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2008 Enduring Vision Award Recipients Announced -- $100,000 Grants Given to Frank Big Bear, Janel Jacobson and Walter Piehl Jr.

2006 Panelist Bios

ELLEN BROMBERG, a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, has been creating dances for more than 30 years. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Soros Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts among others. Awards include two Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, a Bonnie Bird North American Choreography Award, and a PEW/UCLA National Dance Media Fellowship. Her video works have been broadcast nationally on PBS, and have been screened at numerous national and international dance film festivals. She is currently on the faculty of the University of Utah’s Department of Modern Dance where she is the founding director of the International Dance for the Camera Festival.

HAL CANNON is the founding director of the Western Folklife Center and its Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. He has published a dozen books and recordings on the folk arts of the West, and has received three Wrangler Awards from the Cowboy Hall of Fame, the 1998 Will Rogers Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Folklore Society’s Botkin Award, and both the Arts and Humanities Governor Awards in Utah. He currently directs Media Programs for the Center and, along with producer Taki Telonidis, completed an Emmy Award-winning TV documentary, Why the Cowboy Sings, that aired on PBS. The team also produces regular features for NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday,” including their regular radio series called, “What’s in a Song.”

MICHAEL RAY CHARLES creates graphically styled paintings that investigate racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials. Charles draws comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and athletes—images he sees as a constant in the American subconscious. Caricatures of African-American experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in his work as ordinary depictions of blackness, yet are stripped of the benign aura that lends them an often unquestioned appearance of truth. Born in Louisiana, Charles received an M.F.A. from the University of Houston and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

JAMES BAU GRAVES, currently executive director of the Jefferson Center, in Roanoke, Virginia, is co-founder of the Center for Cultural Exchange in Maine, where he worked in close collaboration with community groups and artists to address grassroots cultural aspirations, questions of identity, and social/financial power relations. Graves has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Foundation, the Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy program, the Rockefeller Foundation, and many others. He has performed and recorded with several jazz and traditional music ensembles, and composed original scores for projects with dancer/director Ann Carlson. Graves holds a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from Tufts University and has published essays in both the academic and popular press. His book, Cultural Democracy, was published in 2005 by the University of Illinois Press.

MARY JANE JACOB is adjunct professor and chair of sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A frequent lecturer and contributor to museum catalogues and books, she received a B.F.A. in history of art from the University of Florida, Gainesville. After study in Florence, Italy, she attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she received an M.A. in history of art and museum studies. She is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Study Center Residency, The School of the Art Institute, Roger Brown Residency, and Getty Residency Program at Bard College, New York.

KATHRYN KANJO is the executive director of Artpace San Antonio in Texas where she oversees the International Artist-in-Residence program and coordinates shows for the center’s temporary exhibition space, the Hudson (Show) Room. Prior to joining Artpace, Kanjo served as curator of contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon and associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. As a curator, Kanjo has organized numerous exhibitions including one-person shows of artists John Pilson, Daniela Rossell, Nancy Rubins, and Diana Thater, among others.

LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA, Hopi/Choctaw, has lived the majority of her life close to her home and community in the Southwest. Over the past 35 years Lomahaftewa has received numerous awards for excellence in painting and printmaking. Her works are represented in public collections including American Indian Historical Society (San Francisco), Center for Arts of Indian America (Washington, D. C.), University of Lethbridge, Native Studies Department (Alberta, Canada), and the City of Phoenix, Native American Art Collection. Since 1976 she has served as professor of painting and drawing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Lomahaftewa earned her B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.

JIM MELCHERT is a visual artist best known for his work in fired clay. He holds academic degrees in art history, painting, and decorative arts from Princeton, the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), respectively. Now professor of art emeritus at UCB, he is also a past director of the Visual Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts and a past director of the American Academy in Rome.

JORGE MERCED, associate artistic director of Bronx-based Pregones Theater, directs the company’s Asunción Playwrights Project, a national competition and reading series for Latino writers addressing issues of sexuality and queer identity for which he was awarded a HOLA Hispanic Actors Award in 2004. Other distinctions include the ACE Hispanic Critics Award, the Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO Artist Fellowship, and the Puerto Rican Institute of New York’s Distinguished Actor/Director Award. Outside of Pregones, he has performed with choreographers Eduardo Alegría, Arthur Avilés, and director Pablo Cabrera, among others. Merced is a graduate of the City College-CUNY Department of Theatre and International Theater School in Cuba.

EILEEN NEFF is a photographer, installation artist and writer based in Philadelphia. Her work explores the boundaries between the image and its object and has been exhibited widely, including at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Institute of Contemporary Art and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and Artists Space (New York). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Leeway Foundation grant; she is represented by the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia.

RACHELLE H. SALTZMAN, PH.D., folklife coordinator for the Iowa Arts Council/ Department of Cultural Affairs, has worked in the field of public folklore at private nonprofit and state agencies since 1982. The recipient of grants from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture to study place-based food in Iowa, she works with a variety of communities and individuals to provide assistance with multicultural and diversity issues, project development, event planning and implementation, presentation of traditional arts and artists, grant writing, and curriculum content. Saltzman has contributed to numerous publications including the Journal of American Folklore; Anthropological Quarterly; Journal of Folklore Research; New York Folklore; and Southern Folklore, Southern Exposure, among others.

BENTLY SPANG is a multi-disciplinary artist and videomaker who works in site-specific video installation, photography, live performance, and short films; his work deals with issues surrounding his Northern Cheyenne identity. Spang’s art is in private and museum exhibits and collections in the U.S. and Europe. He was awarded a Paul Allen Foundation Grant in 2004 for a residency in conjunction with the Techno Powwow Project. In 2003 he received a Woodrow Wilson Foundation: Imagining America grant, and an Outstanding Alumni Award from Montana State University-Billings. Spang also has received artist fellowships from the Creative Capital and the Joan Mitchell Foundations.

JON SPELMAN is a performer, writer, and storyteller whose work has been seen in literally thousands of venues throughout the United States and a dozen other countries. He has been an artist in residence at The Blue Mountain Art Center in New York and at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. Spelman has developed and performed commissions for the Kennedy Center, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Round House Theatre, the Smithsonian Institution, The Washington Storytellers Theatre, and the National Storytelling Network. In addition to performing, Spelman also regularly offers keynote programs, school and community residencies, and projects that help communities develop their own stories.

ALEXANDRA SWANEY, director of folklife programs at the Montana Arts Council, was born and reared in Helena, Montana. After a year spent as an exchange student in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, she attended Mills College in Oakland, California, graduating with a B.A. in history and art. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Colorado after completing field work in Mexico. In Montana, she has worked as a writer-educator for a variety of nonprofit organizations and toured as a pianist-composer for a popular regional jazz quintet. She has served as translator and cultural resource person on many tours to Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia; was assistant professor of anthropology and sociology at Carroll College for two years; and has taught at the University of Great Falls.

KAREN TSUJIMOTO is senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California where she has been on staff since 1991. Selected exhibitions she has organized include: Images Transformed: Pegan Brooke, Mary Campbell, Tina Hulett, Sabina Ott, Lucy Puls (1992), The Art of Peter Voulkos (1995/national tour), Dorothea Lange: Archive of an Artist (1995), Transformation: The Art of Joan Brown (1998), and The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are (2003/national tour). From 1986 to 1990, Tsujimoto worked as an independent curator in Northern California; from 1971 to 1985 she was on the staff of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She studied at Whittier College in California, and received her B.F.A. from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.