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Cassandra Anais Lake

Visual Artist: Computer Arts

I live in a Northern California forest, permaculture-style. Life is enchanting. My eleven year old child loves his homeschool. We study naturopathy and electronic arts. In a few years we’ll travel earth to produce international art projects. Yogic, shamanic and nature vibrations consume my attention. This interaction increase beauty in my creative life every day.

Monica Lam

Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer

Monica Lam is a documentary film and television producer who has traveled on five continents producing, reporting, and shooting for the NewsHour, Frontline, Frontline/WORLD and other PBS programs as well as Swiss television and MSNBC. She has won an Emmy for her work and was cinematographer of an Oscar-nominated short documentary. Monica has written for the Daily Californian, San Francisco Chronicle, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Hyphen magazine and was the founding editor of Berkeley Patch, a daily hyperlocal news site. She studied urban planning at Stanford University and received her masters in journalism from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Robin Lasser

Visual Artist: Photographer

Robin Lasser is an artist residing in Oakland, California. She is currently a Professor of Art at San Jose State University. Lasser produces photographs, video, site-specific installations and public art dealing with socially and culturally significant imagery and themes. Lasser often works in a collaborative mode with other artists, writers, students, public agencies, community organizations, and international coalitions to produce public art and promote public dialogue. Lasser is currently working on a collaborative project with Adrienne Pao titled Dress Tents, Nomadic Wearable Architecture that conflates public art, fashion, performance art, and photography. The most recent public art commission, Edible Dress Tent, is currently on display at the Montalvo Art Center. In 2011 Lasser received a $30,000 commission to create a public artwork titled: Ms. Yekaterinburgh: Camera Obscura Dress Tent and publish a book about the international exchange with Russia. In 2010 Lasser and collaborator Marguerite Perret received a $50,000 temporary public art commission from the San Jose Public Arts Program in collaboration with the ZERE01 International Arts Festival to create a sculpture, sound, and light public works titled: Floating World: A Campground/Tent City for Displaced Human and Bird Song. Lasser exhibits her work nationally and internationally. Recent international exhibitions include solo shows at museums such as: The Metenkov Museum of Photography, Yekaterinburg, Russia, The Recoleta Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and The Caixa Cultural Center in Rio De Janeiro. Lasser also participates in international biennials such as ZERO1: Global Art on the Edge, San Jose, California, Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Canada and the Pingyao International Photography Festival in Pingyao, China. Earlier national and international exhibitions include: Aronson Galleries – Parsons School of Design in New York City, Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery in the Bronx, New York City, L.A. County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, California, Osaka World Trade Center Museum in Japan and the Academy of Film in Prague, Czech Republic. Her work has been published in numerous books and periodicals. Newspaper reviews include: The New York Times, New York Post, Time Out New York, Los Angeles Times, and the SF Chronicle. Magazine feature stories include: COLOR magazine (International), Flaunt (International), TOP (Brazil), Playboy (South America,) Marie Claire magazine (Taiwan, Greece), Dazed and Confused, (England), and Craft Magazine (US). Periodicals include: Afterimage, Artpapers and Artweek. In 2012-2013 Lasser’s work is included in the following books: “Not a Toy: Radical Figures in Architecture and Costume,” PICTOPLASM Publishing, London, “Creative Fashion,” Olo editions, France, “We Are Photogirls, D.I.Y. Fashion Shoots Back,” London, “A Waiting Room Of One’s Own,” NEA and Washburn University Press, “Seven Days-Sister Cities-Artist Exchange,” published by the U.S. Department of State, and “Viz. Inter-Arts: Interventions,” University of Santa Cruz Publishing, U.S. Lasser’s work has also been included in books such as “Made in California, Art Image and Identity, 1900-2000, LACMA”, University of California Press, “Facing Eden 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,” University of California Press, “Pregnant Images,” Mathews + Wexler, Routledge Press, “Fasting Girls”, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Vintage Press, “Women Artists of the American West”, Susan R. Ressler, McFarland & Company, Inc. and “Overlay Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory,” Lucy R. Lippard, Pantheon Books.

Joanne Lee

Visual Artist: Animator, Filmmaker, Videographer

My current work is engaged with Design and Design Thinking.

Daniel Leeson

Literary Arts: Writer

Daniel Leeson is a 30-year veteran of the IBM Corporation, a professional performing musician for much of his life, one of the editors of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe 120 volumes of Mozart’ss music, and, following retirement from his business career, a teacher of college-level mathematics. A former officer of the Mozart Society of America, he is also an award winning writer of nonfiction, the author of more than 100 technical articles, the co-author or co-editor of five books, and a published fiction writer.

Marianne Lettieri

Visual Artist: 3D, Mixed Media, Sculptor, Textile

Marianne Lettieri creates art from commonplace objects that people have used over time and no longer find desirable or necessary. Her mixed media constructions explore the process by which relics of the past illuminate and inform current contexts. Marianne is an artist-in-residence at the Cubberley Artists Studio Program, sponsored by the City of Palo Alto. Marianne is on the leadership team of Doing Good Well, a national initiative to empower next generation female arts and culture leaders. She is on the board of directors of Council for The Arts, Palo Alto and Mid-Peninsula Area (CAPA).

Barbara Leventhal-Stern (Deceased)

Visual Artist: Painter, Print Maker

Barbara Leventhal-Stern was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1948. Her formal art education began in St. Louis, Missouri at Washington University School of Fine Art. It was in their gallery that she first saw the paintings of Max Beckman, who had taught there after leaving Germany. In the Art School Library she found a collection of books on German Expressionism, and she immediately fell in love with their wood cut prints. After two years, Barbara left St. Louis and enrolled in The Boston Museum School where she was free to spend hours in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, next door. In Boston, she concentrated on Painting and Etching. She then finished her B.F.A. in London through a joint program with Tufts University and studied Printing at the London Polytech. During this time, she lived in Cambridge, England and taught drawing for the Workers’ Educations Association. Eventually returning to the U.S., Barbara joined a community of artists situated on what once was a chicken farm in New Haven, Connecticut. After the chickens died off, the place was wistfully named, “Bittersweet Farm” and was converted into artist studios, complete with bucolic goats and organic gardens. During the four years that she lived at this commune, she studied figure drawing and painting with Dutch Artist, Roger Van Damme. In 1978, Barbara moved to Southern California and began a Master’s Degree in Painting, at the Claremont Graduate School of Art. However, she did not finish her graduate degree until 1985, at San Jose State University where she studied with Sam Richardson and Geoff Bowman. Since then, she worked in her own studio in Palo Alto, California making paintings, drawings, and prints, designing and cutting all of her own woodblocks and then publishing print editions through Kala Institute in Berkley, California. To produce her small editions of etching, she worked collaboratively with Master Printer, Davis Kelso at his Made-in-California Studio. Barbara’s work was essentially narrative and there was always a story at the core of what she did. She usually worked in a series that allowed her to process subjects that both interested and troubled her over time. During the last years of her life, Barbara worked on a series of paintings about two specific communities of people; Eastern European Jews before the Holocaust and world circus performers. As wildly different as these themes seem to be, they were linked together in her mind. Both of these people lived on the edge of life and walked a tightrope, upon which they tried to keep their precarious balance, for better or worse.

Katherine Levin-Lau

Visual Artist: Painter

I am a perpetual student of nature. My explorations have taken me to physical places such as tide pools, gardens and forests and my learning broadened by museums and books. I am filled with wonder at the beautiful, horrific, bizarre and puzzling intricacies of the natural world. I feel deeply the connection between all living things. In 1992, I saw my first curiosity cabinet at the Royal Palace in Prague. These cabinets, sometimes called “wonderkammen”, gained popularity with a new breed of collectors during the Renaissance and later became precursors of our modern museums. Originally the hobby of the social elite: these private collections became more publicaly attainable when men like P.T. Barnum realized their monetary potential and purchased, displayed and scattered these collections for their own gain. It was wonderful to see the Prague collection, intact and still in all it’s chaotic glory. A large étagère dominated the room with curved glass doors and shelves crammed to the top with objects. The collection was jumbled with no clear order: stuffed birds, statues,coral, an animal’s paw, dried flower specimens, a shrunken head, turtle shells, a dried puffer fish piled one on top of the other, vying for attention. My current body of work reflects the impact of this visit to Prague. I have collected images from nature and anthropology and use these as elements in my personal iconography, juxtaposing images of contrasting origins in homage to the Prague cabinet’s Jumbled contents. Recently I have been working on a series combining skeletal remains, seeds and butterflies. These images reflect not only the cycle of life but also their interconnection. All the images are hand drawn on a zinc plate using a reductive process. The prints have multiple runs through the press. The original drawings have a monochromatic base and color is overlaid using viscosity techniques. Often the ghost of the image is used to begin the next print.

Lukas Ligeti

Performing Artist: Composer, Musician

Transcending the boundaries of genre, the Austrian, New-York-City-based composer-percussionist Lukas Ligeti has developed a musical style of his own that draws upon downtown New York experimentalism, contemporary classical music, jazz, electronica, as well as world music, particularly from Africa. Known for his non-conformity and diverse interests, Lukas creates music ranging from the through-composed to the free-improvised, often exploring polyrhythmic/polytempo structures, non-tempered tunings, and non-western elements. Other major sources of inspiration include experimental mathematics, computer technology, architecture and visual art, sociology and politics, and travel. He has also been participating in cultural exchange projects in Africa for the past 15 years. Born in Vienna, Austria into a family from which several important artists have come including his father, composer György Ligeti, Lukas started his musical adventures after finishing high school. He studied composition and percussion at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and then moved to the U.S. and spent two years at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University before settling in New York in 1998. His commissions include Bang on a Can, the Vienna Festwochen, Ensemble Modern, Kronos Quartet, Colin Currie and Håkan Hardenberger, the American Composers Forum, New York University, ORF Austrian Broadcasting Company, Radio France, and more; he also regularly collaborates with choreographer Karole Armitage. As a drummer, he co-leads several bands and has performed and/or recorded with John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Raoul Björkenheim, Gary Lucas, Michael Manring, Marilyn Crispell, Benoit Delbecq, Jim O’Rourke, Daniel Carter, John Tchicai, Eugene Chadbourne, and many others. He performs frequently on electronic percussion often using the marimba lumina, a rare instrument invented by California engineer Don Buchla. His first trip to Africa, a commission in 1994 by the Goethe Institute to work with musicians in Côte d’Ivoire, embarked him on an exploration of cross-cultural collaboration that continues to this day. In Abidjan he co-founded the experimental, intercultural group Beta Foly which led to the release of his first CD as a bandleader, Lukas Ligeti & Beta Foly in 1997. He has worked with Batonka musicians in Zimbabwe; collaborated with Nubian musicians in Egypt which culminated in a concert at the Cairo Opera; and composed a piece for musicians from various Caribbean cultures which premiered in Miami Beach. In 2005, Lukas was featured at the Unyazi festival in Johannesburg, the first electronic experimental music festival in Africa, and in 2006, he was composer-in-residence at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Lukas traveled to Uganda in 2007 to collaborate with the music/dance/theater group, the Ndere Troupe. In 2008, he taught composition at the University of Ghana at Legon (Accra), and in 2010 he collaborated with musicians in Lesotho, focusing on the lesiba, a rare traditional instrument that is in danger of extinction. Lukas’ band Burkina Electric, based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, combines African traditions with electronic dance music and has been touring internationally, with recent performances at the BAM Next Wave Festival and central Park Summerstage in New York, the Luminato Festival in Toronto and the Montreal Jazz Festival. Burkina Electric’s debut CD, “Paspanga”, was released in 2010 on Cantaloupe Records. Lukas most recently toured in the midwestern U.S. and Canada in support of his electronic percussion solo CD Afrikan Machinery (Tzadik Records), performing at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, and the Music Gallery in Toronto. Prior to that tour, he gave solo concerts in the UK, performing at the London Jazz Festival. He also completed a month-long curatorial project at The Stone in NYC and an American Composers Orchestra commission and world premiere of “Labyrinth of Clouds” at Carnegie Hall with Lukas on solo marimba lumina. Lukas also recently received the 2010 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music.

Aaron Lington

Performing Artist: Composer, Musician

Grammy Award-winning baritone saxophonist and composer Aaron Joseph Lington (b. 1974) received his BM in music education from the University of Houston, Moores School of Music, and both his MM in jazz studies and DMA in saxophone performance from the University of North Texas where he studied with James Riggs. His performing and compositional credits include collaborations with the University of North Texas One O’clock Lab Band, the San Francisco Symphony, Maynard Ferguson, the BBC Radio Orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra, Doc Severinsen, Bo Diddley, Joe Lovano, Jamie Davis, Tommy Igoe, Pacific Mambo Orchestra, and many others. In addition, he has won awards for both his playing and writing from Downbeat Magazine, ASCAP, and was the 2003 recipient of the Sammy Nestico Award. He was named the 2011 “Jazz Educator of the Year” by the California Music Educators Association, and has been recognized multiple times in the both the Downbeat Magazine Critic’s Poll and Reader’s Poll. The San José Mercury News praises Dr. Lington’s playing as “revelatory…he obviously relishes the beautiful, blustery bark of his instrument…” and that he possesses a “…finely honed melodic sensibility…” Josh Davies from the International Trumpet Guild states that Lington “…[shows] a true command of his instrument with a very studied and soulful essence.” Cadence magazine declares “Lington and compatriots come up with a wonderful and totally American jazz sound, [resulting in] a solid mainstream set based on some sweet melodic improvisation.” In addition to his position as professor at San José State University where he serves as Coordinator of Jazz Studies, Dr. Lington is also a member of the faculty at the Texas Music Festival Jazz Institute, hosted by the University of Houston. Aaron Lington is a Saxophone Performing Artist for Selmer Saxophones and is a D’Addario Performing Artist and performs exclusively on Rico Reeds.

Jeffrey Lo

Literary Arts: Playwright

Jeffrey Lo is a Filipino-American playwright and director based in the Bay Area. He is the recipient of the 2014 Leigh Weimers Emerging Arist Award, the 2012 Emerging Artist Laureate by Arts Council Silicon Valley and Theatre Bay Area Director’s TITAN Award. His plays have been produced and workshopped at The BindleStiff Studio, City Lights Theatre Company, Custom Made Theatre Company and the Orange County Playwrights Alliance. Recent directing credits include Eurydice at Palo Alto Players Some Girl(s) at Dragon Productions and The Drunken City at Renegade Theatre Experiment. Jeffrey has also worked with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, TheatreWorks & San Jose Repertory Theatre. He is the FutureWorks Fellow at TheatreWorks, the founding artistic director of The 06 Ensemble and a proud alumnus of the UC Irvine Drama Department.

Susan Longini

Visual Artist: Ceramist

Susan J. Longini has been involved in the glass world for over 3 decades as studio artist, educator, and administrator. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in sculpture from the University of Michigan and did postgraduate studies in glass at San Jose State University and California College of the Arts. From 1986 to 2003 she was Adjunct Professor and head of the Glass Program at Ohlone College in Fremont, CA and Executive Director of the Bay Area Glass Institute (BAGI), in San Jose, CA 2002-2004. From 2000-2010 she was a member of the City of Fremont Art Review Board, in charge of awarding artists grants for Art in Public Places projects. Susan’s work is exhibited throughout the United States and is in public and private collections in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. She is a frequent lecturer, guest curator and juror. Her particular interest in glass is pate de verre, literally “paste of glass”, which uses glass frits and powders formed by hand and placed in a mold, then fired in a kiln to produce one-of-a-kind sculptures. In addition to pursuing a career as a studio artist, she is President of the Glass Alliance of Northern California (GLANC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to further education and appreciation of glass art. She is also Program Manager for boxART!, in charge of transforming Fremont’s 165 traffic signal control boxes into works of art.

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