1997 Artist Support Program

Byron Au Yong composes songs of dislocation dedicated to intercultural collaboration and the places people call home. Works include Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas (Bumbershoot Festival of the Arts), Occupy Orchestra 無量園 Infinity Garden (Chicago Composers Orchestra), Piano Concerto–Houston (Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts), Stuck Elevator (American Conservatory Theatre), and YIJU 移居 (Jack Straw New Media Gallery).

Au Yong has been artist-in-residence with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Montalvo Arts Center, Rutgers University Center for Migration & the Global City, Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, Virginia Tech Center for the Arts, Westminster Choir College, and Yale Institute for Music Theatre. Honors include a Creative Capital Award and Time Warner Foundation Fellowship.

Artist Support Program 2009

New Media Gallery 2008-09 (with Randy Moss): Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas

New Media Gallery 2004-05: Yiju: Songs of Dislocation

Artist Support Program 1997

Originally from Seattle, David Brugman is based in Munich, Germany, where he works as a sustainability consultant and as a creative photographer and photo-artist.

Artist Support Program 1997

Ffej is an analog synthesist, songwriter and sound artist on the run from normality. His experimental songs and compositions defy description as does his multifaceted musical life. This longtime resident of Seattle, WA has been performing since 1992. As well as playing his own material solo, he has participated in a number of group projects including Mutant Data Orchestra, Chaosmosis and now defunct bands like Little LuAnn and Euphorbia. He has been a key member of the Sonicabal, a Seattle based collective of experimental musicians, and host of Seattle’s online creative music calendar, Cognitive Dissidents.

Artist Support Program 1997

Heather Dew Oaksen is a media artist, independent producer, and the founder/recent Board President of 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle. She has produced a body of personal work that challenges viewers to see social issues in new ways through altered scale, sequence, light and point of view. She has received numerous awards including support from The Flintridge Foundation, Artist Trust, Art Matters, The Phelan Foundation, the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, the American Film Institute, and the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowship. Oaksen’s videos and media installations are exhibited throughout the United States and Canada. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.U.P. in Urban Planning from the University of Oregon. She currently teaches at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

New Media Gallery 2007-08: Still Point

Artist Support Program 1997

Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody award-winning writer and independent media and theatre artist who has written and produced more than 400 audio art pieces and documentaries for NPR and PRI programs. Her Peabody award-winning documentary “Mei Mei, a Daughter’s Song” is a harrowing account of her mother’s childhood in Taiwan during WWII. Her Crossing East, the first Asian American history series on public radio also garnered a Peabody award. The eight-hour series took three years to produce and ran on more than 230 stations around the country. She is now creating the Crossing East Archive Project, an online repository of nearly 300 hours of oral history interviews collected for the ground-breaking series.

Artist Support Program 1997: “The Journey of Lady Buddha,” the first episode of the radio series Legacies: Faith, Hope, and Peace.

Bert Wilson (1939-2013) was a jazz clarinetist and saxophonist. After spending time in New York and California in the 1960s and’70s, he moved to Olympia, Washington, where he led the group Rebirth, which included Nancy Curtis, Chuck Metcalf, Bob Myers, Jack Perciful, Chuck Stentz, and Allen Youngblood.

Artist Support Program 1997 (with Rebirth and James Zitro): Dedicated to Friends and Mothers

Christian Asplund is a Canadian-American composer-performer based in Utah where he teaches at Brigham Young University. His interests have included the intersections of text/music, improvisation/composition, and modular textures/forms. He has received awards and grants from Genesis Foundation, Barlow Endowment, Artistrust, King County, ASCAP, Alpert Foundation and Jack Straw Foundation.

Artist Support Program 1999: Recorded Liquid, An Epistolary Opera by the Seattle Experimental Opera.

Artist Support Program 1997

Jay Clayton is an internationally acclaimed vocalist, composer, and educator, whose work boldly spans the terrain between jazz and new music. Clayton’s pioneering vocal explorations placed her at the forefront of the free jazz movement and loft scene in the 1970s, where she counted among the first singers to incorporate poetry and electronics into her improvisations. She formed a long-term association with renowned minimalist composer Steve Reich.

With more than 40 recordings to her credit, Clayton has appeared alongside such formidable artists as Muhal Richard Abrams, Kirk Nurock, Stanley Cowell, Lee Konitz, and Fred Hersch, as well as fellow vocalists Jeanne Lee, Norma Winstone, Urszula Dudziak, and Bobby McFerrin. Clayton currently records for Sunnyside and her album Brooklyn 2000 met with enthusiastic critical praise. Her many accomplishments include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and Chamber Music America (2004). She has worked with thousands of students in the United States and across the globe.

Artist Support Program 1997

Stephen Reed Griggs (b. NYC, 1960) earned certificates in Narrative Non-Fiction and Arts Management from the University of Washington, a Bachelor of Musical Arts in Saxophone Performance from the University of Illinois, and a Master of Business Administration in Management Information Systems from Pace University.

As a writer, Griggs is a member of the Jazz Journalists Association. His work has been published in the Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, Earshot Jazz, Raven Chronicles Volume 26, Creative Colloquy Volume 3, Stories of Music Volume 2 (2017 International Book Award), and Rhythm in the Rain: Jazz in the Pacific Northwest. Griggs’ historical research has been mentioned in The John Coltrane Reference and Wild Isle in the City.

Musically, Griggs is an award-winning composer, producer, performer, and publisher with six commercial jazz recordings of his music on his independent, self-produced Hip City Music label. NEA Jazz Master Elvin Jones is featured on two of Griggs’ records. He accepted the Jazz Journalist Association 2021 Best Historical Recording award as Associate Producer on John Coltrane: A Love Supreme Live in Seattle for finding the source tape. His live performances of site-specific programs of social justice stories and original music have twice earned an Adventurous Programming Award by Chamber Music America and ASCAP, and The Seattle Channel broadcast Griggs’ music and narrative program based on the police killing of native carver John T. Williams on Front Row: Steve Griggs Ensemble present Seeing John T. Williams. Griggs is the featured saxophone soloist on the soundtrack for the Microsoft video game Halo 3: ODST which sold more than 6 million copies worldwide.

2023 Writers Program

Artist Support Program 2017: Record six songs and narrations for the program Sound in Stone: Music in the Sculptures of James Winston Washington.

Artist Support Program 2015: Record and mix the narrative and music program for A Cup of Joe Brazil, an audio documentary about an important figure in Seattle’s cultural history.

Artist Support Program 2013: Perform oral history recording, digital preservation of historic recordings, and production of audio excerpts for a blog and biography about the life and impact of Joe Brazil.

Artist Support Program 1997

Seattle-based guitarist Bill Horist has played on dozens of records and has performed throughout North and Central America, Europe and Japan; collaborating with numerous leading lights in a beguiling range of genres. Perhaps best known for his prepared guitar treatments, his work is widely regarded alongside masters like Fred Frith and Keith Rowe. He has cultivated a unique voice in a number of styles in the realms of, jazz, rock, folk, and experimental music.  Horist is also becoming known as a masterful acoustic fingerstyle player in the tradition of Leo Kottke and John Fahey, additionally incorporating elements from Asia, India, the Middle-East and West Africa.

In both solo and ensemble capacities, Bill has received critical praise internationally and has been awarded several grants and residencies. He has created music for dance, film, theater and video games. In addition to a busy performance schedule, he teaches private lessons and conducts classes and workshops from elementary to graduate levels.

Artist Support Program 1997

Nancy Rawles has worked as a journalist, playwright, and novelist. The New York Times called her novel My Jim “as heart-wrenching a personal history as any recorded in American literature.”

Nancy has received many awards for her writing, including an Alex Award from the American Library Association, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and a Legacy Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. My Jim was selected by the Seattle Public Library for its popular Seattle Reads Program.

​Nancy grew up in Los Angeles, studied in Chicago, and makes her home in Seattle, where she enjoys teaching writing and spending time with family and friends.

Artist Support Program  2004: Recorded My Jim – a companion CD to her novel of the same name

2001 Writers Program (Curator)

Artist Support Program 1997