2019 Artist Support Program

Dakota Camacho is a multi-disciplinary artist / researcher working in spaces of indigenous life ways, performance, musical composition, community engagement, and education. Camacho holds a Masters of Arts in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in Gender & Women’s Studies as a First Wave Urban Arts and Hip Hop Scholar. Camacho is a chanter, adjunct instructor, and core researcher for I Fanlalai’an Oral History Project based at the University of Guåhan.

Camacho co-founded I Moving Lab, an inter-national, inter-cultural, inter-tribal, and inter-disciplinary arts collective that creates community and self-funded arts initiatives to engage and bring together rural & urban communities, Universities, Museums, & performing arts institutions. Camacho has worked at festivals, universities, and community organizations as a public speaker, facilitator, composer and performer across Turtle Island (USA), Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Sweden, and South Africa.

Artist Support Program 2019: Audio support for Guma’ Matao, an inter-disciplinary ritual activation exploring inter-cultural responsibility and ancestral knowing.

ings is a guitarist and maker from Seattle, WA, who plays lullaby rock, and directs music videos. She is also a community facilitator, and hosts and organizes many DIY shows in Seattle. She has, as a completely DIY artist, earned 1 million + streams on Spotify. She has released 2 EPs, “Dog Physics” (2013) and “Afterthought EP” (2016).

Artist Support Program 2019: Produce an 8-song album of lullabies for children and adults, focusing on universal themes of self-acceptance, kindness, and joy.

Saxophonist Briggan Krauss has been an internationally recognized key player in New York City’s downtown and creative music scene for more than twenty years. He connects the extreme edges of technique with the unexplored tonal possibilities of the instrument while making his work as much about shape as it is about his unique signature sound.

He has released several critically acclaimed recordings as a leader and has appeared on over fifty other recordings as a sideman. He has worked with a diverse range of artists including John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Steven Bernstein, Wayne Horvitz, Levon Helm, Skerik, Eyvind Kang, Robin Holcomb, Norah Jones, Medeski Martin and Wood, Hal Willner, Skuli Sverrisson, Jim Black, Ikue Mori, Joey Baron, Kato Hideki, Satoko Fuji, Dave Harrington, The New York Composer’s Orchestra, Elysian Fields, Iron & Wine, Rufus Wainwright, Sarah Manning, Trey Anastasio, Joan Wasser, Jessie Harris, Beth Fleenor, Lou Reed, Marc Ribot, Antony, and U2.

In addition to his work as a saxophonist and composer, Briggan plays guitar in several projects including his String and Reed Quartet. He also works in the areas of sound art, electronic music and interdisciplinary performance. He is currently a professor in the Performance and Interactive Media Arts [PIMA] and Sonic Arts MFA programs at Brooklyn College.

Natasha Marin is a conceptual artist whose people-centered projects have circled the globe since 2012 and have been recognized and acknowledged by Art Forum, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, NBC, Al Jazeera, Vice, PBS and others. In 2018, the City of Seattle and King County have backed BLACK IMAGINATION–a series of conceptual exhibitions–amplifying, centering, and holding sacred a diverse sample of voices including LGBTQIA+ black youth, incarcerated black women, black folks with disabilities, unsheltered black folks, and black children. Her viral web-based project, Reparations, engaged a quarter of a million people worldwide in the practice of “leveraging privilege,” and earned Marin, a mother of two, death threats by the dozens. As a busy anti-racism consultant and community builder, Natasha was listed as one of 30 women who “Run This City” by Seattle Met magazine in 2018.

Artist Support Program 2019: Black Imagination, a series of recording circles featuring diverse representations of Black Joy–stories, testimonies, and dynamic soundscapes that explore the vastness of the Black Imagination.

SassyBlack (Catherine Harris-White) is a Seattle-based vocalist & producer. This Goddess of “electronic psychedelic soul” & “hologram funk” explores sound through deep electronic compositions.  Sassy studied under Julian Priester, Jovino Santos Neto, and others at Cornish College of the Arts, graduating in 2008. Since then, Black has traveled the world having performed in Berlin, Barcelona, Milan, London & beyond. With roots in classical & jazz, her voice is comparable to Ella Fitzgerald & India Arie while her production value is reminiscent of Herbie Hancock.  When not touring, she teaches music production workshops using the production software Ableton and will be releasing her third album, Ancient Mahogany Gold, fall 2019.

Artist Support Program 2019: Recording tracks for her third album, Ancient Mahogany Gold, which dissects her journey in the world as a Black Queer woman.

Seattle Modern Orchestra (SMO) is the only large ensemble in the Pacific Northwest solely dedicated to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Led by co-artistic directors Julia Tai and Jeremy Jolley, SMO commissions and premieres new works from an international lineup of composers, in addition to presenting important pieces from the contemporary repertoire that are rarely if ever heard by Seattle audiences. Many of SMO’s performances are premieres locally, regionally, and nationally. The ensemble “operates at that exciting cusp between old and new, between tradition and innovation” (Vanguard Seattle) curating new sounds and experiences for concert goers in the region.

Artist Support Program 2019: Record a range of contemporary and 20th century works for chamber ensemble, showcasing the group’s versatility.

Mako is a traditional Okinawan music performer who plays in the NW area, primarily in Seattle.  She performs solo and also leads a group called Mako and Munjuru presenting music, dance, and story telling from Okinawa. Mako has played with the traditional Ryuukyuuan full ensemble for various events through out the Pacific Northwest,  Hawaii and Okinawa, Japan. She is a member of a musical troupe based in Honolulu called Ukwanshin Kabudan who works to help perpetuate the tradition of music and art of Okinawa.

Okinawan music and arts are closely related to Chinese; though Japanese, it is uniquely its own. The main instrument played is called sanshin, a 3 stringed lute, whose body is covered with python skin and looks more like the Chinese version than the Japanese lute. The songs/language used is an ancient language of Okinawa.  This language is considered to be one of endangered languages in the world today. As of 2009, UNESCO recognized and included Okinawan language aka Ryuukyuuan language to be protected from disappearing completely.

Watch: Mako live at Jack Straw

Artist Support Program 2019: Recordings of Okinawan music, both folk and classical, on the sanshin.

Jeffrey Bowen is a composer whose work explores the potential of musical structure to channel, transfigure, and reframe lived experience. His compositions have been performed by Pascal Gallois, Maja Cerar, Beta Collide, Ensemble DissonArt, and the Luminosity Orchestra, among other ensembles in the USA and Europe. In 2013 his orchestral work Stalasso was chosen by conductor Ludovic Morlot for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Works program, and he has recently presented work at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, the University of Nebraska’s New Music Festival, the University of Washington’s Harry Partch Festival, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.

He is currently based in Seattle, where he has taught courses in music theory at Cornish College of the Arts and the University of Washington, and is co-director of Seattle’s Inverted Space Ensemble. He recently completed a DMA in composition at UW under Joël-François Durand.

Artist Support Program 2019 (with Inverted Space Ensemble): Produce a studio recording of five new works from Seattle composers written within unconventional, microtonal tuning systems.

The daughter of a Sicilian meat cutter and a cool blonde Norwegian beauty, Julie Cascioppo grew up in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood and attended Western Washington University. She originally intended to have a career as a teacher, but the call of the stage proved too strong. “I was on holiday [in the Caribbean] and a French father and son heard me sitting in with the hotel band and said I should come to Paris. So I did.” She stayed for four years, performing at a variety of venues. In 1985 she returned to Seattle, the “home port” from which she’s since traveled the world, performing in such places as Istanbul, Rio de Janiero, Istanbul, Bangkok, Hong Kong, London, Hamburg, Sicily, Brussels, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Whenever she was back home, she starred in “The Julie Cascioppo Experience,” a weekly musical cabaret revue at the Pink Door restaurant in Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market.

When not entertaining and collecting international admirers on her globe-trotting itineraries, Julie is working on her forthcoming memoir, I Love Being Abroad: Tales of a Globetrotting Chanteuse.

Artist Support Program 2019: Produce a podcast based on 10 specific stories from her memoir, I Love Being Abroad.

Artist Support Program 2006: Produce a CD of original cabaret songs composed in collaboration with various Seattle jazz artists.

Clarinetist, composer, and improviser James Falzone is an acclaimed member of the international jazz and creative music scenes, a veteran contemporary music lecturer and clinician, and an award-winning composer who has been commissioned by chamber ensembles, dance companies, choirs, and symphony orchestras around the globe. James performs throughout North America and Europe, appears regularly on Downbeat magazine’s Critics’ and Readers’ Polls, and was nominated as the 2011 Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalist Association. Educated at Northern Illinois University and New England Conservatory, James is also a respected educator and scholar and has been on the faculty of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Deep Springs College, North Central College, and was a fellow at The Center for Black Music Research. At present James is the Chair of Music at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington.

Artist Support Program 2019: T’ien Ti Jen (heaven, earth, people), three pieces for clarinets, Native American flutes, piano, ritual bells, and shruti box that explore themes of Taoist contemplation.

C. R. Grimmer (she/her/they/them) is a poet, scholar, and lecturer at the UW in Seattle with an MFA, MA, and PhC. They also the host The Poetry Vlog, a social justice YouTube channel and podcast, with its third season sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. The Poetry Vlog is dedicated to building queer and anti-racist coalitions by showcasing poetry and music video readings and analysis, as well as hosting conversations with guest poets, scholars, and students. C.’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals, from Fence and Drunken Boat to The Portland Review. Scholarship on contemporary queer and race theory can be found in journals such as The Comparatist. The Harlan Hahn Disability Endowment partially funded the completion of their manuscript, The Lyme Letters, which has been a finalist with several presses such as Alice James Books.

Artist Support Program 2019: Audio support for the Poetry Vlog, a YouTube channel and podcast designed to build social justice coalitions through poetry and pop culture discussion.

Dylan Hayes is originally from San Francisco, and began playing piano at the age of seven. He attended an arts school in Novato, California, Marin School of the Arts, where he started playing in a rock, R&B, motown and funk bands. As time progressed, he joined the school’s top jazz band and realized that jazz was the direction he wanted to take in his career as a musician. He continued his studies at Cornish College of the Arts from which he graduated from in 2019, and was able to study with Dawn Clement, Jovino Santos Neto, and Marina Albero.

Dylan’s piano playing has brought him to share the stage with top tier musicians in both San Francisco and Seattle such as Jay Thomas, Johnaye Kendrick, David Marriott, Mark Taylor, Dan Marcus, Rex Gregory and Chris Amberger, a former member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

Dylan has taken over the big band book of renowned composer Jim Knapp and has been revitalizing the group in Seattle. He also co-leads a group with Xavier Lecouturier called the DX-TET featuring Seattle’s best musicians.

Artist Support Program 2019: The Hayes/Lecouturier/Knapp Collective, formerly known as the Jim Knapp Orchestra, will record their first album since the original band’s 2002 album.

Gregg Daniel Miller received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington in 2005. His research focus is on the philosophy of language, power, and aesthetics within the traditions of critical theory and liberalism (see: Mimesis and Reason, SUNY Press, 2011). He is also an improvising saxophone player. For his Jack Straw project, Miller combines his interests in political theory with his love of free, experimental, improvisatory music.

Artist Support Program 2019: The Improvised Event: Racer Sessions recorded: Record on-location and edit four Racer Sessions (a weekly, public, all-ages improvisatory music gathering at Café Racer in Seattle) and interview participants as primary research for a book on power, freedom, and improvisation.

O is a Ukrainian, U.S.-based, multimedia avant-gardist. Her dynamic oeuvre fuses cross-disciplinary arts, emergent technologies, education, and civic engagement. Through relational aesthetics, she investigates individual and systemic roots and ramifications of Anthropocene. Her “Think Global, Act Local” practice galvanizes global citizenship by interconnecting and advancing the well-being of autonomous self, collective ethos, and our Pale Blue Dot.

The artist grew up behind the Iron Curtain, weathering the Chernobyl cataclysm, ethnic oppression, death throes of Cold War, and collapse of USSR. In addition to an 8-year track at a music conservatory, O’s academic background includes Law, Societies & Justice, Interdisciplinary Arts, and Art History.

O founded and directs TYPONEXUS, known for elaborate, immersive, durational, site-specific productions at monumental loci. Drawing audiences to unorthodox venues like industrial facilities, landmark mansions, century-old sanctuaries, and defunct warehouses, she incorporates eclectic themes ranging from climate change to space exploration.

Nuclear Recitals – visceral, en-plein-air odes to the beauty of human creativity and the natural world in juxtaposition to ruinous overreaches of industrialization – is the most notable of these. Set at a nuclear site, the inaugural installment featured world’s fast pianist and pioneer of Continuous Piano Music from Ukraine. Vol. I is presently in post-production for global release. Nuclear Recitals II: Apprehension Engine unfolds September 2019.

Artist Support Program 2019: Nuclear Recitals, Vol. I: Lubomyr Melnyk: Edit, master, and arrange audiovisual recordings of original, site-specific, en-plein-air performance by world’s fastest pianist at nuclear site for global release of multimedia environmental art compilation.

Ran Park is a musician and composer based in Seattle. She began playing the piano at the age of four and spent her youth playing for church services and school functions. After a hiatus of six years she cautiously revisited her relationship with music, privately composing original work beginning in 2012. Her sound is heavily influenced by impressionist music of the turn of the 20th century and jazz of South Africa and Ethiopia.

Artist Support Program 2019: Songs for No Words: Original solo piano compositions on acoustic piano.

Tom Varner is internationally known as one of the top living pioneers of jazz/improvised/new music on the French horn and as an inventive, witty, and passionate composer for his different ensembles, which have featured, over the years, such players as Steve Wilson, Tony Malaby, Lee Konitz, Mark Feldman, Kenny Barron, Cameron Brown, Billy Hart, Tom Rainey, and Matt Wilson.  Tom’s recent Seattle nonet project, Nine Surprises, was released in 2014.  Tom has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell and Blue Mountain arts colonies and grants from the NEA, Doris Duke Foundation/Chamber Music America, and the Jack Straw Center. Tom has 14 recordings as a leader and plays on over 70 others, such as with Steve Lacy and John Zorn.

After living in New York City for 26 years, Tom moved with his family to Seattle in fall 2005.  Since his move, he has played at the Vancouver, Earshot, and Bumbershoot festivals, the Good Shepherd Center, the Seattle Art Museum, and at the Royal Room and Tula’s as a leader and sideman alongside many Seattle greats such as Mark Taylor, Hans Teuber, Wayne Horvitz, Kate Olson, Neil Welch, Thomas Marriott, and Jim Knapp. Tom is also an Associate Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts.

Artist Support Program 2019: A meditative sound collaboration with the “Sound Vespers” Mixed Ensemble, featuring four field recording artists, five trumpets, French horn, trombone, and percussion.

Artist Support Program 2012: Nine Surprises, a new original work for an improvising nine-piece ensemble.

Artist Support Program 2007: Heaven and Hell, an album of classical chamber and jazz compositions for double-quintet featuring French horn.

Seattle based singer/songwriter Tekla Waterfield lives in the wide-open realm of Rock music, incorporating elements of folk, country, indie, rhythm and blues, and soul creating an eclectic, wide-ranging sound. Tekla partnered with collaborator and husband, Jeff Fielder (Mark Lanegan, Amy Ray) to produce her 2018 release, The Curtain Falls, which garnered critical acclaim, radio play, and placement in the award-winning indie film Dakota with the song “Rock and Roll Man.”

​In addition to live performances with her band, Tekla loves to help curate concerts such as the Great Women of Country Tribute Series and the Americana Festival at the Big Wheel. She’s an occasional gig manager and production assistant with Gigs4U. She also lends her vocals to others for recordings and live appearances, is an active member of Seattle’s Bushwick Book Club, performs regularly at SeaTac Airport as part of the Experience the City of Music Project, is a featured vocalist with the highly revered Seattle Rock Orchestra, and was a long time open mic host in Seattle.

Watch: Tekla Waterfield and Jeff Fielder live at Jack Straw

Artist Support Program 2019: Record a new album of original music.

Andrew Weathers (b.1988) is a composer and improviser originally from Chapel Hill, NC, currently based in Littlefield, TX. His music engages with notions of place, tradition, repetition, and spirit. He studied composition at UNC-Greensboro and electronic music at Mills College in Oakland, CA. A consistent presence in the underground music scene over the past decade, Andrew’s work covers a wide spectrum from solo acoustic guitar to the utopic future folk of Andrew Weathers Ensemble. He also performs and records regularly with Tethers, Real Life Rock & Roll Band, Satin Spar, and Common Eider, King Eider, among others. In addition to his busy performing schedule, Weathers helps run Full Spectrum Records and Other Minds Records, and works as a freelance mixing and mastering engineer.

Artist Support Program 2019: Mixing Past & Future Worlds: We Have Power & We Can Build a New World: The fifth studio album by Andrew Weathers Ensemble, a long-running revolving door collective of musicians playing mostly reworkings of American folk music.