2024 Sponsored Projects
Awarded Artists:
Anaïs Maviel
Anaïs Maviel is a multidisciplinary artist whose work transforms spiritual concepts into immersive sensory experience, treating perception itself as a medium. A composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist, she works across traditional and experimental practices to explore the power of sound to shape reality and highlight the stakes of cultural multiplicity. She moves fluidly between song, choral, instrumental, and orchestral music, as well as interactive staging, drawing on sacred geometry and cosmologies of sound as structural foundations.
Through an aesthetically layered vocabulary and embodied processes, she creates multidimensional, “spiritually illuminating” experiences (New York City Jazz Record). Her expansive collaborations across mediums include Alarm Will Sound, Craig Taborn, Meshell Ndegeocello, Meredith Monk, Merce Cunningham Trust, Okwui Okpokwasili, Sean Webley, and Nene Humphrey.Jazz Right Now has called her a “unique aesthetic visionary.” She is a recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship (2019), the American Composers Forum Create Award (2020), the Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2021–2022), the New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship (2022), New Music USA’s Next Jazz Legacy (2023), and a nominee for the Herb Alpert Award in Music Composition (2023).
She holds a master’s degree from Paris Diderot University in modern literature, aesthetics, and contemporary thought, which led her to write about music and utopia in the creolized world. Her essays and poetry can be read in her intentional newsletters.
Associated project: Métadire
Anaïs Maviel will present an experiential & durational music piece in collaboration with chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound. Métadire is inspired by the less obvious details of perception, and immerses its audience in the contemplation of space, time, and human existence. Co-commissioned by Alarm Will Sound and Harvestworks, Métadire is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
AutomaticRelease
Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty (AutomaticRelease) are multiplatform artists who make interdisciplinary performances, installations, experimental films, documentaries and interactive video scores to accompany live performance. Recent projects include Why Why Always, a live cine-performance inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s techno-noir film Alphaville (Abrons, 2017), Atmospheres & Accidental Ghosts, a self-generating video/sound installation (NYEAF, 2015), and Keep Your Electric Eye On Me, an interdisciplinary performance exploring dual realities and hysteria (HERE, 2014). Their current project All Over Everywhere, a requiem for an imperiled natural world, received production funds from both NYSCA and NYFA Made in NY Women’s Fund, was featured in The Kitchen’s online magazine All Over Everywhere premiered in May2021 as a live-broadcast on Twitch as part of Theater Mitu’s Artists-At-Home series.
Their work has been presented at venues including BAM, The Brooklyn Museum, The Chocolate Factory, Anthology Film Archives, The Kitchen, Tokyo Wonder Site, REDCAT, CURRENTS New Media Festival, Rencontres International Paris/Berlin, the Museo Nacional Havana and the Venice Biennale. They have received numerous awards including grants from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, Jerome Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, Bel Geddes Fund, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, LMCC, Harvestworks, Asian Cultural Council, as well as residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, Signal Culture, HERE, Camargo Foundation, the Tokyo Wonder Site and the Bogliasco Foundation.
Associated project: All That is Seen and Unseen
Victoria Vesna
VICTORIA VESNA, Ph.D., is an artist and professor in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and the founder/director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). Trained as a painter at the University of Belgrade, her work now resides at the intersection of disciplines and technologies, focusing on experimental creative research. Her installations explore how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity in relation to scientific innovation. (Ph.D., CAiiA-STAR, University of Wales, 2000).
Victoria’s work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nanoscientists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists, enriching her students’ learning experience. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows and delivered over 100 invited talks in the past decade. She serves as the North American editor of the AI & Society journal (Springer Verlag, UK). Her publications include “Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow” (Minnesota Press, 2007) and “Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts” (co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy, Intellect Ltd, 2011). Currently, she is co-curating the exhibition “Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Arts in Times of Climate Disruption” and working on a new book, “Vibrations Matter: Art & Science of Listening” (Routledge Press, forthcoming fall 2024).
Associated project: [SUN] Flower Plasma
Woody Sullender
Woody Sullender is a media artist and musician based in Queens, NY. His pieces encompass a myriad of media including sculpture, video games, performance, theater, music, installation, architecture, origami, and sonic weaponry. His recent work utilizes video game space as an arena to undermine specific modernist ideologies and rituals of music reception. Previously, Sullender was recognized as a pre-eminent experimental banjo improviser.
Sullender has performed internationally at venues such as the Kitchen (with Sergei Tcherepnin + Okkyung Lee), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), the River to River Festival, the Schindler House (Los Angeles), Knockdown Center (NYC), SculptureCenter (NYC), Abrons Art Center (NYC), Les Instants Chavirés (Paris), Chicago Cultural Center, DNK-Amsterdam (with Seamus Cater), and many others. He recently completed the Art & Code cohort at NEW INC (partnered with Rhizome and the New Museum) and has been an artist in residence or visiting artist at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), STEIM (Amsterdam), Harvestworks (NYC), Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (NYC) and Brown University’s MEME program. His work has been reviewed internationally by such widely disparate publications as Wire Magazine, Art in America, Fast Company, and Maximumrocknroll.
Other projects include the music album “Four Movements” constructed in video game space, as well as a special music review issue of EAR WAVE EVENT written entirely by AI. Additionally over the past few years, Sullender has worked on re-interpreting the work of Maryanne Amacher at venues such as the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and REDCAT (Los Angeles) as a member of Supreme Connections, as well as in collaboration with Daniel Neumann and members of Yarn/Wire.
Among other activities, he is founding co-editor (will Bill Dietz) of the sonic arts publication Ear Wave Event
