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Pantea Karimi

Visual Artist

Pantea Karimi has lived, studied, and worked in Iran, the UK and the US and presently resides in San Jose, California. Karimi’s fine arts are in public and private collections and have been exhibited in diverse solo, group and traveling exhibitions in Iran, Algeria, Germany, Croatia, Mexico, the UK, and the US. She is the recipient of the 2019 Arts and Cultural Exchange Grant in San Jose; the 2016-2017 Kala Fellowship Award; and the 2011 Multicultural Arts Leadership Initiative Fellowship. Karimi researches visual representations in medieval Persian and Arab and early modern European scientific manuscripts in five categories: mathematics, medicinal botany, anatomy, optics, and cartography. She works with interactive installations, virtual reality, silkscreen, and digital prints. Pantea is an Adjunct Faculty in the Departments of Studio Art and Digital Media at the College of San Mateo and maintains a studio in Cubberley Artist Studios in Palo Alto, CA.

Robert Kelley

Performing Artist: Stage Director

A Bay Area native and Stanford University graduate, Robert Kelley founded TheatreWorks in 1970 and has been its Artistic Director ever since. He has directed over 150 TheatreWorks productions, including many world or regional premieres. In 2012, he received the Silicon Valley Arts Council’s Legacy Laureate Award for his lifetime of artistic achievement. The Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle (BATCC) also presented him with both their Paine Knickerbocker award for lifetime achievement and for his direction of TheatreWorks’ productions of four different performances. He has also received BATCC Awards for Outstanding Direction for his productions of Into the Woods, Pacific Overtures, Rags, Sweeney Todd, Another Midsummer Night, Sunday in the Park with George, Jane Eyre, and Caroline, or Change; Bay Area Drama-Logue Awards for his direction of Ah, Wilderness! and Once in a Lifetime; Dean Goodman Choice Awards for Violet, Ragtime, Proof, Dolly West’s Kitchen, and Harold & Maude; and Back Stage West Garland Awards for his direction of Side Show and Sunday in the Park with George. He recently directed 33 Variations, Of Mice and Men, The Secret Garden, Sense and Sensibility, and Snow Falling on Cedars, and productions of Emma at TheatreWorks, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, and Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.

Deborah Kennedy

Visual Artist: Mixed Media

Deborah Kennedy has exhibited in California and Europe in numerous solo and group shows. She is currently exhibiting in two shows including the Triton Museum’s 2009 Statewide Drawing and Print Competition and Exhibition. Recently, she received an award in the Indoor Sculpture Exhibition at the Santa Clara City Hall. In 2007, she exhibited in completed her fourth public artwork, Solar Sight, for Sunnyside Park in San Francisco. Kennedy presented an installation, The March of Eco-folly, at the Thacher Gallery in San Francisco in 2007. In 1999, she completed a solo exhibition, Nature Speaks, in the de Saisset Museum of Santa Clara University. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a three-year California Arts Council grant to work with at-risk youth on graffiti murals and an Artist’s Fellowship for Installation Arts from the Arts Council of Santa Clara County, in San Jose, California. Kennedy has presented at eco-art conferences and also teaches art and art history classes at the college and university level. Deborah Kennedy’s artwork consists of conceptually-based installations and objects in galleries, museums and public spaces. Her work begin with questions, such as: What new ways of thinking can help us solve our environmental problems? Can we reform our technological systems so they operate in a bio-compatible manner? How is exposure to toxic chemicals affecting the health of human and animal populations? Questions, such as these, focusing on social and environmental dilemmas are the starting point of her work. These questions propel her investigations. Today, the majority of her research is web-based, where she tracks rapidly advancing scientific research on endocrine disruptors, the amphibian decline and other areas of concern. This research informs her choice of images, materials, and methods. Therefore, her creative process and artwork are characterized by an on-going state of inquiry, extensive research, and a balance between concept and form. Kennedy says, “I want to work at the growing edge, where we as a global community are struggling to create new visions that will help solve our environmental problems. My hope is that these new perceptions will help us change how we think about ourselves and our role in the world. Then, perhaps, we can begin to change our behaviors as individuals and larger communities.”

Nina Koepcke

Visual Artist: Ceramist, Painter, Print Maker

Nina Koepcke has over thirty-five years’ experience working as both artist and arts facilitator. Her ceramics, paintings and prints receive consistent recognition with awards and inclusion in regional, national, and international art competitions. Her artwork in public and private collections in the United States, Canada, Russia, France and Japan, includes the permanent collections of the Triton Museum, the Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, CA, the Valley Medical Center, San Jose, City Museum of St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia. Fujiwara collection, Okayama, Japan and AIR Vallauris, France.

Phyllis Koestenbaum

Literary Arts: Writer

Phyllis Koestenbaum is currently completing a mixed-genre manuscript of essays, prose poems, lyric essays (essay-like prose poems), and very short fiction. Autobiographical material links the individual pieces in the all-prose manuscript. She is also working on a manuscript of Selected Poems, to include work from her eight published poetry books as well as new poems; and a sequence of Mistranslations, poems veritably her own, since, except for a minor knowledge of French, she does not read or speak the languages of the original texts. Koestenbaum’s most recent book is Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies (2001), preceded by Criminal Sonnets (1998). Koestenbaum’s latest publication is her essay, The Secret Climate the Year I Stopped Writing, in the Summer 2007 issue of The Massachusetts Review. Other recent publications include a selection from her book oh I can’t she says in an anthology of fragmentary pieces (Impassio Press, 2006); prose poems in the literary journals Court Green, Witness, and Sentence; and poems and fiction online. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council and been in residence at MacDowell, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown as a Senior Fellow, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her poems have been selected twice for the The Best American Poetry anthology. A poetry teacher for many years, she has taught in Continuing Studies at Stanford and at the 2007 Foothill College Writers Conference. She continues to teach poetry students privately.

Judith Komoroske

Educator; Performing Artist: Choreographer, Dancer; Visual Artist: Painter

Dancer, choreographer and teacher Judith Komoroske is now retired after a 38 year career. She now pursues creative expression through painting and writing.

Jan Krawitz

Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer

Jan Krawitz has been independently producing documentary films for 35 years. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals in the United States and abroad, including Sundance, the New York Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Edinburgh, SilverDocs, London, Sydney, Full Frame, South by Southwest and the Flaherty Film Seminar. She has recently completed Perfect Strangers, a documentary that follows one woman as she embarks on an unpredictable, four-year journey of twists and turns, determined to give away one of her kidneys. Krawitz’s previous film, Big Enough, was broadcast on the national PBS series P.O.V. and internationally in eighteen countries. Her documentaries, Mirror Mirror, In Harm’s Way, Little People, and Drive-in Blues were all broadcast on national PBS and her short film Styx is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Little People was nominated for a national Emmy Award and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Krawitz has had one-woman retrospectives of her films at venues including the Portland Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Rice Media Center, the Austin Film Society, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 2011, she was awarded an artist’s residency at Yaddo. Krawitz is a Professor at Stanford University and director of the M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film and Video.

Terry Kreiter

Visual Artist: Sculptor

I have been making art in various media for more than 40 years. In the last 20 years most of my concentration has been in bronze cast sculpture. I still draw, paint and fabricate. I work in my studio / foundry which I designed and built behind my home. My current work is bronze cast and fabricated sculpture. The castings are unique (one of a kind ), and cast from my original wax patterns into sacrificial flasks. This method of finality makes certain that the sculpture has been well thought out and brought to a conclusion that meets my satisfaction and allows me to move on to the next piece. I think of my sculpture as personal artifacts. They are illustrations of literature, conversations, events and thoughts. My sculpture is preceded by many drawings and paintings which leads me to create relationships between the objects, symbols and images in a stream of consciousness sort of way; and, which allows them to take on a life of their own. In this way I’m assembling something like a montage; and in a way, I’m playing in the sandbox. I render the objects, symbols, details and surfaces in an intimate style. Using the sculpture as a code or coda I strive to offer more than enough details and symbolism to allow the viewer to complete the idea and make it their own.

Mythili Kumar

Performing Artist: Choreographer, Dancer

Artistic Director Mythili Kumar founded Abhinaya Dance Company of San Jose in 1980 to present professional–quality and innovative performances of South Indian classical dance. Now celebrating 35 years of performance and instruction, Mythili has been Abhinaya’s Artistic Director throughout its growth as a regionally and nationally-recognized dance program. She has nurtured over 1600 Indian American girls, training a generation of exceptional dancers. Through Mythili’s direction, Abhinaya Dance Company is known for its adherence to traditional dance as well as its inventive programming and collaborations with other artists, including San Jose Taiko. A dedicated teacher and expressive choreographer, Mythili has garnered many awards, including Choreographers Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1989-1993), Outstanding Artist Award from the Federation of Indo-American Association (1990), the Malonga Casquelourd Lifetime Achievement Award by the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival (2010), and an Isadora Duncan Sustained Achievement award from the Bay Area Izzies Committee (2011).

Rasika Kumar

Performing Artist: Dancer

Rasika Kumar is the daughter and student of Mythili Kumar, Artistic Director of Abhinaya Dance Company. She began studying at the early age of four and performed her arangetram in 1996. Additionally, Rasika has studied abhinaya with Padmabhushan Kalanidhi Narayanan for several years and has trained under Sri C.V Chandrasekar. She has also attended workshops by several acclaimed artists including Smt. Bragha Bessel, Sri Madurai P Muralidharan, and Smt. Rama Vaidhyanathan. Rasika performs regularly as a soloist and as part of Abhinaya Dance Company’s ensemble in the greater Bay Area. She began performing as a company member in 1996, with major roles in several of Abhinaya’s productions from 1996 till 2000. In 2000, she moved to Cambridge, MA to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, as a member and later president of Natya, MIT’s classical dance club, Rasika organized, choreographed, and performed in various events in the greater Boston area from 2000 until her graduation in 2005. Rasika spent the fall of 2004 living and training in Chennai, India, studying under Padmabhushan Kalanidhi Narayanan and Sri C.V. Chandrasekar, and performed in the annual Chennai music and dance festival to critical acclaim. In 2005, she returned to Bay Area and continued performing with Abhinaya. Rasika has been a featured soloist since 2005 and assistant choreographer since 2006 for many of Abhinaya’s productions. While working as a software engineer at Google, Inc, Rasika continues to perform and tour both as a soloist and as part of Abhinaya’s ensemble in the San Francisco Bay Area and across the United States. Under the guidance of Mythili Kumar, Rasika has been choreographing solo and group pieces for Abhinaya since 2006. Her choreography has been featured in several performances and company productions including Saatvika (2006), Ritusamhara (2006), Poetic Splendor (2007), Prithvi (2007), Dharma Yuddh (2008), Rivers: A Mystical Journey (2008), and Nritya Sangati (2009). Rasika’s choreography and performance have garnered attention from beyond the Indian dance community. “Varsha: the Rainy Season,” jointly choreographed by Rasika Kumar and Mythili Kumar and performed by members of Abhinaya, was chosen to be performed at the 2007 Ethnic Dance Festival and also received an award and commision for the 2008 Festival. Additionally, “Prithvi Sooktam, ” choreographed by Rasika in 2007, has been selected to perform at the 2010 Ethnic Dance Festival. Rasika has been selected to perform her solo choreography for sjDANCEco’s Annual ChoreoProject Award in 2007, 2008, and 2010 and for the WestWave Dance Festival at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2008. She is also the recipient of the Arts Council of Silicon Valley Performing Arts Fellowship for Dance Choreography in 2008.

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