Jack Straw Artist Support Program

Vania Clemons Bynum is a former Computer Engineer who utilizes the ingenuity of making software to create dance. A graduate of Cornish College of the Arts, Vania has taught and choreographed throughout the Greater Seattle area for almost 20 years. She performed in the Paramount & Moore Theaters, Intiman Theatre, Benaroya Hall, the Meydenbauer, and the intimate space of local churches. Utilizing dance as her form of worship, Vania directed the Adult Liturgical Dance Ministry at New Beginnings Christian Fellowship for 11 years. She also performed in The Black Nativity, Hip-Hop Back to Its Roots!, Dance This!, 7 Women 7 Stools, the American Jazz Nutcracker and more.

Vania’s works have been sponsored by the city of Seattle, 4Culture, Central District Forum, Bossak Heilbron, Microsoft, and the Allied Arts Foundation. Artist Trust will be an additional sponsor in her new works. Vania produced a Hurricane Katrina Benefit raising $13,000 for victims in 2005, “Excerpts from the Soul of a Woman” in 2006/2008, and CATS in 2009 for Broadway Bound Children’s Theatre.  In addition, Vania choreographed works for Northwest Tap Connection, Bellevue Lyric Opera/Bellevue Youth Theater, Tacoma Urban Performing Arts Center, Jerboa Dance, and Hal Jackson Talented Teens.

Vania was a featured dancer in Langston Hughes inaugural African American Master Choreographer series, choreographed by the late Kabby Mitchell. She also worked with distinguished artists such as Donald Byrd, Sonia Dawkins, Wade Madsen, Michele Miller & Deborah Wolf.

In 2018, Vania performed a work in progress, “Dancing Our Truth” for Showing Out: Contemporary Black Choreographers and she danced in “A Special Evening with Stephanie Mills and Friends 2019 concert.”

Artist Support Program 2023: QUEENS IN THE MILITARY: Audio production for a multidisciplinary dance project that uses music, dance, video and poetry to explore the challenges that women face in the military.

Artist Support Program 2020: Audio support for Humanity: An Evolving Perspective, a virtual performance and fundraiser as part of their project We Inspire Humanity

Peter Colclasure graduated with a degree in piano performance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, before going on to spend a decade touring, recording, and performing with various bands. He lived in Seattle from 2007 to 2012, where he became involved in dance accompaniment, playing piano and writing music for Dance Fremont, Spectrum Ballet, and Evergreen Ballet. He currently lives in San Jose, California, where he teaches private lessons and works as an accompanist for the New Ballet School. He has released two solo instrumental albums since 2016. His compositions have been used for choreography by the eMotion Arts dance troupe, the Memphis Ballet, and Boise Ballet Academy.

Artist Support Program 2020: Record My Lai, a three-movement work for piano and string quartet based on the My Lai Massacre.

Randy Hathaway released a double CD of his compositions, Classical Guitar In America, which has received international reviews and generous radio play across the US, Canada and UK.  He was the co-founder and director of the Seattle School of Music and graduate of Cornish College of the Arts.  Randy resides in Yakima Washington.

Randy, classical guitarist Connor Ritchie, and English horn player Logan Esterling formed the New American Ensemble while collaborating on Randy’s composition, Urban Dance.  In 2019, the group was the recipient of a Washington State Arts Commission grant.

Artist Support Program 2020: Record Urban Dance, a two-movement composition scored out for English Horn and Classical Guitar that will incorporate a Dancer in performance.

Benjamin Hunter is an award winning multi-instrumentalist—violin, mandolin, guitar, percussion, voice—whose interests lie in roots music from around the world.  Born in Lesotho, raised predominantly in Phoenix, with stints in Seattle and Zimbabwe, Ben was raised classically on violin, but now plays a variety of styles—roots, folk, jazz, blues, gospel, world.  Ben plays in the internationally touring duo, Ben Hunter & Joe Seamons, as well as solo and with other local Seattle jazz groups.  In 2017, he composed music for a dance piece, Black Bois, that has received critical acclaim and most recently played at The Moore Theater in February 2020, and is currently an artist-in-residence for Seattle’s On The Boards theater group.  Ben was the recipient of the 2015 Governor’s Arts & Heritage Award, 2016 City Arts Magazine Future’s List Award, 2016 International Blues Challenge winner, and the 2019 Gordon Ekvall Tracie Memorial Award.  Ben is a Seattle Music Commissioner, and served on Seattle’s pilot BASE program board (Building Art Space Equitably).

Watch: Benjamin Hunter live at Jack Straw

Artist Support Program 2020: Produce recordings of music composed in conjunction with choreography for Dani Tirrell’s Black Bois.

Marijke Keyser is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher based in Seattle. She earned her BFA at the University of Washington, and her MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her work stems from an obsession with place & time, and takes many forms; from map-like paintings and prints, to walking performances, to sound installations. Her latest project, weathered, investigates how the sound of a material can change overtime due to rain, rot, and the curiosity of passers-by.

Artist Support Program 2020: weathered: Recording a marimba-sculpture as it is left outside to weather to document how its sounds evolve and use sounds as components for performance.

Jeffrey Moidel’s song cycle Neruda Love Sonnets received “First Place for the Nation: USA” representing Washington State in the International Ravel Composition Competition held in Bergamo, Italy in 2015 and was advanced to the Semi-Finals. His song, “And now you’re mine . . .” was singled out by the NATS Art Song Composition Award panel of judges and given the award of “Stand-Out Song,” the first song ever to receive such mention in the ASCA competition’s history, since they created the category specifically to honor this song.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company and the Aspen Dance Connection have featured his compositions with Jeff at the piano. Jeff has performed throughout the United States, Europe and South America as a piano soloist and collaborative pianist

A graduate of the Mannes College of Music in New York City, Jeff has been a vocal coach and instructor for Seattle Opera’s Young Artist Program, the Aspen Music Festival, and other music schools and festivals. He was an Assistant Professor at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Jeff believes it is important for children to develop an early appreciation for the arts and has written six children’s musicals and other concert works for young audiences.

Artist Support Program 2020: The New Colossus: A new musical setting of the poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty, for voice and piano.

Artist Support Program 2001

Alicia Jo Rabins is a musician, composer, writer, ritualist, and Torah teacher. The New York Times calls her voice “gorgeous”; the San Francisco Chronicle calls her writing “a poetry page-turner, both sexy and humble.” She has released three albums with Girls in Trouble, her indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah; is the author of two books of poetry, Divinity School (2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode; and is currently at work on A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, an independent film about the intersection of finance and spirituality, in collaboration with director Alicia J. Rose. Rabins has toured Central America and Kuwait playing fiddle music as a cultural ambassador for the US State Department and composes for film and TV. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, bassist Aaron Hartman, and their two children.

Artist Support Program 2020: Music and audio production for A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, a mystical-musical feature film about the greatest financial fraud in human history, as seen through the eyes of an artist working on Wall Street.

Singer-songwriter J.R. Rhodes believes that music heals and that love is real. From her first open-mic performances at the O.K. Hotel, Seattle, to her latest album I Am, these beliefs in the transformative power of song are distilled into gems of quiet intensity that traverse blues, jazz, folk and rock.

Rhodes earned her B.A. in music composition from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. Jazz artists Bill Lowe and Anthony Braxton were teachers who encouraged her to explore and push beyond any self-imposed boundaries. These lessons have allowed her to continually grow and evolve her music. Her full-length albums include I Am (2017), Elixir (2011), Afriqueen Stare (2003), and Songs of Angels (1999). Additional works that demonstrate Rhodes’s range are Lullabies (2013), a performance of traditional spirituals, On the Boards, Seattle; as well as 2 Old Chicks (2005), a 50-piece orchestral film score, created in collaboration with Doris Bartha and Steve Brush. She’s currently in writing mode exploring African rhythms and spirituals.

Artist Support Program 2020: Soul Serenade: A collection of original songs in the genres of folk, spiritual and lullaby music.

Prolific trumpeter/composer Samantha Boshnack walks her own path. Whether blasting through the alternative sonic explorations of her 14-piece alternative chamber orchestra, B’shnorkestra, leading Seismic Belt or her own quintet, Boshnack’s sound pulses with vitality.  After getting a degree in jazz from Bard College in 2003, Boshnack moved to Seattle. She toured extensively with the modern jazz group Reptet for seven years, releasing four albums comprised mostly of her compositions. Since 2011, she has led three ensembles, released five critically-acclaimed albums, and continued to tour and present concerts, workshops, and festival performances. She is a member of the Alchemy Sound Project (a composer-led ensemble featuring composers Sumi Tonooka, Erica Lindsay, Salim Washington, David Arendt, and Boshnack) who have released two records.

Boshnack has received support and commissioning funds from New Music USA, Meet The Composer, 4Culture, Artist Trust, Jack Straw Cultural Center, New York Foundation of the Arts, Earshot Jazz, among others. In 2019 she was a composer fellow at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.  She was the 2018 Make Jazz Fellow, an annual award is sponsored by the Herb Alpert Foundation to support promising, emerging composers. She has attended two Atlantic Center for the Arts Master Artist-in-Residence Programs and was selected as a 2012 participant in the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute  (a program of American Composers Orchestra in partnership with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music).

Artist Support Program 2020: Record six new compositions written for both a string trio and a chamber group of mixed instrumentation, collaborating with two poets.

Artist Support Program 2008 : Recorded Agendacide, a 7″ record with Reptet

Mary Coss is an interdisciplinary artist known for her haunting installations that provide commentary on the human condition. Born in Detroit, she received her MFA from Syracuse University, Dept. of Experimental Studios. This hybrid sculpture and media department introduced a life-long interest in layering social relevance with sculpture, projection and sound. Coss re-contextualizes common artifacts to explore issues of identity, memory, and social justice. Her public work includes commissions and socially engaged practices.

Recognized through awards and grants by the NEA, Ford and Puffin Foundations, Artist Trust, 4Culture and the ACLU, her extensive exhibition record includes several northwest museums and an international profile. Research, interviews and travel are integral to her process. This includes a cultural exchange with Candyland Arts in Stockholm, workshops in Turkey and Guatemala, and residencies in Ireland and throughout the US.  She actively curates and is a cofounder of METHOD Gallery, CASA rape crisis center, a public art program teaching youth employable skills, and Borealis Light Festival.

Artist Support Program 2020: Timbre Lines: a sound piece which incorporates water, interviews, Whulshootseed language, and sounds of a working mill to accompany a large sculpture.

Kimya Dawson is a Grammy winning, platinum selling singer songwriter most widely known for her work on the JUNO soundtrack and her former band, The Moldy Peaches. She has released 6 solo albums, including a children’s album, Alphabutt. She has been featured in Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, NY Times, NME, Q, AOL, and more.

Since 1999 Kimya has toured the world as a solo performer and with The Moldy Peaches and The Uncluded (Aesop Rock & Kimya Dawson). She has shared the stage with Regina Spektor, The Strokes, The Mountain Goats, Third Eye Blind, Billy Bragg, Daniel Johnston, Patti Smith, Ani DiFranco, Amy Goodman, Tom Robbins, Janeane Garofalo, Norm MacDonald, Atmosphere, Sleater Kinney, They Might Be Giants, Bright Eyes, Sheryl Crow, John Waters, Jonathan Richman, Neil Gaiman, and Kshama Sawant.

In addition, she has performed on the View, the Independent Spirit Awards, multiple times at TEDxBoulder, the National Conference for Media Reform, the REM Tribute at Carnegie Hall, author John Green’s Evening of Awesome (celebrating The Fault in Our Stars) at Carnegie Hall, The Hollywood Premiere of the film Juno.

Artist Support Program 2020: Record original songs for her eighth solo album.

Different Drummer is a multi-genre chamber ensemble founded by three string players from this region’s premier chamber orchestra, the Northwest Sinfonietta. Violinist Brandon Vance is a two-time winner of the US National Scottish Fiddle Championship. Gretchen Yanover is an acclaimed electric cellist with three solo albums to her credit. Bassist Anna Doak has performed and/or recorded with Dave Mathews, Joe Williams, Spirit of the West, Linda Ronstadt, and the Seattle Symphony. Add to the mix Don Dieterich, a percussionist who is willing to whack in any number of non-traditional gadgets from lamp shades to garbage cans and you’ve got a show that represents genres as varied as the artists presenting it. Prepare to by entertained, amused and exhilarated by this unique collaboration!

Artist Support Program 2020: Mix 9 tracks from a 2019 performance at the Chapel Performance Space and record 3 new pieces live in-studio to include on new album release.

Artist Support Program 2015: Different Drummer, an album of music for double bass, fiddle, and tap.

A conservatory-trained classical pianist and vocalist who fell into creating electronic music shortly after a stint playing Baroque lute, Kaley Lane Eaton’s music is colored by this eclecticism, expressing a preoccupation with harmony, improvisation, storytelling, emotion, physical gesture, and vocal virtuosity. Her work has been performed across the US and internationally, in venues ranging from Hong Kong concert halls, to the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Her “disconcertingly lovely” (Seattle Magazine) compositions are quickly gaining notoriety for combining innovative digital technology with ancient performance practices, questioning humanity’s growing dependence on technology and the resulting exploitation of human connection.

Eaton’s work has garnered recent support from ASCAP (2019 Plus Award), Seattle Office of Arts and Culture (2019 CityArtist Award), the Allied Arts Foundation (2018 Listen Up! Grants for Composers grantee), the International Alliance for Women in Music (2017 Pauline Oliveros New Genre prize for lily [bloom in my darkness]), the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences (2017 Distinguished Holland and Knight Fellowship), the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2017 Associate Artist), and 4Culture (2017 Tech-Specific Grant).

Eaton holds a DMA in composition from the University of Washington and is Director of Music Technology at Cornish College of the Arts.

Watch: Kaley Lane Eaton live at Jack Straw

Artist Support Program 2020: Recording and production for two albums of original music.

entr’acte is a violin and piano duo consisting of Luke Fitzpatrick and Laure Struber. As a violin and piano duo, they have performed the Complete Sonatas by Johannes Brahms, Sonatas by Ravel, Mozart, Franck, and Shostakovich, as well as works by Arvo Pärt, Benjamin Britten, John Adams, and Luigi Dallapiccola.

Artist Support Program 2020: Production of ZOMBIES, a debut album striving to create a new sound that maximizes resonance, reinterprets older music, and expands upon the piano’s possibilities.

Betsy Hanson’s novel, Always Gardenia, was featured on Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust TV program and has found readers in Tasmania, Southern France, the UK, Belgium, Japan, and many US states. Ms. Hanson is the coeditor and translator, with Yukiko Tanaka, of This Kind of Woman: Ten Stories by Japanese Women Writers (Stanford University Press). She wrote book reviews for The New York Times Book Review for ten years and has received writer’s grants from the City of Seattle and The Elizabeth George Foundation. In March 2018 Ms. Hanson presented her original short story, one of the top three entries in a contest sponsored by the North American Barbara Pym Society, at the group’s conference at Harvard Law School. She wrote and directed a dozen one-act plays for community theater, and her ten-minute plays have been produced at the Phoenix Theater in Edmonds, the As If Theater Company in Kenmore, the Eclectic Theater Company in Seattle, and the IPOP short play festival in Olympia.

Artist Support Program 2020: Produce an audio version of her novel Always Gardenia.

Wayne Horvitz is a composer, pianist and electronic musician who has performed extensively throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. He is the leader of the Gravitas Quartet, Sweeter Than the Day, Zony Mash, The Four plus One Ensemble and co-founder of the New York Composers Orchestra. He has performed and collaborated with Bill Frisell, Butch Morris, John Zorn, George Lewis, Robin Holcomb, Fred Frith, Julian Priester, Michael Shrieve and Carla Bley, among others. Commissioners include the NEA, Meet the Composer, Kronos String Quartet, Seattle Chamber Players, BAM, and Earshot Jazz.

Wayne has composed a song cycle for soprano voice, piano and electronics named Smokestack Arias in 2o02, commissioned by Jack Straw Productions through Meet The Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program, inspired by the 1916 labor uprising and resultant deaths, now known as the Everett Massacre. Each song assumes the perspective of a different woman affected by the uprising and the deaths of the slain protesters, giving a personal account of a seminal event in the history of the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. The text was written by Robin Holcomb.

Wayne has been the recipient of numerous awards including two MAP grants and the NEA American Masterpiece award. Recent compositions include The Heartsong of Charging Elk based on the novel by James Welch and 55: Music and Dance in Concrete: a site-specific collaboration with dancer Yukio Suzuki and video artist Yohei Saito. He is the music programmer for The Royal Room, a performance venue in Seattle, Washington, and a professor of composition at the Cornish College of the Arts.

Artist Support Program 2020: Recording of new compositions and improvisations for piano and amplified piano with electronic processing.

Composer in Residence 2012 : Composed Smokestrack Arias, a song cycle for soprano voice, piano and electronics, with lyrics by Robin Holcomb, through the national Meet the Composer program.

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, and performer whose research focus is on Black women’s creative production and use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her current book manuscript argues that Black women’s creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls “feelin.” She is currently Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.

She has received fellowships from the Five Colleges, The Vermont Studio Center and the University of Maryland. Her poems and essays have appeared in Torch, Mythium, Meridians, and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled patient., which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women, won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences within the United States and internationally.

Artist Support Program 2020: Mitochondrial Eve: a multidisciplinary project that takes up the image of the Black mother in U.S. culture and history.

A freelance flutist, improviser, and composer in the Seattle area, Leanna Keith delights in creating sound experiences that make audiences laugh, cry, and say: “I didn’t know the flute could do that!”

Leanna is dedicated to playing music by composers who are still living, and advocates for the usage of music as social activism. Her recent work “Finding the InBetween” focuses on the challenges faced by mixed-race people in America. Her incubating projects focus on themes such as gun violence and queer identity.

Leanna is co-founder of the 501(c)(3) arts organization Kin of the Moon and is co-artistic director and flutist of the ensemble. Kin of the Moon is an improvisation-centric, technology-friendly chamber music ensemble. They explore sonic rituals, promote cross-pollination of genres, emphasize the communicative power of specific performance locales, and celebrate the creativity that multiplies itself through the collaboration of performers and composers.

Leanna is the professor of flute at Cornish College of the Arts.

Watch: Leanna Keith live at Jack Straw

Artist Support Program 2020: Voices of Air: An album of solo bass flute pieces written for and performed by Leanna Keith.

Morsel Trio is a new Seattle-based ensemble, comprised of young artists that have performed all over the United States. Made up of Emily Acri (violin), Chris Young (cello), and Steven Damouni (piano), Morsel Trio is dedicated to creating programs combining traditional repertoire with works of living composers. The trio believes in the importance of including education and community outreach in their programming and seeks to surprise and inspire their audiences!

Artist Support Program 2020: Record four new piano trios commissioned by local composers.

Praised for her “rococo gracefulness,” Lindsey Strand-Polyak is active throughout the West Coast as a baroque violinist and violist. Nationally, she performs with ensembles such as the American Bach Soloists, Seattle Baroque Orchestra, and Bach Collegium San Diego; and has appeared at the Oregon Bach Festival, Twin Cities Early Music Festival, Corona del Mar Baroque Festival and the Fringe Series of both Boston and Berkeley Early Music Festivals. In Southern California, she can be heard with Ensemble Bizarria, Musica Angelica, Con Gioia Early Music Ensemble, and Tesserae. Dr. Strand-Polyak was the assistant director for the UCLA Early Music Ensemble from 2011-2015, and is artistic director of Los Angeles Baroque—Southern California’s first community Baroque orchestra. Recent artist residencies include Michigan State University, University of Richmond and Northern State University of Louisiana, and she is currently adjunct professor of violin at Claremont Graduate University. She earned her PhD/MM in musicology and violin performance from UCLA, studying historical performance with Elisabeth LeGuin and modern violin with Guillaume Sutre and Movses Pogossian.

Artist Support Program 2020: Sei Sola: a collection of pieces written for unaccompanied violin, incorporated with spoken word elements for cultural and musical context.