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Adeena Karasick
Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist, and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award-winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
Polina Porras Sivolobova
Polina Porras Sivolobova is a Russian-Mexican multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Although her artwork includes painting, works on paper, artist books, and puppets, she is best known for her performance work. Currently, in a ‘transitional’ state of themes, motives and methods, Polina’s work in the past 15 years have explored narratives of female iconography in slow, site-specific, durational, ritualistic and participatory actions.
In 2019 and 2013, she performed at the performance biennial ENCUENTRO hosted by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in Mexico City and Sao Paulo, Brazil and was part of the EMERGENYC 2012 program organized by the same institution. She performed during the Venice Biennale 2017 and La MaMa Theater, Ailey Theater, The Museum of the American Indian and PEN Voices Festival in New York City: Artsadmin in London and the National Center for the Arts in Mexico City; she held an individual exhibition at The Contemporary Arts Museum of Oaxaca, the Embassy of Mexico in Kuwait and The University of Texas at El Paso.
Polina was a featured artist in the Catalogue of Cultural Offerings of the Ministry of Culture of Mexico and has been supported by the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was selected for the First Food Residency as part of the UK-Mexico Dual Year in 2015 and received the Queens Community Arts Fund Award in 2017, 2012 and 2009. She is the creator of three-14-feet tall puppets, a commission by El Museo del Barrio in New York, which are used yearly in their Three Kings parade. Polina has been an arts educator for sixteen years, developing curricula and teaching in New York public schools, libraries, museums, and community centers. Her latest project is organizing interdisciplinary travel programs to Oaxaca, Mexico. Polina received a Master in Fine Arts and Art and Design Education from Pratt Institute
John Roach
John Roach is an interdisciplinary artist from Queens New York whose work exploits fissures between materials, objects, and our everyday experiences. Of particular interest is human perception and how it filters our experience of the world, he explores this through a variety of forms including installation, sound art, collaborative performances, sculpture, and participatory experiences.
Recent works include the 12-channel sound installation Frozen Words, an unlikely fusion of Donald Trump and François Rabelais; Symbiotext a project with the evolutionary biologist John Burns that brings together the genome of a salamander and green algae to control a text-based sound installation; and Stone Cold Groove in which he worked with local historians as well as a group of children to explore the historical and sonic resonances of the local marble quarries in Dorset Vermont.
John is a full-time faculty at Parsons School of Design where he teaches a wide range of courses that address the aesthetic, spatial, emotional, psychological and political impact of sound. His site-specific installation and performance Wandering Stacks activates the floors of the Pratt library with the live sound of materials associated with books and paper-making and is coupled with language manipulations akin of those seen throughout Robbin Silverberg’s collection of works.