Jack Straw Artist Support Program

Jai Kobi Kaleo’okalani is a Seattle-based guitarist, producer, and poet. Graduating in 2025 with a BM in Jazz and Improvised Music from the University of Washington, they studied with Steve Rodby, Cuong Vu, Ted Poor, and Kassa Overall. Often performing under the moniker BLUES.WEAVE, their genre-defying work seamlessly blends the sonic worlds of improvised Black American music traditions and experimental sound production, conjuring immersive performances and recordings featuring resonator and electric guitars, drum machines, samplers, and electronics. Drawing from a deep well of ancestral inspirations and approaches, her music emphasizes themes of radical transformation and freedom-making by imagining futures through soundscape.

Their work as a soloist began with a DXARTS commission to compose and perform the beat suite “Let Loose Thy Soul: Black Alchemy and the Upper Arcana” for the 2024 SPAM New Media Festival at the Georgetown Steam Plant. Since then, Jai has been invited to present original music, multimedia performances, installations, and artist demonstrations at Town Hall Seattle, the Henry Art Gallery, Burke Museum, Frye Art Museum, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and ARTS at King Street Station Gallery. During her Jack Straw residency, she will create an album following the story of the tarot’s major arcana.

Artist Support Program 2026

The feature documentary film Boys on the Inside follows Christina, Sebastian, and Sarah as they discover their ‘boy’ identity while in women’s prison. Now on the outside they come together to face the long-term impact of incarceration as Latinx butch and trans masculine survivors, reclaiming their narratives through recovery and healing. A film 18 years in the making.

Director/Producer Elliat Graney-Saucke (she/they) is a White queer femme documentary filmmaker, educator, and organizer who has produced award-winning media for over 25 years in 10+ countries. Their work applies a queer lens to themes of immigration, incarceration, gender and racial identity, creative expression, and political histories. Past films include 20+ short films such as The Resilience of King Khazm (SIFF/Alaska Airlines) and the feature documentary Travel Queeries, which premiered at BFI London in 2009 and toured 13 countries. Elliat currently teaches Foundations of Documentary Storytelling at the University of Washington and is running queer/trans art activation Children of Shelly’s Leg. Recognitions include SIFF Grant for Courageous Documentary Filmmaking, Artist Trust Fellowship / Millay Artist Retreat and grants from King County 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and Puffin Foundation.

Artist Support Program 2026: Boi Podcast – stud and trans-masculine stories about recovery and life beyond prison expanding upon the documentary Boys on the Inside.

Miranda Elliott is a Seattle-based musician, multimedia artist, and creative technologist crafting ethereal electronic soundscapes and immersive audiovisual worlds. As Old Man of the Woods, a solo spectral synthpop project named after a spiky shroom, she alchemizes anguish into awe, weaving webs of intimate vocals, hypnotic harmonies, swirling synths, pulsing rhythms, and organic textures that “blur the line between the personal and natural world, conjuring a vivid, eerie soundscape as damp and rich as the woodland floor” (Various Small Flames).

Elliott’s practice is rooted in wide-eyed curiosity, steeped in romanticism and surrealism, and driven by a hunger for connection—with herself, the environment, and the listener. Moving fluidly between mediums, she conceives and creates every aspect of her work across songwriting, production, visual design, and video. She has toured the US and EU and released a genre-defying discography, from the dreampop delicacies of Votives (2021) to the darkwave devotionals of Tendrils (2025), recorded during a residency with Culterim Gallery at an abandoned sanatorium outside Berlin. Elliott now shares Cape Perpetua, a visual album pairing meditative vocal-loop incantations with nature projection portals, while shaping her forthcoming post-punk EP. Through it all, entwining memory and mirage, she creates spaces to muse and move.

Artist Support Program 2026

Ife is a soul‑multigenre artist whose music offers a grounded pause in a world that rarely slows down. He approaches the stage with the humility of someone always listening—always learning from the quiet truths that live between the notes. For him, a song is a living canvas, mapping the textures of shared human experience with care, intention, and a deep sense of cultural memory.

Audiences often describe his sound as both familiar and entirely his own. Listeners hear echoes of the music that shaped them—Sesame Street melodies, Al Jarreau’s fluidity, the warmth of church songs, the sweetness of DeBarge, the pulse of New Edition—woven into something contemporary, soulful, and spiritually rooted. One reviewer wrote that hearing him perform felt “as if Shirley Murdock, George Benson, Mary J. Blige, and Lyfe Jennings were introducing their new protégé.”

Musically, Ife moves with ease across traditions—soul, R&B, Yoruba and English devotional songs, and Orisa music—creating a sound that feels expansive and deeply rooted. A tribute to Oshun may flow through English and Yoruba “like honey,” while another song settles into a warm, steady groove that invites the room into a shared chorus. His transitions into Orisa songs feel natural and unforced, opening a space where spiritual lineage and contemporary soul meet.

Ife’s performances are designed to slow the world down. His musicality invites listeners out of the relentless push of “what’s next” and into the grounded presence of “right now.” At venues like Black & Tan, audiences have described his shows as healing—music that “moved through the room with a restorative energy that lifted hearts and minds,” offering not a promise that everything will be alright, but a gentler truth: things may or may not be, and what we have—what we can return to—is the clarity and steadiness of this moment.

What lingers after the last note is a sense of renewal: a reminder that connection, integrity, and shared humanity are forms of wealth.

Artist Support Program 2026

Artist Support Program 1998

Briana Marela Lizárraga is a Peruvian American composer, vocalist, and performing artist that is currently based out of Oakland, CA. Raised in Seattle, WA she developed her songwriting first in the local music scene and then matured into her compositional and technological practice. She is inspired by Magical Realism and using her voice as a focal point, making use of visually engaging elements of tech augmented gestures and objects to compose and perform her music live. Lizárraga’s gestural and lyrical song performances draw from elements of both experimental electronic music and vocal driven pop music. Using a visual programming language, sensors, and microprocessors she is able to make custom tools to create compositions with varying fixed elements that transition into moments of improvisation. She was most recently a spatial sound artist in residence at Audium in San Francisco for their residency New Voices IV, performing her multi-channel piece live every weekend from February to April 2025. She is currently a Montalvo Lucas Arts Music and Composition fellow. She received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in 2020. Her newest full length album, My Inner Rest, was released on June 6th, 2025 via AKP Recordings.

Artist Support Program 2026

Award-winning composer/keyboardist Victor Noriega has been described as having “the sensitivity of Bill Evans, the propulsion of Horace Silver and the experimentation of Thelonious Monk,” while his compositions have been characterized as “layered, complex, interesting and rhythmic,” “introspective at times, energetic and boundary-stretching at others… seamlessly blend[ing] jazz and modern classical influences.”

Victor has been a featured artist in the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, the Earshot Jazz Festival, Bumbershoot, the Filipino American Jazz & World Music Festival, and the Philippine International Jazz Festival.  His commissioned original work for the Oakland East Bay Symphony, Generations, Directions, which premiered in April 2012, musically addresses three generations of ethnicity in North America.

Noriega’s albums – Stone’s Throw (2004), Alay (2006), and Fenceless (2008) — each recorded with his trio, earned critical acclaim, and Victor was honored with three Golden Ear awards (2005 Emerging Artist of the Year, 2006 Instrumentalist of the Year, and 2006 Album of the Year by Earshot Jazz, recognizing the best of the Pacific Northwest jazz scene.  His latest recording, 2 Trios (2013) features a collection of unique improvisatory sketches with long-time Seattle collaborators.

Born in Richmond, British Columbia and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Noriega obtained a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies at the University of Washington.  Victor continues to work on a diverse set of original projects and collaborates with artists from a wide range of musical backgrounds.

Artist Support Program 2026

Artist Support Program 2010

Artist Support Program 2005

Anika Tara and Shahana Dattagupta together represent the oral transmission of music-and-spirituality in the Vedic way. Here, the study of self, scripture, and music are inextricably intertwined, and the cultivation of Nada—sounded truth—happens via guidance in shared presence and lived embodiment.

As a second-generation Indian American, Anika was raised and apprenticed in this vein with Shahana since the age of 8. Now, as a young adult, she carries this essence into her singing, songwriting, modeling, content creation, yoga training, and even her archival research at the UW.

Shahana was born in America and raised in India, and was cultivated in Indian classical music in Carnatic, Khayal and Dhrupad forms, starting at the young age of 3. She has been guiding, facilitating, creating and composing in the Seattle area for the last 26 years. She expresses herself as a multi-faceted artist—in writing, theater, design, painting and music—and is also a life/spiritual guide to many around the world.

Artist Support Program 2026: Main To Tere Paas Main: a Presentation of Kabir’s Poetry Composed in 11 Ragas

Timea Tihanyi is a Hungarian born interdisciplinary visual artist and ceramicist living and working in Seattle, Washington. Tihanyi holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary; a BFA in Ceramics from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston; and an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington. Tihanyi’s work has been exhibited in the United States, Brazil, Australia, Denmark, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. She has received many recognitions, including the 2018 Neddy Award in Open Media. In the Pacific Northwest, her work has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions at Gallery 4Culture, CoCA, the Henry Art Gallery, Museum of Glass, the Seattle Art Museum Gallery, Greg Kucera Gallery, Bellevue Arts Museum, and the Museum of Northwest Art. Tihanyi is a creativity and leadership coach, a Teaching Professor Emerita at the UW, and the founder and director of Slip Rabbit Studio. Slip Rabbit is an internationally recognized technoceramics teaching studio and a unique mentoring space for experimentation at the intersections of art, design, mathematics, architecture, computer science and engineering.

Artist Support Program 2026: Audio Guide to the Handbook of Stupad Rituals (revised and extended edition)

Antonio Davidson-Gómez is an educator and percussionist focused on fostering musical dialogue between cultures. He has studied, performed and recorded in various genres with emphases on Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Afro-Latin music. Tony has produced arts and culture programming, educational projects and community engagement initiatives for over two decades. A 2013-14 Jubilation Foundation Fellow for music in education, he has developed curricula for PBS and the EMP Museum/Smithsonian, in addition to teaching students and educators for Seattle’s Creative Advantage and various school districts. Tony is the Education Manager at Broadway Center for Performing Arts and is a speaker on music and culture for Humanities Washington, offering presentations including Saffron & Honey: Muslims, Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain and Mapping Latino Musical Migrations. Formerly a K-12 teacher, he has been a Collaborating Teacher with Cal Performances, the Silk Road Project and the Jewish Music Festival, designed a college prep course on world music and managed educational resources and wrote documentaries for KCTS 9 Public Television in Seattle. Recent musical projects include work with Tango del Cielo, Gary Stroutsos and the Early Music Guild of Seattle. Tony holds a Masters in Education from UC Berkeley and has conducted study and research trips in the Mediterranean and Latin America, most recently returning from travels in Morocco and Spain where he studied music and history.

Artist Support Program 2026 (with Trio Guadalevin)

Artist Support Program 2024 (with Trio Guadalevin): El Noroeste – A Musical Portrait of Washington’s Latinx  Communities Past & Present

Artist Support Program 2018: Continue work on the Guadalevín Project: an intimate exploration of identity and cultural dialogue which radiates across generations and continents; principally a musical collection bolstered by personal writings and historical accounts.

Artist Support Program 2015: Record music from many traditions for the Guadalevin Project, an exploration of identity and cultural dialogue combining elements of autobiography, travelogue, and musical collection.

As a performer on lute, theorbo and Baroque guitar, August Denhard has appeared with Baroque Northwest, Seattle Baroque, the Concord Ensemble, Chicago Music of the Baroque, the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra, Camarata Pacifica Baroque, and many other ensembles specializing in early music. He is an accompanist/coach for 16th and 17th century song at Ars Vocalis Mexico in Morelia, Michoacan.

Gus has given numerous solo recitals and is in demand as an accompanist of 17th century vocal music. He performs regularly in a lute song duo with tenor Eric Mentzel, with the Turkish udist/composer, Münir Nurettin Beken, and with the Japanese kugo harpist Tomoko Sugawara.

In addition to his activities as a performer, August Denhard is the Executive Director of Early Music Seattle, the Pacific Northwest’s oldest and largest presenter of early music.

Artist Support Program 2026 (with Trio Guadalevin)

Artist Support Program 2024 (with Trio Guadalevin): El Noroeste – A Musical Portrait of Washington’s Latinx  Communities Past & Present

Artist Support Program 2012 (with Eric Mentzel): The English Cavalier Songs, a program of duets for lute and tenor.

Artist Support Program 2008 (with Münir Nurettin Beken): A Meeting Place: Medieval and Renaissance Music for Lute and Ud

Artist Support Program 2002: Cusp of the Baroque, a CD of works for solo lute.

Abel Rocha is a Mexico City-born folklorist, singer and multi-instrumentalist who performs music of Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Chile and Argentina. He is a foundational member of groups including Trío Guadalevín. Correo Aereo, and Los Flacos and was recently the subject of the KCTS 9 Seattle Emmy-nominated documentary, Los Artistas.

Artist Support Program 2026 (with Trio Guadalevin)

Artist Support Program 2024 (with Trio Guadalevin): El Noroeste – A Musical Portrait of Washington’s Latinx  Communities Past & Present

An original Northwest artist with a PNW sound. Largely instrumental, Alec Estes’s music covers a broad range of moods. His current project will be looking at one of the waterways that provide Seattle with drinking water.  He hopes to present that project in the winter of 2026.  For now, put on some headphones and slip into the sound.

Artist Support Program 2026: Mountain to Sound (A Journey Along One Puget Sound Waterway)

The proud recipient of the 2022 Artist at the Center, 2023 4Culture Projects, and 2022 Uptown Storefronts grants, Miz Floes is an ever-evolving artistic implant into Seattle. Not a stranger to poverty or the byproducts that can impact families; as a youth, Miz witnessed violence and crime daily, even had the misfortune to experience poverty first hand. The literary arts saved her! Through poetry Miz Floes located an escape from the madness that surrounded her. Her soul connection to literature inspired the evolution of this BIPOC writer, performance poet, theater producer, director, actress, storyteller, and Jazz vocalist. Her literary journey led to her relocation from the “Windy City” of Chicago to the Seattle area in 1991. Miz is a current member of the African American Writers Alliance, and currently performs as a member of the Griot Party Experience. In addition she has penned 15 scripts and published 7 manuscripts.

Artist Support Program 2026: Royalty Revisited

Nina Fry is a transatlantic actor, director and producer. She began as a series regular in a BBC children’s television series at age 12. After leaving the series, she gained a BFA in Acting from Drama Centre London and went on to act in film, theatre and television. Since moving to the US in 2010, she has worked as a director and producer of plays, opera and film as well as written, directed and produced her own work. She also completed an MFA in Directing at The New School of Drama.

Her work is driven by a desire to better understand the dissonance between society’s idealization of ‘the powerful woman’ and the limitations that owning this title chains us to. She explores ‘What is Womanhood?’ and the conflicting emotions of AWE and FEAR that she has experienced from embracing this identity.

Her process is greatly influenced by her life long passions of sound, movement and documentary. Mixing these forms together, she creates highly stylized productions that find their grounding from honest and truthful experiences. She has worked in film, podcast, cabaret theatre, opera, plays, movement, soundscapes and more.

Artist Support Program 2026: The Hole Story

Baroque violinist Eleanor Legault is a versatile performer and interpreter of early music, who plays with a diverse roster of period ensembles. Recent performances include international tours with The English Concert, and appearances with Les Arts Florissants, Philharmonie Austin, Tempesta di Mare, The Sebastians, and soloist with Seattle Chamber Orchestra. Eleanor is founder of Duo Moda, a historical violin/cello duo, whose album of unpublished duets from the Classical era is expected to release in 2026, as well as ensemble Aquitaine, a bi-coastal, research-based group presenting their first season around the piccolo violin. Eleanor was a finalist in the 2025 Matthieu-Duguay International Early Music Competition, and recently made her directorial debut in Seattle, WA with Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra. She has presented at conferences across the country on composer Emilie Mayer, and was the first to speak about Mayer’s work at the American Musicological Society, as well as curate a program based on her work with Arpeggione Ensemble this past season. Eleanor performs on a composite Tecchler violin from Rome, 1703.

Artist Support Program 2026: Twists and Tunings: Exploring Scordatura and the Stories Tuning Tells

Soprano Laura Loge has been hailed for her “luminous stage presence” and “characterful and versatile voice.” Opera roles include Violeta, Micaëla, Ännchen, and many more. She has performed as the soprano soloist in Mozart’s Requiem; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Incidental Music to Egmont; Neilsen’s Symphony No. 3; Fauré’s Requiem; Grieg’s Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, Foran sydens kloster, and Peer Gynt; David Monrad Johansen’s Syv Sanger; Schumann’s Mass and Requiem; Handel’s Messiah; and Verdi’s Requiem.

She regularly performs concerts of Nordic art song, which she has performed across the United States and in Norway, including in Edvard Grieg’s villa. She has released two CDs, Breaking the Languages Barrier, and Songs & Piano Music of Edvard Grieg, Op. 33 & 66. Her third album, Der skreg en fugl, featuring world-premiere recordings of songs by Norwegian women, will be released on the Chandos label. For the 2025 bicentennial celebration of the first wave of Norwegian immigration to America, Laura collaborated with Steven Luksan, presenting Musical Migration, a concert of songs and piano works by Norwegian-American immigrants, with tours in the US and Norway. She frequently gives presentations, workshops, and masterclasses focusing on Nordic art song and chamber music.

Laura is the Artistic Director of the Nordic Chamber Music Series, Music Series Coordinator at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, and the President and Founder of the NW Edvard Grieg Society.

Artist Support Program 2026 (with Steven Luksan): Musical Migration: 200 years of Norwegian-American immigration in music

Steven Luksan is a composer, pianist, music historian, and educator making music in Seattle. He is a pianist at Seattle Opera and the accompanist for the Seattle Mannskor (The Norwegian Male Chorus of Seattle). He currently serves as Composer-in-Residence with the Northwest Edvard Grieg Society and is the founder and artistic director of the Saltwater Music Series (Des Moines, WA). Steven holds a Master’s Degree in Music Composition from the Univ. of British Columbia and Bachelor’s Degrees in Music Composition and Norwegian Language from the Univ. of Washington.

Steven’s projects in the 2025/26 concert season include two performances of his opera Valparaiso (Oct. ‘25), three performances of his reconstruction of Gerard Tonning’s lost opera Leif Erikson (Oct. ‘25), a concert tour of Norway (Nov. ‘25), presentations of his original scholarship at the International Edvard Grieg Society in Bergen, Norway, a recital at Cascadia Art Museum (Jan. ‘26), an appearance at the Cascade Song Festival (Jan. ‘26), a performance tour with Seattle Opera’s School Opera Tour, and the completion of a new choral composition, co-commissioned by Seattle Opera and the US Army field Band and Soldiers’ Chorus (premiere date TBD).

Artist Support Program 2026 (with Laura Loge): Musical Migration: 200 years of Norwegian-American immigration in music

A South Sudanese American raised in the rugged inner city of Omaha, Prince David is a sonically versatile artist whose roots trace back to the raw spirit of early East Coast hip-hop. Blending witty lyrical acrobatics with unfiltered emotional depth, his music captures the tension of a man who wrestles with faith, survival, and ambition. Through introspective storytelling he endeavors to shed light on the struggles of the common man, brought up in circumstances outside of his power to control, fueling his desire to be the change.

Artist Support Program 2026

Clara Ritger (she/her) is a writer, actor, filmmaker, and teacher of meditation and mindful movement. As an award-winning documentary filmmaker with over a decade of experience, her work has appeared in international film festivals and U.S. national news media outlets.

After a prolonged struggle with her health, Clara turned her lens on herself, embarking on a transformational journey around the world to heal. That journey became the foundation for her memoir, Object in Motion, for which she is currently seeking literary representation. She shares more stories of her experiences and self-revelations in her newsletter, Adventure to Awaken.

Clara is a trauma-informed practitioner who believes that safety is the soil from which people grow, that self-love is the water that washes away shame, and that living courageously in one’s truth invites others to set themselves free. It is from this foundation that her storytelling and teaching dances with the polarities of what it means to be alive.

Artist Support Program 2026: An audio-video performance adapted from Clara Ritger’s forthcoming memoir, Object in Motion, about overcoming trauma, reclaiming the physical body after illness, and becoming the subject of her own life story.

Melanie Sevcenko is an audio editor & producer, writer, and sound artist. Based in Portland, OR, she currently edits and produces Live Wire, a nationally-syndicated public radio variety program from PRX. She’s also reported for numerous outlets, including The Guardian, American Public Media, NPR, BBC World Service, and CBC, amongst others. As an accomplished poet, Melanie’s debut collection I Still Go to Bed with Water was published by Unsolicited Press in 2022. She’s also the recipient of a Portland Arts Project Grant, from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and has attended several writing residencies in the Pacific Northwest. Her sound art — which combines her own field recordings, poetry, musicscapes, and sampling — has been showcased on Transom, a Peabody Award-winning platform for new works in radio, as well as on famed community radio station WFMU.

Artist Support Program 2026: A collection of 10 audio poems based on her poetry collection Educated Ear.

Combining the vintage soul of “Bonnie Raitt with the lyrical poignancy of Joni Mitchell,” Nashville-based, award-winning songwriter Tai Shan’s seventh studio album Wildfire Moon (August 2024) has been hailed by LA Weekly as “simply stunning.” Known for her magnetic live performances, Tai has toured extensively across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, sharing her breezy, road-trippin’ tunes described as “infectious and impossible to sit still to.” She has performed for audiences as varied as Pope John Paul II and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and graced iconic stages including Nashville’s Bluebird Café. A critic’s darling and a songwriter’s songwriter, she is a two-time Kerrville New Folk Finalist and the recipient of the grand prize from both the Rocky Mountain Songwriting Festival and the John Cirrillo Scholarship Fund.

Artist Support Program 2026: Am Album of Stories About Addiction, Recovery, and the Resilience of the Families Who Live It

Artist Support Program 2016: Meet in the Middle, a full length album of songs inspired by literature