NOVEMBER @ MILLAY ARTS
FROM TOP LEFT TO RIGHT:
Vivian Pham — Fiction/Poetry; Parramatta, Australia - Vivian is a novelist, essayist, poet, and aspiring folklorist from southwestern Sydney. In high school, she wrote a novel called The Coconut Children, which was published in March 2020 by Penguin Random House. She is currently writing the film and stage adaptations of The Coconut Children, and teaching workshops with Story Factory, a not-for-profit creative writing center for young people. Vivian is our second DVAN Fellow.
Beth Weeks — Fiction; Vandalia, OH — Beth received her MFA from Miami University in Ohio. Her fiction has appeared in The Write Launch, Barren Magazine, Rivet Journal, and others. She is a recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant, and was a finalist for the Hudson Prize and Launch Pad Prose Competition. Her work has most recently been supported by the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center and Jentel Artist Residency.
Lilian Garcia-Roig — Visual Arts; Tallahassee, FL — Lilian Garcia-Roig is a Cuba born, Texas raised artist living in Tallahassee, Florida whose works landscape-themed works have always explored the complex propositions of sense of place and belonging which so influence the construction of personal identity, while she is most known for her perceptually based, large-scale, “all-day” cumulative paintings that underscores the complex nature of trying to capture first-hand the multidimensional and ever-changing experience of being in that specific location. Recently she has embarked on a conceptual investigation of the idea of the Cuban landscape and how her American Bauhausian education has colored her relationship to place and space. These new works are part of the Hecho con Cuba and Hyphenated-Nature Series. She has shown at such places as the Chopo Museum in Mexico City, Americas Society Gallery in NYC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Art Museum of the Americas and extensively in many museums throughout the southeast. Her MFA is from the University of Pennsylvania (1990) and her BFA is from Southern Methodist University (1988). From 1991 to 2000 she was a tenured Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin and in 2001 was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Art Practice before deciding to move to Tallahassee where she became the Director of Graduate Studies in Studio Art from 2002-2008. Currently she is a professor at Florida State University where she serves as Chair of the Department of Art.
Gary Krist — Non-Fiction; Jersey City, NJ — Gary is the author of four narrative nonfiction books: The White Cascade (2007), City of Scoundrels (2012), Empire of Sin (2014), and The Mirage Factory (2018). He has also written three novels--Bad Chemistry (1998), Chaos Theory (2000), and Extravagance (2002)—and two short story collections--The Garden State (1988) and Bone by Bone (1994). A widely published journalist and book reviewer, Krist has been the recipient of The Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Travel Journalism, a fellowship from the National Endowments for the Arts, and a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Empire of Sin was named one of the top ten books of 2014 by The Washington Post and Library Journal. He now lives in Jersey City NJ, where he is at work on his tenth book.
Kay Ulanday Barrett — Non-Fiction; Rahway, NJ – Kay is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a winner of the 2022 Next Book Residency with Tin House, a James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell, and most recently in 2023, residencies at Baldwin for the Arts and Millay Arts awarded by Lambda Literary. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, The Hemispheric Institute, The Whitney, The MoMA, Symphony Space, The Ford Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Manchester PRIDE, Sesame Street & more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Colorlines, Literary Hub, The Advocate, Poetry Unbound, Split This Rock, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, The Lily, and elsewhere.
Adam Mirza — Composing; Stone Mountain, GA — “I am a composer and sound artist who works with acoustic and electronic instruments as well as video and other media. My work involves the abstraction and reconfiguration of bodily gestures and politically charged or otherwise culturally resonant sonic media. I use the tools of production (microphones and loudspeakers, audio and video processors, musical instruments, objects, and spaces) to render the familiar unfamiliar and to create unique performance experiences through/with sound. Current projects include Partial Knowledge (an upcoming chamber music album), Nagleria Fowleri (audio-video poem cycle based on texts by Rimona Afana), and Fake Radiolab (absurd “anti-podcast”/live electronic performance duo with Akiva Zamcheck). I teach composition and electronic music at Emory University in Atlanta.”
Diane Wong — Visual Arts; Newark, NJ — Diane is a multimedia artist, educator, and curator born and raised in Flushing, Queens. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark and an affiliate faculty of Global Urban Studies, American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. As a queer Chinese American and daughter of immigrants, her work is intimately tied to the Asian diaspora and urban immigrant experience. Her artistic practice and scholarship is fundamentally about the intersectionalities of how race and racialization processes are articulated in the production of everyday life and entangled with other structures including class, sexuality, empire, and colonialism. As a scholar whose work traverse traditional divides between the social sciences and humanities, her work complicates how we understand the racialization of Asian Americans over space, across scale, and through time. Her current book project, You Can’t Evict A Movement: Intergenerational Activism and Housing Justice in New York City, combines ethnography, participatory mapping, archival research, augmented reality, and oral history interviews to examine intergenerational resistance to gentrification in Manhattan Chinatown. She is co-editing a special issue on Asian American Abolition Feminisms for Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies which explores community models of safety, mutual aid, and collective care, bringing together a range of scholars, sex worker advocates, oral historians and archivists, organizers, and formerly incarcerated writers. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, a variety of anthologies, media outlets, podcasts, and exhibitions. As a socially engaged artist, Diane is a member of the Chinatown Art Brigade and co-founder of The W.O.W. Project, a queer, non- binary, trans and youth-led initiative that uses arts activism to combat displacement in Manhattan Chinatown.