2018 Artist Support Program

Kathya Alexander is a writer, actor, storyteller, and teaching artist.  Her poem, Naa Naa, appeared in Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workplace.  She has won the 2017 Artists Projects Award from 4Culture; the WRAP Award, Youth Arts Award, and the CityArtist Award from the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture; and her play, David and Jonathan: A Modern Day Retelling of the Biblical Tale, was selected for STG’s Night At The Neptune.  Another play, HomeGoing, was chosen for Freehold’s New Plays Festival, Mahogany Project’s Play Festival, and for residency at Hedgebrook Women’s Writer’s Retreat. She was playwright for Intiman Theater’s Rough Eagle’s Project, and her play, Black To My Roots: African American Tales from the Head and the Heart, won the Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland for Outstanding New Performance.

Artist Support Program 2018: Record a collection of short stories, set for self publication in 2018, called Angel in the Outhouse.

Damiano Unique, American vocal artist, record producer, and entrepreneur was born Damiano Unique Austin. Growing up in an economically troubled & disadvantaged neighborhood, Damiano was attracted to the arts at any early age. In the seventh grade she became a member of her middle school marching band and participated six consecutive years and later went on to attend college on a music scholarship. After discovering & honing her creative gifts and vocal talents she founded Wemoonwalkerz & recently released a mixed tape titled P∆≤≤PøR† Mµ≤iç.

Artist Support Program 2018: Produce a hip-hop album speaking about current social issues through the eyes of the protagonist & the antagonist.

Brandon Blake plays the bass guitar and the sansula. His music is a small offering to the lineage of the rich history of the variations of the African Kalimba/M’bira/Sanza in which he stands on the shoulders of giants who came before him. His music is aimed to help heal and connect, calm and entrance. He honors the past while forging his own unique path with this instrument and its fascinating capabilities. It is Brandon’s goal to move people towards the path of kindness through musical connection.

Artist Support Program 2018: Original music featuring the sansula (a variation of the kalimba) and bass guitar, blending old traditions with new techniques.

Charles Corey is an American composer holding a Ph.D. in Music Composition and Theory from the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied with Mathew Rosenblum, Eric Moe, Amy Williams, and Trevor Björklund. His approach to composition exploits and subverts the relationships that exist between different tuning systems; the results of this process range from pieces that use standard tuning systems in unique ways to works that involve multiple tuning systems working in concert. Corey’s compositions are known for their unexpected, evocative harmonies and their strong dramatic arcs. His music has been played in North America and Europe by a variety of performers including Cikada Ensemble, Iktus Percussion, Kjell Tore Innervik, Ere Lievonen, Inverted Space, and entelechron, with recent premieres in Amsterdam, Seattle, and Buenos Aires.

Corey is Director and Curator of the Harry Partch Instrumentarium and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Washington, Seattle. He conducted the world premiere of Partch’s 1955 revision of The Potion Scene, and gave the first performance on Partch’s Adapted Guitar I of his original score for U.S. Highball. His current research involves the microtonal compositions of György Ligeti and the total-theater works of Harry Partch.

Artist Support Program 2018: Produce a recording of Harry Partch’s complete works for Adapted Guitar I and Intoning Voice, as well as works written for this instrumentation by other composers.

Amy Erickson grew up near Detroit in the ’60s in a family of singers. This, along with the music of Motown and Burt Bacharach blaring on her kitchen radio, helped her learn to sing by ear. She also loved to dance and started working at age 13 to take jazz dance lessons. These, combined with her introduction to musical theatre as a child, nurtured Amy’s love of performing onstage. But in her 20s, the singing and dancing stopped due to her unprocessed, early childhood trauma. Her physical and emotional pain kept her shut down. Then, in her 40s, she found the courage to perform in a musical theatre production and rediscovered the vitality she felt in her youth. This proved to be the first step of healing from PTSD. Today, as the documentary film director of Visceral: transforming trauma through theatre, Amy is realizing her life’s purpose and flow.  In 2017 she received a WA state Artist Trust Grant for Artists’ Projects for Visceral. Through her film’s outreach, she will encourage others to pursue transformative expressive–arts experiences and continue her work as a trauma-informed, social-change artist.

Artist Support Program 2018: Audio production for Visceral, a documentary film telling the stories of four people who are living with the impact of post-traumatic stress and begin to transform their physical and mental health with the tools of acting.

Dr. Jeff Roberts is a composer-improviser and sound artist working in interdisciplinary acoustic and electroacoustic contexts. His music explores relationships between different music styles and cultures. Described as ‘bewitching’ and ‘delicately affecting’ by the Boston Globe and Boston Music Intelligencer, Roberts’s compositions has been performed and commissioned worldwide by ensembles including Philharmonisches Orchester Cottbus, Eighth Blackbird, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble Emex, Ensemble Interface, Wet Ink, Music From China, Cellophone and Duo Antwerp. His work has been recognized by a Fulbright Fellowship, an Asian Cultural Council grant award and an award from the Franz Goethe Stiftung to fund study and collaborative work in Germany. His compositions have been awarded the Wellesley Composer’s Conference Kaske Prize, 2008 Bent Frequency Competition winner and finalist selections in several international composition competitions. He has held artist residencies at the Banff Centre in Canada, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Brush Creek Foundation and the STEIM Foundation in Amsterdam. From his studies with guqin master Li Xiangting in Beijing, China, Dr. Roberts performs frequently on guqin in solo and collaborative improvised contexts, often using sensor-interactive live-electronic setting to expand the sound of guqin and integrate guqin performance with modern, cross-cultural contexts. Recent guqin performances have taken place in New York, Toronto, Edmonton, Toulouse, Antwerp and Seoul. He co-founded the East Asian improvisation ensemble ‘PAN Project’ with Korean piri master Gamin. This ensemble was awarded a 2016 Avaloch Farm Ensemble Residency and will tour Canada and the US in late 2016 and early 2017. As sound artist he has presented shadow theatre/sound art collaborations with Colombia-based performance artist Adriana Rojas-Pretel at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in the US and World Stage Design Festival in Cardiff, Wales, England. Continued collaborations in 2017-18 will take place in Bogota, Colombia. Dr. Roberts founded the Music Beyond The Moongate International Chamber Music Festival in Beijing, China which has held festivals of modern Western and intercultural music. He holds a PhD in Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at Williams College and currently teaches in the Music and East Asian Studies Departments at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Artist Support Program 2018: Recording of guqin solo and ensemble improvisations and compositions for a CD.

New Media Gallery 2016-17 (with Roger Feldman): The New Landscape: Reconstructed Ecologies

Elizabeth Schiffler is a filmmaker, puppeteer, and scenic designer. Her work stems from her research in comparative mythology, post-humanism, and feminism. She focuses on exploring human and non-human relationships with the natural world through experimental narrative work. Along with participating in the Artist Support Program at Jack Straw, she is currently the Artist-in-Residence at the Pacific Science Center.

Artist Support Program 2018: Create a sonic landscape for A Hungry Shell (seeks champagne), a live puppetry performance including a giant mollusk puppet that towers through space searching for champagne.

Stuart Wheeler and Jesse Quebbeman-Turley are multi-instrumentalist singer-composers who met in 2014 through the Avant GaRawge – a DIY experimental performing arts series in Provo, Utah – where they both participated as co-curators and frequent contributors. Much of their early friendship was spent driving around, listening to Ensemble Organum’s seminal recording of Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame. Since meeting, Jesse and Stuart have performed with each other in numerous bands (FunCoffin, Quiet House, COLLAPSES, Zoo Pals and NAPS), appeared together on nine albums and performed in several of each other’s operas: The Museum Of (Quebbeman Turley), The Heavenly City (Wheeler), Red Lake (Wheeler), The Beekeeper’s Journal (Quebbeman-Turley) and The 55 brides of Brileen Young (Wheeler). Additionally, the two performed in the premiers of Lara Candland and Christian Asplund’s puppet opera The God Fugitive and Christian Asplund’s Micro Passion, along with three short bicycle operas composed by Jesse. Both Stuart and Jesse serve on the board of Deseret Experimental Opera, which Jesse co-founded in 2013 with Luke Swenson and Logan Hone. Stuart holds a degree in Music Composition from Brigham Young University, and Jesse from the Performer-Composer program at CalArts.

Artist Support Program 2018: Produce an album of radically-reimagined 14th-century vocal works by Guillaume de Machaut.

Equally at home on the concert stage or in the elementary school lunchroom, Agermos aims to return chamber music to its natural habitat: everyday life! Despite decades of formal academic training, the maestros of Agermos have preserved their spark of curiosity and fun, tapping their “inner child” to bring a fresh twist to centuries old tradition. With influences from Dmitri Shostakovich and Wolfgang Mozart to Heraclio Fernandez and Vince Guaraldi (and everything in between), the creative arrangements and original compositions of Agermos transcend genre to reinvent a medium.

Artist Support Program 2018: Record their repertoire of original compositions, arrangements of classical and folk music, and incidental music and narration for children’s stories.

Danny Barksdale was raised in the Appalachian Mountain foothills in the northeast corner of Alabama.  After a rigorous 18-year-training in Sunday School at a small Southern Baptist church, he left home and earned a B.A. in literature from the University of Montevallo, which is located at the geographic center of Alabama. Subsequently, he left Alabama and earned a M.A. in literature from the University of New Hampshire. He currently teaches culinary arts at FareStart, a job training and placement program for homeless and disadvantaged individuals.

Artist Support Program 2018 (with Catalyst Kitchens of FareStart): Produce a podcast featuring conversations with experienced and successful culinary social entrepreneurs and change makers, committed to building a better world by providing people with a pathway out of poverty.

Artist Support Program 2013: Billy Barksdale: The History, a radio piece and album containing the original recordings and story of Billy Barksdale, told by the people who knew him and accompanied him as musicians.

Antonio Davidson-Gómez is an educator and percussionist focused on fostering musical dialogue between cultures. He has studied, performed and recorded in various genres with emphases on Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Afro-Latin music. Tony has produced arts and culture programming, educational projects and community engagement initiatives for over two decades. A 2013-14 Jubilation Foundation Fellow for music in education, he has developed curricula for PBS and the EMP Museum/Smithsonian, in addition to teaching students and educators for Seattle’s Creative Advantage and various school districts. Tony is the Education Manager at Broadway Center for Performing Arts and is a speaker on music and culture for Humanities Washington, offering presentations including Saffron & Honey: Muslims, Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain and Mapping Latino Musical Migrations. Formerly a K-12 teacher, he has been a Collaborating Teacher with Cal Performances, the Silk Road Project and the Jewish Music Festival, designed a college prep course on world music and managed educational resources and wrote documentaries for KCTS 9 Public Television in Seattle. Recent musical projects include work with Tango del Cielo, Gary Stroutsos and the Early Music Guild of Seattle. Tony holds a Masters in Education from UC Berkeley and has conducted study and research trips in the Mediterranean and Latin America, most recently returning from travels in Morocco and Spain where he studied music and history.

Artist Support Program 2024 (with Trio Guadalevin): El Noroeste – A Musical Portrait of Washington’s Latinx  Communities Past & Present

Artist Support Program 2018: Continue work on the Guadalevín Project: an intimate exploration of identity and cultural dialogue which radiates across generations and continents; principally a musical collection bolstered by personal writings and historical accounts.

Artist Support Program 2015: Record music from many traditions for the Guadalevin Project, an exploration of identity and cultural dialogue combining elements of autobiography, travelogue, and musical collection.

Rachel Green creates site-specific multimedia performances that tell stories about our human condition. She regards the body as a container for emotions, infusing her work with delicate and volatile expressions of human feeling. As a performer, director, choreographer, and producer she has presented collaborative work at Velocity Dance Center, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, On the Boards, Ghost Gallery, Inscape Arts, Hedreen Gallery, and the Chapel Performance Space. Her work invokes a sense of the primal and cerebral while exploring ancient and mythic themes. Green takes inspiration from nature as a way to harness one’s own power, wildness, wonder, and freedom.

Artist Support Program 2018 (with Daniel Salo): Record an EP by Earth and Ceremony, a music and performance art group that creates installations, modern operas, and contemporary performances that evoke the paradoxical uncertainty of life.

New Media Gallery 2016-17 (with Daniel Salo): Forgetting of Being

New Media Gallery 2013-14 (with Seth Sexton): Hypnagogic Jerk

Daniel Salo is a composer and sound artist with a focus on orchestrations for performance art, modern dance and film scores. As a multi-instrumentalist he has written and performed music for piano, organ, guitar and string quartets as well as music groups Joy Wants Eternity and A Story of Rats (with collaborator Garek Jon Druss). His narrative compositions, often performed with film visuals and sound installations, has led to intensive collaborations within the theatrical and dance communities, including the widely acclaimed performance group Saint Genet, and dancer/choreographer Rachel Green.

Artist Support Program 2018 (with Rachel Green): Record an EP by Earth and Ceremony, a music and performance art group that creates installations, modern operas, and contemporary performances that evoke the paradoxical uncertainty of life.

New Media Gallery 2016-17 (with Rachel Green): Forgetting of Being

Srivani Jade was introduced to music at the age of four by her father Bhavani Prasad Jade and uncle Raghavendra Tilwalli. She studied Khayal initially with Dr. Sharad Gadre in the Gwalior style (2002-03), and since 2006, with Pandit Parameshwar Hegde in the Kirana style. Srivani also sings an eclectic repertoire of light classical music, such as,Thumri-dadra, Tappa and Bhajans. She performs regularly both in India and North America, and has sung in major music festivals such as the Sawai Gandharv Bhimsen Mahotsav (2014) and Devanandan Ubhayaker Yuva Sangeet Utsav (2009). She has five solo albums to her credit, and several grants, artist residencies and awards–including the Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship Award (2009). She has lent her voice and music to independent films such as Tapasya (2003), Siddhanto (2014) and stage productions such as Indian Ink (Sound Theater Company). She is an auditioned artist with All India Radio, and Visiting Artist at the University of Washington’s School of Music.

Artist Support Program 2018: Peace Mantra, a musical composition for female voices composed of incantations of peace from all around the world.

Artist Support Program 2016: Record music combining Indian raga vocals with Greek clarinet, Latin piano, Senegalese drums, tabla, and other instruments.

Artist Support Program 2008: Meera’s Love, an album of original songs featuring a range of styles and instrumentation representing different regions of India.

Nic Masangkay is a Seattle-based community musician and poet. They graduated in 2016 from the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Notable highlights include Buzzfeed, Autostraddle, and Tumblr features for poem “My Gender Is for Mothers”; 2018 Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Assistance Program Resident; 2019 4Culture Arc Artist Fellow; and independent singer-songwriter-producer alt-pop releases with EP Dark at Dusk: the Final Suicide (2019), singles “Star” (2021) and “Mothers” (2022). Aside from their solo work, Masangkay regularly collaborates with music, movement, and film artists, for remixing, scoring, production, and live sound. As they move to create more intergenerational and all-ages art, working with young people as a teaching artist is a budding focus of their practice. In their music, poetry, collaborations, teaching, and everyday life, Nic generously shares their perspective on the transformative potential of cultural work.

Artist Support Program 2023: We Came of Age As Love Was Changing

Artist Support Program 2018: Dark at Dusk: The Final Suicide EP

Clyde Petersen is a Seattle-based artist, working in film, animation, music, installation and fabulous spectacle. He is a member of the Transgender and Queer communities in Seattle. Clyde is the director of Torrey Pines, an autobiographical stop-motion animated feature film, which premiered in October 2016 and toured the world with a live score. He is currently directing his second feature, Even Hell has its Heroes, a documentary about the legendary Seattle drone band Earth.

Artist Support Program 2018: Record new music by members of the band Earth for Even Hell Has Its Heroes, a documentary film about them.

Artist Support Program 2016: Record and mix live foley for the stop-motion animated film Torrey Pines.

James Kelly Pitts spent his twenties crawling across the ideological divide, finally finding a nice vantage point from his Floridian Southern Baptist roots in Seattle. As a bartender he is no stranger to weird walks of life and often finds the stumbling figures he encounters inspiring his offbeat and eclectic songs. At heart a lo-fi bedroom pop shut in, he has officially released two albums, 2011’s Quiet Desperation and as Bad Rites 2014’s Touch the Ground. He has recorded hundreds more home spun songs, many of which he chronicles through his bandcamp website. He is currently working on his third album.

Artist Support Program 2018: Produce a full-length album of original songs.

Kay D. Ray was the senior film producer for Experience Music Project where she developed and created over 85 films and just produced and directed the films for the new Museum of History and Industry in Seattle exhibit Edible City. She also created all the exhibit films for the new MOHAI opening, Celluloid Seattle and Essential Seattle. Her feature documentary Lady Be Good; Instrumental Women In Jazz premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival, toured the US in film festivals and school and is now in distribution.

Ms Ray also recently produced, directed and shot Corazon Contento for a special needs school in Nicaragua, was co-curator and filmmaker for an exhibit Jumpin’ With The Big Bands with the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, produced an interactive for Washington State Historical Society’s exhibit Women’s Votes, Women’s Voices with Frause Creative. With Weatherhead Experience Design Group she produced and directed the films on a microcomputer history gallery at the Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. Additionally she completed the documentary on Northwest arts patron Anne Gould Hauberg; Visionary for the Living Treasures series for Northwest Designer Craftsman and her documentary on jazz great Ernestine Anderson; There Will Never Be Another You was nominated for an Emmy award.

Artist Support Program 2018: Audio production for the documentary film In Her Hands: Key Changes in Jazz, exploring obstacles facing women in Jazz today as women around the US are fighting for auditions, creating opportunities and being role models for young musicians.

The Seattle Women’s Jazz Orchestra (SWOJO), co-founded by Barbara Hubers-Drake and Ellen Finn, was formed to nurture the musical, educational and artistic growth of individual musicians, to encourage women to become involved in jazz performance/composition as a career or avocation, and to foster community interest in and appreciation of jazz as an art form.

Since the first rehearsal in January of 2000, the band has performed at clubs, jazz festivals, and concert halls on two continents and performed with many distinguished artists including Don Lanphere, Mimi Fox, Becca Duran, Susan Pascal, Greta Matassa, Kelley Johnson, Hazel Leach, Jill Townsend, Ingrid Jensen, and Grace Kelly.

SWOJO has released two CDs on OA2 Records. The band has performed at the Earshot Jazz Festival, Seattle Jazz Vespers series, the Triple Door Mainstage, Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley, Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival, and many others.

Artist Support Program 2018: Produce recordings of winner and honorable mention compositions from Seattle Women’s Jazz Orchestra (SWOJO)’s annual international jazz composition contest for women composers.

Born and grown on a small farm between Puget Sound and the Cascade foothills, Amanda Winterhalter makes songs at once elegantly crafted yet unafraid to show blood. Her songs walk the edges of unavoidable aches, desire and flirtation, and the uneasy paradoxes we carry. Amanda is a frequent performer with Seattle’s Bushwick Book Club, writing and presenting original music inspired by books. Her song “Shirt” won first place in the 2016 Jane Titland Songwriting Contest at the Tumbleweed Music Festival. Her debut album, Olea, released in November 2016, presents her range of styles from gothic Americana to grit rock. Her second album will release in the fall of 2018, as she begins work on a third project – a collaborative anthology of songs inspired by Pacific Northwest stories and heritage.

Artist Support Program 2018: Produce an album of songs inspired by historical stories of death, extinction, theft, relocation, and loss in the Pacific Northwest.