Adela Goldbard

Adela Goldbard was the 2017 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Goldbard is an artist and filmmaker with a research-based practice who believes in the potential of art to generate critical thinking and social transformation. With her work she questions the politics of memory by suspecting archeological preservation, official history, mass media, and popular culture. She dissents by making visible defiant events that have been forgotten or erased and by ritually and allegorically obliterating social evil. Goldbard challenges traditional cinema by re-enacting history and by collectively building, staging and importantly, destroying, always with a subtle amount of parody and dark humor. Her work includes photography, video, sculpture, text, public actions and immersive installations.

Goldbard holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017) and a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the National University of Mexico. Goldbard is a member of the National System of Artistic Creators of Mexico since 2015. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Philippines, Russia, Argentina, Canada, USA, and widely in Mexico. She lives and works in Chicago and Mexico City.

During the Edes award year Goldbard worked on an expanded cinema project titled “The Last Judgment”, which will be based on a XVI century play written in Náhuatl by Fray Andrés de Olmos as a spiritual conquest tool during the Spanish colonization of present-day Mexico. The play was adapted to a contemporary setting, problematizing and reflecting on the current migration crisis in the US, the strengthening of border politics, the hybridization of culture and language and the cultural Reconquista of the lost territory. The stage was built with the help of immigrant workers. “The Final Judgment” was simultaneously performed live and filmed, inserting the spectators in a stage/backstage (meta)experience. The final work is presented as a multi-channel video installation.

Cali Kasten

Cali Kasten was the 2017 DePaul University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Cali is a classically trained musician turned corporate convert with a knack for combining the artsy and the analytical. She is a co-founder of Chicago Symphonic Winds, a not-for-profit organization founded to fill the need for quality performances of wind repertoire in the Chicagoland area.

A passionate advocate for the arts, Cali’s musical background was the foundation for her work as an arts administrator. She still maintains an active performance career and has been noted for her sensitivity and versatility as a percussionist, having performed in a variety of ensembles and musical styles.  Cali can be seen across the Midwest in venues ranging from storefront theaters to Orchestra Hall.

Cali graduated with honors from DePaul University where she received her B.M. in Performing Arts Management. She is a member of the Percussive Arts Society, Social Enterprise Alliance and the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network.

During the Edes Award year, Cali worked towards building a sustainable model of acquisition, maintenance and rental/redistribution of percussion equipment to help fulfill the artistic needs of Chicago’s music community.

Dado Gyure

Dado Gyure was the 2017 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Dado is a visual artist and theater practitioner in the Chicagoland area. She was born in East Chicago, Indiana. She has two children. She is interested in value perceptions and how they inform empathic systems. Dado is an ensemble member of A Red Orchid Theatre, which is Chicago’s premiere theater for the best acting in the city. A lot of her work, both formal and experimental, happens at A Red Orchid. She has recently directed The Room by Harold Pinter, The Mutilated by Tennessee Williams, Simpatico by Sam Shepard, and Megacosm by Brett Neveu.

Dado is a trained actor (University of Southern California, Los Angeles Theater Academy), a director and visual artist, (UChicago DOVA), as well as an educator. She has appeared in many theaters and on tv/film. 

Dado’s Edes year project, The Little Match Girl Passion, was workshopped during her time at DOVA and is being moved into a larger social platform in the Chicago area. The Little Match Girl Passion is taken from a chamber opera written by David Lang (Pulitzer 2008) and is derived from the short story by Hans Christian Anderson of the same name.  The project used movement, sculpture, percussion and voice. 

Dado has also been a Maggio Fellow for directing, She has received a Jeff Citation as well as an After Dark Award. In 2017 her production of Sam Shepard’s Simpatico will move to the McCarter Theater in Princeton New Jersey. She teaches often at DePaul University and UIC. Her performance collective is known as        c      a       K    e.    Cake stands for Collections, Analysis, Kinesthesia, and Ensemble.

Angelo Madsen Minax

Angelo Madsen Minax was the 2017 Northwestern University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Minax makes films, videos and multi-disciplinary projects inspired by the collective and individual politics of belonging, and considers where fantasy, desire and embodiment interfere. Hiz works have shown at Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), REDCAT (LA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the British Film Institute (UK), the European Media Art Festival (Germany) and numerous film and video festivals around the world. Madsen received an MFA from Northwestern University (2012), a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014), The Core Program (2012-2014), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2015), and the Berlinale DOC Station (2016).

During the Edes award year Madsen worked on his feature film At The River, a hybrid documentary project that interweaves personal essay, reenactment, and landscape meditation to explore a convergence of themes: the American dream, religiosity, ruralness, and trans embodiment.

Kairos Dirt and the Errant Vacuum (teaser) from Madsen Minax on Vimeo.

My My Handsome Monster (excerpt) from Madsen Minax on Vimeo.

Eric Watts

Eric Watts was the 2016 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Watts is a Chicago based artist working in moving image and installation. He received his MFA from the University of Chicago, his BFA from The School of Visual Arts, with interstitial time at The Royal College of Art.

Eric Watts His Edes project, Edifice, is focused on the interrelated themes of Home, Biography, and Memorial. It looks specifically at connections between the house Ludwig Wittgenstein built for his sister in Vienna and the Cone House from Thomas Bernhard’s novel, Korrectur. He traveled to Austria to film these real and imagined spaces, creating his own architecture to install these films into.
In 2014, Watts took part in Winterjourney, a group thematic residency at The Banff Centre, Banff, AB and was an Artist in Residence at The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, YT. Watts and his partner, artist Lauren Edwards, were awarded a DCASE Individual Artist Grant from the City of Chicago to fund their exhibition Fanfare for the Times at Heaven Gallery in 2016. Watts has exhibited and screened works at The Logan Center Gallery, Regina Rex, ACRE TV, Walter Phillips Gallery, and Trunk Show.

 

Norman Teague

Norman Teague
Norman Teague was the 2016 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

 

Teague received his MFA in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects (AIADO) from ​the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)​. He is a father of two sons w​ho lives on the South side of Chicago. During his Edes Prize year, he launched a design studio in his neighborhood to increase area residents’ access and exposure to art and design to facilitate social change.

Norman’s work, Plank Sinmi Stool, was featured in whatnot, AIADO’s exhibition at Milan’s 2015 Design Week; and was named “Best In Show” by Metropolis. His birch plywood and rubber stool ​is inspired by ​the traditional American rocking chair​, and​ create​s​ an innovative perch for temporary respite. Plank +, a wooden bowtie fabrication project that employs youth in Chicago, continued ​Norman’s​ ​work merging design, community​,​ and educational practice. Teague says, “I believe in impacting the neighborhood economy through direct acts of designing, making, selling, and marketing products that encourage sustainability.” ​

“​During my ​​Edes Prize year​,​ I ​​plan​​ to launch my design studio in Chicago’s ​S​outh​ ​Side​, increasing access to design education for area residents​. Presently, there is no place that ​promotes design as a career choice​,​ let alone as a device for change, so I would like to engage audiences in the design process​ by ​hosting events in​ my workspace​ where they can interact with​ art and design ​practitioners, enabling​ them to view making as an attainable choice in achieving change. I plan to develop a space that will ​showcase old and new furnishings​ and ​objects ​and evoke the stories behind them​. The space will also ​creat​e ​employment, ​encourage ​storytelling​,​ and ​generate ​revenue as a means of creating capital ​to support design openings, exhibitions, design lectures, workshops, dinners with professionals and patrons of the community, design/build charettes and ​pop-up design shows and performances. By including ​​community members in the design process​,​ I find that positive interaction becomes a bonding agent for independent design to take place. I have a solo show planned at Blanc gallery in Bronzeville, ​and am coordinating ​The BLK Atelier Collective​, a traveling exhibition​ that will showcase designers of African Diasporic backgrounds and the moments that inspire​ them​ in today​’​s urban ​environment​.

“Lastly, I plan to make products ​that convey my personal narrative as a professional practitioner in the design field ​as an example of success in the field for young designers who live in the neighborhood. I ​dedicate considerable time and effort to these projects in an effort to promote ​design as a monumental force in​ facilitating​ community empowerment.​”​

Will Arbery

Will Arbery was the 2016 Northwestern University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Arbery is a playwright, filmmaker, and performer. He grew up the only boy among seven sisters, and his work examines the idea of “perceived limitation.” Inspired by his older sister Julia, who has Down syndrome, he’s compelled to write authentic characters across all spectra, and is particularly invested in characters with physical and cognitive disabilities. He’s based in Brooklyn, and is a member of Clubbed Thumb’s writers group Impartial Nudity.

Arbery

His play The Mongoose was produced by The Road Theatre in Los Angeles, where it was an LA Times Critic’s Pick. In 2014, he was one of the winners of the Samuel French OOB Festival with his play The Logic. His plays include: Claustrophile (Clubbed Thumb SummerWorks reading), The Confession (Alliance Theatre/Kendeda workshop), You’re Sadder Than You Realize (Dixon Place), and WE WERE NOTHING! (Flavorpill Editor’s Pick). He’s a member of BOOMERANG and was in residence with them at the Watermill Center.

During the award year, Will planned to finish his short film Your Resources and develop it into a feature film. He also planned to create: a new musical featuring a Down syndrome lead performer, a web-series involving perceived limitation, and a new play about his seven sisters. The award also helped him afford the costs of residencies, travel for research, rehearsal space, submissions, and professional development.

Residencies include: Tofte Lake Center, Wildacres, Can Serrat. His writing has been published in Better, great weather for MEDIA, The Awl, Word Riot, decomP, Howl Round, and more. He was named one of Variety’s “110 Students to Watch.”

Karly Bergmann

Karly Bergmann was the 2016 DePaul University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Karly BergmannBergmann received her BFA in Dramaturgy/Theatre Criticism from The Theatre School at DePaul University where she also received The Louise de Marillac Women of Spirit and Action Award. She found shadow puppetry when an old overhead projector was discovered in her closet, and has since been captivated by the enchanting effect the medium has on an audience and the visual dramaturgy inherent to the work.

Bergmann’s shadow puppetry reimagines the folk tale for a modern
audience. She has adapted The Green Ribbon (The Wretched Nobles Film Screening “Best of 2015” pick), Tatterhood (The Dollhouse Female Filmmaker Festival), and created shadow projections for the world premiere of the musical The Mountain Digby (MCL Chicago). Bergmann’s work has been performed at Constellation, The Den Theatre, and in DIY venues around Chicago. She is proud to have worked with Manual Cinema, National Cool Theater and the art festival 2nd Floor Rear.

During her Edes Year, Karly furthered her studies in shadow puppetry by attending festivals and workshops across Italy. These included the the Incanti Festival in Turin and an intensive international shadow puppet workshop held annually by Teatro Gioco Vita in Piacenza. The Edes Prize also supported the creation of a weekly shadow puppet GIF and monthly street performances in Rome.

skydiver from Karly Bergmann on Vimeo.

Nada Shalaby

Nada Shalaby was the 2015 Northwestern University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Nada is a visual artist born in Cairo. Her practice is primarilyNS_1 situated between installation, performance and social engagement. She is concerned with the interrogation of uncontested spaces, often involving constructs of language and cultural associations, that exist in the public sphere. She began work in social practice in 2009 with a storefront studio in Chicago’s West Roger’s Park neighborhood. In 2011, she founded a social practice residency program for young artists and co-founded the art space Doukan7002 in Chicago. She moved back to Egypt later that year and began teaching in the Department of the Arts at the American University in Cairo. She holds a Masters degree in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University.

Francisco Castillo Trigueros

Francisco Castillo Trigueros was the 2015 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

FranciscoFrancisco is a composer and performer of contemporary and electronic music from Mexico City residing in Chicago.  As a composer he has received numerous distinctions such as the BMI Student Composer Award, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne Young Composer’s Forum Jury prize, two honorable mentions in the Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, and four nominations for the Gaudeamus Music Prize. As a performer of electronic music, Francisco is part of Collect/Project, a trio with flutist Shanna Gutierrez, and vocalist Frauke Aulbert. He has also performed with ensembles and soloists such as Ensemble Dal Niente, the Spektral Quartet, Fonema Consort, Claire Chase, and Ryan Muncy, and with the prestigious Mexican dance company Delfos Danza Contemporanea.

Francisco recently received a Ph.D at the University of Chicago, where he served as Computer Music Studio Manager for three years, and is currently teaching Digital Music Composition at Columbia College Chicago, and Theory and Composition at the New Music School. His mentors include Augusta Read Thomas, Shulamit Ran, and Howard Sandroff, among others. Current projects include Xilitla, a large-scale multimedia song cycle funded by the Edes Prize, a new piece for harpist Ben Melsky, and the music for a videodance by Delfos Danza Contemporanea.

 

Jeffrey Levin

Jeffrey Levin was the 2015 DePaul University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Jeffrey is a composer, sound designer, musician, and sound engineer based in Chicago IL. As a freelance artist Jeffrey has contributed original music, sound design, and music direction for over sixty productions for various theaters and performance venues in and outside of Chicago. He is an Artistic Associate of Profiles Theatre where he contributes all music and sound designs for the past five seasons. Other theaters Jeffrey has collaborated with includes Steppenwolf, About Face Theatre, Strawdog Theatre, Stage Left, TUTA, Step Up Productions, Dead Writers Theatre, Chicago Fringe Opera, Collaboraction, ChiArts High School, McGill University, and Columbia College. Awards and Recognitions that Jeffrey has received in addition to the Edes Foundation Prize includes two Equity Joseph Jefferson Award Nominations for In the Company of Men (Sound Design) and In God’s Hat (Original Music), both at Profiles Theatre. He was also winner of the Kleinman Composition Competition for his original work for Clarinet and Electronics. Jeffrey received his Masters of Music in Composition at DePaul University and Bachelors of Music in Composition at Columbia College Chicago.

Leonard Suryajaya

Leonard Suryajaya was the 2015 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Leonard, who is originally from North Sumatra, Indonesia, received dual bachelor’s degrees in Theatre Art and Creative Photography from California State University Fullerton in 2013.

Front, 2012
Front, 2012

He received his Master of Fine Arts in Photography at SAIC in May 2015. He has exhibited his work extensively, including at Expo Chicago, Mana Contemporary, Defibrillator Gallery, and the Irvine Fine Arts Center in Irvine, CA.

Influenced by the cultural milieu of inter-ethnic relations in Indonesia, Suryajaya’s work explores intricate and complicated layers of selfhood in the context of cultural background, intimacy, sexuality, and personal displacement. By utilizing photography, video, along with elements of performance and installation, and through the use of personal narrative and story telling, his work challenges and deconstructs the perspective we use to scrutinize and observe our roles in a transnational global world.

Lila Newman

Lila Newman was the 2014 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

She is an actor, writer, musician and comedian, and received her MFA in Acting from Drama Centre London with study at the Vakhtangov Institute in Moscow.  As part of her Edes year, She worked on a play about Ora Nichols, the pioneer of Golden Age Radio Sound Effects. For more on that project including interviews and images, please see: Edes Grant Project: Ora Nichols.  

Her recent screen work can be seen on Amazon’s Alpha Houseopposite John Goodman and Julie White and written by Garry Trudeau. Stage work includes New York: White on White (Steps Theatre), About Face (The Brick), A Map to Somewhere ElseSomething Wicked (Everyday Inferno). Chicago: A Prairie Home Companion (NPR), The Ballad of Lula Del Ray (Manual Cinema), Sketch Comedy & Improv (Donny’s Skybox at The Second City, iO (Improv Olympic), The Playground), Spectacle Performer (Redmoon),Compass Players (Pocket Guide to Hell), Liberal Arts: The Musical,The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Underscore Theater Company)Williamstown Theater Festival: 356/365 Plays, Uncle Sam I Am (Nikos Theater). London: Hedda Gabler, The Broken Heart (The Platform Theatre), Twelfth Night (Studio Theatre at Kings Cross) Moscow: The Seagull (SADA Theatre).

A graduate of Chicago’s Second City & iO Conservatories and a member of the Playground Theater, Lila’s performed sketch and long-form in venues all around Chicago including: Donny’s Skybox and the DeMaat at The Second City, iO, The Playground, a handfull of dive bars and countless dilapidated storefronts. She performed under many group names, all of them sound like parodies of comedy group names, among them: The Business and Lumberjack Tsunami (Check out reviews in Time Out and NPR Station WBEZ).

She is a classically trained soprano with a passion for belt, folk and jazz. Lila plays an ok piano, a better ukulele and the clawhammer banjo (please, forgive her the last).

Lila writes and contributes sketches weekly to A Prairie Home Companion. With Sarah Rosenshine, Lila also co-writes, produces and acts in Barnum Effect, a radio sketch show. For more on her writing, please see: Writing (Bits & Pieces). 

 

Marc David Pinate

Aaron Hughes

Aaron Hughes was the 2014 Northwestern University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

He is an artist, activist, teacher, and Iraq War veteran whose work seeks out poetics, connections, and moments of beauty, in order to construct new languages and meanings out of personal and Aaron Hughescollective traumas. He uses these new languages and meanings to create projects that deconstruct systems of dehumanization and oppression. He works with a variety of art, activist, and veteran organizations and projects including: Iraq Veterans Against the War, National Veterans Art Museum, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Warrior Writers Project, Dirty Canteen,  and Center for Artistic Activism.

During the Edes Prize award year, Aaron focused on his ongoing Tea Project that utilizes the space created when someone sits, sips, and reflects over a cup of tea to offers counter-narratives that disrupt the numbing effects of war, detention, and dehumanization.

Spencer Elias

Spencer Elias was the 2014 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Spencer was born in San Francisco in 1987. He graduated from the University of Oregon in 2011 before receiving his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Stucky has exhibited Spencer Stuckyin the US and abroad including the Elmhurst Art Museum, and Schingoethe Gallery, at Aurora University, as well as featured in Ambit Magazine (London), and other publications.  Stucky currently lives and works in Chicago, IL and is an instructor at the School of the Art Institute.

By Way of Repose, his Edes year project, is a film that examines a connection between photography, avant-garde dance, and architecture in Stockholm during the 1930’s. Social and familial ties of three figures from this period are used as a narrative framework: architect Eskil Sundahl, Eskil’s son – architectural photographer Sune Sundahl, and dancer Birgit Åkesson. The film features the choreography of Trisha Brown, to highlight a continuing lineage of influence of this location within Modernism. Soloists from the Royal Swedish Ballet performed Brown’s Accumulation pieces in locations that hold a historical significance to the period and individuals examined in the film.

 

Shawn Jaeger

Shawn Jaeger was the 2013 Northwestern University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

He was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1985. His music often drawsjaeger-headshot1 inspiration from Appalachian folksong and hymnody, and has been performed by Dawn Upshaw and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Contemporaneous, at venues including Zankel Hall, Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, the Morgan Library, (Le) Poisson Rouge, and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. He has received commissions from Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Bard College Conservatory of Music Graduate Vocal Arts Program, the JFund/American Composers Forum, and the BMI Foundation/Concert Artists Guild. Honors include the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Northwestern University M. William Karlins and William T. Faricy Awards, and two BMI Student Composer Awards. Jaeger holds a DMA in composition from Northwestern University, and a BM from the University of Michigan. He lives in New York City.

An Opera Double Bill from The Fisher Center on Vimeo.

Shane Ward

Shane Ward was the 2013 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Shane is an American artist who lives and works in Chicago.  His work is dedicated to themes ofHeadShot war and romance, capital and masculinity, violence and emancipation, surface luster and value.  Shane is after the relationship between the grave and the monument, the mine and jewelry box, the wound and the mend.  Of late, he has thought of this as a sustained inquiry into the nature of victory, its relationship to liberty, and its ultimate fragility.

Shane earned his MFA from the University of Chicago in 2012.  He currently teaches in the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Matt Ulery

Matt Ulery was the 2013 DePaul Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

The Chicago-based bassist/composer and bandleader has developed an instantly recognizable sound. Known for his sweeping lyricism, unconventional phrase structures, expressionistic emotionalism, Ulery’s music is informed by the entire spectrum of jazz, classical, rock, pop, and folk– specifically American, South American, Balkan, and other European folk styles. He performs not only on upright and electric bass, but doubles on tuba.

For a decade, Ulery has been the leader of his own groups and frequent collaborator. Ulery has produced and released 6 albums of all original music under his name including his three most recent releases of critical acclaim, “By a Little Light,” “Wake an Echo,” and “In the Ivory,” on Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf Music record label in 2012-2014.

Ulery earned a Master of Music degree at Depaul University and Bachelors degree in music composition at The Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University and has played in bands with Kurt Rosenwinkel, Phil Markowitz, Jimmy Chamberlin, Fareed Haque, Grazyna Auguscik, Howard Levy, Patricia Barber, Goran Ivanovic, Jeff Parker, Zach Brock, and many others. As a composer, Ulery has collaborated with ensembles such as eighth blackbird and the New Millennium Orchestra of Chicago.

When not touring parts of the U.S. and Europe, Matt appears regularly in the Chicago area music venues and has performed with his groups at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, Chicago Orchestra Hall, Millennium Park Pritzker Pavillion, Chicago Cultural Center, The Krannert Center, Blues Alley, Jazz Showcase, The Metro and countless other fine music listening rooms.

Meghan Moe Beitiks

Meghan Moe Beitiks was the 2013 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Moe works with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. She analyzes perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that interrogates relationships with the non-human. The work emerges as video, performance, installation, writing or photography depending on what arises from her process of research and improvisation.

She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studied playwriting, acting, movement and scenic design. She has an MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied Bio Art, Social Practice, Environmental Chemistry, and performance methodologies.

As part of her year as an Edes Awardee, within which she sought to develop her practice according to Karen Barad’s concept of “Intra-Action,” Moe spent several months at a SymbioticA, the Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts, in Perth, Australia. She trained with scientists at La Trobe University in Melbourne regarding the proper care and handling of anerobic bacteria, then returned to Perth to build her own anerobic facilities and perform with them. This was for a piece called A Lab for Apologies and Forgiveness v.5, part of a larger series within which Moe looks at what it means to apologize to a site that has been altered or contaminated by human use. She was also a fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art and Arts Residency, and presented work at the World Stage Design conference and the Out of Site Festival in Chicago. Documentation of work from her Edes year was later displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

She has presented work in California, Connecticut, Chicago, Nevada, Michigan, Brooklyn, Wales, London, Latvia and Russia. She was a Fulbright Student Fellow in Theater to Latvia and received a MacDowell Colony fellowship from the Leon Levy Foundation following her Edes award year, as well as residencies at the Kala Art Institute and the I-Park Foundation.

Jack Lawrence Mayer

Jack Lawrence Mayer was the 2012 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize, with David Milton Brent.

Jack is the co-writer and director of Single Long, a seven-episode HBO GO digital comedy. He is the co-creator of numerous web series, including L.A. Famous (2014), and Distance (2015). He is the co-founder of Screen Door, a live movie company based in Chicago. He is the writer and director of numerous short films including, How To Say I Love You with Video (Portable.tv), Exit Ghost @ High Concept Labs, and Five-Fingered Lucy.

Chet Catherine Pancake

Catherine Pancake was the 2012 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

She is a filmmaker and sound artist. Her work has been presentedcatherine_pancake nationally and internationally in a wide variety of venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, Royal Ontario Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Academy of Fine Arts Prague and Big Screen Plaza, Herald Square NYC. Her awards include the Paul Robeson Independent Media Award, Jack Spadaro Documentary Award, Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, and the Silver Chris. Her films have been broadcast in the U.S.A. and Great Britain (Sundance Channel, PBS, FreeSpeech TV, CommunityChannelUK) and are distributed by Bullfrog Films and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Sound art releases can be found on Ehse Records and Recorded in Baltimore. Pancake completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2012. She is currently a member of the Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, and teaches in the Center for the Arts at Temple University and the Digital Arts Program at LaSalle University.

Genius Project, her Edes Year project, is a feature-length documentary film exploring four creative visionaries who self-identify as queer women. The film uses first-person stories, archival footage, verite sketches, and creative re-enactments to deliver a deeply funny, compelling, revelatory, and ecstatic view into the world of these unusual artists. The film features Eileen Myles, Barbara Hammer, Jibz Cameron, and Shannon Funchess.

 

 

Shannon Matesky

Shannon Matesky was theShannon Matesky 2012 DePaul Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Shannon hails from Berkeley, California where she began as one of the youngest poetry slam champions in the Bay Area, at age 14. Shannon has since been apart of Brave New Voices College Tour, the final season of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and numerous stages across the country as a poet and actress. She has performed with many talents such as Talib Kweli, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Danny Hoch, Rachel McKibbens, George Watsky, Rafael Casal and countless others. Shannon also features in the award winning documentary 2nd Verse: The Rebirth of Poetry (Corduroy Media) and is author of her first solo play She Think She Grown.

An alumni of Depaul University’s Theatre School, Shannon holds a BFA in Acting. Some of her theatrical credits include,  A Raisin in the Sun (Merle Reskin), Electricidad (Merle Reskin), Welcome to Arroyo’s (ATC), Chicagoland and Hit The Wall (The Inconvenience), Sonnets for An Old Century (UrbanTheatre Co.), Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses (The Hypocrites) and The March (Steppenwolf Theatre). Shannon also assisted Chuck Smith in directing Race by David Mamet at the Goodman Theatre. Shannon is signed with Paonessa Talent Agency.

Shannon is also an activist and teacher that encourages forward movement toward enlightenment of consciousness. She works independently to develop curriculums that fit the demands of the current youth culture. Shannon has worked for organizations such as Young Chicago Authors, Youth Speaks, Step-Up Women’s Network, Kuumba Lynx and others, aiding young adults in technical and life skills.

Nolan Pearson

Nolan Pearson was the 2012 Northwestern University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Nolan Pearson has been praised by the New York Times as a “high-energy pianist” who “brought beauty and cohesiveness” to his interpretations of new music. As soloist he has appeared with conductors including Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Stefan Asbury, Bridget Reischl and Robert Hasty and in recital in Europe and throughout North America. Based in Chicago, he appears on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chamber Music series and is an Instructor at Northwestern University.

Invested in promoting emerging composers, Mr. Pearson has commissioned many solo works. As original pianist of The New Fromm Players, called “fearlessly accomplished” by the Boston Globe, he worked closely with composers Charles Wuorinen, Oliver Knussen, and Bright Sheng and performed at the Elliott Carter Centenary at Tanglewood. He is active in new music performance and a regular guest performer at the Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong.

Mr. Pearson studied principally with Ursula Oppens, Robert Shannon and Jill Sprenger. He has been winner of the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship and also holds a degree in Biochemistry.

Joe Clark

​Joe Clark was the 2011 DePaul Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

He is an active composer and arranger, and has been on the faculty of DePaul University since 2012 and Northwestern University since 2014.

Joe is an arranger for The Negaunee Music Institute at the ChicagoIMG_0089 Symphony Orchestra, writing for the Once Upon a Symphony and Orchestra Explorers programs. Clark’s music has been performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Rene Fleming, Randy Brecker, Jon Faddis, Marquis Hill, Kurt Elling, Phil Woods, Ira Sullivan, Julia Bentley, the Chicago Brass Quintet, the Chicago Sinfonietta, Bob Lark and his Alumni Big Band, the Tom Matta Big Band, the New Standard Jazz Orchestra, Chicago Q Ensemble, V3NTO, the Spektral Quartet, players from the Grant Park Symphony and Louisiana Philharmonic, and ensembles at DePaul University, University of Cincinnati CCM, Truman State University, University of Illinois Chicago, and others.

His horn arrangements can be heard on many albums, including Kanye West and Malik Yusef’s “G.O.O.D. Morning G.O.O.D. Night”. His awards include multiple Luminarts Awards, the Kleinman Composition Award, a DownBeat Student Music Award, and the Claire and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists. Joe is also in demand as a producer for recording sessions in a variety of styles.

Additionally, Joe Clark is a trumpeter and bandleader with two recordings as a leader: “Lush” (2013) on Jazzed Media Records and “The C.O.W.L. Sessions” (2014) on Sparks & Shadows.​”​

Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman

Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman was the 2011 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Jacob writes and direct movies. Short films, a couple features, music videos, animation, and documentaries. He recently directed a few music videos in my hometown of Detroit that he’s pretty proud of. One of them (Waves) was put in the “Top 10 Music Videos of 2014” list in Detroit Music Mag. He won an Emmy in 2014 for directing a series of short documentaries.

Jacob used the Edes Award to direct and edit a feature documentary called Detroit Threat ManagementJacob in water about a for-profit urban paramilitary squadron. He’s the director/editor/co-creator of a music webseries called Far Off Sounds that chronicles unique musical subcultures and artists around the world. As of 2015,  he was living  for the month in Accra, Ghana, shooting a documentary about underwater logging in the world’s largest underwater forest.

Cameron Crawford

Cameron Crawford was the 2011 Northwestern University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

He lives and works in New York. His writing hasheadshot been included in Blast Counterblast (Mercer Union/WhiteWalls),  Manual for Treason for the 2011 Sharjah Biennial, and the 2012 Whitney Biennial catalogue. His artwork has been exhibited in galleries and institutions throughout the United States, including the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah Sohn

Sarah Sohn was the 2011 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee for the Edes Foundation Prize.

Sarah holds an M.F.A. in painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois and a B.F.A. from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 2011, she was awarded a sarahsohn200fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Ms. Sohn’s paintings have been included in numerous group shows in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Her museum shows include the Provincetown Art Association Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Ryan Muncy

Ryan Muncy was the 2010 Northwestern University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Praised for “superb” performances by The New York Times as well as his ability to “show off the instrument’s malleability and freakish extended range as well as its delicacy and refinement” by The Chicago Reader, Ryan is a saxophonist who performs, commissions, and presents new music. His work emphasizes collaborative relationships with composers and artists of his generation and aims to reimagine the way listeners experience the saxophone through contemporary music. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in France, the Kranichstein Music Prize, and has participated in the creation of more than 125 new works for the instrument. His debut solo album Hot was released by New Focus Recordings in 2013, described as “absorbing” (Alex Ross) and “one of the year’s best albums” (Time Out New York). Based in New York City, Ryan is the Saxophonist and Director of Institutional Giving for the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and holds the Doctor of Music degree from Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

Nadav Assor

Nadav Assor was the 2010 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

nadav_portrait1Nadav’s work performatively mediates cities, bodies and personal narratives via lo-fi reenactments of appropriated military-industrial technologies, examining technological mediation as an essential and transformative human condition. Nadav has exhibited internationally in festivals, music venues, museums and galleries in North America, Israel, Europe and Asia. Some recent venues for his work include ISEA Vancouver, Transmediale Festival in Berlin, European Media Arts Festival, the Soundwave Biennial in San Francisco, Residency Unlimited NYC, Spectrum NYC, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, the Koffler Center in Toronto, Julie M Gallery Tel Aviv, Xuzhou Museum, China, and many others. Assor’s work has been featured in publications such as Art Forum, Art Monthly, Haaretz, ArtAsiaPacific, the Creators Project, Motherboard, and more. Nadav holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Art & Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2010). He is among the 2011 awardees of the Israeli Ministry of Culture’s Young Artist awards. Since 2012, Nadav has been an Assistant Professor of Expanded Media and a Fellow at the Ammerman Center for Art & Technology in Connecticut College.

Cut Stories, his Edes year project, is an installation in which 8 monitors of varying sizes serve as one semi-circular, layered screen, displaying any of six short, true personal narratives covering a range of subjects, from an intimate night conversation in Brasil ending with a man running through the fog holding a severed cow leg, to an American sex scene involving fractured bones and religion, to other tales of surgeries, injuries and car accidents: all transgressions into the participants invisible personal spaces.

The visitor to the installation enters a darkened space in which a panorama of faces is spread over the arc of monitors. It is a constantly panning image shot from the center of a circle of seated participants: most are listening to the story being told by one of them.

Beyond these, in the shadows is the Apparatus: another circle of people, all holding cameras of every type, documenting the event, rotating, contracting and expanding around the inner circle in a dance of mediation. This seemingly continuous image of seated people is actually comprised of adjacent windows into consecutive points of time within the single, constantly panning video: these are tiled next to each other so as to create the illusion of continuous space. The effect of this is that only the central monitor is showing the current, audio-synced, real time. The others are showing adjacent participants at moments that are increasingly further away from the present, towards either the future (left) or the past (right).


Cut Stories: excerpts from installation documentation 2010 from Nadav Assor on Vimeo.

Rachel Walshe

Rachel Walshe was the 2010 DePaul Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

“In Chicago Walshe made a name for herself as a director of plays by and about women at DePaul and with the Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, where she earned a best-director nomination in the 2009 Jeff Awards for These Shining Lives . . .

Rachel Walshe Spotlight Image

Walshe relocated to her native Rhode Island in 2010. There, with support from the Edes prize, she continued to develop her sills in the role of visiting artistic director at Providence’s Perishable Theatre,
which is widely known for its annual International Women’s Playwriting Festival as well as its regular program of new work by women.

Walshe’s new title opened doors, enabling her to network with other women directors and playwrights throughout the country. In addition to producing the theater’s 15th women’s playwriting festival, Walshe directed Carson Kreitzer’s 1:23, a harrowing work taken directly from the confessions of two women convicted of killing their own children.

‘The Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists gave me a sturdy launching pad,’ she continues. ‘I’ve been invited to direct a number of plays throughout New England — my home — which is very exciting. I feel blessed and very charged that my year was so successful in that respect.’ ”

— From DePaul Theatre School Alumni Spotlight

Leigh-Ann Pahapill

Leigh-Ann Pahapill was the 2010 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

pictures for catalogue_1916 (1)She designs site-responsive projects where architecture is systematically examined as a means to dis-locate subject, object, and place. Her work is an attempt to invert and sustain the processes of representation as a means to provoke reflection on the logics, grammars, and other complexes of interpretation that comprise culture.

Pahapill’s 2010 Edes Award project, The Screen as the Juncture of the Infra-Ordinary, initiated a period of research into the material, epistemological, and ideological particularities of the screen, the white cube of the gallery, and the black box of the theatre. These spaces of representation were explored as hybrid scenes of exchange with the potential to materialize the realm of translation and mediation that is experience. Her award year started off with a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada and finished with an exhibition of the works produced in residence at Galerie Catherine Bastide in Brussels in 2011.

Pahapill’s recent solo exhibitions include Screen Space, Melbourne, AU (2015); Box13 Artspace, Houston, TX (2014); Window (re/production re/presentation) Asheville, NC (2013); Penelec Gallery, Allegheny College, PA (2013); and the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, FL (2011 & 2012). Recent group exhibitions include Hyperbole at the History Museum at the China Academy of Art (IMPACT9 2015); It Was Better in Real Life Than Real Life at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi (ISEA2014); and PROOFOFPROOFOFCONCEPT at the Ontario College of Art and Design University Graduate Gallery (2013). Pahapill joined the faculty of the School of Art at Bowling Green State University in Ohio as an Assistant Professor in 2012.