2024 Artists in Residence

Pat Badani is an artist, writer, and scholar born in Argentina. Throughout her densely woven research-creation journey she has drawn from the fields of art, science, and technology to develop projects that inspect social, biological, and technological networks. Projects have been recently shown in curated, international new media events: Festival de la Imagen (Colombia); ELO – Electronic Literature Organization (Canada); and Technoetic Arts, DeTAO (China).  Profiled in LEONARDO Journal; Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism; and Artelogie Journal  (EHESS, France); her works have been discussed in anthologies such as The Performing Observer: Writings on Contemporary Art, Performance, and Photography, ed. Martin Patrick (Intellect Press, Bristol, UK) and Advances in Visual Methodology, ed. Sara Pink (Sage publications, London). In 2024, Badani received a major award from The Canada Council for the Arts to develop “BichEden: ParaDoxa”.

Pat Badani’s projects have been distinguished with over 20 awards and commissions by the Canada Council for the Arts; Illinois Arts Council; DCASE; National Endowment for the Arts; the Robert Heinecken Trust; Harvestworks; Festival Internacional de la Imagen; Art Souterrain; and recognized for leading-edge work by Creative Capital, Art Matters, and AWAW, in the U.S.A. Badani exhibits her projects broadly in North and South America, Europe, and Asia, in electronic media festivals, galleries, and museums. She has participated in international symposia with her essays and talks in over 15 countries, and her works have been critically surveyed in conference panel discussions, in scholarly journals, and in art history anthologies. She is former full-time faculty at ILSTU (Integrated Media); Acting Director at Colombia College, Chicago (Interdisciplinary Arts); and Editor-in-Chief of Media-N Journal, New Media Caucus, in the U.S.A. Since 2017 she serves on the board of directors of ISEA International overseeing the continuation of the annual symposia. (https://www.patbadani.net/)

In a career spanning 55 years, Bill Fontana has become internationally recognized for his pioneering experiments in sound. Since the late 1960’s, he has consistently used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. Applying his knowledge of composition, he draws out patterns of sound from natural and manmade worlds to create sound works that have the potential to conjure up visual imagery in the mind of the listener. He has realized sound sculptures and radio projects for institutions, museums and broadcast organizations around the world.

Many of these works create live listening networks that collect information from sources as diverse as the slowly vanishing sounds of Japan, the Bosporus River in Istanbul and it’s cisterns, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Millennium Bridge in London, the sounds of the sea of Normandy Coast, fog horns in San Francisco, old growth forests, hydroelectric turbines, diverse urban and marine environments; the silenced bells of both Notre Dame and the Great Bell of the Vatican; the imagined sounds of the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin, the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, rain forrests from 3 continents and the melting Dachstein Glacier in the Austrian Alps. Fontana’s projects have explored hybrid listening technologies using acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers). His more recent works are explorations of the relationship between image and sound, expressed through the combined mediums of audio and video.

Many of these works create live listening networks that collect information from sources as diverse as the slowly vanishing sounds of Japan, the Bosporus River in Istanbul and it’s cisterns, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Millennium Bridge in London, the sounds of the sea of Normandy Coast, fog horns in San Francisco, old growth forests, hydroelectric turbines, diverse urban and marine environments; the silenced bells of both Notre Dame and the Great Bell of the Vatican; the imagined sounds of the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin, the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, rain forrests from 3 continents and the melting Dachstein Glacier in the Austrian Alps. Fontana’s projects have explored hybrid listening technologies using acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers). His more recent works are explorations of the relationship between image and sound, expressed through the combined mediums of audio and video.

Jillian McDonald is a dual citizen Canadian-American artist living in Brooklyn and Troy, NY. She received an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College at City University of New York and is a professor at Pace University.

Exhibitions and screenings were held at PS122 Gallery, Undercurrent, Air Circulation, and FiveMyles in New York; The Art Gallery of Regina in Saskatchewan; Régart, La Bande Vidéo, and AxeNéo7 in Québec; aCinema in Milwaukee; Philip Steele Gallery in Denver; and The Esker Foundation in Calgary. She has mounted performances for 50 to 1000 performers in natural and urban settings in Tempe at The Arizona State University Art Museum, in Sweden in collaboration with Lilith Performance Studio, and in Toronto at La Nuit Blanche. A CBC IDEAS documentary profiles her videos, which were also reviewed in The New York Times and Canadian Art. Critical discussion appears in The Transatlantic Zombie by Sarah Lauro and Deconstructing Brad Pitt, edited by Christopher Schaberg. Awards include grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts, and participation in numerous international residencies such as Wave Farm in Acra, NY, The Arctic Circle Artist & Scientist Residency in Svalbard, Norway, The Headlands Center for the Arts in California, Sporobole in Sherbrooke, Québec, the Glenfiddich Canadian Art Prize in Dufftown, Scotland, and The Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada.

Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler have been collaborating since 2017, creating audiovisual performances that investigate everyday objects, concepts of agency and queer potentiality. Their collaborative work has been shown in numerous festivals and venues such as Revolutions Per Minute, Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music, Transient Visions, Light Matter, Athens International Film + Video, Re-connect Art Festival as part of the Prague Biennale, Intermediale Festival of Audiovisual Forms, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Festival ECRÃ, Fisura, International Festival of Experimental Film & Video and forthcoming CURRENTS New Media Festival. Duncan and Pirler performed their audiovisual performance, “Surface Connection” at the 61st Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Expanded Cinema program and exhibited their work in the LEAF2023 Sync Exhibition. They have been artists-in-residence at Signal Culture (Owego, NY), PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), Institute for Electronic Arts (Alfred, NY) and LMCC at Governors Island (NYC). They are recipients of the 2024 Harvestworks New Works Artist Residency.

Ellen Pearlman is a New York based media artist, curator, writer and educator. An Affiliate Research Professor at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering  @ the Brooklyn Navy Yard, she was awarded a three-year grant as a guest artist by German Culture Foundation for a collaboration with Musiktheater im Revier Gelsenkirchen (MiR.LAB) under the direction of Nora Krahl to work on a new AI opera, “The System Cannot Fail”.  She is also a member of the London-based Alan Turing Institute’s AI and Art working group, as well as a participant in the MIT Co-Creation Lab partnership with the human rights organization Witness on Documentary AI.

Ellen was previously an artist resident at both Mir Lab and Dock 11 in Germany. A New Works Artist Grantee at Harvestworks in New York City she has been a presenter at Ars Electronica Expanded Animation festival in Linz, Austria, a Lumen Prize finalist in AI Moving Images, a Research Fellow at MIT, A Fulbright Scholar to the Department of Mathematics and Informatics at The University of Warsaw, Poland, a three-time Fulbright World Learning Specialist in Art, New Media and Technology, an EU Vertigo STARTS Laureate (Horizon 2020), a Zero1 American Arts Incubator/U.S. State Department cultural envoy to Kyiv, Ukraine, and a Fulbright Alumni Ties grantee. A Senior Research Associate Professor at RISEBA University in Riga, Latvia she was a Contributing Editor to Performance Arts Journal (PAJ) MIT Press. She received her Ph.D. in Digital Media from the School of Creative Media at Hong Kong City University where two out of three years she was awarded the department’s outstanding academic achievement award. She premiered her brain opera “Noor”, the world’s first  immersive interactive brainwave opera in a 360 degree theater at ISEA Hong Kong and Microwave International Festival, HK. Her PhD thesis, “Is There A Place In Human Consciousness Where Surveillance Cannot Go?” was awarded the highest global ranking from Leonardo LABS abstracts.

Lucie Vítková/ Luc Vitk is a composer, improviser, and performer (accordion, hichiriki, drums, synthesizer, harmonica, voice, and dance) from the Czech Republic and New York. They received their PhD from the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno (CZ) and conducted research at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (NL), the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (USA), the Universität der Künste in Berlin (D), Columbia University in New York (USA), and New York University. They are currently a Lecturer at the School of Music, Waipapa Taumata Rau, Aotearoa / University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Their compositions focus on sonification (compositions based on abstract models derived from physical objects), while in their improvisation practice, Luc works with the characteristics of discrete spaces through the interaction between sound and movement. In Luc’s recent work, they are interested in the social-political aspects of music in relation to everyday life and in reusing trash to build sonic costumes and instruments.

They have been nominated for the 2017 Herb Alpert Awards in Arts in the category of Music, were commissioned by the Roulette Intermedium New York in 2017 and 2023, and have become Roulette resident artist in 2018. They have put together two ensembles: the NYC Constellation Ensemble (focused on musical behavior) and the OPERA Ensemble (for singing instrumentalists)

Adrienne Westwood’s multi-layered work incorporates objects into embodied explorations of memory, bringing traces of other times and places into the present. Her work has been called “a finely crafted progression” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) and noted for its “precision, attention to detail and unspecific but tangible sense of the barely remembered” (Culturebot).

Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys, and electronics. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” (WQXR/Q2) while The New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise.”

Katherine Young’s electroacoustic music and sonic art has been recognized by awards, fellowships, and commissions from organizations including the Guggenheim Foundation, Fromm Foundation, and the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. As a bassoonist and improviser, Katherine amplifies her instrument and employs a flexible electronics setup. Katherine lives in Atlanta, where she teaches composition, improvisation, and electronic music at Emory University.