FROM TOP LEFT TO RIGHT:

Nneoma Ike-Njoku, Athens, GA — Fiction (she/her)

Nneoma Ike-Njoku is a Nigerian writer. She is the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the DGA First Novel Prize for her novel-in-progress. She is currently an English & Creative Writing PhD student at UGA, where she received the Jane Appleby Entrance Award. She holds an MFA in fiction from Cornell University, and has received support and fellowships including from Kimbilio, the Miles Morland Foundation, and Millay Arts. In 2022, she was commissioned to write an original short story for the Newman Wetlands Center, which will be audio-recorded to accompany hiking tours through the site. Her short fiction has appeared in Winter Tangerine, where it won the 2016 Prose Prize, and elsewhere.

Amanda Love, Columbia, SC — Visual Arts (she/her)
Amanda Love is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in bookbinding, typography, and conservation. In two decades in Chicago she regularly exhibited sculpture and artist books, collaborated with artist/musicians on numerous creative projects, founded LoveLeaf Press, fine bookbinding, letterpress and design studio. Love’s work is informed by the environment and current events related to book suppression. Her work ranges from small intimate works to large scale installations. Years ago, Love began using books as a medium for art. In addition to making books herself, she realized another act of creation could come from disassembling them. The process of creating in this manner was integral to the work of art itself: the loving act of taking books apart, the repetition of ripping them, the sorting and categorizing of parts. A visual language emerged in the process. Though a rip may be attractive in and of itself, it often evokes disparate things of equal interest. Today, Love is executing a large scale, outdoor installation (SILOS) at Grange Audubon Nature Center, Columbus OH (Spring 2023-Winter 2024) and is represented by Hammond Harkins Galleries in Columbus.

Helen Glazer, Owings Mills, MD — Visual Arts (she/her)

Helen’s photographs and photogrammetry-based sculpture arise from a search for a deeper understanding of the natural world, informed by scientific insights into interacting forces affecting ecosystems and shaping landscapes. In 2014-15 she served as the Baltimore Ecosystem Study artist-in-residence, a long-term research study focused on urban ecology, accompanying scientists in the field. That experience heightened her perception of the interactions between human activity and nature. During her seven-week 2015 residency in as a grantee of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program she further evolved her approach to form and subject matter and made her first 3D scans of large geological sites. Walking in Antarctica, a solo exhibition of photographs, sculptures, and a first-person audio tour premiered at Goucher College, Baltimore, in 2017-18, funded in part by grants from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and Puffin Foundation (on a five-year tour of the US under the auspices of ExhibitsUSA (eusa.org) through 2027). Works from the Antarctica project have also been featured in a rotating exhibition at Baltimore-Washington International Airport since 2017. They were also exhibited in the 2017 exhibition of finalists for the Trawick Prize, a major award for Maryland, Virginia, and DC artists. Since 2016, Glazer has been interviewed by Vice Media’s Creators Project, AtlasObscura.com, Adobe 99U Magazine, Baltimore’s leading NPR news station, and Lenscratch.com. Her photos were featured on the cover and in the National Academy of Sciences’ print magazine Issues in Science and Technology in 2019. The Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art houses her Antarctica archive and displayed it there throughout 2020.

Other notable achievements include a solo exhibition at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA (2023); semifinalist in the prestigious Philadelphia Print Center Annual (2022); an Individual Artist Award in photography from the Maryland State Arts Council and a solo show of her photographs at Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York (both 2012). She received a Rubys Award grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation in 2019 to fund a photography project begun in 2021 of the former US military base in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, for an eventual book. In 2022, the Kangerlussuaq Museum, which has been providing logistical support for her project, was awarded funding from the US Embassy in Copenhagen to mount a permanent display of her photographs in two rooms there, scheduled to open in 2023. Glazer holds a BA in Art cum laude from Yale University and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Art.

Andrew Rincon, Brooklyn, NY — Playwriting (they/them)

Andrew is a Queer Colombian-American playwright and screenwriter. His work blends fantasy, modern mythologies and Queer fabulation. His plays have been developed with Latinx Playwrights Circle, INTAR, The Austin Latino New Play Festival, The Amoralists Theatre Company, Pork Filled Productions (Seattle), Out Front Productions (Atlanta). He was a member of INKtank Lab for Playwrights of Color (2017) , 2017 Fornés Playwriting Workshop (Chicago). He is winner of the 2018 Chesley/Bumbalo Grant for writers of Gay and Lesbian Theatre and New Light Theatre Project’s New Light New Voices Award (2019). He is a member of the Latinx Playwrights Circle, a Dramatist Guild Foundation Fellow (19-20), MacDowell Fellow (Winter 2020). Visiting Playwright in Residence at Skidmore College (21-22). His play I Wanna Fuck like Romeo and Juliet was recently published in Yale Theatre Magazine (Vol 52.1) and will have it’s world premiere in Oct 2022 in NYC (produced by New Light Theater Project). He received his B.A. from Florida State University. Plays include, That Rhythm in the Blood, The Lonely (A Fictionally Non-Accurate Historical Kiki), and El Mito or The Myth of my Pain. Currently in Development; a multi media comedy inspired by mixed martial arts, healing, and research into Queer religion and spirituality, Maracuyá.

Brooks Whitney Phillips, Key West, FL — Fiction

Phillips is a freelance writer and author. She began her writing career at the Chicago Tribune where she wrote a syndicated column along with feature stories on music and the arts. She has written eight non-fiction MG books, six for American Girl and two for Scholastic. She’s also contributed design and travel stories to Coastal Living, Art News, Country Living and other magazines. Brooks has received residencies from Vermont Studio Center, the David and Julia White Artist’s Colony in Costa Rica, VCCA, and the Studios of Key West. She is =the 2013 winner of the Key West Literary Seminar’s Marianne Russo Award, given annually to an emerging fiction writer of exceptional merit. In 2019 she co-founded the Rowland Writers Retreat, which funds ten two-week residencies for women authors at Rowland House in upstate New York. Her novel, The Grove, a coming-of-age story set in a Florida orange grove in the 1960’s, is being published by Penguin Random House in 2023.

Christophe Preissing, Oak Park, IL — Composing (he/him)

Christophe Preissing is a music/sound composer, intermedia/installation artist, collaborator, curator, producer, and artistic instigator, who creates music and sound for live, interactive, and immersive environments. He holds a Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in composition from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He is the founder and artistic director of NON:op Open Opera Works, a Chicago-based non-profit organization. Christophe has been a sponsored artist/artist in residence/fellow at Indiana University, Beloit College, Ball State University, Experimental Sound Studio, High Concept Labs, Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VCCA-France, Djerrassi Resident Artists Program, MISE-EN_PLACE, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, PLAYA, DCASE/Chicago Cultural Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Preissing has received support from Jerome Foundation, Arts Midwest/Meet the Composer, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Illinois Arts Council Agency, Experimental Sound Studio, City of Chicago, American Composers Forum, Partners of the Americas Illinois, and fellowships from the Pritzker Foundation and the Columbus School for Girls. Preissing’s music has been performed by The Adrian Dunn Singers, International Contemporary Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion, Chartreuse, ensemble mise-en, Mocrep, NON:op, and Kosmologia, and presented with choregraphy by Khecari Dance, Kristina Isabelle Dance Company, enidsmithdance, Ayako Kato and with video by Charlie Simokaitis/Groundfire Pictures, Octane Rich Media, and Liviu Pasare.  Recent projects include Memoria de Memoria, an hour-long composition for 12 solo voices in memory of Keith Cooper and Chicago’s 794 homicide victims in 2021 (The Adrian Dunn Singers, 2022); sound for the animation Becoming an Oyster, with Michael Covello and Elizabeth Schneider (2022, animation to be released in 2023), INSIDE: 28 Improvisations Inside a Piano (Virginia Center for Creative Arts, 2022); installations Blood Lines: Remembering the 1919 Chicago Race Riots, with David Sundry and Hugh Sato (Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, Chicago, 2019); whorls of recent memory (Millay Colony, 2018); Street Sheets, with Hugh Sato and Mario Gonzalez, Jr. (Columbia University, 2017); and Portrait of Carrie Sandahl, with Riva Lehrer and Carrie Sandahl (Evanston Art Center, Evanston, 2017). He also created original sound scores for Samuel Beckett’s radio play, Cascando (NON:op, 2018/2021), Tristan Tzara’s The Gas Heart (NON:op, 2020-21), the short story Broad Contagion, by BettyJoyce Nash (2020), and is: SI ng, a performance with artist Matt Bodett (Victory Gardens Theater, 2017). In 2012 Preissing founded NON:op Open Opera Works, a Chicago-based, non-profit arts organization, to further the creation and production of intermedia, immersive, site-adaptive opera and stage works, and to cultivate and research co-creative processes and methodologies. Beginning in 2020, the organization has been focused on facilitating radical access, experimentation, and creativity across communities while working collectively towards a more just society. With NON:op he has directed and produced SAY THEIR NAMES, a database and interactive map that remembers Black Americans killed by law enforcement (2020), Viral Silence: Community Portraits in Response to Covid-19, a statewide commissioning and virtual touring program (2020-2022), Aural Neighborhoods: Listening to Neighborhood Chicago (2020-2022), and HPSCHD@50, a 50th anniversary festival celebrating John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD (2020).

Ann Burke Daly, Arlington, NY – Visual Arts (she/her)

Daly is an Interdisciplinary artist, whose conceptually based installation practice has received recognition and support from Art Matters Foundation; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Creative Capital and LMCC Artists Summer Institute; New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA/NYFA); and Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Ann has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome and has been awarded artist residencies at Yaddo, Millay, and MASS MoCA. Their work has appeared in ArtForum, ArtPress, Performing Arts Journal, Cabinet Magazine, El Pais, and The Los Angeles Times, and has been shown internationally at Uppsala Konstmuseum, Sweden; Akademie der Kunste, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; George Eastman Museum, The Alternative Museum, The Drawing Center, White Columns, Trial Balloon, and Exit Art (NY). Ann earned an MFA from Yale School of Art and is an alum of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.