2640 Move/Music Performer Biographies

RENEE BROZIC-BARGER
Renée Brozic Barger has been performing, teaching and making dances in the Baltimore/DC Metro Area for over twelve years. She is a founding director of movement/addiction, a dance-based multi-media performance company, and is currently the coordinator of the dance program at Howard Community College in addition to serving as Director of HCCC’s Arts Collective Dance Company. Most recently, she has taught, choreographed and performed internationally in the US, Canada, India and the UK.  She has been called “aristocratic and elegant” by the Oxford Times, and “brilliantly angular” and “fragile and powerful” by the Oxfringe Review. Recent collaborations of an improvisational nature have been with the Basso Moderno Duo and Timothy Nohe.
 
In addition to performance-related projects, Renée has been increasingly focusing on arts advocacy work within Maryland as a member of Maryland Citizens of the Arts Emerging Arts Advocates, a group that endeavors to educate the next generation of Maryland arts advocates, and to provide advocacy training, professional development, and leadership opportunities to young advocates in the arts area.

AUDREY CHEN
Audrey Chen is a Chinese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic.

Now, using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of a homemade analog synth, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language.

Chen has performed in Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan, Canada and the USA. She is currently based in Baltimore, MD USA but primarily maintains an active touring schedule throughout Europe.
www.myspace.com/audreychen

TIFFANY DEFOE
Tiffany DeFoe is a saxophonist and stone-age giantess with a love for all kinds of music and a willingness to play in virtually any situation, which has occasionally gotten her into trouble, but usually works out pretty well. Current projects include the Multiphonic Choir, The Bellevederes, Lafayette Gilchrist and the New Volcanoes, Gunwife Gone, the Baltimore Afrobeat Society, a community arts and activism center called 2640, and a collectively owned and operated bookstore called Red Emma’s.

MEGHAN FLANIGAN
Meghan Flanigan is a dancer, improviser and creator of movement based work.  She has recently returned to her native Baltimore and is wondering if she has a Baltimore accent yet.  She has lived in Bogotá, London, New York and Providence and has produced work, taught and trained in all of those cities.  Her work is inspired by the people and places that surround her and has been developed in theaters, site-specific locations, galleries and sometimes only in her imagination. She is currently pursuing a MFA in Imaging and Digital Arts at UMBC and creating work in the Baltimore area. Samples of some of her work, along with some general musings, can be seen on www.meghanflanigan.blogspot.com.

CAROL HESS
Carol Hess, one of “the most exciting choreographers in Baltimore,” is known for her groundbreaking work focusing on the interaction between dance and video. She was born in New York City, where she trained as a dancer, and performed with Hannah Kahn and Dancers, The Rondo Dance Theater, and DANCES/Janet Soares. Co-director of the award-winning Baltimore Dance Project, her choreography has been presented at numerous venues in New York City, the Baltimore Washington area, Germany and the Netherlands. Her dance films have been screened at the Maryland Film Festival, the Rosebud Festival and abroad. An accomplished tap artist, she has choreographed and performed in solo concerts and on television in the United States and Europe. The book Dancing describes her as a “new wave tap dancer.”

FRANCESCA JANDASEK
Francesca Jandasek, born in Africa and of Czech descent, has worked with several companies in the Washington DC area, including Propaganda Dance Theater, CityDance Ensemble, Artefacts Dance, BosmaDance, Santi Budaya (Indonesian Dance) and Deviated Theatre and has performed and taught nationally and internationally.  She received a choreographic fellowship from the Kennedy Center as part of the Millennium Stage Local Dance Commissioning Project 2006 and she choreographed and composed music for the full evening length work, “Ellesmere”.  In 2007, she was nominated as one of the finalists for “Emerging Choreographer” for the Metro DC Dance Awards. Francesca dances with several local dance companies and choreographers including Sharna Fabiano Tango Company (Tango Mercurio) and Dakshina Dance Company. She is also co-founder of BARE, a contemporary dance collaborative created in 2008 with Stephanie Yezek and Leah Wrobel. In addition to dancing, Francesca teaches Kindergarten at the Sheridan School, instructs dance at Joy of Motion, plays violin in the Community Tango Orchestra, is working toward her GYROTONIC® certification and paints in her spare time.

CLARINDA MAC LOW
Clarinda Mac Low’s solo work and collaborative group extravaganzas have appeared at P.S. 122, St. Mark’s Church, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the Kitchen, and many other places and spaces around New York City (including a century-old ferryboat and the Queens Botanical Garden) and elsewhere in the world, including a park in Siberia. Mac Low’s most recent collaborations include TRYST (with Alejandra Martorell and Paul Benney), a sly series of performance interventions into everyday life; Cyborg Nation, public conversation on the technological body and the nature of intimacy;  and Salvage/Salvation, an ongoing collaborative installation and performance project that explores the philosophical, emotional and material implications of re-use, discard, decay and abundance. She is Co-Director of Culture Push, a cross-disciplinary organization encouraging hands-on participation and strong hybrid ideas.

LUCA MARINI
Luca Marini is a German/Italian drummer currently based in New York City who currently performs with The Little (with Pär Lammers, Santiago Botero, Noe Escola), Tatune (Guillaume Heurtebize, Santiago Botero), Herbert Eckardt, Blin (duo with dutch guitar player Jasper Stadhouders) and Van der Weide/Fariello/Marini trio. He performed and toured in Europe and North America playing improvised music, jazz, rock and electronic music. He studied at the Conservatories of Nice and Paris in France, at the Conservatory of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, at the University of Montreal in Canada and at Purchase College in New York.
http://www.myspace.com/lucamarini

TIMOTHY NOHE (organizer)
Timothy Nohe is an artist and educator engaging traditional and electronic media in public life and public places. His recent work has been realized in Intermedia works, including site-specific sound and video installations, sound scores for dance, and improvisatory electro-acoustic sound performances. Nohe has exhibited and performed his work in a range of national and international venues, from North America to Europe and Australia. Nohe was the recipient of a 2006 Fulbright Senior Scholar Award from the Australian - American Fulbright Commission. Four Maryland State Arts Council awards have supported his work in the area of Media, New Genre and Installation/Sculpture. His professional affiliations include the Electronic Music Foundation and the Society of Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. Nohe is an Associate Professor of Visual Art at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and an Associate of the Centre for Media Arts Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney.

CATHERINE PANCAKE
Catherine Pancake is a filmmaker, artist, and organizer currently living in Baltimore.  In Fall 2010, she will enter the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to pursue an MFA.  Her award-winning films have been screened and broadcast internationally including the Museum of Modern Art, Washington Project for the Arts, and will be featured in Toronto at the InsideOut Festival in May 2010.  Her experimental music has been presented at the Shanghai Conservatory ROC, International House Japan, Bard College, Princeton University and a wide range of experimental music venues. 

MICHELLE PURDY
Michelle Purdy is a contemporary percussionist and performance artist currently residing in Baltimore. Michelle is a soon to be graduate of The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she is a recipient of the Linehan Scholar Award. The Linehan Scholar Award is a full four year scholarship rewarded to incoming undergraduate students who exemplify the creativity and dedication required of a career in the arts. Michelle’s passion for performance of contemporary works has led to a vast array of performance opportunity including performances at percussion conferences in Maryland, Delaware, and New York and at universities such as University of Baltimore, Queens College, and Princeton University. Michelle will be continuing her musical studies this fall as a graduate student in percussion performance at SUNY Buffalo.

NICOLE SHIFLET
Nicole Shiflet is a multimedia visual artist influenced by scientific renderings she has been exposed to through her schooling. Though no scientist herself, much of her work references a variety of scientific phenomena. She is constantly surprised, awed, and inspired by biological growth, geological topography, and electronic circuits. Her work may not reflect the logical processes of these studies but forms its own fictional and abstracted narrative.

Nicole Shiflet was born in Wisconsin, grew up in Georgia, and currently resides in Baltimore. She received her MFA in Imaging and Digital Arts from UMBC in 2006 and her BFA in Painting from the University of Georgia in 1998. Her work ranges from drawing and painting to 2D animation and sculptural sound objects.

STEPHANIE YEZEK
One of the most valuable things Stephanie Yezek has learned being a performer with Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company, DeviatedTheatre, Gesel Mason Performance Projects and the award-winning BosmaDance over the past seven years and studying and performing as a guest dancer with David Dorfman in 2003 and 2008 is the importance of creating together. As a performer, both in set works and improvisation, both on the ground and in the air, Stephanie has learned to be open and experience every performance as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure, realizing that it is in those split second decisions that the movement and the body fuse into one expressive dialogue with the dancers, musicians and audience. As a burgeoning choreographer and co-founder of BARE, a contemporary dance collaboration created in 2008 with Francesca Jandasek and Leah Wrobel, Stephanie seeks to incorporate diverse creative visions in the works she creates to produce not a single voice, but a harmony of voices atop a physical, expressive movement vocabulary. A graduate in English literature both from Bucknell University and Oxford University, Stephanie believes in the power of words both written and spoken from and on the body, and she further wishes to explore how this tool can enhance the process of creating dance.