The Unseen Festival: List of Participants
T H E U N S E E N F E S T I V A L
List of participants in The Unseen Festival:
Awon Atuire is a spoken word artist of the West African oral tradition and a writer. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado Boulder where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies. His work is grounded in Ghanaian oral poetics and Africana literature. Awon’s book length manuscript, “The Ladder Gave the Roof its Name” is a collection of short stories and essays.
Ramona Ausubel is the author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, which was a San Francisco Chronicle and NPR best book of the year, as well as No One is Here Except All of Us, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, and A Guide to Being Born, a New York Times Notable Book. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, One Story, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a faculty member of the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Sarah Boyer is a poet. She attended UMASS Poets and Writers for her MFA and the University of Denver for her PhD in poetry. Her first book is called howard and it is available from sunnyoutside press in upstate New York.
D. Brigman is an artist currently living in Denver, CO. His aural works explore densely layered soundscapes and integrated textures from raw source material. Utilizing diverse techniques within abstract composition, the result—existing somewhere among sound collage, musique concrete, drone, power electronics, and harsh noise. Since 2005, an extensive discography has been released through predominantly independent and experimental labels (Anarchy Moon, Featherspines, Lotus Sound, Meditations, Monolithic Document, Painted Records, Peyote Tapes, Sick Sick Sick) with distribution in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan.
Sommer Browning writes poems, draws comics, and tells jokes in Denver. She is the author of YOU’RE ON MY PERIOD (Counterpath, 2016), THE CIRCLE BOOK (Cuneiform Press, 2015), BACKUP SINGERS (Birds, LLC, 2014), PRESIDENTS AND OTHER JOKES (Future Tense Books, 2013), and EITHER WAY I’M CELEBRATING (Birds, LLC, 2011). She is a librarian.
Andrew Busti has been making handmade films in various forms since 1999. His work revolves around the idea of the subjective and the languages that evolve through experience and perception. He is the technical director for the Film Studies Program at University of Colorado in Boulder and teaches classes in Alternative Process and Alchemical Cinema. He works with artists, museums, and archives through the name Analogue Industries Ltd., facilitating new works, helping to preserve any work that may be of value, and always striving to support analog cinema in all its ongoing forms. He is a founding member of Process Reversal, a nonprofit artist-run analog film initiative that currently educates, informs, supports, and outfits artist-run film labs and communities around the globe. He currently obsesses about the reclaiming and refining of silver from the photographic process .999 percent of his time.
Julie Carr is the author of six books of poetry, including 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of two prose works, Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2013) and Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta, 2017). With Jeffrey Robinson she is the co-editor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015). Carr’s co-translation, with Jennifer Pap, of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess—The Factory is due out from Commune Editions in 2018, as is a mixed-genre work, Reallife: An Installation (Omnidawn). Also to be published in 2018 is her book of critical essays, Someone Shot my Book (University of Michigan Press). She regularly collaborates with dance artist K.J. Holmes, is an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is the co-founder of Counterpath.
Serena Chopra is the author of Ic (Horse Less Press, 2017), This Human (Coconut Books, 2013) and the chapbooks, Penumbra (Flying Guillotine Press, 2011) and Livid Season (Free Poetry, 2012). She is a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar, working on a novel informed by her research with Maya For Women, a queer women’s support organization in Bangalore, India. She is a multidisciplinary artist, working as a professional modern dancer and company member with Evolving Doors Dance, as well as a visual artist, serving as a 2011-2013 resident artist at the RedLine Gallery in Denver. She is a co-founder and actor in the poet’s theater group, GASP, and she recently worked with Splintered Light Theater on a shadow/light production of Ic, for which she composed the soundscape. Her ongoing text/image collaboration, Memory is a Future Tense, with artist Lu Cong, can be found at memoryis.net. She lives and works in Denver. SerenaChopra.com
Tameca L Coleman is a singer, writer, massage therapist, itinerant nerd and point and shoot tourist in her own town. She is a current grad student at Regis’ new writing MFA program, and has published work in many genres. She has also performed and recorded music with many different bands. She doodles sometimes and likes dancebreaks.
CRIME is a multimedia poet and data manipulator. She hates cops gods and borders and loves you/does not trust you. They’ve published in Reality Beach, Alien Mouth, and MICRO//MACRO, and he can be found tweeting @metanyme.
Clark Davis is a Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English and Literary Arts and the University of Denver. He is the author of three books on American authors, the most recent of which is a biography of novelist and short story writer WilliamGoyen.
Joan Dickinson is an artist, writer, and priestess working in small and big forms:visual and performance art, writing and photography, farming and environmental restoration, astrology and ritual, and teaching. Her work has been presented widely in America, the UK, and in Europe. Under the HEX imprint, Dickinson has published thirteen books on such topics as herbal lore and psychedelia, European witch burnings; tuning the human pulse; lake ringing; and, in collaboration with 18 other artists and writers, the interconnection of the world’s waterways. She holds a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing and has taught for 25+ years.
Marcia Douglas is the author of the novels The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Madam Fate, and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells, as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and she is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Steven Dunn is the author of the novel Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016). He was born and raised in West Virginia. Some of his work can be found in Columbia Journal and Granta Magazine. His second novel water & power is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky in Fall 2018.
Amir George is a practicing alchemist working as a motion picture artist and film programmer. He creates work for the cinema, installation, and live performance. Born and bred in Chicago, George’s motion picture work and curated programs have been screened and exhibited in festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. In addition to founding The Cinema Culture, a grassroots film programming organization, George is the co-curator of Black Radical Imagination, a touring experimental short film series.
Peter Giebel is a writer and educator living in Denver, CO. His recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Diagram, Lana Turner, Prelude, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook To Trace a Circle in the Interior of Which Would Come to Be Inscribed the Outside of Every Circlecan be found as part of the Poetry will be made by all! project.
Christopher Harris was awarded a 2015 Creative Capital grant in support of his film Speaking in Tongues. His work has screened at festivals, museums and cinematheques throughout North America and Europe including the 2014 Artists’ Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2005, 2008, 2010), the VIENNALE-Vienna International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Leeds International Film Festival (2007, 2009), the San Francisco Cinematheque, and Rencontres Internationales Paris, among many others. “Cosmologies of Black Cultural Production: A Conversation with Afro-Surrealist Filmmaker Christopher Harris” was published in the summer 2016 issue of Film Quarterly.
Shunsaku Hayashi (b.1992) is a Japanese artist mainly working on painting, animation and experimental film. He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London as a trainee under the Japan Cultural Ministry Abroad Research Fellowship for up-and-coming artists from 2012 to 2015. His recent animation REMEMBER won Golden Horseman for Animated Film at 28th FILMFEST DRESDEN, and it was shortlisted for several international competitions.
Brandi Homan holds a PhD in English, Creative Writing (Prose), from the University of Denver and is the author of two books of poetry, Bobcat Country and Hard Reds, from Shearsman Books.
Trent Hudley is a professor of English. He teaches in the Creative Writing M.A. Program at Regis University; he also teaches at Metropolitan State University, and the Community College of Denver. He earned his B.A. from Metropolitan State University and his M.F.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso. He was raised in Denver, Colorado and before he entered the world of academia he held a multitude of positions including working in the Denver Post Sports Room, janitor, kitchen manager, painter, cashier and a multitude of other similar jobs. He still lives in Denver in the company of his friends and family.
Laird Hunt’s writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and in many literary journals here and abroad. He is the author of Neverhome, The Evening Road and, forthcoming in 2018, Red Boy.
Alexandra Jackson is a recent graduate from the University of Denver with degrees in psychology and creative writing. She holds distinction in creative writing for her creative poetry senior thesis titled, “Angels in my Living Room”. While completing her senior year of college she simultaneously began her first year in the Masters of Social work program through The University of Denver. In between writing and school she interned with the Aurora non-profit, Colfax Community Network, servicing individuals experiencing housing crises in motels on Colfax and in the area. This upcoming year she will be interning in the housing and urban development section at the Veterans Affair Hospital advocating to remove housing barriers faced by Veterans experiencing homelessness. She hopes to bridge her Masters of Social work experiences with her passion of creative writing to increase self-expression and self-esteem while breaking down systematic barriers for marginalized communities.
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Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels and six story collections. Most recent are Mapping the Interior, from Tor.com and the comic book My Hero, from Hex Publishers. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil (Ojibway) are filmmakers and artists from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work subverts traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative documentary practice. Their films and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, UnionDocs, e-flux, Maysles Cinema, Microscope Gallery (New York), Spektrum (Berlin), Trailer Gallery (Sweden), and Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay). They both graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College and are UnionDocs Collaborative Fellows and Gates Millennium Scholars.
Ella Longpre is the author of How to Keep You Alive (Civil Coping Mechanisms 2017). She is also the author of three chapbooks, and her work has been published and anthologized widely. She was named the 2013 Anne Waldman Fellow at Naropa University, where she now teaches. She lives with her partner and two kittens and can be found in the woods.
Alexander Lumans was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. He was also awarded a fellowship to the 2015 Arctic Circle Residency, where he sailed around Svalbard, Norway in a tall ship. His fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Story Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Cincinnati Review, among others. He has been awarded fellowships to MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, Blue Mountain Center as well as scholarships to Sewanee and Bread Loaf. He received the 2015 Wabash Fiction Prize from Sycamore Review, the 2013 Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, and the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from Yalobusha Review. He graduated from the M.F.A. Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and now teaches at University of Colorado-Denver.
Julia Madsen is a multimedia poet and educator. She received an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is a doctoral student in English/Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Blue-collar born and raised, she is currently thinking about technology and the working class. She is the video editor at Reality Beach, and has shown video poetry at Outlet Fine Art Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and No Nation Art Gallery in Chicago, IL. You can read/view her work at www.juliamadsen.com.
Jovan Mays is the emeritus Poet Laureate of Aurora, Colorado, a National Poetry Slam Champion, Curator of A Story, a student narrative project in Aurora Public Schools, a TED Speaker, and Director of Your Writing Counts, a youth poetry program throughout the Denver Metro that engages just over 200,000 students annually.
Blair Seab McClendon is an artist and editor who is from San Diego, but is currently living in New York City. His most recent work, America for Americans, is a found footage essay film on black joy and besiegement. The film won a Jury Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His work as an editor has screened at Sundance, SXSW, DOC NYC, and Cannes.
Courtney E. Morgan is the author of The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman, published by FC2 in 2017. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she has also taught. She is a recipient of the Thompson Award for Western American Writing, and was longlisted for the Diana Woods Memorial Award at Lunch Ticket and Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Fiction. Morgan is the founder and managing editor of The Thought Erotic sexual culture journal and teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and The Gathering Place women’s shelter. She currently lives in Denver with her son and is working on a literary speculative novel.
Dakota Nanton is an experimental animator based out of Boulder, Colorado. His artwork and films draw inspiration from such diverse areas as comic books, folklore, science fiction, religious imagery, and art history. Borrowing from the images and iconographies of the past, and mixing old techniques with new, he explores the complexities and contradictions of living in the modern world. His work has been exhibited all around the world and is held in permanent collections in the United States, Canada, Italy, Australia, Egypt and New Zealand.
Born in Los Angeles, Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet and multimedia artist whose work has appeared widely in literary journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Boston Review,PEN America, and The Iowa Review, among others. A winner of the 92Y’s Discovery / Boston Review 2017 Poetry Contest, she currently lives in Colorado where she is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver. Her first book, Ghost Of, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in April 2018. www.dianakhoinguyen.com
Toluwanimi Oluwafunmilayo Obiwole is a Nigerian-born, Colorado-raised poet, educator, and organizer. For 2015-2016 she was Denver’s first Youth Poet Laureate. Since then, she has completed her Bachelor’s degree in Ethnic Studies, and toured/performed nationally. In 2016 she co-wrote and co-starred in a play called How I Got Over which featured at the Denver Center for Performing Arts. In 2017 she was announced as one of The Root’s 25 Young Futurists. She was a member of SLAM NUBA from 2015-2017, and is co-director of the Slam Nuba organization. She was a TEDx Mile High speaker and is the author of two chapbooks: OMI EBI MI and How to Become a Lightning Storm. She writes, hoping to cultivate her own black girl magic while creating space and a platform for people who have yet to realize that their voices are necessary.
Maureen Owen is editor of Telephone Books and author of over ten poetry collections, including American Rush, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and AMELIA EARHEART, a recipient of the American Book Award. Formerly co-director of the Poetry Project, she now lives in Denver and teaches at Naropa University. Most recently, she is the author of EDGES OF WATER (Chax Press, 2013).
Prayer Generator is the collaborative effort of multi-disciplinary artists libi rose and D. Brigman, currently living in Denver, CO. Their intention is to create richly composed aural/visual pieces, informed by abstraction and sensory detournement. The material is often sourced from raw field recordings; refined and deliberately structured to reveal densely enigmatic passages for all exposed.
Carolina Charry Quintero is an experimental filmmaker from Cali, Colombia. She holds an MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts, and a BA in Philosophy from Universidad del Valle in Cali. Her work is concerned with the experience of the unmeasurable, and the idea of the limit of comprehension. She is interested in the human-animal border as a place of thought, and as a place from which to revise the grand definitions of what is human, as well as the ethical, political and epistemological issues that are born at this border. Her work has screened at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Slamdance, Chicago Underground, and REDCAT in Los Angeles. She was awarded the Michelle Lund Calarts/Earthfire Institute Residency. She been the recipient of the Jack Oakie Foundation Grant, and the Emerging Artists Creative Grant from Colombia’s Ministry of Culture. She lives in Cali, Colombia.
Dani Rado received her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Her fiction has appeared in Harpur Palate, Clackamas Review, Mochila Review, Liar’s League NYC, Unstuck, The Other Stories, Tusculum Review, among other journals. She lives with her wife in Denver.
Tim Roberts is the author of Drizzle Pocket (2011) and The Reaganites (forthcoming), and is the director of Counterpath.
Jamilah Sabur was born in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica and lives and works in Miami. Sabur received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009 and an MFA from University of California San Diego in 2014. Recent exhibition and screening venues include REDCAT, Los Angeles; MoMAPS1, NY; Armory Art Center, Palm Beach; and HistoryMiami Museum.
Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution, all published by Coffee House Press. Widely published and anthologized, she also curates Madame Harriette Presents, an occasional series. A former instructor at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, Saterstrom currently lives in Colorado and is on the faculty of the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program.
Fern Silva primarily works in 16mm. His films consider methods of narrative, ethnographic, and documentary filmmaking as the starting point for structural experimentation. He has created a body of film, video, and projection work that has been screened and performed at various festivals, galleries, museums, and cinematheques, including the Toronto, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, New York, London, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals, Anthology Film Archives, Gene Siskel Film Center, Cinemateca Boliviana, Museum of Art Lima, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, New Museum, Greater New York at MOMA P.S.1, and Cinema du Reel at the Centre Georges Pompidou. He has organized and curated screenings at venues including the Nightingale Cinema, Gallery 400, and DINCA Vision Quest in Chicago. His work has been featured in publications including Film Comment, Artforum, Cinema Scope, Filmmaker Magazine, Millennium, and Senses of Cinema. He studied art and cinema at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. He is Visiting Artist in Residence in the Film & Electronic Arts Department at Bard College and is based in New York.
Musa Starseed is an award winning filmmaker, artist, musician, dancer, youth mentor, and community leader living in Boulder, Colorado. Musa has dedicated the trajectory of his artistic gifts and talents to uplift, inspire, and motivate his community towards values such as, empowerment, health, expression, cultural competency, and integrity. He is a world traveler and his claim to fame is being the first to make a documentary about the history of Hip Hop in Cuba called Soulz Of Azucar.Musa Starseed has currently been accepted to a graduate program at the University of Colorado at Boulder and he intends to write a book of empowering stories, poems, and principles for young black youth.
libi rose striegl is an artist across and between many media, ranging from robotics and software design to textiles and filmmaking. Her interest in curation comes from a desire to share work that might not otherwise be seen with people who might not otherwise see it. She is a PhD candidate at CU Boulder and holds an MFA from Duke University and a BA/BFA in Film Studies from CU.
Miriam Suzanne is an author, performer, musician, designer, and web developer — working with OddBird, Teacup Gorilla, and CSS Tricks. She’s the author of Riding SideSaddle and The Post-Obsolete Book, co-author of Jump Start Sass and 10 Myths on the Proper Application of Beauty Products, and creator of the Susy and True open-source toolkits.
Mathias Svalina is the the author of five books, including Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), Wastoid (Big Lucks Books), & the recently released The Wine-Dark Sea (Sidebrow Books). He is an editor for the small press Octopus Books. Since 2014 Svalina has run the Dream Delivery Service & a similar project for the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2015. In the fall of 2016 through the summer of 2017 he will be delivering dreams in other cities, including Richmond, Tucson, Marfa, Austin & Chicago.
João Vieira Torres is a filmmaker, artist, and actor born in Recife, Brazil. He studied Visual Arts at Miami Dade Community College and photography at the University of Paris 8. He attended Le Fresnoy in 2010. His work has been shown at film festivals in New York, Edinburgh, and Marseille, and in museums such as Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Anthology Film Archives in New York. He currently lives and works in both Brazil and France.
Thorsten Trimpop is a filmmaker based in Chicago. His new film Furusato, is a human-scale portrait of a small town in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. It premiered at DOK Leipzig, where it won the grand prize, the Golden Dove, and is now touring film festivals worldwide. His first feature film, The Irrational Remains, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won numerous awards. His earlier film and theatre work have been presented at venues as the Locarno Film Festival, The International Film Festival Rotterdam, and on European Television. Thorsten taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and Boston University. From 2014–17 he was a fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute Chicago.
Christin Turner (North Carolina, USA) is a filmmaker and artist based in Boulder, Colorado by way of Southern California. Her films navigate the psychological terrains of landscape, material, and image; they investigate the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence. Turner is currently an MFA candidate at University of Colorado at Boulder. She received her BFA from the University of California San Diego. Her work has shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally including Rotterdam International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Edinburgh Film Festival, Karlovy-Vary International Film Festival, and Hamburg International Film Festival, where she received a jury prize. Her abstract films and music videos have toured with musicians around the world, and were included in MoMA’s Abstract Currents (2013).
A chance meeting in Havana with legendary Cuban film propagandist Santiago Alvarez changed the course of Travis Wilkerson‘s life. He now makes films in the tradition of the “third cinema,” wedding politics to form in an indivisible manner. In 2015, Sight & Sound called Wilkerson “the political conscience of American cinema.” His films have screened at scores of venues and festivals worldwide, including Sundance, Toronto, Locarno, Rotterdam, Vienna, Yamagata, the FID Marseille and the Musée du Louvre. His best-known work is an agit-prop essay on the lynching of Wobbly Frank Little called “An Injury to One,” named one of the best avant-garde films of the decade by Film Comment. His most recent fiction feature, “Machine Gun or Typewriter?” premiered at Locarno 2015 and was awarded Best International Feature at DokuFest (Kosovo). It has since screened worldwide and was recognized as one the finest films of the year on numerous lists including La Furia Umana and DesistFilm. His writings on film have appeared in Cineaste, Kino!, and Senses of Cinema. He has taught filmmaking at the University of Colorado and Film Directing at CalArts, and was the inaugural Visiting Fellow of Media Praxis in the Pomona College Media Guild. Presently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film at Vassar College. He is also the founding Editor of Now: A Journal of Urgent Praxis.
Suné Woods is an artist living in Los Angeles. Her work takes the form of multi-channel video installations, photographs, and collage. Woods’ practice examines absences and vulnerabilities within cultural and social histories. She also uses microsomal sites such as family to understand larger sociological phenomenon, imperialist mechanisms, & formations of knowledge. She is interested in how language is emoted, guarded, and translated through the absence/presence of a physical body. She has participated in residencies at Headlands Center of the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. She was in residence at Light Work in 2016. Woods is a recipient of the Visions from the New California initiative.