Brainard Carey's Blog, page 64

Ishion Hutchinson

Ishion Hutchinson Neil Watson

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons.

He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others.

He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University. Books mentioned, two by Montale: Collected Poems and The Second Art of Life.

Alexx Shilling

photo by Taso Papadakis, This Dance Session is Stolen

Alexx Shilling is a Los Angeles-based choreographer, performer, filmmaker and teacher fully committed to the infinite investigation of movement and its potential to uncover alternative narratives and allow us to remember. Her original choreography and experimental films have been presented nationally and internationally, through residencies including Millay Colony, PAM, UCLA and Ebenbökhaus / Jewish Museum in Munich, and with generous support from institutions including Dance Films Association, Asylum Arts, Yiddishkayt, Center for Cultural Innovation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, CHIME (with mentor Bob Een) and California Arts Council both as Artistic Director of alexx makes dances and ann and alexx make dances (2004-2010).

She has collaborated as a performer most robustly with Victoria Marks and Richard Rivera/PHYSUAL, and recently in projects by Christine Suarez, Kevin Williamson and Nickels Sunshine. Alexx holds an MFA in Choreography from UCLA’s World Arts & Cultures/Dance Department and a degree in Dance from Skidmore College.

She currently teaches at Loyola Marymount University and Cal State Long Beach, co-founded the performance platforms Hi, Solo and Gold Series and holds certifications in Pilates, Yoga, Open Source Forms and Fleming Technique.

Nguyen Nguyen, Dorothy Dubrule and Carol McDowell in Absence: a History, Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles (2015), photo by Taso Papadakis
Julie Troost in the opening scene of The Sun Is Over the Yardarm (2004-5) , Conceived and co-directed with Ann Robideaux taken aboard the Lightship “Frying Pan,” Hudson River, photo by Bing Smith

Merlene Schain

Sarah Stolar and Merlene Schain at SFMOMA, 2012, photo credit Jeff Medinas

Merlene Schain is a painter and mixed-media artist. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA from the University of Cincinnati, and she has been exhibiting internationally since 1972.

Cincinnati born, in the family lineage of Rookwood Pottery and German master painter Adolph von Menzel, Merlene Schain is an acclaimed art educator in the Midwest. Founder of Schain Studios, an independent art school established in 1989, Merlene is responsible for mentoring students in achieving over 300 regional and national Scholastic awards, and over $900,000 in college scholarship money from top art schools across the country.

She has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Cincinnati and Art Academy of Cincinnati. Her own artwork is in several prestigious private and public collections including Fidelity Investments, Merrill Dow, and Lifesphere, among others. Recently, Merlene Schain retired from teaching and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico focus on her work.


Merlene Schain’s current studio space with a selection of new drawings on the wall.


Cultural Harmony, ink and acrylic on Stonehenge paper, 44×84”, 2013


Hazel Nut Tree, Sumi ink on Stonehenge paper, approx. 12×6”, 2018, photo credit Heather Marie Bergerson

Vladimir Palibrk

Vladimir Palibrk
Curator, writer and artist.

After graduating at Comparative studies of world literature department at Belgrade University, Vladimir focused mostly on storytelling through various forms, including words, graphic art forms, and event production/network management as ways to externalize his visions. With more than 10 years of experience of working as a mediator and author both in challenging non-formal international setting as well in more structured official platforms and organizations worldwide gave him valuable experience in the nature of creative and team processes. He is based in Paris, France, since 2015.

Installation at Atelier Meraki Paris by DZAIZKU
Dzaizku collage by Vladimir Palibrk

Fady Joudah

Author Photo by Cybele Knowles

Fady Joudah has published four collections of poems, The Earth in the Attic, Alight, Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; and, most recently, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance.

He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.

He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Dan Hill

Dan Hill, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized expert on the role of emotions in politics, business, sports and culture. He pioneered the use of facial coding in business to capture emotional dynamics and has done work for over 50% of the world’s top 100 B2C companies. He’s also been a political pundit for CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, Fox, and MSNBC, among other media outlets, since the 2004 presidential race. His eight books include Emotionomics, chosen by Advertising Age as a top 10 must-read book of 2009 and featuring a foreword by Sam Simon, co-creator of The Simpsons; and among his three most recent books, First Blush: People’s Intuitive Reactions to Famous Art. Dan holds a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University, following a M.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University and has thrice been noted with commendation in The Best American Essays series.

The conservative scientific estimation is that 95% of people’s mental activity isn’t fully conscious. First Blush is by far the largest study ever done involving eye tracking and art – plus facial coding, to capture how participants felt about what they were precisely seeing (and experiencing).
This handout picture received from Christies auction house on May 27, 2014 shows an artwork entitled “My Bed” by British artist Tracey Emin. Tracey Emin’s unmade bed artfully littered with condoms, cigarette packs and underwear is expected to fetch around £1 million (1.2 million euros, $1.7 million) at auction. The work, called simply “My Bed”, cemented Emin’s notoriety when it was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize, although the British artist eventually lost out to future Oscar winner Steve McQueen, who directed “12 Years a Slave”.  AFP PHOTO / CHRISTIES
Caption for Tracy Emin eye-tracking results for My Bed – Tracy Emin’s installation piece, My Bed, was the top-performing art work in First Blush. That result is based on both driving a high volume of fixations (where the eye stays with a detail long enough for it to mentally register) and a high volume of emotional engagement (when facial muscle activity reflects interest).

Leila Seyedzadeh

Leila Seyedzadeh lives and works in New York. She received a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from The University of Science and Culture in 2014 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2019.

Seyedzadeh was a recipient of the H.Lee Hirsche prize at Yale School of Art. She has been invited to participate in exhibitions which include shows at WhiteBox in New York, and Dastan Basement Gallery in Art Dubai 2019. Her work is represented in institutional exhibitions in the US and Iran which includes Green Hall Gallery at Yale University and Ahvaz Contemporary Art museum in Iran.

Seyedzadeh’s work addresses imaginary landscapes and focuses on natural subjects such as mountains that are extracted from subconscious. It is as if she is attaching together pieces of her memories, and by doing so she is destroying their meaning, and thus creating a landscape that is immersed in placelessness.

The books mentioned in the interview are In Praise of Shadows and Mount Analogue.


Mount Qaf, hand dyed cotton rope, 2020
A memory of a view from my homeland, hand dyed cotton cloth, found cloth, hand dyed fringe, ribbon, string, 2018
The landscape of my voice, sound drawing based on Farsi and English, glass, fringe, wood pole
Detail, the landscape of my voice

Desi Mundo

Desi Mundo is an Oakland-based spray paint educator, hip-hop cultural diplomat and the founder of the Community Rejuvenation Project, a pavement to policy mural organization that has produced more than 250 murals, throughout the Bay Area as well as nationally and internationally.

His largest mural, the “Universal Language” galvanized the Oakland community in the struggle against gentrification resulting in $20 million in community benefits, as documented in the feature documentary film “Alice Street.” Desi’s legacy as an educator and youth worker in K-12 schools spans two decades. He received the “Rising Leaders” Fellowship from the Youth Leadership Institute in 2005 and has been awarded the Individual Artist grant from the City of Oakland eight times.

S Surface

S Surface is a Seattle-based curator of art, design and architecture, and the King Street Station Program Lead with ARTS. Previously, Surface was co-curator of The Alice, an artist-run exhibition space and writers’ residency, and Out Of Sight 2017, a regional survey of Pacific Northwest artists. As Program Director at Design in Public, Surface organized the annual city-wide Seattle Design Festival and curated at the Center for Architecture & Design. Trained in graphic design, photography and entrepreneurship at Parsons School of Design, and with a M.Arch from Yale School of Architecture, research coordinator and editor with C-LAB, Volume Architectural Journal, and the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; and a teaching fellow in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Yale University. Surface served on the Seattle Arts Commission and on the board of Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility.

Carol Ann Davis

Carol Ann Davis is a poet, essayist, and author of the poetry collections Psalm (2007) and Atlas Hour (2011), and The Nail in the Tree:  Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood (2020), all available from Tupelo Press.

The daughter of one of the NASA engineers who returned the Apollo 13 crew from the moon, she grew up on the east coast of Florida the youngest of seven children, then studied poetry at Vassar College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  A former longtime editor of the literary journal Crazyhorse, she is Professor of English at Fairfield University, where she directs the Low-Residency MFA Program and is founding director of Poetry in Communities, an initiative that brings writing workshops to communities hit by sudden or systemic violence.  She lives in Newtown, CT, with her husband and two sons.