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2007 Panelists Bios

Artist Fellowship Selection Panel Biographies — 2007
The members of the preliminary and final selection panels, all artists and arts professionals, are from outside Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

DWIGHT ANDREWS, associate professor of music theory and African American music at Emory University and senior minister of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Atlanta, received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from the University of Michigan. He continued his studies at Yale University, receiving a master of divinity degree and a Ph.D. in music theory. While at Yale, Andrews was on the faculty of the music department and African American studies program, and served as the resident music director at the Yale Repertory Theater. It was during this period that Andrews began his long association with playwright August Wilson, and worked as music director of the Broadway Productions of Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Fences, The Piano Lesson and Seven Guitars. Andrews’ film credits include Louis Massiah’s documentary films, W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices and Louise Alone Thompson: In Her Own Words, the Hallmark Hall of Fame’s The Piano Lesson, HBO’s Miss Evers’ Boys and numerous others. In addition, he has served as a multi-instrumentalist sideman on over 25 jazz and “new music” albums. Andrews is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2005 Lexus Leader of the Arts Award, a Pew Trust/TCG Artist Residency Fellowship, a Mellon Fellowship, Emory University’s Distinguished Teacher Award and the Yale Tercentenary Medal from the Yale Club of Georgia. Currently, Andrews is a scholar/artist in residence at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

RICK BASS is the author of 23 books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, a short story collection, The Lives of Rocks. He lives in northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley, where he is active in a campaign to protect as wilderness the last road-less lands in the Yaak Valley.

KARL GAJDUSEK is a San Francisco native, now living in Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a master’s degree from the University of California at San Diego. Gajdusek’s plays include FUBAR, Fair Game, Silverlake, North, Minneapolis, Dr.s F’s in the Terminal Ward, Big Sun Setting Fast, The Gilded Garden of Patcheww, Malibu and Waco, Texas, Mon Amour, and have been featured across the country. His screenplays include Shanghai, Widow’s Walk, Reunion, The Next Best Thing (not the one with Madonna), Higher, The Condemned (co-authored) and the newest film for WWE star John Cena, Brother’s Blood (also co-authored). Gajdusek was a story editor on the Showtime show Dead Like Me, creating four of the 2004 season episodes. He founded the script publication service, Big Sun Publication, and is the recipient of the 1991 Jacob K. Javits fellowship, the 1996-97 and 1998-99 Jerome Fellowships, the 1997 McKnight Screenwriting Fellowship, the 2000 McKnight Advancement Grant and the 2005 Clubbed Thumb Biannual Commission. He is a member of New Dramatists in New York City and of Annex Theatre in Seattle.

MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉSis the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles. Directing credits include productions at The Children’s Theatre, The Guthrie Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville-Humana Festival, The Huntington Theatre, Hartford Stage, Woolly Mammoth, Florida Stage, Geva Theatre, and Yale Repertory Theatre and, in New York, New York Theatre Workshop, Second Stage, INTAR, Repertorio Español, Atlantic Theatre Co., Playwrights Horizons and The Cherry Lane. Plays he has written include Los Illegals (Cornerstone) Points of Departure (INTAR), Acts of Mercy (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre) and Audiovideo (Drama League Director’s Project). Garcés is the recipient of the Alan Schneider Director Award, the Princess Grace Fellowship, a TCG New Generations: Future Leaders Grant, the NEA/TCG Career Development Program Grant, a NYFA Artists’ Fellowship for Playwriting, a Van Lier Directing Fellowship, a Princess Grace Special Project Grant, a Drama League Director’s Project Residency and a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant. He currently serves on the executive board of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. Garcés is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.

JANICE GITECK, who was born in New York in 1946, studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College (BA 1968, MA 1969) and on a French Government Grant, attended the Paris Conservatory as a student of Olivier Messiaen. Subsequently she studied Indonesian Gamelan music with Daniel Schmidt and percussion with Obo Addy, master drummer from Ghana. Her interest in the relationship of music and healing led her to study psychology, resulting in an MA from Antioch University in Seattle, 1986, also work as a music specialist at Seattle Mental Health Institute from 1986 to 1991.

Her works include “TREE” commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony (1981) and music for two films by Pat Ferrero: “Hopi: Songs of the Fourth World” (1983), and “Hearts and Hands” (1987) funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Released on an earlier compact disc are “Thunder, Like a White Bear Dancing” with Thomasa Eckert, soprano, which received the Norman Fromm Composers Award in 1977; “Callin’ Home Coyote” composed in 1978 for tenor, John Duykers, Andy Narrell, steel drums and Karla Lemon, double bass, (California Arts Council Award), and “Breathing Songs from a Turning Sky” (1980-84) for six instruments (National Endowment for the Arts Composer’s Award).

DAVID GOMPPER has lived and worked professionally as a pianist, a conductor, and a composer in New York, San Diego, London, Nigeria, Michigan, Texas, and Iowa. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London with Jeremy Dale Roberts, Humphrey Searle, and Phyllis Sellick. After teaching in Nigeria, he received his doctorate at the University of Michigan, taught at the University of Texas, Arlington, and since 1991 has been professor of composition and director of the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa. In 2002–2003, Gompper was in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching, performing, and conducting at the Moscow Conservatory. Gompper’s compositions are heard throughout the United States and Europe. In 1999 his Transitus (for wind ensemble) premiered at Carnegie Hall, and a number of his works have premiered in London’s Wigmore Hall. Gompper is in the process of completing a violin concerto, which will be recorded by the Slovac Radio Orchestra in the fall of 2007.

MORGAN JENNESS spent over a decade at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, with both Joseph Papp and George C. Wolfe, in various capacities ranging from literary manager to director of play development to associate producer. An Obie winner for “long time support of playwrights,” she also was associate artistic director at the New York Theater Workshop, and an associate director at the Los Angeles Theater Center in charge of new projects. Jenness has worked as a dramaturg, workshop director, and/or artistic consultant at theaters and new play programs across the country, including the Young Playwrights Festival, the Mark Taper Forum, The Playwrights Center/Playlabs, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and Center Stage, among others. She has participated as a visiting artist and adjunct in playwriting programs at the University of Iowa, Brown University, Bread Loaf, Columbia and New York University and is currently on the adjunct faculty at Fordham University. She has served on peer panels for various funding institutions, including New York State Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 Jenness joined Helen Merrill Ltd., as creative director and has recently moved on to the literary department at Abrams Artists Agency.

GENNY LIM is a native San Franciscan poet, performer, playwright, and educator. Her play about Angel Island immigrants, Paper Angels, aired on American Playhouse in 1995 and the landmark anthology she co-authored, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, drew international attention on the issue of institutional racism against immigrants. She has been featured on the PBS series, The United States of Poetry, KQED’s Neighborhoods series, San Francisco Chinatown and Genny Lim: The Voice, by David Moragne. Lim also has performed in concert performance collaborations with jazz artists such as Max Roach, James Newton, Jon Jang, Francis Wong, John Santos and Herbie Lewis. Her work has garnered awards and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Zellerbach Family Fund and San Francisco Art Commission. Lim has been featured in the San Francisco Asian American and Chicago Asian American Jazz Festivals, Houston International Art Festival, San Jose Jazz Festival, and San Diego Street Scene Festival. Her CD, Child of Peace, was released in 2005 and her poetry book, Child of War, was published in 2003. Currently, she serves on the faculty of New College of California in San Francisco.

ABINA MANNING has been involved with the promotion of artists’ film and video for many years in both Europe and the United States. Since 1999 she has worked with Video Data Bank in Chicago, one of the world’s leading distributors of video art, where she is currently interim director. Manning has worked with arts organizations in the U.K., including the LUX Center, the London Film Maker’s Co-op and London Electronic Arts. She was director of the inaugural Pandæmonium Festival of Moving Images, a major European exhibition presented by the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London that showcased film, video, gallery installation, and multi-media works. She has participated in many international film and video festivals and conferences as a juror, panel member, curator and advisor, and has collaborated with arts venues such as the Tate Modern and Serpentine Gallery on exhibition events.

MIYA MASAOKA resides in New York City and is a classically trained musician, composer, and sound artist. She has created works for koto, laser interfaces, laptop, video, installations and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestra, and mixed choirs. Since forming the San Francisco Gagaku Society, Masaoka has been performing her work in varied musical contexts in India, Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Her works have been performed by Volti, Piedmont Choirs, Bang on a Can and ROVA, and have been presented at the Venice Biennale 2004, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, KunstRadio, Vienna, among others. A recipient of the 2004 Herb Alpert Arts Award, Masaoka holds a degree in music from San Francisco State University and a master’s in music composition from Mills College where she studied with Alvin Curran. She is currently a professor in the Music/Sound Department at the Milton Avery School of the Arts MFA, Bard College, New York.

HONOR MOORE is the author of three collections of poems, Red Shoes (2005), Darling (2001), and Memoir (1988). Moore is also the author of The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother the painter Margarett Sargent, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 1996. Her play Mourning Pictures was produced on Broadway, her edition of the selected poems of Amy Lowell was published by the Library of America, and she co-edited The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt. She lives in New York City where she teaches in the graduate writing programs at the New School and the School of the Arts at Columbia. From 2000 until 2006 she served on the board of the PEN American Center and in 2004 received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. The Bishop’s Daughter, her memoir of her relationship with her father, Bishop Paul Moore, will be published in 2008.

ED RADTKE has made three independent feature films, including the award-winning Bottom Land and The Dream Catcher, which garnered 11 awards at international film festivals. Radtke, also a screenwriter, recently co-wrote the feature script Aime Ton Pere, produced by Gerard Depardieu and starring Depardieu and his son, Guillame. The film was the official Swiss entry for Best Foreign Film consideration at the recent Academy Awards®. Radtke has worked extensively with at-risk youth and taught media making to developmentally challenged adults and to prisoners. He has lectured at Columbia and New York University (NYU) and conducted workshops in Paris and in South America. He is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. Radtke, who studied film at NYU, currently lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and is in post production on his third feature, Superheroes.

ELIZABETH WEATHERFORD is the founding director of the Film and Video Center of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and of NMAI’s international Native American Film + Video Festival. She also is the editor of the bilingual Native Networks/Redes Indigenas Website which is dedicated to Native film, video, radio, television, and new media. Weatherford serves on the advisory boards of numerous film festivals and has been profiled in The New York Times column “Public Lives.” Other articles about her work have appeared in the New York Sun and newspapers in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Tampa and Rio de Janeiro, and national publications such as Indian Country Today and The Independent. She has served on the faculty of New York University’s Program in Media and Culture and the School of Visual Arts. She is one of several subjects to appear in an upcoming film on the history of the 1970s collective that published Heresies: A Feminist Journal on Art and Politics.