These conversations and interviews with a diverse group of artists, curators, faith leaders, and scholars explore the role of the arts in spiritual practice and religious life. Through the Faith in Arts conversations, we are collecting and building a library of stories and perspectives from our local (Asheville/WNC) and international community which illuminate the myriad dimensions of the complex topic of faith in arts from a multiplicity of viewpoints.
The first of these conversations were presented as part of the 2021 Faith in Arts Institute in partnership with UNC Asheville
Wed, February 10th, 2021 – André Daughtry
André Daughtry is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary photography and media artist, writer, and performer born in Queens, NY. André’s work as a “speculative social documentarian” explores contemporary expressions/experiences of the spiritual, mystical, and theological in the contexts of pluralistic democracies. Since 2016, Daughtry has served as Community Minister of the Arts at Judson Memorial Church.
Wed, February 24th, 2021 – Molly Silverstein
Molly Silverstein is a poet, graduate student, and former BMCM+AC staff member. She currently studies at Harvard Divinity School, where her work focuses on spiritual care and counseling and the psychology of religion. Her writing has been previously published in Clerestory Magazine, Maudlin House, Sheila Na Gig, and Five 2 One Magazine, and she has performed with the Juniper Bends reading series based in Asheville, NC.
Wed, March 3rd, 2021 – Norman Fischer
Zoketsu Norman Fischer is an American poet, writer, and Soto Zen priest, teaching and practicing in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. He is a Dharma heir of Sojun Mel Weitsman, from whom he received Dharma transmission in 1988.
Wed, March 24th, 2021 – Krisha Marcano
Krisha Marcano was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company from 1995-1997 and performed with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 1997-1999. From 2005-2008 she starred in the first principal role as Squeak in the original production of “The Color Purple.” She has taught dance and performance for numerous institutions and is now professor of Musical Theater and Dance, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs and Entrepreneurship at UNC School of the Arts.
Wed, March 31st, 2021- Marie Cochran
Marie Cochran is an American installation artist, educator, curator, and art writer. She was born and raised in Toccoa, Georgia. Her work centers on issues of race and gender from an African-American perspective and explores the dynamics of Affrilachia. She is the founding curator for the Affrilachian Artist Project, an organization that promotes the concept of Affrilachia, and works with artists of color in Appalachia. During the 2020-21 academic year, she was the Lehman Brady Professor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Wed, May 26th, 2021 – Charles Hallisey
Charles Hallisey joined the Faculty of Divinity at Harvard University in 2007–08. His research centers on Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Pali language and literature, Buddhist ethics, and literature in Buddhist culture. His most recent book is Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women (Harvard University Press, 2015). He is currently working on a book project entitled “Flowers on the Tree of Poetry: The Moral Economy of Literature in Buddhist Sri Lanka.”
Wed, June 9th, 2021 – Christopher-Rasheem McMillan
Christopher-Rasheem McMillan, is a performance-related artist and scholar. He has a joint appointment between Dance and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. McMillan received his BA from Hampshire College, his MFA in Experimental Choreography from the Laban Conservatoire, London, and his PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from King’s College, London (2017). His interests concern choreography in an expanded field, something that he has approached through experimental practices and creative processes in multiplicity of formats and expressions. He uses video, performance, photography and oral storytelling to explore themes of race, memory, queer desire, religion, personal and public mythology.
Wed, July 7th, 2021 – Aviya Kushner
Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau / Penguin Random House), which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, a Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Finalist, and one of Publishers Weekly‘s Top 10 Religion Stories of the year, as well as the poetry chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). Kushner is The Forward‘s language columnist, and previously wrote a travel column for The International Jerusalem Post. She is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, a founding faculty member at the Randolph College MFA program, and a member of The Third Coast Translators Collective.
Thurs, August 25th 2022 – Vandorn Hinnant
Vandorn Hinnant is a visual artist, poet and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. Known for his visual exploration of metaphysical ideas, Hinnant utilizes Sacred Geometry, fractal mathematics, the Golden Ratio, and the Logarithmic Spiral to create his dynamic two and three-dimensional artworks. Referencing Buckminster Fuller, Leonardo da Vinci, Frank Lloyd Wright, and M.C. Escher as inspirations because of their use of geometry and math in making their artworks, Hinnant catalyzes dialogue through and around his work about the golden proportion, human relationships, and metaphysical energy. See Paths to the Infinite: Finding your Sacred Center, an interview of Vandorn Hinnant in our bookstore.
Thurs, September 22nd, 2022 – Rodger Kamenetz
Rodger Kamenetz is an award-winning poet, author and teacher. Of his thirteen books, his best known is The Jew in the Lotus, the story of rabbis making a holy pilgrimage through India to meet with the Dalai Lama. Kamenetz won the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought for Stalking Elijah and later explored the hidden connection between Franz Kafka and Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav in Burnt Books. Inspired by the focus on dreams in both Tibetan and Jewish culture, he also wrote The History of Last Night’s Dream and was interviewed by Oprah on her Soul Series. Kamenetz continues to write and teach about dreams, poetry, spiritual writing, and the Jewish-Buddhist dialogue.
Thurs, June 8th, 2023 – Peter Cole
Peter Cole is a poet and translator whose work takes root where cultures meet and tradition extends itself in vital fashion. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (The American Poet), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a ramifying vision of connectedness, one that defies conventional distinctions between old and new, foreign and familiar, translation and original. He is, Harold Bloom writes, “a matchless translator and one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation.”
Thursday, June 29th, 2023 – JJJJJerome Ellis
JJJJJerome Ellis is a stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, poet, and performer. His works are invitations to healing, transcendence, communion, and deep listening. Through an interdisciplinary practice that focuses on oral storytelling, improvisation, and the interrelations between speech, silence, disability, and religion, he’s collaborated with choreographers, rappers, playwrights, booksellers, typographers, podcasters, toddlers, and filmmakers. Mr. Ellis’ work has been presented or developed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, and WKCR.