Volume 10 Contributor Bios
Volume 10: Chance | Dance
Jason Andrew is an independent scholar, curator, and producer. Specializing in the field of Post War American Art, Mr. Andrew is the Curator/Manager of the Estate of Abstract Expressionist Jack Tworkov. Since this appointment in 2002, he has organized countless exhibitions and lectured extensively on the artist and his contemporaries including organizing the first retrospective of the artist’s work in New York City at the UBS Art Gallery in 2009. Mr. Andrew has published extensively on the artist and his contemporaries and is currently editing the catalogue raisonné of works by Jack Tworkov. In 2016, Andrew was made Head of the Estate of Elizabeth Murray. A prominent figure in the Brooklyn art scene since for nearly two decades, Mr. Andrew was featured in Brooklyn Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture (2014). His curatorial projects got him voted “Best Exhibitionist” by the Village Voice (2011), and his promotion of the cross disciplinary arts got him listed in L Magazine’s Who Made the New Brooklyn (2011). He has curated and organized historic retrospectives of the work of Jack Tworkov (1900-1982), Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007), Edith Schloss (1919-2011), and Gerald van de Wiele (b.1932) among others. These and others have been critically reviewed by Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Hyperallergic and The New York Times to name a few. In 2004, Mr. Andrew along with choreographer Julia K. Gleich co-founded Norte Maar, a non-profit with a mission to encourage, promote and present collaborative projects in the arts. Mr. Andrew and Ms. Gleich are co-editors of the forthcoming book Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Dance (Intellect Publishing, Bristol, UK).
Kimberly Bartosik is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography. Her recent project, I hunger for you, was commissioned and presented by BAM Next Wave Festival 2018 and LUMBERYARD Center for Film & Performing Arts. She is a 2017-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency Artist where her new work will premiere in March 2020. In NYC her work has also been presented by American Realness, FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, Abrons Art Center, Gibney, Danspace, The Kitchen, and La Mama. Kimberly has toured to Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic (Melbourne, Australia), Dance Place, Wexner Arts Center, American Dance Festival, The Yard, MASS MoCA/Jacob’s Pillow, Flynnspace, Bates Dance Festival, Church, Columbia College (2020), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (2020), Mount Tremper Arts, Festival Rencontres Chorégraphique Internationales de Seine-Saint Denis, and others. Kimberly is a 2019-20 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Virginia B. Toulmin Women Leaders in Dance Fellow; a 2019-20 Harkness Dance Center Artist-in-Residence @ the 92nd St Y; and a 2019 Exploring the Metropolis (EtM) recipient with Composer Sivan Jacobovitz. In 2017 she received a National Dance Project Production & Touring Grant and Community Engagement Fund awards along with a MAP Fund award. She has also received support from the Jerome Foundation; FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance); Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, USArtists International; American Dance Abroad; New Music USA; and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists and Emergency Grants. Kimberly was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance company for 9 years and received a Bessie Award for Exceptional Artistry in his work.
Julia K Gleich is a choreographer, teacher, scholar and mathematics aficionado with an MA from the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2004, Ms. Gleich, in partnership with Jason Andrew, founded Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts with a mission to renew and refresh the exchange within the interdisciplinary arts. Following on from this success, she has joined forces with Jason to become a partner in Artist Estate Studio, LLC. Ms. Gleich, who also has an MFA from the University of Utah, is the founder and Artistic Director of Gleich Dances which has received critical notice in The New York Times, DanceInforma, DanceInsider, Village Voice, The New Criterion, The Brooklyn Rail, among others. In addition to her choreographic work, Ms. Gleich’s practiced-based research been published in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (Oxford University Press), DanceUK, The Dynamic Body in Space (Dancebooks, Ltd), and Ballet Review to name a few. Ms. Gleich and Mr. Andrew are co-editors of the forthcoming book Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Dance (Intellect Publishing, Bristol, UK).
David Kherdian was born in Racine, Wisconsin, the site of his 13 volume Root River Cycle. In addition to his poetry, biographies, novels, and memoirs, his translations and retellings have included the Asian classic Monkey: A Journey to the West, and the soon to be released 9th century Armenian bardic epic, David of Sassoun. He has also written a narrative life of The Buddha. As an editor he has produced two seminal anthologies: Settling America: The Ethnic Expression of 14 Contemporary American Poets, and Down at the Santa Fe Depot: 20 Fresno Poets, which inspired over 100 city and state anthologies. His biography of his mother, The Road From Home, his best known work, has been continuously in print in various editions and 17 translations, since its publication in 1979. An hour long documentary on his poetry, by New York independent filmmaker, Jim Belleau, was released in 1997. He is married to two-time Caldecott Award winner, Nonny Hogrogian, with whom he has collaborated on a number of children’s books, and also on three journals, Ararat, Forkroads: A Journal of Ethnic-American Literature, and Stopinder: A Gurdjieff Journal for Our Time.
Kathleen Meyers Leiner has been teaching, performing and creating dance for universities, national and international festivals, museums, non-profit organizations, private, and public schools for 40 years. Kathy draws inspiration from literature, social issues, and personal stories to develop workshops, performances and participatory events. She brings visual artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and educators, of a variety of disciplines, into collaborative conversations which explore process through structured questions and ongoing research. Currently, Kathy co-teaches a seminar course on Black Mountain College, is the Dance Program Director, Graham Theater Manager, and Chair of Fine Arts at the Asheville School. Kathy holds a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts: Choreography & Visual Arts from Wilson College and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance Performance and Choreography from Towson State University. She continues to grow as an educator and artist through her in-depth research of Black Mountain College to discover ways to engage community with interdisciplinary art. www.kathleenmeyersleiner.com
elin o’Hara slavick is a Professor of Studio, Theory and Visual Practice at UNC, Chapel Hill. Slavick has exhibited her work internationally, and her work is held in many collections, including the Queens Museum, The National Library of France, The Library of Congress and the Art Institute of Chicago. Slavick is the author of two monographs – Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography with a foreword by Howard Zinn, and After Hiroshima, with an essay by James Elkins and a chapbook of surrealist poetry, Cameramouth. She has held artist residencies in Canada, France and Japan. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Images Magazine, FOAM, San Francisco Chronicle, Asia-Pacific Journal, Photo-Eye, and Actuphoto: Actualite Photographique, among other publications. Her work explores issues of labor, war, history, feminism, the body, and the Anthropocene. A curator, critic, poet, educator, artist, activist, and organizer, slavick hopes to see the radical and peaceful transformation of the world before she dies.
Eric Steineger teaches creative writing, literature, composition, and technical writing at Mars Hill University. His recent projects include organizing/co-curating a poetry reading for Mars Hill and UNC-Asheville students (with Dr. Richard Chess of UNCA) at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and co-curating an exhibit at Weizenblatt Gallery with Art Department Chair Kenn Kotara. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, he is the Managing Editor and Senior Poetry Editor of The Citron Review, while his work has been featured in Waxwing, Rattle: The Poets Respond, Tinderbox, The Ekphrastic Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and other journals. His poetry chapbook, From A Lisbon Rooftop, explores themes from Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and is available from Plan B Press. He lives in Asheville with his wife and daughter.
Justin Tornow is a dance artist, educator, and researcher based in Durham, NC. Her artistic work is primarily collaborative and interdisciplinary: Partnering with a core group of collaborators in visual art, sound design, filmmaking, and lighting design that experiment with mutability, and form. Justin teaches courses in Cunningham Technique and composition at Elon University and the American Dance Festival, and is a national and international guest teaching-artist. Justin was a 2019 resident artist at UNC and a 2018-2019 Cunningham Dance Research Fellow with the New York Public Library, publishing new research on the pedagogy and practice of the Cunningham Technique.
Ultrabillions is the modular synthesist and systems-based composer Sean Thegen. Ultrabillions can be experienced at electronic music events like Moogfest, Common Circuits and Raund Haus and through spatial sound installations like Flux Projects. Ultrabillions’ recent collaborators include Triple X Snaxxx, Jil Christiansen, Kai Riedl and performance group COMPANY. He is the co-founder of MicroMachines, a small format synthesizer meetup that champions the democratization of electronic music making. Sean lives in Durham, NC with his wife and son/protege.
Editors
Julie J. Thomson is an independent scholar and curator who lives in Durham, NC. She works as the Naturalist at the Eno River State Park and Occoneechee Mountain. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, the editor of That Was The Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson and in 2017 she curated the exhibition Begin To See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
Thomas Edward Frank is University Professor and Associate Dean for Continuing Studies in the Graduate School of Wake Forest University. He teaches and writes about American communities of ideals, particularly liberal arts colleges and utopian movements, as well as the conservation of the natural and built landscapes that tell the stories of how American culture developed.
Kate Averett (Production Editor) is a writer and curator based in Asheville, North Carolina, where she serves as Outreach Manager at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. She also manages Hysterics, a blog and podcast highlighting stories about gender, disability, and chronic and mental illness. She received her MA in Art History from UNC Chapel Hill in 2017.