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Peter Nathaniel Malae

Literary Arts: Writer

Peter Nathaniel Malae is the author of the novels, Our Frail Blood (2013), an epic about the dissolution of an American family in three generations; What We Are (2010), a New York Times Editor’s Choice, winner of the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award and a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award; and the story collection, Teach the Free Man (2007), a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Glasgow Prize and a notable book selection by the Story Prize. He is a former John Steinbeck, Arts Council Silicon Valley and MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Lisa Mallette

Performing Artist: Actor, Stage Director

Now in her thirteenth season at City Lights, and her tenth as Executive Artistic Director, Lisa Mallette is also a member of the Theatre Bay Area Board of Directors, and chairs the TBA Theatre Services Committee. She is a graduate of both the Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts in Santa Maria, California, and of the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City – where she studied under the late, great Sanford Meisner – and she is a proud member of Actors Equity Association, the Screen Actors’ Guild, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. For the past twenty years, Lisa has performed and directed for countless theatres in the Bay Area and throughout the Western United States. For City Lights, she has directed acclaimed productions of Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, A…My Name Is Alice, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Full Monty, Hair, First Person Shooter, Rent , Aphrodisiac, Spacebar: A Broadway Play by Kyle Sugarman and Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show. She is also currently directing Amadeus, opening in March. A San Francisco native, Lisa is a graduate of the prestigious Community Leadership San Jose, and she lives on the Peninsula with her husband, actor-director and City Lights Associate Artistic Director Kit Wilder, and their two beautiful daughters, ten year old Sophie and seven year old Olivia. http://cltc.org/

Leslie Martinson

Performing Artist: Actor, Stage Director

Leslie Martinson, previously Casting Director/Associate Artist and director of many hit TheatreWorks Productions, is the company’s Associate Artistic Director. Martinson has served as a director and administrator at TheatreWorks since 1984.

Gary Masters

Performing Artist: Choreographer

Gary Masters (Founder and Co-Artistic Director) for sjDANCEco is the 2014 Isadora Duncan Awardee for Outstanding Achievement in Restaging/ Revival/Reconstruction for the company’s 2012 production of Joseé Limón ‘s The Moor’s Pavane and the 2007-8 Awardee for ‘Sustained Achievement’. He has been a Professor of Dance at San Josée State University since 2001. A graduate of the Julliard School, he has been associated with the Limón Dance Company/Foundation as Dancer, Artistic Associate, Reconstructor, Director of the Limón West Dance Project and the Limón Dance Company’s San Joseé Operations since 1969. He has been hailed by Dance Magazine as “…one of the most gifted performers in contemporary dance…” and his choreography as a “…dance with symbolism that may be seen as something deeply spiritual, a kind of seeking into the unknown…” Besides choreography for sjDANCEco, he has created work for the Limón Dance Company/NY, Limón West Dance Project/San Joseé, Diablo Ballet/Walnut Creek, Nashville Ballet, Dance Kaleidoscope/Indianapolis, Path Dance Company/Baltimore, Cabrillo Music Festival and Opera San Joseé. For more than a decade together with Fred Mathews, he directed the Mathews-Masters Dance Company/New York that toured the US, Canada and abroad. Other awards include Council Silicon Valley’s 2005 Artist Fellowship for Choreography and two National Endowment Choreography Fellowships.

Ken Matsumoto

Visual Artist: Sculptor

Ken is a well-established and respected sculptor who holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from San Jose State University. His extensive track record includes solo and group exhibitions throughout California since the mid-1980’s. His work has appeared at numerous galleries and shows, and has been showcased at a number of large corporate and government institutions, including Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Syntex, Saks Fifth Avenue, Price Waterhouse, the City of San Jose, the City of Sacramento, and Merrill Lynch. he has been profiled in numerous publications including the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Tribune, Artweek, and Art and Antique Collector.

Janis Mattox

Performing Artist: Composer, Musician; Visual Artist: Computer Arts

Janis Mattox, composer and pianist, is a native of Minnesota and graduate of the University of Minnesota (BA) and Northwestern University (MA) in Evanston, Illinois. She began creating multi-media works merging live performance, dance, film, and interactive digital music technologies at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in the early 80’s. Her music-drama “Shaman” (1984) became the subject of a feature article in Smithsonian Magazine by Alan Rich. She was co-producer with Loren Rush and Elliot Mazer of “The Digital Domain” (1984-Elektra), a best selling classical CD which became an audio standard in the industry. Her video ballet “Book of Shadows” (1992) received over a dozen first-place awards and over fifty international screenings. Her most recent work is “Solombra” (SunShadow) – a song-cycle based on Brazilian poetry which premiered in 2005. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, four NEA fellowships and several grants from the Ross McKee Foundation for her “Music for Kids by Kids” music education project (see Links page). Mattox is co-developer with Loren Rush of The Enhanced Piano in Just Intonation and GoodSound Virtual Acoustics – music technologies featured on “Solombra”

Therese May

Visual Artist: 3D, Textile

Therese May has been a leader in the creation and development of art quilting, recognized worldwide as a guiding light in the movement and one of its most inspiring advocates. Honored as both artist and teacher, she has been chosen to exhibit her works at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and at the Louvre in Paris, France. Among Therese’s many awards are the Most Innovative Use of Medium award in Quilt National ’85 and the Quilts Japan Prize in Quilt National ’95. Her work is published in numerous books and magazines, including The Art Quilt and America’s Glorious Quilts. Her 1969 quilt Therese was selected by The Alliance for American Quilts, the American Quilt Study Group, the International Quilt Association, and the National Quilting Association as one of the 100 best American quilts of the 20th century. Therese began making quilts in 1965 and has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. With a focus on transformational healing, her work is centered on wholeness, integration and creativity through art and the quilt-making process. To realize and continue this focus, she makes herself available as a teacher, leading workshops for groups as well as providing individualized one-on-one sessions. She has appeared on the television show Simply Quilts and has taught at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts; the Cleveland Institute of Art; Cabrillo College; the University of California, Santa Cruz, Department of Art and Design; and the University of Minnesota Split Rock Arts Program, as well as in many quilt guilds. In addition to Therese May’s other awards and recognitions, she was commissioned twice, in 1991 and 1992, to create quilts for the City of San Jose, California, and her two 196-square-foot works hang in the San Jose Convention Center. Her art quilts hang in many hospitals in Northern California and are included in numerous private collections. Therese has been part of the San Jose art community for the past 43 years and has participated in all of the Silicon Valley Open Studios. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in painting and a master of arts degree in design, with emphasis on the art quilt.

Victoria May

Educator; Visual Artist: Mixed Media

As a mixed media artist, Victoria’s work results in objects and installations that integrate contrasting materials and methods, creating a “different perspective between one’s surroundings and ordinary materials”. Victoria was an artist in residence in 2012 at Jentel Artist Residency Program (Banner, WY) and has also been honored with a Rydell Fellowship in 2010. Victoria serves as a guest lecturer and panelist, and presents gallery talks at local arts nonprofit organizations, and share her inspiration through teaching photography and book arts at several local universities and arts organizations. She received her B.A. in Design from University of California, Los Angeles, and M.F.A. from San Jose State University. STATEMENT: An interest in tension and dichotomy fuels my artwork. Continually I attempt to merge the delicate with the strong, to seduce and repel, to obscure and reveal, and to combine the hand and the machine. A conceptual tension arises between beauty and darkness in my work, alluding to the fundamental struggles inherent in the human condition. Using the framework of cultural constructs, such as abstraction, codification, circumscription, my work highlights the absurdity they often impose. By pitting the organic or visceral against the institutional, I seek to reveal a dark humor or tender fragility in the seeming contortions that often underpin our lives. I often rely on raw materials and found objects to function as would text or imagery, allowing the history, function, metaphorical value and/or sensibility of each element to contribute to the work’s intent, along with my own investment of labor. Meticulous handwork transforms humble materials into the precious, mirroring how our own ephemeral lives become precious through our own personal toils.

Elizabeth McKenzie

Literary Arts: Writer

Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of The Portable Veblen, forthcoming from Penguin in 2016. Her collection, Stop That Girl, was short-listed for The Story Prize, and her novel MacGregor Tells the World was a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Kat Meads

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

An award-winning writer of fiction, drama, nonfiction and poetry, Kat Meads is a native of eastern North Carolina. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry, a California Artist Fellowship in fiction and two Silicon Valley Arts Council fellowships. Her short stories have won awards from Chelsea and Inkwell Magazine, her essays from New Letters, Lyra and Drunken Boat. Her historical novel, For You, Madam Lenin, received an IPPY Silver Medal and was a 2012 ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her mystery novel, Senestre on Vacation (written as Z.K. Burrus), was a 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her short plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York and the Midwest. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Dorland, and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. She teaches in Oklahoma City University’s low-residency Red Earth MFA program.

Stephanie Metz

Visual Artist: Sculptor

Stephanie Metz lives and works in San Jose, California and was a featured artist in Bay Area Currents 2009 at ProArts Gallery, Oakland, CA. She has exhibited at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco and New York, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Her numerous group exhibitions include Black Sheep: The Darker Side of Felt at the National Centre for Craft and Design in the U.K., Creatures: From Bigfoot to the Yeti Crab at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho, Formex Stockholm 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden, and Transmission: Experience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Gallery, Singapore. Metz was honored with two Center for Cultural Innovation Grants in 2011 and 2009. Her artwork has been reviewed and featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fiberarts Magazine, Craft Magazine, Artweek Magazine, and PBS. She received her BFA in Sculpture at the University of Oregon. Metz’s focus is overly domesticated creatures, especially those whose form has overgrown their function.

Valerie Mih

Educator; Performing Artist: Composer; Visual Artist: Animator, Filmmaker

Valerie Mih is an animated filmmaker with a wide range of both studio and independent production experience. Commercially, she has animated for Pixar Animation Studios (Toy Story II, Geri’s Game, A Bug’s Life), Lucas Learning Limited (Star Wars Math), WildBrain (Hershey’s Kisses) and game companies (Electronic Arts, Rockstar San Diego). She has independently produced/directed animated shorts for PBS and the festival circuit (Paper Peace, Harmonize, The Pet’s Zone), as well as a half-hour animated documentary (EINSTEIN, awarded best animation at the International Festival of Cinema and Technology). A committed educator, she has taught animated filmmaking at the undergraduate and graduate levels for over ten years. Prior to joining the faculty at ACM, she served as the faculty lead for the M.F.A. program in Computer Animation at The Art Institute of California – San Francisco. Valerie has received grant support from the Silicon Valley Arts Council, CPB/PBS Producers Academy, Center for Asian American Media and the Independent Television Service. Her independent work currently focuses on exploring the storytelling mediums of interactive books and films through her digital publishing imprint, See Here Studios. A trained classical and jazz musician, she often composes the music for her productions. Valerie holds an M.F.A. in animation from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where her student film PETS was awarded a student Emmy, and a B.A. in American Studies from Stanford University. She is currently Assistant Professor at University of Hawaii’s Academy for Creative Media. https://myspace.com/valeriemih

Cathleen Miller

Literary Arts: Writer

Cathleen Miller is a bestselling author and, since 2004, has been a professor of creative writing at San Jose State University. Cathleen has taught hundreds of students – many of whom have gone on to become successful writers, editors, and teachers of writing – in what she call the “daisy chain of learning”. Her biography of Nafis Sadik, Champion of Choice, was named one of the top ten biographies of 2013 by Booklist. Cathleen is the director of the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State University, where she has brought nationally renowned authors to San Jose and has collaborated with organizations including Cinequest, MACLA, the NAACP, First Fridays, and the Hammer Theatre Center.

Joe Miller

Visual Artist: 3D

Joe Miller is a visual artist based in San Jose. His art combines found, acquired, and artist-made objects with text and image to comment on the place of the individual in our manufactured environment. Recent exhibits at local venues include Art Ark Gallery, Anne & Mark’s Art Party, Empire Seven Studios, and Space 47. He has pieces in permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum and Triton Museum of Art. He is the board president of WORKS/San José; board member, and design and publications director of Poetry Center San José; and a board member and programming co-chair of the American Institute of Graphic Arts SF.

Una Mjurka

Visual Artist: Ceramist

Una Mjurka was born in Riga, Latvia. She received an Artist Expert degree from Riga Applied Arts School and a BA in Ceramics from Art Academy of Latvia. In 1994 Mjurka moved to the U.S. to continue her education at Humboldt State University (Arcata, CA) and subsequently earned an MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University (San Jose, CA). She has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. (in nearly twenty states) and participated in shows in Australia, Austria, China, France, Spain, Lithuania and her native Latvia. Growing up during the Soviet era was a unique experience that has influenced Mjurka’s creative work and outlook on life. Triggered by her past, Mjurka developed an interest in exploring human nature and conditioning through the prism of Maslow’s pyramid of psychological needs, categorized in two distinguished groups such as “basic” and “being” needs. Through her work Mjurka celebrates the beauty and simplicity of mundane rituals fulfilling the basic human needs, simultaneously making a reference to the widespread consumerism plaguing today’s society.

Kimberly Mohne Hill

Literary Arts: Writer; Performing Artist: Producer, Stage Director

Kimberly Mohne Hill received her MFA in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.). Currently an Associate Professor of Acting, Voice & Speech, and Dialects at Santa Clara University (SCU), Hill continues to direct and dialect coach throughout the Bay Area. Recent directing credits include: Assistant Director of A Thousand Splendid Suns at ACT/Theatre Calgary with Carey Perloff, When the Rain Stops Falling at the Dragon Theater, Venus in Fur at San Jose Stage Company, In the Next Room (or, the vibrator play) at CityLights Theater, and The Other Place at Dragon and Arcadia at SCU. Kimberly’s recent dialect coaching credits include: Around the World in 80 Days, Outside Mullingar and Constellations for TheatreWorks, Peter and the Starcatcher and The Elephant Man at Hillbarn, Shirley Valentine at Center Rep of Walnut Creek and Sweeney Todd at San Jose Stage, among others. She has published three books for young actors on the subject of dialects: Monologues in Dialect for Young Actors, Vol. I & II and Scenes in Dialect for Young Actors.

Henry Mollicone

Performing Artist: Composer

As a resident of San Jose California, Mr. Mollicone has worked actively as a free-lance conductor of opera, symphonic, and new music ,while holding various university teaching posts. Music composed during this period include the operas HOTEL EDEN (premiered at Opera San Jose, and later produced in New York and Baltimore), and COYOTE TALES (premiering at Lyric Opera of Kansas City with a subsequent production atOverlin Conservatory), several orchestral works, songs, cantatas, and chamber works, and the music for the Studs Terkel musical LEGACY (with composer Jeff Langley), and lyrics by Ronnie Gilbert (The Weavers). His one-act operas have received several productions during this period, often with the composer as music director/conductor.. He has also been a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow from l997, and has been on various panels and onsight visits for The National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Mollicone and librettist William Luce completed a new opera, GABRIEL’S DAUGHTER, commissioned by the Central City Opera, premiered in July, 2003. Mr. Mollicone composed BEATITUDE MASS (mass for the homeless), with Latin texts and additional English texts by William Luce, based upon interviews with homeless people in California, for the San Jose Symphonic Choir. More recent commissioned works include three large choral pieces: MISA DE LOS INMIGRANTES (mass for the immigrants) for the S.J. Symphonic Choir, A SONG FOR OUR PLANET (celebrating the earth) for Seattle First Baptist Church and Plymouth Church in Seattle, and ALL GOD’S CHILDREN for Vancouver Singers USA. New piano works include LA CENERENTOLA: FANTASY FOR PIANO, FIVE BAGATELLES, and MISTERIA. The opera CHILDREN OF THE SUN was commissioned by Notre Dame de Namur University (piano and voices) and the University of Texas San Marcos (small orchestra versiion). In addition, for the San Jose Chamber Orchestra and Quartet San Francisco, Mr. Mollicone composed FANTASIA NOSTALGICA, and most recently for a benefit concert, a new song cycle, SUENOS DE ESPERANZA, which consists of four songs with texts based upon true stories of four Mexican immigrants and their experiences in crossing the border to California. A feature documentary film was released by NEWPORT CLASSIC LTD in 2013: THE FACE ON THE BARROOM FLOOR: THE POEM, THE PLACE, THE OPERA, largely based upon the 26 minute opera which played each summer in Central City, Co. for 33 consecutive seasons.

Kenna Moser

Visual Artist: Painter

My studio is full of objects that inspire, and piles of old botanical books, dictionaries and letters to be used in my work. I begin by gluing original vintage letters, envelopes and collage to a wood panel; a signature layer of beeswax follows this. I have been working with encaustic and beeswax for the past 20 years. The beeswax is applied hot, then smoothed and buffed. It provides a transparent and luminous surface for the oil painting. The letters reference the written word. The script and paper are appealing to work upon. The writer’s stories have been lost. Perhaps I am creating their narrative. There is a bit of humor in the current pieces. Small images of people cut and collaged from books combined with larger life size oil paintings of natural specimens. I am inspired by artists who work with their own visual language, passions and quirks. I believe that the path to the universal is through the personal, that you can only really paint what you know. My work is intertwined with my life. Images are gathered from trees, ferns and feathers found in the woods and stream behind my studio or gleaned from my garden.

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