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Binh Danh

Visual Artist

Binh Danh received his MFA from Stanford University in 2004 and has emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war, both in Viet Nam and Cambodia—work that, in his own words, deals with “mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality.” His technique incorporates his invention of the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the action of photosynthesis. His newer body of work focuses on the Daguerreotype process. Binh Danh has been included in important exhibitions at museums across the country, as well as the collections of the Corcoran Art Gallery, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the deYoung Museum, and the George Eastman House, among many others. He received the 2010 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation and is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco, CA and Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ.

Mel Day

Visual Artist

Mel Day’s interdisciplinary work combines new technologies and the virtual with traditional media and experiences. Day has exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, at venues that include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Film Festival, The Berlin Office in Germany, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, ZERO1 Biennale, and Peak Gallery in Toronto. Residencies include Stanford University’s Experimental Media Arts Lab, Headlands Center for the Arts (Alumni New Works Award and UC Berkeley MFA Fellowship), Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Schwandorf, Germany), and The Lab (San Francisco).Honors include San Francisco Foundation’s Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts and the Eisner Prize in the Creative Arts from UC Berkeley. Day currently has a position as Visiting Lecturer at San José State University, and has taught at UC Berkeley, Santa Clara University, and University of Toronto Mississauga/Sheridan College. She holds an MFA from UC Berkeley and a BFA from Queen’s University, Canada with a year’s scholarship exchange to the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.

Barbara Day Turner

Performing Artist: Conductor, Musician

Conductor Barbara Day Turner is music director of the San José Chamber Orchestra, which she founded 20 years ago. She is an ardent advocate for new music and has commissioned and premiered more than 110 new works which have been performed by the San José Chamber Orchestra. Maestra Day Turner is also the music administrator and conductor of the Utah Festival Opera and Musical Theater where she has been resident conductor for the past 10 seasons. Most recently, she led an all Gershwin concert, as well as productions of Don Giovanni and South Pacific. BDTís resumé includes most of the standard opera repertoire, ranging from the early works of the baroque to several world premieres, as well as dozens of musical theater pieces. Abroad, Maestra Day Turner has conducted at the Rheinsberg Festival in Berlin, the Thuringian Symphony Orchestra in Germany, as well as the Orquesta Sinfónica de Aguascalientes, Mexico. Elsewhere, in the recent past, she has conducted La Bohéme for Rimrock Opera in Montana and the Symphony Silicon Valley’s setting of The Music Man. In her many years with Opera San José, she premiered Henry Mollicone’s Hotel Eden, Alva Henderson’s West of Washington Square, Craig Bohmler and Daniel Helfgot’s The Tale of the Nutcracker and George Roumanis’ Phaedra, besides conducting a vast repertoire of works by Handel, Cavalli, Mozart, Rossini, Puccini, Bizet, Verdi, Britten, Stravinsky, Barber and many others. Other opera venues include Portland Opera (Nixon In China) and El Paso Opera (Elixir of Love). Her orchestral performances include concerts with the Redwood, South Valley and Billings symphonies; and the North Fayetteville orchestra. Recent appearances as guest conductor include the San José State University’s double bill of the operas The Clever Mistress by Sirota and Suor Isabella by Xavier Rodriguez; the musical leadership of Long Live Life, music from Theresienstadt; along with the release of Choose Life, with music by Mona Lyn Reese, the fifth CD released with the participation of the San José Chamber Orchestra. The Maestra’s upcoming projects include productions of Robert Ward’s The Crucible with Rimrock Opera and Gounod’s Faust, Kiss me Kate, and Girl Crazy with the Utah Festival Opera; plus numerous appearances as harpsichordist.

Maria de la Rosa

Performing Artist: Choreographer, Musician

Maria de la Rosa earned both her BA and MA from Stanford University. For 20 years she has devoted her talents to the performance and production of dance in the Folklorico traditions of Mexico. Her works have been performed at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival in 1999 and 2002. Featured in 2002 in the San Jose Mercury News as “Champion of the Arts”, Maria has taught Folklorico dance extensively in San Jose regional schools, has served as dance consultant for San Jose Ballet, is Programs Director for Mexican Heritage Plaza, and, as Assistant Director of Los Lupenos, continues to expand folk traditions with contemporary dance forms.

David Denny

Literary Arts: Poet

David Denny is a writer, teacher, and editor. He is the author of three poetry collections: Man Overboard, Fool in the Attic, and Plebeian on the Front Porch. His poems and short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including The Sun, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Stone Voices, and Pearl. Honors and awards include a 2013 Artist Laureate Award from the Silicon Valley Arts Council, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Cupertino, California, and numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. He is former editor-in-chief of Bottomfish magazine.

Kelly Detweiler

Visual Artist: Ceramist, Painter

Kelly’s work is varied in content and in media. Having started as a ceramist, the mentality creating multiple objects still resonates in his work. The connection to his ceramic past is echoed in subject matter such as vases and vessels throughout the work. The floral and landscape imagery often refer back to his childhood in Colorado and to his extensive travels as an adult. Aside from the obvious influences of his teachers, the work of many European painters informs his work. Picasso and the cubists, Balthus, Bosch, Bocklin, Beckmann and many more can be seen in various pieces. The overriding sense of the work is a fun loving and optimistic approach to making art and experiencing the world around us..

Chitra Divakaruni

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, the O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese, and many of them have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Several of her works have been made into films and plays.She lives in Houston with her husband Murthy and has two sons, Anand and Abhay, who are in college. She loves to connect with readers on her Facebook page.

Kui Dong

Performing Artist: Composer

Born in Bejing, China, Kui Dong’s compositions span diverse genres and styles and include ballet, orchestral and chamber works, chorus, electro-acoustic music, film scores, and multi-media art and free improvisation. Dong graduated with B.A. and M.A. degrees with honors in theory and composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 1989, where she was trained in Western and Chinese classical music, as well as Chinese folk music. Between 1988-1990, she worked as a free-lance composer for film, TV and commercials, as well as composer in resident for the Central Ballet Group of China and composed a 3-act full length ballet (co-author with composer Duo Huang) “Imperial Queen Young.” In 1991, She moved to United State and obtained a doctoral degree in composition from Stanford University. Her works written in US increasingly show a unique synthesis of influences from Avant-garde experimental, jazz, electro-acoustic and other ethnic music. In other cases she has incorporated traditional Chinese instruments and musical concepts into contemporary settings. She also occasionally performs free-improvisation on piano with her Dartmouth colleagues Christian Wolff and Larry Polansky and currently teaches music composition, theory, improvisation and contemporary music at Dartmouth College. Among the honors and awards she has received, most notable are commissions from The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Meet The Composer/USA Commissioning Program, The Jerome Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and China’s new national theatre, ISCM international composition prize, Rockefeller’s Bellagio Residency, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Italy’s Val Tidone Composition competition, Austria’s Prix Ars electronics (Honorary), ASCAP Award for Young Composers, Alea III International Composition Competition and China National Dance Music. Her compositions have been presented in music festivals and concerts in Australia, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Mexico, Spain, the United States and Uzbekistan. Dong has recently completed a string quartet for Arditti Quartet, and a double chorus work for Volti (a mixed chorus) and Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir. Her music, including three full length CDs, can be found on New World Records and Other Minds Records.

Kathryn Dunlevie

Visual Artist: Photographer

Two-time recipient of Arts Council Silicon Valley’s Fellowship in Photography, Dunlevie is a graduate of Rice University’s Fine Arts Department and studied film at the University of Paris, photography at Madrid’s Taller de Artes Creativas, and painting at California College of the Arts. Dunlevie’s work has recently been featured in Saatchi Art’s BEST OF 2014 and in the US Art in Embassies program in Moscow. She has exhibited her work at Belgravia Gallery and Vertigo in London, Studio Thomas Kellner in Germany, Gallery TPW in Toronto, as well as at Washington DC’s Art Museum of the Americas, the Southeast Museum of Photography, and Claudette Lussier Fine Arts in Los Angeles. She has had solo shows in conjunction with FotoFest since 2002 at Hooks-Epstein Galleries in Houston. Dunlevie’s work has also been included in exhibitions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area at San Francisco Camerawork, the Exploratorium, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Stanford University, the San Francisco MoMA’s Artists Gallery, the San Jose International Airport, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, the De Saisset Museum, the Triton Museum of Art, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art, and Frederick Spratt Gallery. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Camerawork – a Journal of Photographic Art, ArtLies, the San Jose Mercury News, and Artweek, as well as internationally in Spain’s La Fotografia Actual, South Korea’s Photo+, England’s Saatchi Online Spotlight, Art of England Magazine, Germany’s Profifoto, and on Myartspace.com. Additionally, Dunlevie’s work has been the subject of four books: Detectives of Fiction and Women of Mystery, Waverley Press, 2014; Cover Versions, with essays by Gerald Brett and Thomas Leddy, Waverley Press, 2012; Kathryn Dunlevie: Syncopated Spaces, with essays by Cathy Kimball and Geri Hooks, Waverley Press, 2012; and Kathryn Dunlevie: Another Look, with essays by Glen Helfand, Frederick Spratt, and Don Snyder; Waverley Press, 2012.

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