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WE ARE ALL FAILING THEM
Artist Biographies
ROBIN HOLCOMB
Pianist, composer and vocalist Robin Holcomb performs as a solo artist and the
leader of various ensembles. Recordings of her compositions can be heard on
Songlines, Tzadik, Nonesuch and New World Records. She has contributed
distinctive performances to Things About Comin’ My Way: A Tribute to the Music
of the Mississippi Sheiks (Red Hen), Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs,
and Chanteys & Son of Rogue’s Gallery (Anti), The Anthology of American Folk
Music: Revisited (Shout Factory), and Bill Frisell’s Nashville (Nonesuch) and
Kaddish. A founder of and principal composer for The New York Composers
Orchestra and WACO (The Washington Composers Orchestra), she creates
music for ensembles of all sizes, theatre, dance and film. Her extended song
cycles Angels at the Four Corners (regarding her experience sharecropping in
North Carolina), O Say a Sunset (inspired by the work of Rachel Carson) and
The Utopia Project (imagined portraits of residents of utopian communities in the
Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s) have been performed nationwide. She
collaborated with Wayne Horvitz in the creation of Smokestack Arias (tales of
women involved in the Everett Massacre) and The Heartsong of Charging Elk
(based on the novel by James Welch about the travails of a rider abandoned by
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Marseille) and was a featured performer in his
Joe Hill: Sixteen Actions for Orchestra, Voices and Soloist.
http://www.robinholcomb.com
BRITTA JOHNSON
Britta Johnson is a Seattle-based stop-motion animator. She makes video
installations and short films, and has directed music videos for bands including
Laura Veirs, Lusine, Andrew Bird, and Minus the Bear. Her projects and
collaborations with musicians (Mirah and Spectratone Int'l, Robin Holcomb, etc.)
have shown in venues including the Lawrimore Project, Bumbershoot, the Henry
Art Gallery, Giant Magnet, the RedCat festival, the PICA's TBA festival, the
Walker Art Center, MassMoCA, the Kennedy Center, and the Boston MFA. This
past April, The Hover, a solo show of her large-scale animations filmed in
Washington State's regional landscapes, was on display in Seattle's
Gallery4Culture. Her website is www.thekmpi.net.
SUSIE KOZAWA
Susie Kozawa, a sound artist, composer and performer, works mostly with sound
collages and site-specific installations, in which the gathering of sounds is a
primary activity. She explores different acoustic spaces using musical
instruments she makes out of found objects, kelp, modified toys and human
voice.
She creates live sound design for dance, film and theater productions. She was a
founding member of Aono Jikken Ensemble and has been a Foley type sound
artist to Guy Madden’s “live spectacle performance” of his silent film Brand Upon
The Brain! that performed in Seattle, Portland, Sao Paulo and Winnipeg.
Recently she designed the sound score for Serge Gregory’s film By the Salish
Sea (2012) and previously When Herons Dream (2009) (with Esther Sugai),
which has won a number of awards and has toured nationally.
She had also been featured in the artist portrait documentary “Degrees of
Inspiration” along with Britta Johnson and Lori Goldston by filmmaker Gabriel
Miller (2009).
She also creates sound collages from field recordings of found sounds. She is a
member of the Seattle Phonographers Union.
She has permanent public art installations with visual artist Erin Shie Palmer in
the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle.
She has received a number of Mayor's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs
(formerly SAC) awards and was a member of their Emerging Public Artist Roster
Program. She has also received an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts
Commission Fellowship in Theater, and several Artist Trust GAP Awards. She is
a previous Ford Foundation Collaborating Artist with Northwest Asian American
Theatre's International Artist Collaboration Project. She has been a guest artist at
The International Workshop for Spatial Media hosted by the University of Aizu
Wakamatsu in Japan.
CURTIS TAYLOR
Curtis Taylor is a writer and director. In Seattle he founded a performancestorefront named Vodvil. Under that auspice he created original murder-ballad
operas and film-hybrids such as Shades of Parkland, Her Phantom Limb, Sea
Saw, O Liberty Eden and Abstract Change Pleasure. His work has premiered at
the Northwest Film Forum, Chicago Film Brigade, On the Boards, the TBA
Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Center on Contemporary Art, New
City Theater and SXSW. As a production designer in film and theater Mr. Taylor
has worked with the Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, the El-Hakawati Theater
of Jerusalem, composer Robin Holcomb, Britta Johnson and Book-It Repertory
Theater. He has received grants and awards from 4 Culture, the Mayor’s Office
of Arts and Culture and an Artist Trust Fellowship in theater. He was recently
artist-in-residence at New City Theater in Seattle---which premiered his play The
White Days in 2011.