Lior Shamriz was born in Ashkelon on the East Mediterranean, spent a decade in Berlin and now lives in California.

Shamriz creates essayistic narrations that utilize cinema as performance and the cinematic languages as a process of reflexive documentation. A prolific filmmaker, churning out experimental shorts and two features, they channel the trickster spirit of the 60's auteurs in his cinema of humorous/political deconstruction, using cinema as the perfect space to discuss ideas - about being, truth, class, sexuality and the Other.

At 18, skipping the army, moved to Tel-Aviv and started making films, music and taking part in collective art projects. Studied film at the Jerusalem Film School and media at the UdK, Berlin.

Their work was shown at numerous festivals including Berlinale (2013,14,15), Locarno, Sarajevo, MoMA’s ND/NF, BAFICI, Torino, awarded at the the Achtung Berlin festival and multiple awards in Oberhausen (2013,14,15) among others and had retrospectives at the Thessaloniki Intl FF, Berlin Israel Film Festival and Ars independent Katowice.

Japan Japan from spektakulativ on Vimeo.

Saturn Returns from spektakulativ on Vimeo.

Photo: autoportrait by James Romberger

James Romberger is a fine artist and  cartoonist who lives and works in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the mid-1980s, he was co-founder of the seminal East Village installation gallery Ground Zero. Romberger's pastel drawings are in many private and public collections  including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.   "Post  York", his multimedia graphic novel/flexidisc collaboration with his son Crosby was nominated for an Eisner award in 2013. In 2015, Fantagraphics Books published The Late Child, his graphic novel collaboration with Marguerite Van Cook. Currently, he teaches at Parsons; and a revised paperback edition of  the critically acclaimed graphic novel 7 Miles A Second, Romberger’s collaboration with Van Cook and the late multimedia artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz is available from https://groundzerobooks.com/

James Romberger, Digestive System 2 (detail), pastel on paper, 2017

Cover of 7 Miles a Second by David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook

Margaret Crimmins is a NYC based sound designer/editor working primarily in historical, social and political documentaries.  Some of the films she has worked on include;

This is Home-A Refugee Story, Letters from Baghdad, Hot Girls Wanted, How to Dance in Ohio,  Into the Amazon, Back on Board, American promise,

The New Black, Soul Food Junkies, Semper Fi-Always Faithful. To Be Heard, Freedom Riders, The Last Truck, Boy Interrupted, Patti Smith: Dream of

Life, Gonzo: The life and Work of Hunter s. Thompson, Taxi to the Dark Side, Jesus Camp, Mad Hot Ballroom, My Architect, The Murder of Emmett Till,

LaLee's Kin, Atomic Cafe, The War at Home, and many more.

She has also earned three Emmy nominations for:

The Farm-Angola USA dir. by Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack

Judy Garland-By Myself dir. by Susan lacy

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib dir. by Rory Kennedy

Born in Istanbul in 1985, Refik Anadol lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA degree from the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, as well an MFA in Visual Communication Design from Istanbul Bilgi University. He is a media artist and director working in the fields of live audio/visual performance and immersive art-in-architecture installations. In particular, his work explores the hybrid spaces of the digital and physical worlds, using technology to create a relationship between architecture and media art.

 An award winner in the fields of both art and technology, Anadol has served as artist-in-residence and guest lecturer around the world. His past site-specific audio/visual performances in the public space include The International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal (Canada), Arts Electronica Festival (Austria), l’Usine | Genève (Switzerland), Arc De Triomf (Spain), Zollverein | SANAA’s School of Design Building (Germany), Santralistanbul Contemporary Art Center (Turkey), Outdoor Vision Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA), Istanbul Design Biennial (Turkey), and the City of Sydney (Australia).

Infinity Room, 2016, Immersive Room

Interconnected, Charlotte Douglas Airport, Public Art Project, 2018

Alice Dalton Brown

Alice Dalton Brown was raised in Ithaca, New York, studied at L’Académie Julien, Paris; Cornell University, New York; and received a BA degree from Oberlin College, Ohio.

She has had over twenty solo exhibitions in New York City, in addition to several nationally and internationally. In 2018, February - April, The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown Ohio presented a solo show of her work. An overview of her career is in the catalog, Summer Breeze, which accompanied her 2013 solo exhibition at the Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Her work is in private and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Allen Art Museum, Ohio; The Johnson Museum of Art, New York; The Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio.

Alice resides in the Hudson Valley and in the Finger Lakes, New York. Recently Alice was a visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome and since then has been creating paintings and pastels derived from her stay in Rome. Her subjects have evolved in the course of her career, invariably invoking images with psychological significance and composed with a focus on light and spatial relationships.

View her catalog from the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University - Summer Breeze: Paintings & Drawings by Alice Dalton Brown.

Azure Blue, 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 48"

Rome #20, Capitoline Museum, 2017, oil on canvas, 56x30"

Photo: Jide Alakija

Odili Donald Odita is an abstract painter whose work explores color both in the figurative historical context and in the sociopolitical sense.

In recent years, Odita has been commissioned to paint several large-scale wall installations including The United States Mission to the United Nations in New York (2011), the Savannah College of Art and Design (2012), New York Presbyterian Hospital (2012), New Orleans Museum of Art (2011), Kiasma, Helsinki (2011) and the George C. Young Federal Building and Courthouse in Orlando, Florida (2013).

Odita has had several solo exhibitions in museums and institutions across the globe including Savannah College of Art and Design; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Studio Museum in Harlem; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; and Princeton University.

Odita was born in Enugu, Nigeria and lives and works in Philadelphia. He has been the recipient of a Penny McCall Foundation Grant in 1994, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2001, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 2007. Also in 2007, his large installation Give Me Shelterwas featured prominently in the 52nd Venice Biennale exhibition Think With The Senses, Feel With the Mind, curated by Robert Storr.

GREAT DIVIDE, 2017, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 74 X 90 1/4 X 1 5/8 INCHES

CODE SWITCH, 2017, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 92 1/8 X 68 X 1 5/8 INCHES

Alice Gray Stites is Museum Director and Chief Curator of 21c Museum Hotels. A multi-venue museum located in Louisville, Cincinnati, Bentonville, Durham, Lexington, Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Kansas City, 21c was founded by Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, collectors and preservationists who are committed to expanding the audience for contemporary art. Stitescurates exhibitions, site-specific installations, and a range of cultural programming at all 21c Museum Hotels. 21c also collaborates on arts initiatives with artists and other cultural organizations worldwide, including Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, North Carolina Museum of Art, Speed Art Museum, Barnes Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, FotoFocus, Creative Time, and others. Since opening in Louisville in 2006, 21c has presented over 100 exhibitions. Recently, Stites has curated Hybridity: The New Frontier; Aftermath: Witnessing War, Countenancing Compassion; Seeing Now; Wild Card: The Art of Michael Combs; Dis-semblance: Projecting and Perceiving Identity; Albano Alfonso: Self-Portrait as Light; Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art; Labor&Materials, Fallen Fruit: The Practices of Everyday Life; The Future is Female; Truth or Dare: A Reality Show; The SuperNatura; Refuge, and others.

Prior to joining 21c as Chief Curator in 2012, Stites was director of artwithoutwalls, a non-profit, non-collecting public arts organization, and from 1995-2006 was adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum. Stites has lectured at universities and conferences such as Art Basel Conversations, Leaders in Software and Art, TEDx Stockholm, Moving Image Spotlight, PULSE Perspectives, the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, NewInc at the New Museum, and has served on juries including ArtPrize, PULSE Prize, and Moving Image New York. She has been active on advisory boards at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design and at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, and is an adjunct member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Louisville. Stites graduated magna cum laude from the University of Virginia, and holds an M.A. from Columbia University.

Interview note: For artists interested in getting involved, learn more here.

Ebony G Patterson (Jamaican), Gully Godz in Conversations Revised I, II, and II, 2010. Wallpaper, fake flowers, bedazzled shoes, cinder blocks.

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian). Oil Spill #1, REM Forza, Gulf of Mexico, May 11, 2010. Chromogenic print.

photo credit: Brian McCabe

Emily Schuck is an editor-in-chief of Foothill Poetry. She is a PhD student in English at Claremont Graduate University and teaches writing at University of La Verne.  

Directed by students at Claremont Graduate University, Foothill Poetry is an annual print and online poetry journal that features the work of poets enrolled in graduate programs around the world. Foothill’s decennial issue will be out in October 2018.

Foothill Poetry, volume 7 issue 1

“MACHINE GIRL IS A MACHINE BOI IS A MACHINE BAND IS A MACHINE FUCK IS A MACHINE GHOST IS A MACHINE GOBLIN IS A MACHINE DEMON IS A MACHINE ASS IS A MACHINE LORD IS A MACHINE CAR IS A MACHINE SEX IS A MACHINE CORP IS A MACHINE VIRUS IS A MACHINE STENCH. 

the world is dead to me and im dead to the world. blech”

Brent Budsberg is a professional artist, exhibition designer, educator, and woodworker based in Milwaukee WI.

Since 2013, Budsberg has designed nearly a dozen exhibits for the Chipstone Foundation including Mrs. M___’s Cabinet, an ornate period room at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Budsberg teaches furniture design, sculpture, and travel study courses at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He is part owner of Current Projects, which offers custom design and fabrication services for artists, filmmakers and arts related institutions.

As an artist, Budsberg works in collaboration with his partner, Shana McCaw. Their multidisciplinary practice employs sculpture, performance, photography, and installation to examine the psychology of place, ancestral memory, and the passage of time. In 2014, they received the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists. They have exhibited nationally and internationally and have participated in numerous artist residencies including the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, UT, and Goldwell Open Air Museum in Death Valley, CA.

“Skew” 2019, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, White Pine, 13’x17’x13.5’ Currently on view as part of Sculpture Milwaukee in Downtown Milwaukee WI, Photo by Kevin Miyazaki

“Reaction” 2008, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, mixed media, 36x36x36” In the collection of The Chipstone Foundation - currently on view at the Rockford Art Museum. Photo by Brent Budsberg