Choreographer Catherine Galasso speaks with veteran performer Sheryl Sutton about the legacy of the 1970s downtown dance & theater scene, and happy accidents in the creative process. A muse for Robert Wilson in his abstract theater productions from the 1970s, and an icon in her own right, Sutton will discuss her experiences in creating collaborative, multidisciplinary, epic works for stage. Galasso will show and discuss excerpts from various site-specific dances, and share elements from her current collaboration with Sutton: CITY OF WOM_N. Galasso and Sutton will also co-lead a participatory improvisational score, open to all levels of experience.

Catherine Galasso has been creating multidisciplinary dances for 17 years, for apple orchards, bank vaults, and opera houses. Her works revolve around the inherent architectural and narrative qualities of the dancing body, granting equal influence to light, sound, and space. She embraces historical renderings and inspirations in a collaborative approach that values intuition and co-authorship. Galasso has personal roots in the avant garde through her artist parents, evident in her unique style that is steeped in postmodern abstraction, combined with a pop sensibility that is playfully self-aware. Her work has been featured in the Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, and she has been commissioned by Danspace Project, River To River Festival, Arts Brookfield, ODC Theater and the Kohler Arts Center, a.o. Her 2015 collaboration with Andy de Groat was nominated for a ‘Bessie’ Award and her 2018 Alone Together was awarded a San Francisco “Izzie.” Born in New York, raised in Italy, and currently based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn), Galasso holds a European Bac. in painting from Venice, IT & a BA in Film from Cornell.

Sheryl Sutton began her career as a performer with theater director Robert Wilson in the 1970s, starring in a number of productions including Deafman Glance (1971), A Letter For Queen Victoria (1974), Einstein on the Beach (1976, 1984) and Zinnias (2013), among others. During this period she toured the world with Wilson’s company, performing at venues like Shiraz Festival, Brooklyn Academy Museum, Festival d’Avignon, Kennedy Center, Metropolitan Opera, Opera Comique, Spoleto Festival, and Théâtre de la Musique. She danced with Andy de Groat’s red notes company from 1978-1983. She recently performed with Big Dance Theater in The Road Awaits Us at NYU Skirball Center (2019) and Carolina Performing Arts (2023), and with Paul Lazar in Cage Shuffle Marathon at La MaMa (2022). She is also the subject of a play by writer and critic Hilton Als, Lives of the Performers.

Sagarika Sundaram (b. 1986, Kolkata, India) creates sculpture, relief works and installation using raw natural fiber and dyes. Drawing extensively on natural imagery, the work meditates on the impossibility of separating the human from the natural and the interior from the exterior, suggesting the intertwined nature of reality.

In 2023, Sundaram exhibited at the Al Held Foundation, the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, the British Textile Biennial and Chicago Architecture Biennial. In 2024 she will participate in Bronx Calling: The Seventh AIM Biennial at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Sundaram’s work has been presented at The Armory Show in New York (2022, 2023) and at Frieze London 2023.

Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons / The New School, NY. She studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and at MICA in Baltimore. Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times and ARTnews, and featured on PBS, Artnet News, and the cover of Fiber Art Now Journal. She is Visiting Assistant Professor teaching at Pratt Institute, and Senior Fellow at Silver Art Projects, NYC.

Performance Workshop "Are the Birds Happy"

Eve Sussman is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker who works independently and collectively with her partner Simon Lee and Rufus Corporation, founded in 2003. Along with Rape of the Sabine Women, 2004, and 89 Seconds at Alcázar, 2007 that debuted at the Whitney Biennial, the company has collaborated on other projects including Yuri’s Office, 2009, and whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, 2011. Rufus Corporation’s works have been exhibited and screened internationally and are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Margulies Collection, Miami; Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Sussman is a 2010 recipient of the Anonymous was a Woman Award and 2008 Creative Capital grantee.

Simon Lee works in photography, video and installation. His work is said to often be “a powerful metaphor for the random flow of history and a low tech formal tour de force” (Holland Cotter, New York Times). His 2010 film collaboration with Algis Kizys, Where is the Black Beast? (2010) was shown at the Sagamore Collection in Miami, Zebra Poetry Film Festival Berlin, IFC Center in New York, and was an official selection at the 2011 Rotterdam Film Festival. Together with Sussman, he co-founded the “Wallabout Oyster Theater,” a micro theater space run out of their studios in Brooklyn. Lee has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Berkshire Museum, MA; Roebling Hall, New York; the Moscow International Film Festival; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal; Poznan Biennale, Poland; The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn NY; Tinguely Museum, Basel, Switzerland; Espace Paul Ricard, Paris, France; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Growing up in Vienna (Austria) Volkmar Klien spent his childhood engulfed in the city’s rich musical life with all its glorious traditions and engrained rituals. Working from this background he strives to extend traditional practices of composing, producing and listening far beyond the established settings of concert music. As a composer and visual artist he works in various areas of the audible and inaudible arts navigating the manifold links in-between the different modes of human perception, the spheres of presentation and the roles these play in the communal generation of meaning.

His works have been widely recognized: He has received commissions from institutions truly varied in nature. For the Volksoper Wien, he composed music to a ballet, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) (Troy, USA) invited him to produce multi-channel electronic sound works and for Transitio_MX (Mexico City, MX) he produced a mixed media installation acoustically surveying landscapes. In his installation Aural Codes he turned the radio sphere over London into his exhibition space inviting residents to tune in and also interact.

Lauren Minnerath is a writer and director of films and television. Her work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, the Gotham Film & Media Institute, SPACE on Ryder Farm and the Jacob Burns Film Center’s Creative Culture Fellowship. She has written for and developed projects at Amazon Studios, New Line Cinema, Shivhans Pictures, Fifth Season and Anonymous Content. She is also a member of the WGA East’s inaugural Showrunner Academy Program.

She is currently developing multiple projects, including her feature directorial debut, CLARE, which was recently selected to be developed at the 2023 Sundance Creative Producing Lab. Her proof of concept short for the film premiered in competition at SXSW in March of 2022.

Loose Parts - When children approach artwork created by adults, they are expected to look, not touch. What if, instead, they were allowed to play with and even to transform what they see? What if they didn’t realize the material they were engaging was intended as “art”? Corin Hewitt will discuss his recent "play actions" experimenting intersections of contemporary art and children's play. You can find an introduction to this project here.

Corin Hewitt’s installations, performances, sculptures, photographs, and videos investigate relationships within architecture and domestic life. He also often draws on past experience as an electrician and plumber — a laborer who works in often unseen and utilitarian spaces. Hewitt received his BA from Oberlin College and his MFA from Bard College. He is a Professor of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Solo exhibitions of Hewitt’s work include Whitney Museum of American Art, MOCA Cleveland, ICA VCU, the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, the Seattle Museum of Art, Laurel Gitlen, New York, Taxter and Spengemann, NY, and Western Bridge, Seattle. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo;  Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp; the Memmo Foundation, Rome; the Sao Paolo Biennial in Brazil; the Whitney Museum, New York; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Galerie Perrotin, Paris; with the Public Art Fund in New York; and the Wanas Foundation in Sweden. Hewitt was a recipient of the 2014–5 American Academy Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011, and a Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 2010.  In 2015, Mousse Publications released a 300-page monograph, entitled Seven Performances featuring six years of work.

Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri

Monica Bill Barnes is a dancer and choreographer. Since MBB&CO.’s founding in 1997, her choreography has been seen in many places such as New York City’s Bowling Green public fountain, on stage at Carnegie Hall, throughout the galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and in Greta Gerwig’s film “Little Women.” The company has been presented in over 50 cities and internationally in venues ranging from The Kennedy Center to the Sydney Opera House in a collaboration with Ira Glass in Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. Barnes started collaborating with Robbie Saenz de Viteri in 2013 at which point the company adopted the motto of “bringing dance where it doesn’t belong.” Recent collaborations include a national tour of The Running Show, a site specific show in a mall - Days Go By, and two online works created during the pandemic - Keep Moving and It’s 3:07 Again. They are currently developing a new show, Many Happy Returns, through a residency at Berkeley Repertory this fall.

Robbie Saenz de Viteri, Artistic Director writes, creates, produces, and performs live theater. He has created performances and toured production throughout the world with the Obie Award winning Nature Theater of Oklahoma and worked with genre redefining artists such as Anna Deavere Smith, Stew, and Ira Glass. He has collaborated with Monica Bill Barnes to create Happy Hour, The Museum Workout, One Night Only (Lilly Award), Days Go By (Bessie Honoree), The Running Show, Keep Moving, It’s 3:07 Again, and Many Happy Returns. He grew up in New Jersey, holds a BA from Muhlenberg College where he studied writing with David Rosenwasser, and lives in Greenpoint Brooklyn which he believes is best reached by bicycle.

Heidi Julavits is the author of four critically acclaimed novels (The Vanishers, The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace) and co-editor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories, among other places. She’s a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at Columbia University. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine.

Lili Maya and James Rouvelle

Lili Maya and James Rouvelle have been collaborating for over 10 years. Their works have been exhibited nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions/performances at the Tektonics Festival in Glasgow, the BBC, New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Shanghai’s Mercedes Benz Area, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. They work with a variety of digital and traditional media. They come from different art backgrounds, and their work is a fusion of media and an ongoing interplay between intentionality and indeterminacy.

Drawing from her experience as a Colombian-American, Lina Puerta’s art examines the relationship between nature and the human-made, and engages in themes of food justice, xenophobia, hyper-consumerism, and ancestral knowledge. She creates mixed media sculptures, installations, collages, handmade-paper paintings and wall hangings by combining a wide range of materials, from artificial plants and paper pulp to found, personal and recycled objects.

Puerta was born in NJ, raised in Colombia and lives and works in NYC. She holds an MS in Art Education from CUNY and has exhibited widely. She has been honored with numerous awards including the 2023 NWAW Artist Residency (FL); 2020 KODA Lab Artist-in-Residency, 2019/2020 Artist-in-Residence at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling (NY), 2017-NYFA Fellowship in Crafts/Sculpture, 2017 Artist-in-Residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, the 2016 Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, Artprize-8 Sustainability Award, 2015 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, 2015 Kohler Arts Industry Residency (WI), 2013-14 Smack Mellon Art Studio Program among others. Exhibition venues include solo exhibits at the New York Botanical Garden, Hunter East Harlem Gallery and Sugarhill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling; group exhibits at Ford Foundation Gallery, Museum of Biblical Art, El Museo del Barrio, Socrates Sculpture Park, Wave Hill, in New York City; 21C Museum Hotels in Louisville, KY; and El Museo de la Tertulia in Cali, Colombia. Puerta’s work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, and Sculpture Magazine among others.

Eve Sussman, Simon Lee and Volkmar Klien performance workshop, "Are the Birds Happy"

Eve Sussman is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker who works independently and collectively with her partner Simon Lee and Rufus Corporation, founded in 2003. Along with Rape of the Sabine Women, 2004, and 89 Seconds at Alcázar, 2007 that debuted at the Whitney Biennial, the company has collaborated on other projects including Yuri’s Office, 2009, and whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, 2011. Rufus Corporation’s works have been exhibited and screened internationally and are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Margulies Collection, Miami; Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Sussman is a 2010 recipient of the Anonymous was a Woman Award and 2008 Creative Capital grantee.

Simon Lee works in photography, video and installation. His work is said to often be “a powerful metaphor for the random flow of history and a low tech formal tour de force” (Holland Cotter, New York Times). His 2010 film collaboration with Algis Kizys, Where is the Black Beast? (2010) was shown at the Sagamore Collection in Miami, Zebra Poetry Film Festival Berlin, IFC Center in New York, and was an official selection at the 2011 Rotterdam Film Festival. Together with Sussman, he co-founded the “Wallabout Oyster Theater,” a micro-theater space run out of their studios in Brooklyn. Lee has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Berkshire Museum, MA; Roebling Hall, New York; the Moscow International Film Festival; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal; Poznan Biennale, Poland; The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn NY; Tinguely Museum, Basel, Switzerland; Espace Paul Ricard, Paris, France; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Volkmar Klien grew up in Vienna, Austria, spending his childhood engulfed in the city’s rich musical life with all its glorious traditions and engrained rituals. Working from this background he strives to extend traditional practices of composing, producing and listening far beyond the established settings of concert music. As a composer and visual artist he works in various areas of the audible and inaudible arts navigating the manifold links in-between the different modes of human perception, the spheres of presentation and the roles these play in the communal generation of meaning.

His works have been widely recognized: He has received commissions from institutions truly varied in nature. For the Volksoper Wien, he composed music to a ballet, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) (Troy, USA) invited him to produce multi-channel electronic sound works and for Transitio_MX (Mexico City, MX) he produced a mixed media installation acoustically surveying landscapes. In his installation Aural Codes he turned the radio sphere over London into his exhibition space inviting residents to tune in and also interact.

crystal kayiza was raised in oklahoma and is now a brooklyn-based filmmaker. named one of filmmaker magazine’s “25 new faces of independent film,” she is a recipient of the sundance ignite fellowship, creative culture woman filmmaker fellowship and sisters in cinema documentary fellowship. crystal is the recipient of the 2022 documentary development initiative grant in partnership with hbo documentary films and the gotham. crystal was the winner of the 2020 tribeca through her lens grant with her film rest stop, which premiered at the 2022 toronto international film festival and was awarded the jury prize for best us short film at the 2023 sundance film festival. her short, see you next time, was an official selection of the 2020 sundance film festival and released by the new yorker. her film, edgecombe, was an official selection of the 2019 sundance film festival and was distributed by pov. she is currently working on her first feature non-fiction film, which received the 2021 creative capital award.

A writer, producer, director based in Brooklyn. Her short film, "Clementine" was nominated for Best Director at the 2022 Austin Comedy Film Festival and Best Film Script at the 2022 Women's Comedy Film Festival in Atlanta. Her fantastical romance short, "Suga" was an official selection at the 2022 Black Women Film Network's Short Film Competition and first screened on KweliTV. She is currently a member of the 2022 Marcie Bloom Fellowship in Film, a 2021 BAFTA Scholar, and a 2021 Fellow for Diverso's Minority Report.  More HERE

Massachusetts born and Brooklyn based artist, producer, DJ and audio engineer Sophie Sawaya MacArthur, better known as Swaya, has spent a lifetime exploring the possibilities of storytelling and meaning making through sound . More HERE

Elianel Clinton is a photographer and director based in New Jersey where he was born and raised. Eli received his Bachelors degree of Fine Arts majoring in Photography and The Digital Image with a minor in History of Art from the Fashion Institute of Technology. His work focuses primarily on the subjects of identity and diversity informed by his own multicultural background. With experience working in and out of studio, Elianels work has been seen in publications such as The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Wall Street Journal, i-D, Vogue Italia, Teeth magazine, and Cake magazine.

As Eli continues building his practice, he works towards reaching other culturally diverse people around the world, pushing gender boundaries and informing the upcoming generations that its okay to be different. More HERE

Born and raised in India, Sushma is a writer/director based in New York City. A storyteller with a passion for women’s rights and immigrant narratives, Sushma’s stories often explore/challenge the idea of home, identity, and the myth of the American Dream. Sushma’s work has been recognized internationally through film festivals, awards and labs. More HERE

Kari Cholnoky holds an MFA in painting from Cranbrook and a BA from Dartmouth College. Recent solo exhibitions include Impending Moreness, Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago (2021); Motherboard, Real Pain, Los Angeles (2020); and True Level, Safe Gallery, Brooklyn (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Theorem X/Y, Rachel Uffner Gallery and Mrs. Gallery, New York (2021); In Sickness and In Health, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2020); Cult of the Crimson Queen, Ceysson & Benetiere, New York (2020); and Wirrwarr, Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2019). Cholnoky attended the Worth Advisory Artist Residency in Bovina, NY (2019) and the Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL (2017). The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.