Friday

Michele Beck and Jorge Calvo are multidisciplinary artists working with video, sound and performance. They have shown their work nationally and internationally at venues including The ICA in London, The Art Museum at the University of Texas Museum, Galerie Chez Valentin in Paris, France, The Bronx Museum, and The Queens Museum of Art. They are recipients of the MCAF grant and the SOS grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and residencies at Yaddo. Tonight they will show two 15 minute  videos from a series called “video portraits in a day” – one about  poet Bill Kushner and one about poet Jennifer Bartlett. The videos will be followed by a performance by Beck and Calvo and readings by Bartlett and Kushner.

Michele Beck completed her Bachelors in Art History at New York University and Masters of Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design. She teaches at the New School University and the International Center for Photography.

Jorge Calvo pursued his studies in experimental theatre in Sydney, Australia. After finishing his training, he performed with the alternative theatre companies G.R.O.U.P and Dangerous Visions Theatre, both of which received funding from the Australian Arts Council. 

Jennifer Bartlett was a 2005 NYFA Poetry Fellow. Bartlett is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM 2007) and (a) lullaby without any music (forthcoming). Individual poems have recently appeared in New American Writing and The Raleigh Quarterly. In 2008, she curated a collection on mentorship for How2. She is currently working on a project on the life and work of Larry Eigner. Bartlett teaches poetry to students with disabilities at United Cerebral Palsy and lives in Greenpoint Brooklyn with the science fiction writer Jim Stewart and their son, Jeffrey.

Bill Kushner is the author of Night Fishing, Love Uncut, He Dreams of Rivers, That April, In The Hairy Arms of Whitman and In Sunsetland With You.  His works have been awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize For Poetry and have appeared in numerous anthologies, including In Out Time: The Gay and Lesbian Anthology, Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets and Best American Poetry 2002. He has been a 1999 and 2005 Fellow of the New York Foundation of the Arts.