Interviews
The art that we make is not detached from a cultural and artistic context.
In this section we post interviews with different artists who have taught us through their art, inspired us to create art and reified our ideas of what art is.
Nathan Silver graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2005. Since then, he has written and directed four short films and four feature films, The Blind (2009), Exit Elena (2012), Soft in the Head (2012), and Simian (2013). His films have played festivals around the world, including Edinburgh, Vienna, Slamdance, Sarasota, Woodstock, Torino, and BAFICI. Recently, Filmmaker Magazine named him “one of the most interesting emerging directors in U.S. indie film.”
Andrew Schneider is a performer and interactive-electronics artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His performance and design work critically investigates our everyday emotional, physical, and psychological dependence on technology. Schneider creates and performs his own solo performance works, is a Wooster Group company member (video/performer), and builds interactive electronic art works and installations. Currently, Andrew is in residency at Abron’s Art Center in NYC developing YOUARENOTHERE, which will premiere in Janurary 2015 as part of PS122’s COIL festival. Andrew creates wearable, interactive electronic art works such as the Solar Bikini, (a bikini that charges your iPod), and wireless programmable sound effect gloves. His interactive work has been featured in such publications as Art Forum and Wired, among others and at the Center Pompidou in Paris. Andrew created the visuals for and performed with the band Fischerspooner’s ENTERTAINMENT 2009 world tour and is creating LED-light suits for the band AVAN LAVA, with whom he also plays electronic drums. Schneider has served as an Adjunct Professor at NYU and has taught courses on Technology and Performance at the Interactive Telecommunications Program and at Bowdoin, and Carleton Colleges. Andrew holds a BFA in Theater Arts from Illinois Wesleyan University and a Masters Degree in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU.
Andrew Schneider
july 2013
K.J. Holmes in a dancer, choreographer, director, performance artist and teacher. She has been making work in and out of New York for the past thirty years and has been working with improvisation as practice and process since 1981. She is a certified Yoga Teacher, and a graduate of both the School for Body-Mind Centering and The William Esper Studio (Meisner). She is a current artist in Residence for Movement Research and her work has been presented in NYC at Danspace Project, DTW, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Dance Works in Progress at The Kitchen, PS122, among many other venues. She teaches at NYU/Experimental Theatre Wing and Eugene Lang/The New School, as well as nationally and internationally. K.J. currently resides in Brooklyn..
Paul Langland is a dancer, choreographer, singer, and Associate Arts Professor at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU. He has been a Contact Improvisation practitioner since the first year of it's discovery in 1972. He was an original member of the Meredith Monk Co. Vocal Ensemble, was an original member of the Mary Overlie Dance Co., and was a member of Channel Z, the improvisation ensemble whose members included Diane Madden, Robin Feld, Daniel Lepkoff, Nina Martin, Stephen Petronio, and Randy Warshaw. He has performed his work and taught Allan Wayne Work, the dance training system he developed, in four continents. Paul has collaborated with many wonderful performing artists for 40 years.
may 2013
Karen Finley is an artist and a professor. Her performance, music, and installation work has long provoked controversy and she was notably one of the NEA Four: a group of artists who lost their NEA fellowships in june of 1990 due to claims of 'obscenity'. Finley's work has been presented all over the world and is within many collections and museums including the Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She currently teaches at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the department of Art and Public Policy. Upcoming works include Sext Me if you Can, a performance installation at New Museum and Broken Negative, a remounting of Finley's defunded chocolate performance We Keep Our Victims Ready.
John Kelly
april 2013
John Kelly is a multidisciplinary artist who has worked in dance, performance art, opera, theatre, visual art, and other various fields and mediums. His performances have spanned subjects from the Berlin Wall to Joni Mitchell, Caravaggio to the AIDS epidemic and has had visual art exhibits at MOMA, PS 1, The New Museum, and many others internationally. Aside from being primarily known as a performance artist and visual artist, John has performed with Anthony and the Johnsons, starred in a James Franco film, and has won two Obie Awards along with two NEA American Masterpiece Awards. His work has spanned decades and genres, and he continues to push boundaries on our "culture of specialists." John can currently be seen in In a Year With 13 Moons directed by Robert Woodruff at Yale Rep.
Rachel Chavkin
march 2013
Rachel Chavkin is an Obie Award-winning director, educator, and the founding Artistic Director of the TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment), a New York based theatre company that is dedicated to dissecting and celebrating the experience living in America today.
With the TEAM Rachel has directed/co-authored Mission Drift, co-produced by New York’s P.S.122, Lisbon’s Culturgest, and London’s Almeida Theatre, Architecting (co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland), Particularly in the Heartland, Give Up! Start Over! (In the darkest of times I look to Richard Nixon for hope), HOWL, based on the poem by Allen Ginsberg, and A Thousand Natural Shocks.
Richard Foreman
february 2013
Richard Foreman is a theatre and film director, who has pioneered his vision of the avant-garde. He writes and designs his own work, which he refers to as "total theatre," which aims to unite the elements of performative, auditory, literary and visual arts, as well as psychoanalysis and philosophy. He founded the Ontological-Hysterical Theatre [1968] to showcase the work of young experimental artists, as well as his own. Richard, for years, has been making his audiences re-evaluate what the driving force behind art and theatre is. He has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays, both in New York City and abroad. Today, Richard still lives in New York and is working on a number of new projects, namely Old-Fashioned Prostitutes for The Public Theatre.
january 2013
Mary Overlie is a dancer, performer, choreographer, theorist, philosopher, teacher and an innovator in each of these fields. Mary is one of the the founders of institutions such as Movement Research, Danspace at Saint Mark's Church, and The Experimental Theatre Wing. She is known for discovering the viewpoints, a language and a philosophical approach to performance that revolutionized dance and theater, and generated a new way of understanding performance in a post-modern context. She lives part in Montana, part in New York and currently teaches at the Experimental Theatre Wing.