Faculty

The ICPP has a small group of core faculty members from Wesleyan University, MoMA, the Walker Art Center, and Danspace Project. Additionally, there will be guest instructors and lecturers from other universities and arts institutions.

Philip Bither has been Walker Art Center's Senior Curator of Performing Arts since April 1997, overseeing one of the country's leading contemporary performing arts programs. Prior to this, he served as Director of Programming/Artistic Director for the Flynn Center, later becoming Associate Director/Music Curator at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). He received the Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award in 2009. He sits on numerous federal, state, local, and national foundation arts panels and he speaks and writes about the contemporary performing arts nationally.

Doryun Chong is currently Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. At MoMA, he is involved in contemporary acquisitions, global research, as well as organizing special exhibitions. The exhibitions he has organized include Ernesto Neto: Navedenga, Bruce Nauman: DAYS (both 2010), and Projects 94: Henrik Olesen. From 2003 until early 2009, Chong was a curator in the Visual Arts department at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he organized a series of group exhibitions as well as first monographic exhibitions. Chong has also organized exhibitions at REDCAT in Los Angeles and for the Busan Biennale in Busan, South Korea and has contributed to various publications such as journals Afterall and ArtAsiaPacific and is a regular columnist for bilingual Japanese-English web journal Art iT. He is the recipient of the inaugural Gerrit Lansing Independent Visions Award given by the Independent Curators International.

Mari Dumett is an art historian and curator and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University, where she was the Luther Gregg Sullivan Visiting Fellow in Art History in 2009-10. Her primary area of research is contemporary art in a global context and critical theory, with an emphasis on performance and video art. She has published essays in journals and exhibition catalogues and is currently working on a book project entitled Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living.

Kristy Edmunds is an artist, curator, artistic director and frequent consultant internationally, recognized for innovation and depth in the presentation of works by contemporary artists, with a particular emphasis on contemporary performing arts. Edmunds was the Founding Executive & Artistic Director of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and the TBA Festival (Time Based Art) in Portland, Oregon. She was the Artistic Director for the Melbourne International Arts Festival from 2005 - 2008, and was the first to serve an unprecedented four year term. Upon completion she was appointed to the Victorian College of the Arts as the Head of the new School of Performing Arts at the University of Melbourne, and after one year became the Deputy Dean for the College. Since 2009, Edmunds has worked as the Consulting Artistic Director for the newly formed and critically heralded Park Avenue Armory in New York. She is the newly appointed Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (most recently known as UCLA Live) in Los Angeles.

Judy Hussie-Taylor has twenty years of experience in non-profit arts programming and administration. She is the former Director of the Colorado Dance Festival (CDF), served as Artistic Director for Performance Programs at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and was Deputy Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. From 2000 - 2004 she taught in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Colorado-Boulder and served as faculty, committee member and director of the Department's Visiting Artist Program. Since taking the helm at Danspace Project she has developed a critically acclaimed series entitled "PLATFORMS 2010" which features artist curators and new contexts for dance presenting in New York City. As part of this program she is editor of a new series of catalogues published by Danspace Project.

Katja Kolcio, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Dance at Wesleyan University. Her research interests are in social somatic theory: investigating the role of physical engagement and creativity in practices of knowledge production, and modern dance as a political art form. Katja's choreography engages the community, culture, and environment within which it occurs. Her book Movable Pillars: Organizing Dance, 1956–1978 was published in 2010 by Wesleyan University Press.

Samuel A. Miller is the President of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) and co-founder of the ICPP. Mr. Miller has also served as President and CEO of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) a ten-year initiative, founded in 2004, dedicated to improving conditions for individual artists in the US. Mr. Miller joined LINC at its inception having served for ten years as the Executive Director of the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA). While at NEFA Mr. Miller designed and implemented a number of national programs including the National Dance Project, the Center for Creative Research, and the Favorite Poem Project (with Robert Pinsky). Prior to joining NEFA in 1995, Mr. Miller served as Executive Director and President of the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, MA.

Nicole Stanton is currently Chair and Associate Professor of Dance at Wesleyan University. She received her MFA in choreography from the Ohio State University (OSU) and her BA in Dance and Foreign Civilizations and Languages from Antioch College. She studied West African dance with the Maimuna Keita African Dance Company in Senegal, West Africa and Contemporary Dance Technique at the Center for New Dance Development in Arnhem, Holland. She was a faculty member with the OSU Department of Dance for ten years, serving as Chair of Undergraduate Studies for four years. In addition to her academic appointments, she has been a choreographer, performer, community activist, costumer and arts administrator.

Steven Taylor was Allen Ginsberg's principal musical collaborator for twenty years. Since 1984, he has been a member of the poetry/rock group the Fugs. In the 1990s, he and Barbara Dilley (formerly of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Grand Union) collaborated on interdisciplinary courses for Naropa University's Interarts program (History and Contexts of Contemporary Art). He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Brown University. He is the author of False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground (Wesleyan University Press, 2003).

 

Image: Audience for Eiko & Koma, from 2009 Retrospective Project in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University (photo by George Ruhe)