Jack Straw New Media Gallery

Sasha K Petrenko (she/her) is an earthling, artist and storyteller. Her interdisciplinary practice blends sculpture, theater, video and sound. Rooted in eco-feminism, rock n’ roll, and post-apocalypse studies, Sasha’s work functions as an invitation for audience members to collectively create sonic, somatic experiences. Recent performances include Northwest New Works Festival, On the Boards, Seattle, 2019; Power of Language Conference, Wesleyan College, CT, 2021; We Will Not Be Silent, Western Gallery, Bellingham, 2021; and Your Anomaly is my Normal at the Bellingham Alternative Library, 2022, a collaborative performance with students in Dance, Art and Music. Petrenko has received residencies and fellowships from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, University of California’s Sagehen Field Station, The Djerassi Foundation, and the LAB, in San Francisco, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Germany, and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, NY. She is the Assistant Professor of Sculpture + Expanded Media at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

​​Whitney Lynn is an artist who works with a wide array of forms, including sculpture, performance, video, photography, sound, and public projects. Mining history and visual culture, her work reframes familiar narratives, questioning issues of perception and the mutability of meaning. She has exhibited widely, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and was previously an artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, The Neon Museum, Las Vegas, and the Internet Archive. Born on a military base in Arizona, Lynn attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, received a BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently the Chair of Interdisciplinary Visual Art at the University of Washington.

2022-23 New Media Gallery (with Barry Olusegun-Noble Despenza and Till The Teeth): Time Kills

Barry Olusegun-Noble Despenza is an interdisciplinary artist whose work builds with and combines archival footage, AI generated imagery, and electronic music composition. Using musical thinking, Despenza’s work illuminates the dynamic and unconscious rhythms of power structures that underlie the perception of time and space. Recent international exhibitions include the Audain Gallery in Vancouver, the CICA Museum in South Korea, and at the Fringe Arts Bath Festival in England. Despenza’s work with AI imagery has been featured in publications such as Adweek and Hyperallergic. Originally from Chicago, Despenza received his BFA in film from San Francisco Art Institute, and is in the process of obtaining a Master’s in Sound Studies & Sonic Arts from Universitat der Kunst Berlin.

2022-23 New Media Gallery (with Whitney Lynn): Time Kills

Till the Teeth is Sandesh Nagaraj and Jonathan Rodriguez. Till the Teeth is a Seattle based duo. Till the Teeth is an amalgamation of musical and non-musical experiences.

2022-23 New Media Gallery (with Whitney Lynn and Barry Olusegun-Noble Despenza): Time Kills

Zack Bent is a Seattle artist working in photography, video, sculpture, and installation. For over 15 years, he has created work with his wife, artist Gala Bent and their 3 sons. Fatherhood, rituals of home, makeshift shelters and the potential for transformation are prevalent themes in his work.

He has received grants from 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, Artist Trust, participated in residencies at Oxbow, Cow House Studios, Signal Fire, and exhibited work in numerous commercial and institutional settings. Bent studied Architecture at Ball State University and received an MFA in Photography at the University of Washington.

New Media Gallery 2014-15: Lean-out, Lean-to

Erin Slomski-Pritz is an audio artist, producer, and journalist based in Seattle. Her work blends journalism, sound design, and narrative. She draws inspiration from fiction that moves us towards complexity, poetry that ventures into the unsayable, and the bridge over Ravenna Park, which is a profound place of wonder.

Her work has appeared on numerous shows and outlets, including The Kitchen Sisters, The Distance, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me. Her most recent projects include: 50 and Forward, a radio documentary about NPR’s history, growth, and future; The Freedom Takes, a literature podcast, whose primary audience is people serving time in prisons and juvenile detention facilities; and Seeing Things, a podcast that examines uncanny, everyday experiences through a spiritual lens. She studied English at Whitman College and audio storytelling at The Salt Institute of Documentary Studies.

2022-23 New Media Gallery (with Jenny Lesser): The Three Stages of Dreaming

Jenny Lesser Holman is a multidisciplinary artist from Seattle, Washington. Her paintings use organic shapes and electric colors to represent multi-perspective narratives and dreamscapes. Jenny’s painted comics can be found in Narrative Magazine, Shenandoah, The Offing, The Daily Pennsylvanian, and other places. She makes functional art furniture in collaboration with interior designers, turning paintings into chairs and tables into paintings, in addition to other transformations. Jenny was international furniture company DEDON’s featured artist for Houston Design Week 2021. She graduated with honors in creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania.

2022-23 New Media Gallery (with Erin Slomski-Pritz): The Three Stages of Dreaming

Wei Yang is a composer/sound artist from China. He works with different mediums, through which he often contemplates the body’s role in sound production, sound in space, as well as the integration of various data from the performance environment (reverberation, light, etc.). Wei composes both instrumental and electronic music, and builds performative systems that allow dynamic interaction between different components. His works have been presented in the U.S., China, Poland, Japan, Finland, Canada, Austria, Germany, France, Mexico, Brazil and Switzerland. Wei received his Doctor of Musical Arts from University of Washington under the supervision of Joël François-Durand. He is currently undertaking his second doctoral studies at the university’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, working closely with Richard Karpen and Joseph Anderson.

2022-23 New Media Gallery (with Murphy Janssen): s(c)ymb(al)iont

Murphy Janssen is a recent graduate from UW with an M.M. in Jazz and Improvised music (‘21). With an emphasis on composition, improvisation, and electro-acoustic music in his own work, he looks to pull from and build on the rich traditions of American Jazz, European experimental/electronic and Orchestral/Concert Percussion musics. Murphy has studied under the tutelage of Cuong Vu, Ted Poor, Steve Rodby, Chris Kachian, Matthew George, and has shared the stage with a wonderful array of performers (Tony Allen, Max Weinberg, King Sunny Adé, Chris Volpe, Jesus Santandreu). He continues to work with groups across the country in a diverse range of electronic, acoustic and improvised fashions and is always looking for ways to push any and all conceptions of what music can be and mean for both performer and audience.

2022-23 New Media Gallery (with We Yang): s(c)ymb(al)iont

Athr (pronounced ah-ther) is an audio visual artist based in Seattle, WA. Working at the intersection of music, art, and technology Athr is a social activism empowered music project who makes music to empower marginalized communities.

Their 2020 debut album Childhood’s End received critical acclaim from Seattle Met Magazine who described it as “industrial-futurist R&B/hip-hop . . . that is music for the dance floor brooding of 2050.” KBFG radio station host Louise Bendall cited the album as “One of the best Seattle albums of 2020.” They create both sounds and visuals to help storytell the modern ethos of underrepresented minority. Their second full length album MMXX was released in 2022.

They hold a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts and Digital Art from Dartmouth College and Masters in Architecture from the University of Washington. Most notably, they received the Seattle Arts & Culture Public Art Commission and the Andy Warhol Foundation Collective Power Fund and are a seasonal instructor for the Seattle Architecture Foundation.

Artist Support Program 2022: Completion of their debut album, MMXX.