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Three Artists Receive Enduring Vision Awards

2009 Panelist Bios

Bush Artist Program Selection Panel Biographies — 2009

These panelists served as members of the preliminary and final selection panels for the Bush Artist Fellowship (BAF) and the Enduring Vision Awards. All artists and arts professionals, the BAF panelists are from outside Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Panelists for the preliminary EVA selection committee live and work in those three states.

ELIZABETH BENNETT is a dramaturg, arts journalist and arts administrator living in New York City. As the resident dramaturg and literary manager at La Jolla Playhouse, Manhattan Theatre Club, Dallas Theater Center, Arena Stage and Second Stage, she read hundreds of scripts (old and new) each year, provided research and production dramaturgy, developed new plays, and managed humanities and education programs. Her 14-year collaboration with Triad Stage artistic director Preston Lane has included the development of numerous world premiere productions (including Debunked by Alexander Woo), as well as classics such as George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession. For Antaeus in Los Angeles, she worked with director Dan Fields’ production of Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck – the first American revival of the play since its premiere in 1944. She is currently working with L.A. Theatre Works as researcher and dramaturg for an untitled play about Robert Kennedy. She currently works as director of the Program Services Unit in the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Elizabeth holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.

As a clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, arranger and social critic, DON BYRON works in a wide range of musical genres including classical, salsa, hip-hop, funk, klezmer, rhythm and blues, or any jazz style from swing and bop to cutting-edge downtown improvisation. He has composed and arranged music for chamber ensembles, dance and film, and he has acted in films directed by Robert Altman and Paul Auster. Among the numerous bands he has fronted are Bug Music, Music for Six Musicians (a klezmer ensemble) and his Ivey-Divey Trio. His collaborations with other artists range from the Duke Ellington Orchestra to Daniel Barenboim and from Salif Keita to Allen Toussaint. As artistic director and artist-in-residence, Byron has produced concert series for the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and New York’s Symphony Space. He has led residencies at many universities, including Harvard and Columbia. A visiting professor at MIT in 2007-08, he is currently on the faculty at SUNY Albany where he teaches theory, saxophone, improvisation and composition. Byron’s discography comprises a dozen albums for mostly Blue Note and Nonesuch Records including Ivey-Divey, which was voted Record of the Year by Jazz Times Magazine and nominated for a Grammy Award. In 2007, Byron was awarded both Guggenheim and USA Prudential fellowships.

MICHAEL CHING has been artistic and general director of Opera Memphis since 1992. His compositions have been performed by Opera Delaware, the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Chicago Opera Theatre, New Orleans Opera, Cincinnati Opera, Indianapolis Opera, Dayton Opera, Virginia Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, New Jersey Opera Theatre, Anchorage Opera, Texas Opera Theater, Fargo-Moorhead Opera, Lake George Opera and Opera New Jersey. He has appeared as guest conductor with Opera Festival of New Jersey, Nashville Opera and frequently with the Hawaii Opera Theatre. In summer 2009, he will conduct Lucia di Lammermoor at Opera New Jersey where they will present a workshop of his new a cappella opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ching was born in Honolulu and went to high school in Saint Paul, MN. He attended Duke University and then was a member of the Houston Opera Studio. In addition to opera, he is also a singer/songwriter and tries to write country songs. In Memphis, he coaches an a cappella group, Delta Cappella.

LINH DINH was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1963, came to the United States in 1975 and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004) and four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (2003), American Tatts (2005), Borderless Bodies (2006) and Jam Alerts (2007). His novel, Love Like Hate, will be released in 2009 by Seven Stories Press. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, 2004, 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among many other places. Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and he has been invited to read his works all over the United States, London, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin and Reykjavik. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.

RINDE ECKERT is a writer, composer, singer, actor and director whose music, music theater and dance theater pieces have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. Among them are Slow Fire, an electric solo opera in collaboration with composer Paul Dresher; Ravenshead, a solo opera in two acts with music by Steven Mackey; And God Created Great Whales with The Foundry Theater (Obie Award 2000) and Highway Ulysses with American Repertory Theatre (Eliot Norton Award 2003). His music/theater piece Horizon had its New York premiere at New York Theater Workshop in 2007; it was nominated for a Drama Desk Award as outstanding play. In March 2006, he premiered Orpheus X (2007 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama), again at American Repertory Theatre. He was featured at Zankel Hall/Carnegie Hall in February 2006, performing his solo evening An Idiot Divine. Eckert is a recipient of the Marc Blitzstein Memorial Award for Lyricist/Librettist given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York with his wife, playwright and actress, Ellen McLaughlin.

MEG GLASER is the artistic director for the Western Folklife Center in Elko, NV, where since 1990 she has conducted and overseen research and fieldwork, as well as producing exhibitions, performance tours, and other events and initiatives. She is one of the founders of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, assisting in the production of this event since its inception in 1985. Prior to working at the Western Folklife Center, she was program director at the National Council for the Traditional Arts in Washington, DC, producing national performing arts tours, the National Folk Festival and other events for the National Park Service, Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Arts. Glaser was an arts management fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts and was a program coordinator for the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife. She served as a trustee of the Nevada Citizens for the Arts. In 2004, she was honored with a Nevada Governor’s Arts Award for Service to the Arts. She received her BA in music education at University of Utah and did graduate studies in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington.

JEWELLE GOMEZ (Cape Verdean/Ioway/Wampanoag/African American) is the author of seven books including the double Lambda Literary Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories, as well as the play based on the novel, which toured 13 American cities. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry are included in over 100 anthologies. She has written essays, literary and film criticism for numerous publications including The Village Voice, MS Magazine, The Advocate, The San Francisco Chronicle and Black Scholar). Born in Boston, she was on the original staff of the first weekly black television show Say Brother (WGBH-Boston). A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, she worked in broadcasting before developing a career in off-Broadway theater in New York City. She joined the staff of the New York State Council on the Arts in 1983. She was on the original board of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. The director of grants and community initiatives at Horizons Foundation, she just finished her second novel, Televised, and is working on a play about James Baldwin.

FENTON JOHNSON is the author of two novels, Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock, as well as Geography of the Heart: A Memoir. His most recent book, Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks, received a Kentucky Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction and a Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay/Lesbian creative nonfiction. He is the recipient of a 2007-08 Guggenheim Fellowship to support completion of his third novel, The Man Who Loved Birds, and to begin research on a new nonfiction project, Desire in Solitude, looking at the work of writers and artists who were single throughout their lives. Johnson has served as a contributor to Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared in many literary quarterlies and have received numerous awards, among them a James Michener Fellowship from the Iowa Writers Workshop and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction. He is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH is a National Poetry Slam champion, Broadway veteran, GOLDIE award winner, featured artist on two seasons of Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry on HBO and inaugural recipient of the USA Rockefeller Fellowship. Originally from New York City and currently living in Oakland, CA, Joseph has toured to Tokyo, where he presented during the first International Spoken Word Festival, and to Santiago de Cuba where he joined the legendary Katherine Dunham as a part of the CubaNola Collective. His most recent work, the break/s, has been acclaimed as a new level of hip-hop theater. He developed this piece while completing the prestigious Arts Institute Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bamuthi has been San Francisco’s Poetry Grand Slam winner three times, won the 1999 National Poetry Slam with Team San Francisco and founded “Second Sundays,” the nation’s first monthly spoken word gathering to generate audiences larger than 500. His local work earned him a GOLDIE award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He has been a featured lecturer and performance artist at more than 100 colleges and universities including UC Berkeley, NYU, Brown University, the University of Michigan, Bates College, Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His first non-fiction book, Line Breaks: A Source Guide to Hip-Hop Theater, was published by The University of Wisconsin Press in 2008. Bamuthi is artistic director of Youth Speaks/ The Living Word project where he curates the Living Word Festival for Literary Arts.

MARY ANN LEACH is a composer/performer whose work reveals a fascination with the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. Her music has been performed throughout the world in a variety of settings, from the concert stage to experimental music forums, and in collaboration with dance and theater artists. She is an accomplished performer in her own right who has been presented across the United States and Europe, and her works have been performed by many eminent soloists and chamber ensembles, most recently in Europe by the Flemish Radio Choir, La Gioia, the London Concord Singers and Vox Feminae (Switzerland). She has received commissions/awards from the New York State Council on the Arts, Danish Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, International Alliance of Women in Music, American Composers Forum, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Westdeutscher Rundfunk and many other funders. In 1995, Leach was selected for a prestigious grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, which was established by Jasper Johns and John Cage to support innovative artists in the performing arts.

JAMES P. LEARY is professor of folklore and Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin where he directs the folklore program and co-founded the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures. Over the past 25 years, he has consulted for or produced numerous folklife festivals, museum exhibits, films, documentary LP and CD recordings, and public radio programs concerning folk music, including coproducing more than 100 half-hour installments of the Down Home Dairyland series on Wisconsin Public Radio that focused on the traditional and ethnic music of the Upper Midwest. His music-related publications include Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music (2006), Down Home Dairyland with Richard March (1996), Medicine Fiddle (1992), Yodeling in Dairyland: A History of Swiss Music in Wisconsin (1991) and Minnesota Polka: Dance Music from Four Traditions (1990). Leary is currently at work on a multi-CD/book project, Folksongs of the Other America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946, concerning the lives, music and songs of exemplary traditional performers from roughly 30 of the region’s ethnic and occupational groups.

BETSY PETERSON is the executive director for the Fund for Folk Culture (FFC). Prior to joining the FFC as program director in 1998, she was a consultant working for clients such as the Wallace Foundation, the Southern Arts Federation, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Carnegie Hall, the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, for whom she wrote, edited and compiled The Changing Faces of Tradition: A Report on the Folk and Traditional Arts in the United States published in 1996. Peterson earned her doctorate in folklore from Indiana University, and was director of the traditional arts program at the New England Foundation for the Arts from 1990 to 1993. She co-founded Texas Folklife Resources with Pat Jasper and Kay Turner, serving as program coordinator from 1985 to 1989. In 1990, she was a visiting professor at the folklore and mythology program at UCLA. Peterson has conducted field research throughout Texas, the South and New England, and has developed numerous public folk arts programs and services including festivals, exhibitions, conferences, workshops, radio programs and recordings, as well as Joy Unspeakable, an award-winning video documentary on Pentecostalism which she coproduced.

DEBORAH RILEY, codirector of Dance Place, has furthered the organization’s mission in her capacity as an artist-in-residence, faculty member and administrative leader since 1987. In addition to directing Deborah Riley Dance Projects, she has presented Moving Affirmations workshops for healing and recovery at various community organizations. Riley is the recipient of several choreographic fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, was honored with the Pola Nirenska Award for Distinguished Artistic Leadership, the Distinguished Alumni in Fine Arts from Ohio University and is a certified Laban Movement Analyst with an individual practice. She was a member of Douglas Dunn and Dancers, as well as creating collaborative choreography with dancer Diane Frank while living in New York City for 13 years. In addition to guest artist appearances at various universities across the country, her work has been presented in the U.S., the U.K. and France.

MILOS STEHLIK is the director of Chicago’s Facets Multi-Media, which he co-founded in 1975. Facets is a cinematheque with a year-round exhibition program that presents film premieres, retrospectives and festivals, including the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival. Facets is also a publisher and distributor of some 65,000 independent and classic films on DVD. He has served on numerous festival juries including the Vancouver, Chicago and Karlovy Vary International film festivals, and panels including for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. Since 1983, he serves as film critic and commentator for World View, the international affairs program of Chicago Public Radio. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Telluride Film Festival. He is co-author of The Human Rights Film Guide and of Next Step: Distribution Strategies for Independent Film. He is a recipient of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Government and of the Jan Masaryk medal from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic.

Last year there were several world premieres of plays by KAREN ZACARIAS: The Book Club Play at Round House Theater and the Berkshire Theater Festival, Chasing George Washington at the Kennedy Center, the musical Looking for Roberto Clemente at Imagination Stage, a bilingual adaptation of Romeo y Julieta (starring Elizabeth Peña) at Chicago Shakespeare, the adaptation of How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents in September 2009 at Round House Theater and the world premiere of Legacy of Light at Arena Stage in spring 2009.

Zacarías is the winner of the 2006 Francesca Primus Award for her play Mariela in the Desert (World Premiere at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago), which is also the recipient of the 2005 TCG/AT&T First Stages Award, the 2004 National Latino Playwrights’ Competition, finalist for the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn prize and short-listed for 2005 Kesselring Prize. Her play The Sins of Sor Juana won Outstanding New Play at the 2000 Helen Hayes Awards and has been produced throughout the country. Her musical plays for young people with composer Debbie La Puma have enjoyed productions at The Goodman Theatre, The Coterie, Chicago PlayWorks, The Alliance Theatre, Imagination Stage, Arden Theater, Cleveland Playhouse and St. Louis Rep.

Zacarías is the founding artistic director of Young Playwrights’ Theater, an award-winning nonprofit dedicated to enhancing literacy, arts empowerment and conflict resolution through playwriting in Washington, DC, area schools.