Martirene Alcantara: Martirene Alcantara is a visual artist, born in Mexico City. As the daughter of two fine art painters, she grew up infused by the visual world around her, and learned to use photography as her form of expression. Her work has been described as "a convergence zone between photography and painting". With an emphasis on lines and rhythm, she finds intimacy in her work. Her images recreate not an object, but the effect it produces, finding in the whole an intimate form. Images that stand independent of the original object, exploring the essence of it, creating a sense until it evolves into the final piece. www.martirenealcantara.com
Becky Brown: Becky Brown was born in Manhattan, moved to Brooklyn and currently lives in the Bronx. She received her MFA from Hunter College and her BA from Brown University. She has recently exhibited at The Drawing Center (NYC), Fort Gondo Complex for the Arts (St. Louis, MO) and the National YoungArts Foundation (Miami, FL). She has also shown in Delhi, India; Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Berlin, Germany and Vienna, Austria. She has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, I-Park Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The WhyNot Place in Delhi, India. Since 2007, she has written art criticism for the Brooklyn Rail and artcritical.com, and for Art in America beginning in 2014. www.thelotterysong.com
Jayoung Chung: Jayoung chung is a inter-media artist who creates inter-disciplinary performances, multiple-screen video installations, single-channel works, documentaries and live performances. She is a recipient of grants from LMCC, NYSC as well as multiple residencies at Yaddo, watermill center, I-Park foundation. She is also Moving Image Director at the Special Olympics Winter Games Opening Ceremony. She received an MPS from ITP at the Tisch School of Arts in New York University in 2010, www.jayoungchung.com
Matthew Fischer: Matthew Fischer lives and works in New York. He has exhibited at Jack Tilton Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery and 247365 in New York and Fjord in Philadelphia. He has been an artist in residence at The Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, NY and currently teaches at the 92Y and the Central Queens Y. www.matthew-fischer.com
Tom Holmes: Born in the spring of 1979 Holmes began life atop a Texas mesa called High Lonesome. Leaving Brooklyn in '10 to live in a community of Radical Faeries in rural TN he continues to be represented in NYC by BUREAU. The artist purchased a graveyard with earnings from his first solo museum show at Kunsthalle Bern. As well at keeping bees his work is featured in the collections of FRAC Bourgogne and Stiftung Kunsthalle Bern.
Saira McLaren: Saira McLaren was born in Toronto, Canada, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has recently exhibited at Sargent's Daughters, New York, NY and Essex Flowers, New York, NY and NADA New York 2014. Her work has been written about in publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, New York Magazine, New American Paintings, Art Observed and ArtSlant. www.sairamclaren.com, www.sargentsdaughters.com
Paul Whiting: Paul Whiting lives and works in New York City. He received a BFA from Cooper Union and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Whiting was granted a Core Program fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and a residency at Yaddo. He has exhibited in NYC, Richmond Virginia and Houston Texas. www.paulwhitingart.com
Ivia Sky Yavelow: Ivia Sky Yavelow is a visual artist who uses mixed media to explore the connections between concepts and physical matter. Her work, which ranges from small handheld sculptures to site specific installations and drawings, is informed by philosophy and biology, as well as by details of her daily life. Her recent works have explored the impact and beauty of unseen, accidentally created details in materials and spaces associated with art making and other forms of creation. Ivia received a BA from Bard College in 2014, and has also studied at the New York Studio School. She has exhibited in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania since 2010, and has been featured in Bard Papers magazine.
Moira Brady Averill: Moira Brady Averill makes mayo everyday in a country where Mayo is also a county. A county is like a state in this country; this country that just voted "Yes" to Marriage Equality. Mayo voted "Yes". Delicious. Moira is looking forward to working on a play about prison life during The Dutch Golden Age whilst at the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center.
Angelica Baker: Angelica Baker's fiction has appeared in Violet and One Teen Story. She has written essays and reviews for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, and The Rumpus. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she taught undergraduate creative writing. Before that, she lived in Paris. She was born in Los Angeles and now lives in Brooklyn.
Adam Bright: Adam Bright is a recent graduate of the Syracuse MFA. His poems explore eros, animals, prophecy, and place. Recently he's become suspicious of poems composed (mentally extruded) while seated at a desk. He plans to spend his time at the Barn working on a first book--walking around, taking deliberate notes, talking to himself, humming.
Marco Calvani: Marco Calvani is an Italian playwright and director based in New York. His plays have been translated into six languages and performed throughout Europe, Indonesia and US. He received commissions by La MaMa Theater New York, the Phoenix Theatre of London, Teatro di Roma, the Théâtre de la Ville of Paris and the Grec Fundaciò of Barcelona. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the Playwrights/Directors Unit at the Actors Studio. https://www.facebook.com/marco.calvani.it
Ian Caskey: Ian is a fiction writer, performance artist, and actor. Select New-York performances include Noodles Astray at La MaMa E.T.C. in Lower East Side—and promoting his chapbooks of gonzo erotica, Doll House Mountain and Rodents in the Penile Garden at Secret Project Robot and Microscope Gallery in Bushwick. He is currently working on a collection of short stories, tentatively titled, Fairview Beyond. Education: CUNY BA from John Jay College; Writers Studio. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Tom Cole: Tom Cole is a playwright living in New York. His work has been presented at Participant Inc, Thread Waxing Space, Art on Air, Dixon Place, Clocktower Gallery, ICA Boston, Performa, and the Boston Center for the Arts. He is a MacDowell Playwriting fellow and heads the New Play Commissioning Program at True Love Productions. He co-curates Experiments and Disorders, a literary series at Dixon Place. He is currently at work on a new play, Airplane Story.
Jennifer Lee: JC Lee is a working on a book of essays, some of which have to do with fire. Also the gods of India and eating. Her work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Critical Quarterly, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette among others. She lives in a little house on a hill and teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh where, in 2014 she won an Innovation in Education Award to introduce digital writing into the curriculum. She's currently at work on an essay about Karni Mata, the holy rat temple in northern India. In Montauk, she'll write about the painter Balthus and her travels with a sadist. After which she'll need a good swim.
Jeff Lennon: Jeff Lennon is a displaced Californian living in Brooklyn. He writes fiction and nonfiction and, in perhaps his greatest individual effort, edits real estate brochures. He likes to move around in coastal or mountainous areas. He keeps and cradles a blog called The Coastal Literary.
Mira Mattar: Mira Mattar writes poetry and prose and is a contributing editor at Mute. Her most recent work was published in Very Small Kitchen. She has been awarded residencies at The Treignac Project and The Millay Colony. She lives in south east London. http://hermouth.blogspot.co.uk -- @her_mouth
Kyle McCarthy: Kyle McCarthy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, among other honors. Her critical essays have appeared in Electric Literature and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she has a story forthcoming from the Harvard Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Ian McDonald: Ian McDonald is a playwright, filmmaker and educator from Portland, Maine. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from Brown University, where he also taught, and is the recipient of a previous Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Clauder Competition Gold Prize, a Playwriting Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Visionary Playwrights Award from Theatre Masters. He received a BA in English Literature from Loyola Marymount University, where he recently returned to teach. Ian is currently finishing work on his first feature film, Some Freaks.
Amy Schleunes: Amy Schleunes is a writer, performer, and teacher based in Nicaragua. Her fiction and essays appear in Fourth Genre, The Missouri Review, Seneca Review, and other literary journals, and her plays have been developed at the Great Plains Theater Conference and the Iowa New Play Festival. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she taught creative writing and ballet, and a BA from Cornell University. She recently received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Kenyon Playwrights Conference, and is hard at work on her first novel.