Let's Have a Renaissance: The DateKeepers Podcast with Itto and Mekiya Outini

In this episode, we speak with Kamala Sankaram, creator of the world’s first virtual reality opera, about online reading habits, comic books, tree growth, and data mining. A composer, a classically trained sitarist, and the leader of an award-winning Bollywood surf ensemble, Bombay Rickey, Kamala makes a compelling case for the importance of crossover projects that bring together highbrow and popular fandoms. She holds a PhD from the New School and serves on the music faculty at Mannes College of Music, and her work has been praised by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, among others, and has received support from the MacDowell Foundation and many more. 

In this episode, we speak with poet and educator Peter Kline about the psychological and social functions of poetry, compare strategies for dealing with writer’s block, and discuss which sorts of literature AI can produce and why. Peter is the author of two poetry collections, Deviants (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2013) and Mirrorforms (Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions, 2020). His poems have placed first in contests run by River Styx, The Southwest Review, and The Columbia Review and have been anthologized by Random House, Tin House Books, and Persea Books. He teaches at the University of San Francisco, and in 2012, he founded the San Francisco literary series Bazaar Writers Salon, which he still directs today.

In this episode, we speak with our friend and fellow MacDowell alumna, Helen O’Leary, about growing up on the margins, surviving disaster, the role of absurdity in the creative life, and the importance of self-love. Helen spent her childhood on a farm in rural Ireland, where she learned self-sufficiency and how to work with her hands. She’s been a practicing visual artist since the late 1980s and has won many awards in the last 30 years, including a few that she’s given to herself.

In this episode, we speak with choreographer Nami Yamamoto about making and dancing with puppets, what it means to lose a future memory, and how her creative practice has evolved as she’s aged. Nami has received support from the Jim Henson Foundation, City Artist Corps, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Movement Research, the New Dance Alliance, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and others, and her show Headless Wolf won the Bessie Award in 2017. She currently teaches at Lehman College and in New York City’s public schools. 

In this episode, we speak with our friend and fellow MacDowell alumnus Steve Chang about writing, thinking, masking, code-switching, genre-bending, emojis, and Camus. Enjoy!

In this episode, we speak with author Alexia Nader about the challenges of writing a first novel, techniques to sustain reader engagement across sections of a multigenerational novel, and how to overcome the fear that writing is a waste of time. Alexia’s debut, The Meaning of Daughter, is due out from the University of Iowa Press in 2026. 

In this episode, we speak with pianist and composer Ben Krause about where and how to find opportunities as an aspiring composer, the productive tension between composers and performers, and whether music industry jobs are vulnerable to AI automation. Ben holds degrees in composition from Rice University and the University of Oregon, and he’s received awards, residencies, and commissions from the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Atlantic Chamber Players, Copeland House, Network for New Music, the American Conservatory in Fontainbleau, France, and elsewhere. Ben lives with his wife, pianist Christina Giuca Krause, in Michigan and teaches at Hope College. 

Anne Harris’s drawings and paintings have been exhibited or are held in permanent collections at The New York Public Library, The Yale University Art Gallery, The Fogg Museum, The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden, and elsewhere. She’s also the originator of The Mind’s I, a collaborative drawing project that’s been exhibited at venues around the world, from Los Angeles, California to Santiago, Chile. In this episode, we talk about beauty: what it is, who defines it, what to do when you don’t possess it, and why a supposedly positive attribute so often causes harm. 

Thea Chacamaty holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan and has received support from the Steinbeck Fellowship, Writing by Writers, the Tin House Workshop, and others. In this episode, we discuss her affinity for short fiction, the novel upon which she’s tentatively embarked, and how to find your way in life after growing up broke in California. 

Josue Bessiake is a painter with an interest in material science and the structure of things. He’s presented work at the National Gallery of the Bahamas, the Chautauqua School of Visual Arts, the Charles Wright Museum, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by several residencies, including the Edward F. Albee Foundation. In this episode, we discuss his interest in the nature of material reality, his itinerant lifestyle, the influence of national culture on visual art, residency-hopping, and more.