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“The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl feel uncomfortably close. We’ve got a precarious petrochemical-driven economy and skyrocketing cancer rates. Melting icecaps. A present day mass extinction of species that some can only compare to the catastrophic dinosaur die-off of 65 million years ago. We are living in dire times. What’s art got to do with it? Subtle, intertwined and passionate, the art being performed in DIRT starts to reveal the deep connections between economics, imagination, our bodies and the natural world. The work is hilarious. It's uncomfortable. It's dark. It's hopeful. It's desperate. It's ironic. It's absolutely sincere. I'd like the festival to raise the personal stakes for everybody in the Links Hall tent.” |
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Bios |
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 Jennifer Allen Jennifer Allen is a choreographer/performer who moved to Champaign, IL from New York City. Her work has been seen in many NY venues such as The Kitchen, |
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 BD Collier’s projects investigating non-human nature in human-dominated environments have been exhibited at Neues Museum Weserberg Bremen (Germany), Deutsche Bank’s 60 Wall Gallery (NYC), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Houston, and Galeria Raul Martinez (Cuba). Reviews and articles about his work appear in Art in America, The New York Times, Afterimage, Art Papers Magazine, and The Chicago Reader. In 2007, he founded The Society for a Re-Natural Environment. Collier earned his MFA from UIUC. |
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 Since 2005, twin brothers Alan and Michael Fleming have been developing a collaborative embodied practice, which employs sculpture, performance and video. Their award-winning work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including shows in Chicago, New York, Berlin, Glasgow and Rio de Janeiro. They are currently MFA candidates in the Performance department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. |
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 Bonnie Fortune is an artist, writer, and educator. Her project-based work explores issues surrounding the environment, health, technology, and aging. Her primary method of inquiry is the interview. She employs conversation and field recordings to create video documents, written texts, and multi-media installations. She has exhibited in such diverse locals as Chicago, Mexico City, Aberdeen and Nashville, TN. |
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 Kevin Hamilton grew up in South Carolina but has lived in Urbana, Illinois since 2002, where he teaches New Media to art students. He's currently working on a commissioned artwork about the history of cybernetics in Illinois, and writing about interfaces in American Cold War propaganda films. Past projects have included synchronized walks with people in faraway places, telecommunication devices that prohibit speech, and control panels that promise impossible power. |
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 Karin Hodgin-Jones was raised in Zionsville, Indiana, a densely wooded agricultural community that was absorbed and suburbanized by the sprawl of Indianapolis during her adolescence. Reconciling the difference between existing equally but separately in those two worlds cultivated an interest in examining what connects the two sides of a polemic. She has exhibited throughout the U.S., venues include: a solo exhibitions at: Cecille R. Hunt Gallery, St. Louis, MO, Lightwell Gallery, Oklahoma University, Norman, OK; Group exhibitions at: Metropolitan Gallery, St. Louis, MO, I Space Gallery, Chicago, IL; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; Mass Gallery in Austin, TX; New Visions Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT; Gittins Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT. IN 2005 her work was featured as one of the 9 collections in the Ninth Letter Art and Literary Journal. |
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 Nadia Jassim is an Iraqi American video artist. Her works have been showcased at DRIP video festival, UIUC campus, SAIC campus, and Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ residency. Nadia received her B.S. in psychology at UIUC and is currently a second year graduate student and merit scholar in Film, Video and New Media at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). |
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 Kyli KlevenBefore performing in Link's Hall, Kyli was born in Nenana, Alaska. She spent a large chunk of adolescence studying dance at the Virginia School of the Arts and the American Dance Festival, both in the American South. She has a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a 17th grader toasting Amish Pretzels at The Roebling Inn in Brooklyn, NY. A proud member of The Embassy of..., a danceWEB group from Vienna, Austria, Ms. Kleven has seen The Deer Hunter. She would like to point out that Steve May, though broader shouldered, continues to move it down his Netflix cue. |
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 Steve May Reaching nearly 5'9", Stephen May towers over insects, reptiles, most birds, and a fair portion of the mammalian kingdom. He moves about his torso and limbs and fancies art-making that employs this talent. Currently he is working with Jennifer Monson on her Mahomet Aquifer Project and with Becky O'Connell and The Dance Team on a new performance evening that premiered in November. He also loves his day job at REI on Halsted. |
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 Jennifer Monson uses choreographic practice as a means to discover connections between environmental, philosophical and aesthetic approaches to knowledge and understandings of our surroundings. As Artistic Director of iLAND she creates large scale dance projects informed and inspired by phenomena of the natural and the built environment. Her project BIRD BRAIN (2000-2011) includes the theatrical work Flight of Mind (2005) and four migratory tours: Gray Whales (Spring 2001); Ospreys (Fall 2002); Ducks and Geese (Spring 2004); and Northern Wheatears (Fall 2011). Each tour followed the migrations of animals offering performances, workshops and panel discussions on navigation, migration and conservation. In 2007 she created iMAP/Ridgewood Reservoir, a yearlong research and performance practice in an abandoned reservoir in NYC. She is currently working on the Mahomet Aquifer Project in Illinois and SIP/watershed an investigation of the NYC watershed dynamics. Monson is currently on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the Dance Department. |
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 Marissa Perel is a performance artist whose work engages text, movement and sound to shape a landscape of eroticism and trauma. Often performing as Workout Girl (recently toured in Central Europe), she utilizes ordinary childhood objects to make sublimely grotesque performances, installations and videos. She has collaborated with dance artists Miguel Gutierrez (Dance Theater Workshop), Justine Lynch (Judson Memorial Church), Lyndsey Karr and Kayvon Pourazar (The Chocolate Factory Theater) and musicians John Moniaci and Mike Pride. Perel has lectured at the Chicago Dancemakers Forum on the 24 hour dance-protest “Freedom of Information”, and has performed at the Chicago Cultural Center, Epiphany Dance Experiment, Spoke Gallery, and Co-Prosperity Sphere as well as many venues throughout New York and Chicago. Perel holds a B.A. in Writing and Literature from Naropa University and is currently an M.F.A candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. |
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 Chris Peck is a Michigan-born composer investigating the peculiarities of listening and perception through a diverse practice that includes works for large untrained groups, interdisciplinary performance collaborations, and improvisation with the computer. His frequent work with dance has included scores for RoseAnne Spradlin, Eleanor Bauer, John Jasperse, David Dorfman, Jeanine Durning, Ming Yang/Dance Forum Taipei, Abby Yager, and others. Ongoing projects include Listening Music for the Age of Crystal Moon Cone, a series of ambient electroacoustic performances and recordings with Stephen Rush and Jon Moniaci, Brooklyn Adult Recorder Choir, directed with choreographer Beth Gill, the Live Sh-- performance series curated with Chase Granoff, Manpack Variant, an electronics duo with Jaime Fennelly, and collaborations with interdisciplinary video/performance artist and storyteller Deke Weaver. Chris is currently working on an MA at the Dartmouth College Digital Musics Program in Hanover, NH. |
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 Audrey Petty is a native of Chicago (South Side!) who currently lives and works in Urbana, Illinois. Her stories and poems have appeared in such literary magazines as StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, The Massachusetts Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, and African American Review. Her nonfiction has been featured in Saveur, ColorLines, Cornbread Nation 4, The Southern Review and Best Food Writing 2006 anthology. A new essay is forthcoming in Oxford American. Audrey is currently working on an oral history of the Chicago Housing Authority’s high-rise housing projects. |
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 Daniel Rudin has recently lived in Nicaragua, where he was writing, filming, and attempting to organize a scavenger cooperative. Graduated from the University of Illinois in 2006, Daniel has recently completed a collaborative film, "Interrupt the Pipeline," which seeks to address the relationship between gentrification, education, and the discipline of inner city students (projectmaroons.org). Daniel is currently a recipient of the Bruton Fellowship and a Graduate Student at the University of Texas, Austin. |
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 Zoe Schwartz is a writer and performer from the great city of Chicago. She attended the University of Illinois where she studied Creative Writing and disillusionment. She has been in lots of shows around Chicago and can occasionally be found teaching kids about acting or spectacle based theater. Zoe really, really likes creating and putting together her own character based plays. Her recent work includes Auntie Dorris: You May Not Wanna Know But I’m Gonna Tell You Anyway (Chicago, Minneapolis), and An Evening With Chastity and Alan Jr. (Austin, Texas, Chicago). |
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 Temporary Services is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. We are based in Illinois and have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. We produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us. |
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 Ryan Griffis mostly works under the pseudonym Temporary Travel Office. The Temporary Travel Office produced what could be called "critical tourism". Ryan also frequently writes, under his own name, about art that he thinks tells important stories for publications like ArtUS, Rhizome.org and others. Sometimes he curates shows of such work. Currently, Ryan is an assistant professor in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. |
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 Ryan Thompson Born and raised in Chicago, Ryan currently lives and works in Western New York state where he is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Photography at Houghton College. He is a recent graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he completed his M.F.A. in Studio Art, researching everything from crude oil futures to glacial erratic boulders. His work was most recently included in the 'NEW INSIGHT' show at the NEXT fair. Curated by Susanne Ghez, the exhibition featured work "from some of the country's most influential graduate programs." He wouldn't mind being influential himself. www.ryanthompson.us |
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 Daniel Tucker works as an organizer and documenter with a focus primarily on space, place and the cultural and social movements that define them. From 2005-2010 he has worked on the biannual journal AREA Chicago. His writings, lectures and collaborative projects have been seen throughout the US and Europe. In 2008 he co-organized an interview project with 100 politically-engaged artists living in Chicago, LA, New York City, Baltimore and New Orleans for "Democracy In America" with Creative Time. Most recently, he co-authored a book of interviews and photo essays of activist farmers throughout the US, to be released on Chronicle books in the fall of 2010. miscprojects.com |
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 Deke Weaver (curator) is a writer-performer and media artist. Experimental theater, film/video, dance, and solo performance venues have presented Weaver’s interdisciplinary performances and videos in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Europe and the United States. A resident at Yaddo, HERE, a two-time fellow at Ucross, a four-time fellow at the MacDowell Colony, a three-time recipient of NEA regional film/video grants, and a 2009 Creative Capital grantee, he also contributes film and video to dance and theater works in the U.S. and abroad. He is currently an assistant professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. DIRT is designed to investigate the multi-layered complexity of environmental issues beyond the political, sound-bitten realm. unreliablebestiary.org, dekeweaver.com |
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