Session 6 | October 29, 2024 - November 26, 2024
Albert Forns Canal | Literary Arts | Barcelona, Spain
Albert Forns Canal is a journalist and award-winning Catalan writer. In 2016 he was selected as one of the “10 New Voices from Europe” by the EU Literary Europe Live programme, as an emerging voice on the European literary scene. As a writer he has published four novels so far: “I el cel ens va caure al damunt” (And the sky fell on us), a non-fiction reconstruction of the Granollers bombing during the Spanish Civil War; “Abans de les cinc som a casa” (Back home before five), winner of the BBVA Sant Joan Prize, a detective-like investigation of the life of an ordinary man after discovering his diaries in a flea market, “Jambalaia” (Jambalaya), winner of the Anagrama Prize; and “Albert Serra (la novel·la, no el cineasta)”, winner of the Documenta Prize. His books, all written in Catalan, have been translated into Spanish, and he also has published the story “The Infinite Demonstration” in the anthology “Tales of Independence & Belonging” from the Welsh publisher Parthian Books.
Carolyn Yarnell | Composer | Huntington Beach, CA
A thousand words unspoken,
my art is both an expression of, and liberation from,
this material world that my restless soul has found itself temporarily
but so inextricably bound up in.
Being a visual artist, my music explores color and form through the depths of emotion. Being a musician, in my visual work I draw from the formal techniques and the spontaneity of classical musical composition, incorporating counterpoint,
tonal harmony and improvisation to create both linear and vertical depth.
My works are not always clear representations of places or things,
they are rather like fleeting frozen moments perceived from great distances.
Teddy Tedholm | Choreography | New York, NY
Teddy Tedholm is a choreographer, dancer, and dance instructor based out of NYC. He has worked with artists as varied as Deborah Hay, Netta Yerushalmy, Kate Sicchio, Erica Sobol, Sidra Bell, Douglas Becker, Julie Mayo, and many others. Since receiving a BFA in Ballet from University of the Arts, he has presented work throughout the country live and on film to great acclaim. In 2021, he received the Ardsley Online Choreographic Fellowship through the Dance Gallery Festival and a grant from the New York City Artists Corps. He has created work in residence at Emma Dior Studios in Quebec, Flux+Flow in Columbus, GALLIM in Brooklyn, Mes Hall in Mount Vernon, and many others. In addition to being nominated for a “World Dance Award” for best Concert Performance, his work has been described by Dance Magazine as “anything but conventional,” by Dance Informa as “totally mesmerizing,” and as “eye popping” by the Boston Globe.
As his artistic practice grows and matures, he moves further toward the fringes of what could be and believes dance is the first frontier of the future of human society. His most recent work “Blue Horizon” explores the implications of “content obsessed” artists on the future of dance work. Imbued with wonder, skepticism, intelligence, and even a dash of hope each of Teddy’s works seek to create a world unto their own and to encourage audiences to expand their understanding of what a dance can be.
Jaehoon (Jason) Choi | Media Arts | Troy, NY
Jaehoon “Jason” Choi is a computer musician / sound artist / researcher based in New York and Seoul. His practice involves embodied experimentation through a technical medium, which involves both the process of making and bodily engagement. As a researcher, he is interested in how a creative practice involving embodied experimentation with a technical medium can suggest a different form of techne and contribute to technodiversity. His works have been presented at the Venice Biennale, MATA Festival, NEW INC, San Francisco Tape Music Festival, NIME, ICMC, CeReNeM, ECHO Journal, ZER01NE, Dunkunsthalle, Visions Du Reel, CEMEC, and etc. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and graduated from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) with an MA.
Mark Hedden | Non Fiction | Key West, FL
Mark Hedden is a writer, photographer, and semi-professional birdwatcher. He has lived in Key West, Florida long enough that he may no longer be employable in the real world. He writes a column, nominally about birds and wildlife, for the Key West Weekly newspaper, as well as profiles of local artists and other aspects of the island’s culture. He has also written about the mysterious hurricane-warding off powers of the local grotto, his aversion to pirates, his intermingled love of I95 and Madonna’s Like A Prayer, and his deep distrust of clowns. He has worked as a newspaper publisher, trivia host, birding guide, comedy club doorman, bird tour operator, and book store clerk. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, Roads & Kingdoms, The Miami Rail, Solares Hill, Bird Watcher’s Digest, The Bone Island Sun, and other places. He has received two Knight Arts Challenge grants, as well as the South Florida Cultural Consortium Award for visual arts.
Mitu Malhotra | Fiction | Milburn, NJ
Mitu Malhotra holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the 2021 winner of the Katherine Paterson Prize for Literature for Young Adults and Children. Her short story Toxins is part of ELA curriculum. In previous avatars, she was a textile and fashion designer. When she is not writing, Mitu paints, sews, and builds miniature dollhouses out of recycled materials.
Tiffiniy Cheng | Poetry | Worchester, MA
Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng (ngai) does experimental joke art, made the pop-up restaurant as performance art in 2007 and developed a new model of political strategy behind some of the largest online protests in history, and has poems published in Oversound.
Zahra Jewanjee | Visual Arts | Dubai, UAE
Zahra Jewanjee (b. 1983, Pakistan) is a UAE-based artist and educator with a BFA from the National College of Arts, Pakistan, and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, USA. She is a recipient of the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship and Full Scholarship, Abu Dhabi 2016. Zahra is a Founder of SoZa Collective. She has exhibited in Karachi, Lahore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, London, Gdansk, New York, Providence, and Seoul. Her work was featured in ‘Dimensions of Citizenship’ for the Venice Architecture Biennale – US Pavilion 2018, RISD NatureLab, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, MAS Context Chicago, Guernica Magazine, and other publications. Zahra is an Adjunct Professor at the American University in Dubai, UAE. Her multidisciplinary practice draws from Nature and explores belonging and individuality through a fictive chair language, “Zuban-e-Kursi,” creating visually chaotic yet logical narratives that mirror human behaviors and relationships in an attempt to break free from habitual silos and connect with the cosmos, offering a form of visual poetry and an anthropological response.
Sanara Rocha | Interdisciplinary Artist | Sacatar, Brazil
Sanara Rocha is an amefrican futuristic artist based in Brazil, South of America. She is a black feminist, independent curator, interdisciplinary artist and researcher with an international engagement. She holds a master’s degree in culture and society in the Multidisciplinary Postgraduate Program in Culture and Society at Universidade Federal da Bahia ( 2020); She holds a bachelor’s degree in performing arts at School of Theater at the Federal University of Bahia and qualified in theater directing (2011). She is currently doing her PHD studies at UFBA.
Her work has a loving and obsessive case with the female history in the percussion territory, the black female ancestrality and with the conflicts between the tradition, genders and modernity present in afro-Brazilian culture. Her practice includes academic and curatorial research, cultural productions, experimental music, scenic performances, videoarts, photography and literature. In the field of sound and installation arts, she has been developing research on African drums in dialogue with electronic music production since 2018 with the aim of creating immersive artistic works and transdisciplinary performances that speak about female memory in the symbolic territory of the drums, about the drums as a magicals entities and its ritualistic processes as a conceptual trigger.
She is the creator and artistic director of the Futurismo Ladino Amefricana Platform, a platform focusing on contemporary and speculative arts production from Latin America continent developed to black and indigenous queer people. She develops two multidisciplinary poetic researches: “Fossil Narratives”, a futuristic archeology based on gender studies and Afrofuturism that addresses the female presence in the symbolic territory of drums over time; “Futurismo Amefricana” which is based on the concept of “ladino amefricanidade” coined by the black thinker brazilian Lélia Gonzalez, in order to think and forge a futuristic aesthetic from black-indigenous Brazilian cultural idiosyncrasies.
Jean-Christophe Cavallin | Literary Arts | Cotignac, France
A former student at École Normale Supérieur, Jean-Christophe Cavallin is a professor of modern literature at Aix-Marseille University, where he created the “écopoétique et création” master’s program in 2017. He is the author of several books on Chateaubriand, Verlaine and Racine. In the field of environmental humanities, he has published Valet noir. Vers une écologie du récit (Corti, 2021) and Nature, berce-le. Culture et trauma (Corti, 2022) . He recently published Pastorales, a collection of contemporary Bucolics co-written with Violaine Bérot, an author and former goat herder, and Florence Debove, a shepherdess (Wildproject, 2024). He also writes ecological tales for children for the collection “Ronces” : Les Enfants de Madame Ô, illustrated by Jérémie Moreau (Albin Michel 2024) and La Petite Sabot, illustrated by Marine Schneider (Albin Michel, 2025).