Artists & Projects Directory

• Africa Consortium
• Boyzie Cekwana
• Dan Hurlin
• David Roussève/REALITY
• Dean Moss
• Gregory Maqoma
• Los Muñequitos
• Marc Bamuthi Joseph
• Ralph Lemon
• Stories Left to Tell
• The America Project
• Yasuko Yokoshi

Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project

Michael John Garcés is Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles, CA.  He is the recipient of the Princess Grace Statue Award, the Alan Schneider Director Award, and a TCG New Generations: Future Leaders Grant.  A member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, he serves on its Executive Board, and is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.  His directing credits include The Falls by Jeffrey Hatcher (Guthrie Theatre/Cornerstone); dark play, or stories for boys by Carlos Murillo and Finer Noble Gases by Adam Rapp (Humana Festival); Light Raise the Roof (NY Theatre Workshop), Force Continuum (Atlantic Theatre Co.) and Snapshot Silhouette (Children's Theatre, MN) by Kia Corthron; N.E. 2nd Avenue by Teo Castellanos (Miami Light Project; Edinburgh Fringe Festival Fringe First Award); Kissing Fidel (INTAR), The Cook (Hartford Stage and INTAR), and Havana is Waiting (The Cherry Lane) by Eduardo Machado; The Dear Boy by Dan O'Brien (Second Stage); Grace by Craig Wright (Woolly Mammoth); Cradle of Man by Melanie Marnich (Florida Stage); Finer Noble Gases (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre); La próxima parada by Carmen Rivera (Repertorio Español); Forever In My Heart by Oscar Colón (INTAR); September Shoes by José Cruz Gonzales (Geva Theatre); ¡Siempre México con nosotros! in collaboration with Sna Jtz'ibajom in Chiapas, Mexico; and King Without a Castle by Cándido Tirado (Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre).  Plays he has written include Los Illegals (Cornerstone Theater Company); points of departure (INTAR); Acts of Mercy (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre); and the short plays on edge and the ride (2007 Humana Festival "The Open Road"); agua ardiente (The American Place); audiovideo (Drama League Director's Project); kapital (Estrogen Fest, Chicago); god (Cornerstone); Adelaide (The Production Company "The Australia Project"); tostitos (Shalimar Productions); and sandlot ball (Mile Square Theatre "7th Inning Stretch").

Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi, a graduate of UC Berkeley, received his M.A. from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2004.  Before graduation, he won the prestigious juried Student Film-Maker Award from the Pan African Film Festival for his documentary Inventos: Hip-Hop Cubano, a film he shot, directed, edited and produced.  Jacobs-Fantauzzi has traveled extensively in the Caribbean and Africa, and produced and directed several shorts and music videos, including the award-winning music video from Ghana, Besin.  His first film, i of MOTION us of MOVEMENT chronicled the life of four women hip hop artists in the San Francisco Bay area. Inventos, the first in-depth look at hip-hop culture in Cuba, premiered in Havana, was screened at the H2O International Film Festival in New York in November 2003, and has been shown across the U.S. to great reviews.  He collaborated with writer/performer Marc Bamuthi Joseph on his acclaimed theater work, the break/s, which prominently featured Jacobs-Fantauzzi's filmed interviews of hip hop pioneers as well as his documentation of hip hop communities worldwide. Jacobs-Fantauzzi has been featured in Anthem Magazine, NRG Magazine, and the Libertad Journal, which wrote, "Inventos embodies the true spirit of hip hop, which is to build a powerful and useful mechanism out of what is seemingly impossible." Currently, Jacobs-Fantauzzi is in production on HomeGrown, a documentary on hip hop in Ghana, West Africa.

Theaster Gates is a Chicago-based artist and community organizer whose practice covers performance and installation, Urban Planning and Design, and the traditional fine arts. His varied works in clay, performance, installation art and public intervention offer a platform that opens up challenging issues by presenting them, not as acute encounters, but as invitations to engage hard information creatively.  His exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Temple Exercises, built of wooden boards recycled from a factory in Chicago's post-industrial heart, encouraged people to see these discarded materials not only in the light of Modernist Art, but to reflect on cultural traditions that depend on scrap for survival.  The installation housed performances by the Black Monks of Mississippi, a music ensemble which Gates founded.  His other performances, installations, and ceramic exhibits include Black Monks & the Gospel of Black, (Van Abbemusuem, Netherlands); Black Monks of Mississippi-If You See Jesus Tell Him Where I Am (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago); Branded Alongside the Cabinet of Curiosities (Milwaukee Art Museum); Tea Shacks, Collard Greens & the Preservation of Soul (Center for Proliferation of Afro-Asian Artifacts, Chicago); Plate Convergence (Yamaguchi Institute, Chicago); Mississippi Houses (Inax Ceramic Museum, Japan); and The American Negro: Too good to be true (St. George Cathedral, South Africa). Gates received an interdisciplinary Master's in Urban Planning and Public Sculpture from Iowa State University in 2005. He is currently Arts Programming Coordinator for University of Chicago, Division of the Humanities, and an Adjunct Faculty member in the Dept of Visual Arts.

James Clotfelter is the Resident Lighting Designer and Production Manager for Miro Dance Theatre, an Artistic Associate with Pig Iron Theatre Company, and a co-founder of Mlab, a laboratory for innovations and design technologies in the live arts.  He has had the pleasure of collaborating with artist and choreographers such as Johannes Wieland, Rennie Harris, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Dan Rothenberg, Bill Shannon, Reggie Wilson, Antony Rizzi, and Thaddeus Davis, as well as companies such as Dayton Contemporary Dance, Southern Repertory Theatre, Z Space Studios, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Peoria Ballet, and Lubelski Teatr Tanca.  His work has been seen at the Walker Center, Yerba Buena, Jacob's Pillow, Bates Dance Festival, Fall for Dance OC, The New Victory Theatre, The Kimmel Center (Philadelphia), Queen Elizabeth Hall, The Pleasance (London), Whitney Museum Altria, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.  

Stacey Printz is artistic director of the Printz Dance Project (PDP).  Founded in 1998, PDP has performed extensively in California with home seasons at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco, and has toured all over the U.S., being presented in such places as New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, Arizona, Colorado, and internationally in Lithuania, Russia and Ireland.  Printz has been commissioned to choreograph for many companies in California and has received awards from organizations such as the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the W&F Hewlett Foundation and Fort Mason Foundation, and she is a recent recipient of the New Work Fellowship from the Marin Arts Council.  Printz received sociology and dance degrees from UC Irvine.  In addition to teaching at San Francisco Dance Center, she has been on faculty at St. Mary's College, Sonoma State University and RoCo.  She has taught master classes and workshops across the United States, as well as internationally in Amsterdam, Belgium, Russia, Lithuania and Ireland.  Highly interested in collaborative experiences, Printz had the pleasure of working with Marc Bamuthi Joseph on Scourge and the break/s, and created new work with live music and spoken word for Intersection for The Arts 40th Anniversary.  Visit www.printzdance.org for more information.