Alumni
Mohammad Aghebati ’17 M.F.A.
Mohammad Aghebati is an Iranian theater director who has been based in New York since 2013. He has received various awards for his plays, including the Young Artist Medal of Honor from Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami. For over a decade, he worked with Leev Theater Group, which is known as one of Iran’s most successful and critically acclaimed theater groups. Several of his works have toured various international festivals such as Freiburg Theater Festival (Globen) in Germany. He was selected and commissioned by Japan Foundation to direct a new interpretation of Oedipus Rex.
Kristin Arnesen ’14 M.F.A.
Kristin Arnesen is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and co-founder of the arts collective Theatre Reverb. Her full-length performances, live art, video, sound, installation, and electronic sculptural works have been shown at clubs, galleries, venues, and festivals throughout New York City (Brooklyn Museum, Con Artists Collective, Recession Arts, the Invisible Dog, Anarko Art Fest, HERE Arts, Galapagos Art Space, Under St. Marks, The Living Theatre, Game Play at the Brick, FRIGID NY) and abroad (HomeBase Salon & tamtamArt in Berlin; TEDx at Muzeum Manggha in Krakow, Poland).
Travis Austin ’16 M.F.A.
Travis Austin is a musician living in Brooklyn. Amid playing various instruments in multiple live acts, he has recently scored a few films and delved into several multidisciplinary projects. He is currently composing material for the next installment of his personal musical project, Mediums.
Inkyoung Bae ’20 M.F.A.
Inkyoung Bae is a video and performance artist who depicts a weird but heartwarming world through surreal and fun images. Combining live-action video, visual effects, animation, and illustration, she talks about humanity, nostalgia, and dystopian future.
Chloë Bass ’09 M.F.A.
Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She is an assistant professor of art at Queens College (CUNY) and co-directs Social Practice Queens.
Sabine Blaizin ’18 M.F.A.
Dj Sabine’s work focuses on the exposure and pleasures of African diasporic music. Brooklyn Mecca and Oyasound are a few of her creative projects. Over the years, Dj Sabine’s mainstay and cultivation has been the monthly event Brooklyn Mecca, which has been coined the home of “Grassroots Dance Culture.”
Adrian D. Cameron ’19 M.F.A.
Adrian D. Cameron is a conservatory-trained theater-performance-media artist and alumnus of La MaMa ETC’s and Lincoln Center Theatre’s directing programs.
Jackie Danziger ’16 M.F.A.
Originally from Philadelphia, Jackie Danziger is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist. She hosts and produces the podcast Voices of Recovery with Serenity Lane Drug & Alcohol Treatment Centers in Oregon. Danziger has presented work throughout New York City with Ars Nova, Pipeline Theater Company, The Attic, and Brooklyn Museum.
Malena Dayen
Malena Dayen is an Argentinian opera singer and director and Princeton Hodder fellow. Dayen won the Catapult Opera’s competition for innovation in opera for her video of Wallen’s The Silent Twins and directed Teatro Grattacielo’s Fedora and Mefistofele video productions, which were selected to the international festivals of Munich, London, and Bali. She directed El Amor Brujo and L’Amico Fritz at LaMama in 2021. As creative director of Bare Opera she directed Piazzolla’s Maria de Buenos Aires, Don Giovanni, Heroes of New York and The Late Walk that was inducted into the Library of Congress’ Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection. She recently directed Firesongs at Chelsea Factory in collaboration with National Sawdust. Upcoming projects include directing Romeo et Juliette, Carmen and Frida with Opera Naples, Aida in Forth Worth Opera, and a residency with Elefantteateret in Norway, as part of the development of a new opera for babies.
Nick Demopoulos ’14 M.F.A.
Among other things, musician Nick Demopoulos performed with NEA Jazz Master Chico Hamilton for five years and leads his group, Exegesis. With Exegesis he has toured and performed as a cultural diplomat for the U.S. Department of State in Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. In 2010, Demopoulos built his first Smomid (String Modeling Midi Device). This instrument allows him to control beats and harmonies, manipulate audio samples, play melodies, and cause high-powered LEDs to interact with sound. If you could play earthy, organic music on all electronic instruments ,that would be what you would hear coming out of the Smomid.
Jean Ann Douglass ’16 M.F.A.
Jean Ann Douglass is a playwright, performer, and artist. Her play The Providence of Neighboring Bodies has received productions in New York, Edinburgh, and Brussels, and is published by Oberon Books. It was named one of the Best Shows at the Edinburgh Festivals in 2018 by the Guardian, which called it a “surreal and wonderfully written drama… pure poetry.”
Isaac Littlejohn Eddy ’14 M.F.A.
Isaac Littlejohn Eddy teaches at Northern Vermont University—Johnson where he is the Performing Arts department chair, head of School of Arts and Communication, and founder of the interdisciplinary B.A. program (and PIMA-inspired) Performance, Arts, and Technology. He performed with the Blue Man Group as a Blue Man from 2003 to 2015.
Patrícia Faolli ’15 M.F.A.
Patrícia Faolli is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist who graduated in Comunicação e Artes do Corpo at PUC-SP in 2009. She started her career in theater but later focused on performance art and dance, always using her body as the primary media. Since she moved to New York in 2011 she deepened her studies at the Martha Graham School of Dance, took part of EMERGENYC at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Her most important work includes: Artérias, House of Decay, Ctrl + Z ou 220 Lâmpadas de 1watt, Urban Camping Project, and Bursting Concrete. On this new stage, her focus centers on urban interventions, human relations, maps, and behavior patterns in large cities.
Dan Foley ’18 M.F.A.
Dan Foley is a multidisciplinary performance artist whose work inspires visceral responses to stunning visuals and gorgeous soundscapes. Foley’s work spans scoring, sound design, performance software engineering, pop music production, experimental lighting design, and full-stack web development. Project archive on his website.
Julia Frey ’17 M.F.A.
Julia Frey, a Philadelphia native, has split her entire career between her hometown and New York. She is a company member of New Paradise Laboratories, the experimental physical theater company with which she created and performed The Adults, 27, Prom, and 10 Unnameable Spectacles.
John Gasper ’18 M.F.A.
John Gasper is a theater-maker, musician, and sound designer, and a founding member of the St Fortune theater and performance ensemble.
Vanessa Gilbert ’15 M.F.A.
Vanessa Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist working in varying scales, from miniature puppet theater to multi-day performance festivals and opera. In 17 years with Perishable Theatre, Gilbert directed and produced scores of events and founded Blood from a Turnip-RI’s only puppet salon. She is a proud member of the Magdalena Project, an international network for women in contemporary theater and an associate artist with Sleeping Weazel, a genre-mixing performance company based in Boston.
Jeremy Goren ’15 M.F.A.
Jeremy Goren is a performer and managing director of Terra Incognita Theater, where he also serves as assistant to Founding Artistic Director Polina Klimovitskaya. He began training with Klimovitskaya in 2004 and joined Terra Incognita the following year. He assisted Klimovitskaya in the workshop she taught at the Zero Budget Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2009.
Ben Gorodetsky ’19 M.F.A.
Ben Gorodetsky is a performer, writer, and producer based in Waterloo, Canada. He has performed at Movement Research at Judson Church, The Tank NYC, Vrystaat Arts Fest, Dancing on the Edge, Mile Zero Dance, Brian Webb Dance Company, e-Volver, Expanse Fest, and Rubaboo. He is co-creator of political satire comedy duo Folk Lordz (VICE).
Kim Guzowski ’16 M.F.A.
Kim Guzowski is a theatrical artist who enjoys collaborating across mediums. Most recently, she performed a self-written piece on disappearance in celebrated multimedia artist Wang Jianwei’s Time Temple at the Guggenheim museum. She writes, directs, performs and creates technically both traditional and devised theatrical experiences.
Sam Day Harmet ’17 M.F.A.
Sam Day Harmet is a mandolinist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, and music educator based in Brooklyn, New York. A musician of diverse tastes, Harmet’s projects range from deconstructive folk music to free improvisation, early jazz, electro-funk, and Soundpainting along with numerous theater collaborations.
Marnie Jaffe ’17 M.F.A.
Marnie Jaffe is a New York City native who was involved with the underground music and art scene of the 1980s. After a short stint at NYU’s graduate film school, she created multiprojector slide shows that were shown at The Kitchen, The Collective for Living Cinema, ABC No Rio, and other alternative venues. It was through her projection work that she came in contact with the musicians Tom Paine and Mark C. and formed the highly regarded post-punk noise band Live Skull.
Adrian Jevicki ’16 M.F.A.
Adrian Jevicki’s Movementpants is a laboratory for dance, theater, and performance art creation. Jevicki is an artist who cares about the nature of the relationship between things and believes that actions/movement are conveyors of relationships between things. Jevicki loves to dance because it is active and thinks laughing is good for you.
Hilary Krishnan ’14 M.F.A.
Hilary Krishnan is a producer, consultant, and artist who employs a multidisciplinary approach to designing and creating theater, performances, music, parties, and other live events.
Deborah Latz ’19 M.F.A.
Deborah Latz continues her journey as a human being in search of unlimited possibilities.
Paul Leopold ’17 M.f.A.
Paul Leopold is a performance artist and producer carving out spaces of fantasy in New York City and beyond. Leopold can be seen performing often as BOYWOLF—a psychedelic queer ritual involving music, sexuality, video, and movement—at clubs, warehouses, theatres, and festivals such as LaMama ETC, Leslie Loman Museum, Joe’s Pub, MIX NYC, The Spectrum and Bushwig. As co-director of art collective The Culture Whore, Leopold is known for throwing concept0driven DIY Brooklyn warehouse parties such as OASIS, RIOT, AN1M0RPHS & the Psychic Series, as well as editing the weekly newsletter The Week, promoting the intersection between art and nightlife in New York City’s queer underworld.
Gloria Llompart ’09 M.F.A.
Gloria Llompart is a pioneer in somatic movement arts (= movement education), experimental dance and performance in Puerto Rico (late 1970s-present). Llompart introduced contact improvisation (a somatic movement practice) in Puerto Rico and for 15 years consistently studied and trained people of all ages and abilities using this form. She received an M.A. in movement and dance studies from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. performance and interactive media arts from Brooklyn College. She is certified in kundalini yoga and meditation, conscious pregnancy yoga, yoga for at-risk youth, NAAM yoga therapies (sound, movement, breath work, and meditation), the Kabbalah of birth and beyond, Reiki, and Harmonyum energy-healing modalities. She is an adjunct faculty member in the Brooklyn College Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies.
Kaija Matiss ’18 M.F.A.
Kaija Matiss is a performer and filmmaker whose work combines live performance, film, and interactive technology.
Peter Musante ’14 M.F.A.
Peter Musante works at the nexus of immersive theater, dance, music, and technology to create unique performance-based experiences that transform space and create community. His approach, as both a creator and an educator, is highly physical and focuses on discovering new points of connection that allow us to celebrate the complexity, and diversity, of human experience. His original works have toured internationally and are created collaboratively with a diverse group of artists, most notably Andrew Schneider (YOUARENOWHERE (OBIE Award)), and Trusty Sidekick Theater Co. (Lincoln Center, Park Ave Armory, Abrons Art Center), where he is a resident artist and multisensory experience director for its latest immersive touring production, Up and Away.
Wi-Moto Nyoka ’17 M.F.A.
Wi-Moto Nyoka is a writer, performer, and transmedia artist. She is the founder of Dusky Projects, creating horror/sci-fi works for young adult and adult audiences. The projects span from interdisciplinary theater to film and transmedia story worlds.
Teerapat Parnmongkol ’15 M.F.A.
Teerapat Parnmongkol (aka Lemur Onkyokei) is a minimalist noise maker based in Brooklyn, New York, an artist working with electronic media. He believes that the deconstruction is a purest form of beauty(imperfect beauty). He interprets the expression aesthetic throughout electronic media in the sense of sighting and hearing to represent the aesthetic of “Breaking Beauty.”
Eva Peskin ’15 M.F.A.
Eva Peskin is a performing artist and member of ANIMALS Performance Group. She has worked with many New York–based artists including Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Banana Bag & Bodice, Hoi Polloi, ANIMALS, Target Margin Theatre, Kristine Haruna Lee, and Meghan Finn, for whom she has served as a performer, musician/composer, technologist, and rigorous conceptualizer.
Peekaboo Pointe ’19 M.F.A.
Peekaboo Pointe received a B.F.A. in dance from George Mason University in 2002. Since then she has created her own solo Burlesque career. Performing all over the world, she has headlined two tours across Australia, performed in Russia and China, and self-produced solo tours across South Africa and Europe.
Rebecca Posner ’16 M.F.A.
Rebecca Posner makes, performs, and teaches art in Brooklyn and beyond. Her work is largely rooted in the practices of sculpture, writing, and movement with a strong interest in the ritual and community engagement. She is co-founder and curator of the interdisciplinary artists’ salon The Big Intimate. Ongoing collaborations include an experimental performance series based on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and a performance and recording cycle in the sonic duo External Lynx.
Hilary Preston ’19 M.F.A.
Hilary Preston is a Brooklyn, New York–based artist who began her training as a dancer at Mill’s College in Oakland, California, and went on to perform, collaborate, and choreograph contemporary and aerial dance works in the Bay Area before moving to London to complete an M,A, in choreography at Middlesex University. In London, followed by Brooklyn, she continued her work as a choreographer, collaborator, and performing artist, working with dance and theater forms, site-specific performance, installation, and work with film and video.
Sadah Proctor (Espii) ’17 M.F.A.
Sadah Proctor, aka “Espii,” is a writer, dramaturg, and performer based in Brooklyn. She works primarily in devised theater and intermedia performance. Espii strives to create a “cyborg theater” that analyzes womanism, social justice, rhythm and movement, and cultural aspects of the African diaspora. Inspired by the Afro-futurist, visual-kei, and cyberpunk movements, Espii explores cyborg bodies in performance through physical computing, gestural sound, circuit bending, and sound synthesis.
Emily Rea ’12 M.F.A.
A co-founder of The Institute for Psychogeographic Adventure, Emily Rea is a collaborative theater-maker, educator, and production manager. She has taught at UC San Diego, Williams College, and NYU. Professional highlights include her work as a company member of The Wooster Group and ongoing collaborations with Michelle Ellsworth.
Rachael Richman ’14 M.F.A.
Rachael Richman is an actor, writer, and theater-maker. She has performed and created all around New York, as well as internationally, including at The Public Theater, La Mama, The Whitney Museum, Flea Theatre, HERE Arts Center, New Dramatists, and PS 122. This summer she will be making theater with the Art Monastery Project in Italy, and returning to New York for a second run of her thesis piece Private(i) at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as part of the BEAT Festival.
David J. Rios ’18 M.f.A.
David J. Rios graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in entertainment technology in 2010. Rios invented, designed, programmed, and constructed the MIDI Interface AMMA (Arduino MIDI Machine Alchemation). He worked on several video pilots for Terramax Entertainment as a sound designer and music producer.
Jason Schuler ’15 M.F.A.
Jason Schuler is an interdisciplinary artist and performer. His most recent collaboration, The Oracle: Iris Atalanta Lee, The Luddite Prophetess, is a performance piece in the style of a museum exhibit.
Bhurin Sead ’19 M.F.A.
Bhurin Sead is an actor and musician based in Queens, New York. He attended the University of Texas at Austin and received a Bachelor of Science degree in human biology. Sead has performed and toured with Blue Man Group as a Blue Man since 2008 and is currently a permanent cast member at the Astor Place Theater. He has worked as a teaching artist for Asian American youth with a focus on identity and storytelling. As a musician, he has been a member of punk and instrumental rock bands and is currently a guitarist for the four-piece rock band Mortars.
Dennis Shafer ’15 M.F.A.
Dennis Shafer is a saxophonist, director, and live-composer based in Boston and New York City. His playing was reviewed as “brilliant” by The Boston Globe, performing the Chemins IV concerto by Luciano Berio with New England String Ensemble, Federico Cortese, conducting. He has toured the world as a saxophonist, educator, and live-composer. He conducts and directs Boston Conservatory Saxophone Ensemble, Chagall Performance Art Collaborative, and Brooklyn Soundpainting Ensemble. Shafer holds a Legacy Award from the Creativity Foundation, and an Artist Diploma from Longy School of Bard. He studies soundpainting with the inventor of the live-composing sign language, Walter Thompson.
Chanan Ben Simon (aka Ben Simone) ’20 M.F.A.
Chanan Ben Simon (aka Ben Simone) is a singer, composer, and nultimedia artist, born and raised in Jerusalem and currently Brooklyn-based. Simone received his PIMA M.F.A. at Brooklyn College and Bachelor of Music in composition from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. His previous works includes a 1990s-themed TV opera (The Weather Channel), an LP named Toy Store, a YouTube music video project called Bedroom POP, a voice/video installation and performance called The Dino Show, and other works that usually explore pop culture/modern-day references and their relation to the experimental contemporary art knowledge.
Lisa Szolovits ’16 M.F.A.
Lisa Szolovits is a director and developer of new plays. She has made work on the East Coast with the Playwrights Horizons Resident Workshop, Ars Nova, Dixon Place, Columbia University, NYU, The Assembly, UglyRhino, Tugboat Collective, Lost Theater, Manhattan Shakespeare Project, and Williamstown Theatre Festival as well as with Echo Theater Company, Theatre of NOTE and Circle X Theatre Co. in Los Angeles.
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste ’14 M.F.A.
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste is a multidisciplinary performer, conceptualizer, and laborer, working in Brooklyn, New York, and Toronto. His work is a constant re-evaluation and complication of the Black body’s relationship to environments and the various agencies that inhabit them. He frequently collaborates with musicians, designers, videographer, and choreographers under the name CROWNS. His works have been featured by Arts East New York (with choreographer André M. Zachary), Assembly New York (with videographer Nicole Van Straatum), at Toronto’s HarborFront Festival (with musician Brendan Philip), and on Dazed Digital.
Miguel Angel Valderrama ’18 M.F.A.
Miguel Angel Valderrama graduated from the Department of Entertainment Technology at City Tech (CUNY), where he is now a professor of entertainment technology and electricity for live entertainment.
Eva von Schweinitz ’14 M.F.A.
Eva von Schweinitz is an interdisciplinary artist, primarily working in theater and film. Holding a B.A. in screenwriting that she received from the International Film School in Cologne, Germany, in 2007, she has expanded her interest in storytelling into exploring ways of using media as a narrative device and technology as a performative tool. Her research has been focused on interactive theatrical structures and immersive game designs that blur the line between the analog and the digital world, and between the fictional and the real.
Adrienne Wagner ’18 M.F.A.
Adrienne Wagner grew up in North Carolina between the mountains and the sea, posting up in the mountains for eight years. She graduated from Appalachian State University with a degree in interdisciplinary studies focusing on cross-cultural studies, Spanish, sustainable development, and modern dance.
Magali Wilensky ’15 M.F.A.
Through an interest in art, Magali Wilensky developed a fascination for the human body, which eventually led her to pursue extensive training in healing and massage techniques. Wilensky graduated from “Educating Hands, School of Massage” as a holistic massage therapist and received her license shortly after. In 2008, Wilensky participated in the Soundwork Practitioner Training Program directed by Gary Diggings, where she completed her certification in Soundwork as Soulwork and also studied sound as a healing tool with Jonathan Goldman (2010) and Vickie Dodd (2011). Wilensky has also acquired body-mind techniques for the development of the human being at Rio Abierto in Argentina and is certified in Kundalini yoga (2011).
Justine Williams ’15 M.F.A.
Justine Williams is an interdisciplinary artist and performer interested in art as social practice. From 2002 to 2012, Williams was co-artistic director of The Glass Contraption, an ensemble-based company that presented original works of performance and film, leading artist training and carrying out collaborative art projects with communities locally and abroad.
André M. Zachery ’14 M.F.A.
André M. Zachery is a Chicago-bred and now Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and technologist with a B.F.A. from Ailey/Fordham University and an M.F.A. in performance and interactive media arts from /Brooklyn College.