Karen Weiser is the author of two full length collections of poetry: the recently released Or, The Ambiguities and To Light Out (UDP), as well as chapbooks Dear Pierre (Well Greased Press), Placefullness (UDP), and Pitching Woo (Cy Press). She was recently awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, a Process Space residency through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She is currently working on the libretto for an opera (“You Who Made the Heavens Incline”) in collaboration with composer Peter Gilbert. It is about one of the first great composers, Kassia, a 9th century Byzantine nun/ She lives in New York City where she teaches and writes on 19th century American Literature.

Performer and educator, Keisha Turner, has Chicago and Brooklyn roots, and is based in Oakland, CA. She is a former touring company member and current teaching artist and BOLD (Builders, Organizers, and Leaders through Dance) Facilitator with critically acclaimed dance company Urban Bush Women. Keisha is a creative change-maker with growing ties to the many resistance movements taking place in the Bay Area. She is also a certified yoga instructor, and is committed to offering body-positive, life-affirming classes that create space for participants to prioritize self-care and self-awareness as an entry point to engaging with their communities. Her creative enterprise, EarthChild, is a collection of love-offerings comprised of performance, yoga classes, and body care products to celebrate, heal, and uplift oppressed communities. In her artistic practice, she values the ability of African American/African diasporic traditions of dance and improvisation to intersect with contemporary performance art to tell stories that probe issues of politics, culture, and identity.

http://baileyscafe.org/bios/keisha-j-turner/

Kira Nam Greene’s work explores female sexuality, desire and control through lush still-life paintings of food, surrounded by complex patterns and abstract. Imbuing the feminist legacies of Pattern and Decoration Movement with transnational/multicultural motifs, Greene creates colorful paintings that are unique combinations of realism and abstraction, employing diverse media such as oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor and colored pencil, etc. More recently, Greene’s interest in food has expanded into examining ethical aspects of modern food consumption and the proliferation of advertising imagery on our visual culture in a series of paintings of mass produced and brand name food products. In this latest series, Greene combines typical Pop Art tropes with her signature transnationalism, subverting the marketing slogans out of context among highly crafted patterns rooted in older cultural traditions. Greene has shown her work widely at venues such as Accola Griefen Gallery, Jane Lombard Gallery, Kiechel Fine Art, A.I.R. Gallery, Brown University, Salisbury University, Wave Hill, Bronx Museum of Art, Noyes Museum and Sheldon Museum of Art. Her latest project was a large installation of her wall drawings at Schaffer Library at Union College, Schenectady, NY.

http://kiranamgreene.com

In January/February of 2016 Marisa’s comedy, Mad Love, was the first new play produced at the brand new Northern Stage/Barrette Center in White River Junction, Vermont. Directed by Maggie Burrows. Mad Love was an O’Neill Playwright’s Conference semi-finalist and won Best Play (2012) from NH in Portland Stages’ (Maine) Clauder Competition and was developed and had readings at the Lark Play Development Center in NYC, The Dorset Theater Festival, The University of Delaware’s professional resident theater company (one-week workshop and reading) and at Dartmouth College and Urban Stages in NYC.

Marisa’s plays include Saving Kitty, winner of Best Play (2010) from NH in Portland Stages’ (Maine) Clauder Competition and premiered at Wellfleet Actors Harbor Theater in 2012, directed by Rand Forrester. In the summer of 2013 Saving Kitty was produced by New Jersey Rep in Long Branch, NJ and directed by Evan Bergman.

In July and August of 2015 Saving Kitty enjoyed an extended sold-out run at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Mass. It was produced by the Nora Theater Company, directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner, and starred Jennifer Coolidge in the leading role. Saving Kitty was developed at the Lark Play Development Center, The Dorset Theater Festival and had readings at the Hayworth Theater in LA (Wendy Malick in the lead), The Lark (Harriet Harris), Boston Playwrights Theater (Karen MacDonald) and at the Williamstown Theater Festival, with Jennifer Coolidge, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel (Hand to God.)

Marisa wrote her first play in 2005 (Book Group) and it was produced at the Eclipse Grange Theater in Thetford, Vermont. Her second play, The Divine Family Comedy, was a Lark Playwright’s Week finalist in 2007 and a semi-finalist in the Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays, 2007 and was produced at the Eclipse Grange.

Marisa’s 10-Minute plays have been produced in the Boston Marathon of 10- Minute Plays, Barrington Stage in NY and in other theaters in VT, NH, Florida, New York and Massachusetts. They include: The Dress Rehearsal, Getting into Vassar, The Pre-Nup, Polar Bear Swim, Day One, Welcome to the Beekman Arms and Total Expression (Heideman Award Finalist, Actors Theater of Louisville).

In 2014 Marisa penned her first film, Second Wind, shot in England, staring June Brown, Harriet Walter and Tamzin Merchant, an Andrew Silver Production. Marisa is an associate artist at the Lark Play Development Center and has participated in their Meeting of the Minds program and attended the Theresa Rebeck Writer’s Colony in Dorset, Vermont (sponsored by the Lark) every spring since 2007. She is an Artist in Residence at the Hermitage Artists Retreat on Manasota Key, Florida for 2015-17, a six-week residency opportunity that can be taken over the course of the next two years.

Marisa is the co-owner and Publisher of Smith and Kraus Publishers, the leading publisher in the US of theater books for the trade with over 600 titles in print. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

Mary Bichner is a classical-meets-pop composer with the bizarre musical superpowers of perfect pitch (the ability to recognize notes and chords by name upon hearing them played) and synesthesia (a neurological condition that causes Mary to “see” splashes of specific colors when she hears their corresponding pitches sounded). Called a “musical genius” by CBS News, and invited to Harvard University’s prestigious neuroscience lab to be studied for her brain’s unusual wiring, Mary creates richly-colored compositions that delight classical enthusiasts and indie-pop rockers alike.

Past projects include “Alice’s Evidence”, a suite of incidental music penned to accompany the dramatic reading of Chapter 12 of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland for alto soloist, harpsichord, flute, violin, clarinet, cello and narration; creating numerous string quartet arrangements for the illustrious Vitamin String Quartet (including a placement on ABC’s “Modern Family”); and “To Helen”, an aria setting of the celebrated Edgar Allan Poe poem for alto soloist and piano. Past awards include receiving a 2014 Somerville Arts Council Music Fellowship Grant, being named the SAC Somerville Artist of the Month for March 2014, and receiving a 2014 San Diego Film Award for her musical score of the short film, “Just Desserts”.

http://www.marybichner.com

Artist Maureen McQuillan explores aspects of growth and unpredictability, repetition, replication and imperfection in the process and activity of drawing itself. Her work over the last two decades has ranged over many diverse mediums including printer’s ink and resin on paper, cameraless photography and installation. “Currently, I am making drawings that flout the traditional separation between line and color in Western aesthetics and explore the possibilities inherent in my own incredibly flawed system of color investigation.”

McQuillan is based in Brooklyn, and has been exhibiting her work both nationally and internationally, including eight solo shows. Her most recent was in 2015 at McKenzie Fine Art in NY and was entitled “Process Color.” Group exhibitions include: Le VOG Contemporary Arts Center, Fontaine and The College of Art and Design, Grenoble, France; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Maryland; The Drawing Center, NY; The Islip Art Museum, NY; The College of New Rochelle, NY; and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin, among many others. McQuillan’s work has been mentioned and reproduced in The New York Times, Newsday, The Boston Globe, TimeOut, The San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, ARTnews, Architectural Digest and Art on Paper, and her work is held in private and public collections all over the world. Maureen McQuillan is represented by McKenzie Fine Art in New York.

http://www.maureenmcquillan.com

Rachel Mica Weiss is a sculptor and installation artist. Her sculptures are composed of cast forms, wood constructions, and hand-braided elements, all of which balance uneasily against each other or are hopelessly intertwined. Her hand-strung site-specific installations also explore themes of tension and control, as well as architecture’s relationship to weaving. Weiss holds a B.A. from Oberlin College, an M.F.A. in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. San Francisco Foundation Murphy and Cadogan Fellow (2011). She has had solo exhibitions at Fridman Gallery, NY (2014) and the San Francisco Arts Commission (2013); group exhibition venues include Storefront Ten Eyck, SOMArts Cultural Center, and the Fiber Philadelphia Biennial. Weiss has created large-scale installations for the Norwood Club in Chelsea, Nassau Community College, and PULSE New York. Her upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Monserrat College of Art and a large-scale commission for the U.S. Embassy in Kyrgyzstan through the State Department’s Art in Embassies Program. Her work has appeared in international publications, the San Francisco Chronicle, Hyperallergic, and on the Bad at Sports blog. Weiss lives and works in Brooklyn as a resident of chashama’s studio program.

http://www.rachelmicaweiss.com