Artist Bios

Chih-Hung Shao is a lighting designer for live performances in the Seattle area. His most recent lighting design was Hotdish produced by Pony World Theatre.
Other selected lighting design credits include Measure For Measure(Freehold Theatre), Miss You Like Hell(Strawberry Workshop), Two Big Black Bags(eSe Teatro), Matt & Ben(ArtsWest), The Prom(Village Theatre Kidstage), Hedwig and The Angry Inch(ArtsWest), Where Is Home: third shore(Mala Carne), All New Cells(The Shattered Glass Project), As It Is In Heaven(Taproot Theatre), Miss Step(Village Theatre-Issaquah), An Endless Shift(ArtsWest), and Becoming Othello(Seattle Shakespeare Company).

Jason E Anderson is an electronic musician/sound artist living in rural Eastern WA. Since 2014, he has created/performed music under his own name and in performance art/film hybrid LIMITS with dancer Corrie Befort. Anderson generates musical spaces through live sound synthesis with analog circuits and analog/digital control systems. He is currently building a Serge synthesizer, improvising in a cattle shed, creating music for dance and film, and finding his way back to live performance. Anderson was actively involved in Seattle’s experimental music and performing arts communities until relocating in 2018. Notable projects from that time include his label Gift Tapes/DRAFT and many music projects: BNSF, Brother Raven, Spare Death Icon, Harpoon Pole Vault and MESH.

Corrie Befort (cbefort.com) is a dance-based inter-media artist working between performance, design and film. Formerly based out of Seattle and Tokyo/Yokohama she now works from the rural Palouse where she is nearing post-production on a feature-length film, developing inclusive movement education for children and adults involving manipulatable objects, structuring new group choreography on local dancers and running hybrid company LIMITS with sound-artist Jason E Anderson. On the Westside, her award-winning short “a valley myth” is screening in Seattle’s Out of Sight, her Unnamed Shapes project held a UW bst residency and shared a Portland residency with LIMITS in Linda Austin’s PWNW. Corrie co-directed and performed in Seattle company Salt Horse with Beth Graczyk and Angelina Baldoz (2008-2015), danced for Scott/Powell Performance and designed costumes, objects and large-scale sets for both companies as well as for Cherdonna/Jody Kuehner and Mark Haim.

Alina To is a Seattle-based violinist with over 20 years of experience in live performance and studio recording. As a classically trained musician, she has expanded her musical expertise and repertoire across jazz, rock, pop, hip hop, experimental, and folk. She is well-versed across multiple genres, and performs and records both acoustically and amplified (with a dialed-in pedalboard). She has performed and recorded with artists and groups including Perfume Genius, Fleet Foxes, Macklemore, Wayne Horvitz, Jherek Bischoff, Judy Collins, Scrape, Symphony Tacoma, Puget Sound Strings, Seattle Music Inc, Andrew Joslyn, and Tomo Nakayama. As an accomplished recording artist, she has worked on many musicalalbums as well as video game and motion picture soundtracks. She is a member of the Passenger String Quartet and Auburn Symphony Orchestra. https://www.helloalinato.com/

Paige Barnes is an East Asian medicine practitioner and a dance artist who integrates over twenty years of experience as a dance maker with her medical practice, forging pathways to connect us with the beauty of our bodies’ imagination and its interconnection with the natural world. Born in Alabama, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Paige moved to Seattle to attend college in 1994. Her coursework led her to Ecuador where she met choreographer Pablo Cornejo, with whom she trained and performed internationally for 10 years. Together they also co-founded Open Flight Studio. Paige later became a certified practitioner of the GYROTONIC® method, training and teaching under Magali Messac for 10 years. Paige holds a BA in Dance from the University of Washington and MS in East Asian Medicine from Bastyr University. Now, Paige creates and holds space for us to meet and gain a greater understanding about ourselves, others, and nature through individual care, retreats, and performance. paigebarnes.in | peonymedicine.com

Chari Glogovac-Smith is an Emmy nominated composer, performer, and intermedia artist. 

Using an evolving mixture of traditional and experimental techniques, Chari is dynamically exploring and illustrating various counterpoints between the human experience and society. Chari’s recent works have posed questions about empathy, conflict, landscapes and cultural connections, the archive, social justice, healing, listening, and time.

Nia-Amina Minor is a movement artist, choreographer, curator, and educator originally from Los Angeles. Her work focuses on the body and what it carries using physical and archival research to explore memory and history. She approaches her practice as an imaginative space grounded in rhythm where improvisation, Black vernacular movement, and choreography meet. Nia-Amina is a co-founder of Black Collectivity, a collaborative project developed through the Velocity Made in Seattle Artist Residency Program. She has received regional and national commissions for her choreographic and film work and has a working background as a performer and dramaturg. In 2021, she was recognized as Dance Magazine's 25 Artists to Watch. Nia-Amina holds a MFA from UC Irvine and a BA from Stanford University and is currently based in Seattle.

A freelance flutist, artist, improviser, and composer in the Seattle area, Leanna Keith (she/they) delights in creating sound experiences that make audiences laugh, cry, and say: “I didn’t know the flute could do that!” Their works focus on spontaneous sound creation, timbre-shifting, the mixed-race experience, queer theory, and the breaking of performer/audience boundaries. She is dedicated to playing music by composers who are still living, and advocates for the usage of music as social activism. Leanna is the professor of flute at Cornish College of the Arts. She is currently in the process of recording her second album, "A Body of Breath", which features new works for bass flute, as a part of their Jack Straw residency. Her next project - "Rice, Blood, Sugar" a piece that explores the experience of heritage language loss, will premiere as a part of the Nonseq series.

Moonyeka (they/them) is a nonbinary Ilocano-Filipinx shapeshifter who takes form as a interdisciplinary performing artist, teaching artist, writer, choreographer, curator, scholar, and brujx. They have the honor of being the Artistic Director of The House of Kilig. With a specialty in offering sensually sacred dance and movement-based storytelling experiences, Moonyeka's performance, community organizing and divination work centers kapwa and kilig as a compass to imagine worlds where their communities can thrive.

 They’re currently developing an upcoming work, Harana For The Aswang. Harana for The Aswang is an interdisciplinary performance work centered on the research of harana, a Filipinx serenade song form rooted in courtship and grief rituals. As a Jack Straw New Gallery Resident, Moonyeka & The House of Kilig will be opening a 6-week exhibition of this interdisciplinary performance research on May 31, 2024.

 Moonyeka also plays in the fields of hybrid writing genres, like biomythography and is working towards publishing their first book, Sever. IG: @m00nyeka x @houseofkilig

Tom Baker is a composer, guitarist, improviser, and electronic musician who has been active in the Seattle new-music scene since arriving in 1994. He is the artistic director of the Seattle Composers’ Salon, co-founder of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO), and founder of the new-music recording label Present Sounds Recordings. Tom’s compositions have been performed throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. He writes chamber music, opera, and electronic music, as well as music for percussion, chamber orchestra, dance, film, and chorus. His work traverses themes of grief, loss, redemption, and perseverance, through a combination of sound exploration, electronic improvisation, and musical form and structure. He has been in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Montalvo Arts Center, and his music is published by Frog Peak Music.

Tom is active as a performer and improviser, specializing in fretless guitar and live-electronics. His electronic-interactive-arts collaboration with visual artist Robert Campbell called Manifold2 was was featured in the MoxSonic festival in 2019 and excerpts from their new opera-in-progress called The Language of Change were featured in the Current’s New Media festival in 2020.

Alia Swersky is a movement artist, performer and educator deeply engaged in dance improvisation, durational time-based art, film, site-specific work, and environmental installation. She is an artist and an educator with degrees from Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA in dance from the University of Washington.

 Her artistic path over the last two decades has been shaped by this yearning for deep and meaningful connections with people and places. As a co-creator, ritual maker, and a “horizontal” director, Alia seeks to touch others through dance, somatic presence, vulnerability, and fierceness. Her work ranges from full audience participation to intimate acts of One-to-One performances, site-specific dances for film and live performance, as well as durational time-based art that includes physical acts of endurance, repetition, stillness, subtlety, singing, soft energetic grace, abstraction, caricature, and a deconstruction of clichés such as extreme high femme expressions. Her teaching and art-making seek to create practices that embrace endurance on stage and in life as acts of resistance, resilience, release, and beauty. 

Hope Wechkin is a Seattle-based composer, performer and physician who is known for her innovative creations for the stage. Classically trained as a violinist and singer and a graduate of Yale University and the University of Washington School of Medicine, she performed the one-woman show ‘Charisma’ featuring her compositions to sold-out audiences in an extended run at Seattle’s ACT theater in 2008. Her 2013 album ‘Leaning Toward the Fiddler’ garnered critical acclaim and Global Music Awards for Breakthrough Artist and Female Vocalist. Together with Beth Graczyk she developed ‘The Withing Project,’ a theatrical oratorio about quantum consciousness based on research conducted at the University of Washington that premiered in 2015, and in 2018 she was a participant with playwright Elizabeth Heffron in the inaugural ‘First Draft: Raise Your Voice’ program at Seattle’s 5thAvenue Theater.  She works as a hospice and palliative medicine physician in Seattle, where she lives with her husband and son.

Beth Graczyk is a choreographer, director, performer, and educator based in Brooklyn/Lenapehoking whose 21-year career as a creative maker and scientist has allowed her to cultivate a unique perspective. She is the Artistic Director of Beth Graczyk Productions, Inc. (BGP) which creates intersections in arts and science through contemporary dance-based projects celebrating LGBTQIA+ and neurodiverse communities. Since 2002, Graczyk has performed throughout the US and in Japan, Ecuador, France, China, and India, and in NYC has been presented by Velocity Dance Center, Gibney, La Mama, Jack, CPR, and Movement Research amongst others. In 2019, Graczyk directed a new work in collaboration with Aaron Gabriel examining the experiences of LGBTQIA+ artists with disabilities that was workshopped at the Walker Arts Center and featured in Critical Correspondence. She is on Faculty for the Peridance Certification Program in NYC and since 2019. Concurrently, Graczyk is an author on 10 science publications and received a 2020 Pilot Award from Rockefeller University with collaborator Guadalupe Astorga for research on visual perception and neurodiversity. Graczyk co-directed the performance company Salt Horse in Seattle from 2008-2016 where they received funding from 4 Culture, Artist Trust, Washington State Arts Commission, NEA, and commissions including City of Seattle, Northwest Film Forum, and Cornish. She has had many ongoing collaborations with artists including John Maria Gutierrez (G^2), Aaron Gabriel, Amy Chavasse, Torben Ulrich, and has danced for Sara Shelton Mann, Mark Haim, Raja Kelly, Molly Scott amongst others. @bethgraczyk

Photos:

1) Leanna Keith & Moonyeka, photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis.

2) Nia-Amina Minor, photo by Devin Muñoz.

3) Chari Glogovac-Smith, photo by Tony Contini

4) Alia Swersky, photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis.

5) Paige Barnes

6) Jason E Anderson & Corrie Befort, photo by Corrie Befort & Harvey.

7) Beth Graczyk, photo by Effy Grey.