britain's OBE.

Caden Manson founded Big Art Group in 1999, and since then have produced more than a dozen new works. Several of them are characterized by the “Real-Time Film” technique of bringing together live stage acting and live video. The experimental theatre company is a frequent guest at European festivals, and will open Broke House in New York in 2012.

Jemma Nelson founded Big Art Group in 1999, and since then have produced more than a dozen new works. Several of them are characterized by the “Real-Time Film” technique of bringing together live stage acting and live video. The experimental theatre company is a frequent guest at European festivals, and will open Broke House in New York in 2012.

Frank Hentschker is executive director and director of programs at the CUNY Graduate Center, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. http://www.thesegalcenter.org