Students

Leah Coloff

Leah Coloff is a Grammy winning cellist, singer/songwriter, composer and creator. Raised near Seattle, Washington, her classical roots collide with 70’s rock and a pioneer spirit creating her self-identified style, CLUNK (Classical + Punk) with songs and works that are honest, sensual, funny, brutal, pissed-off, beautiful and chilly sweet.

In addition to her own creations, Leah is a professional cellist most recently winning a Grammy for her cello playing with the Scorchio String Quartet on So She Howls, by Carla Patulo which won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best New Age, Ambient or Chant Album.

She has performed and recorded with numerous musical artists including Trey Anastasio, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Michael Cerveris, Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed, Damon Albarn, Ziggy Marley, Linda Thompson, Dean & Britta, Angelique Kidjo, Nancy Sinatra and Mark Mulcahy among others.

Leah studied with Irene Sharp at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music and with Bernard Greenhouse at The New England Conservatory of Music. She learned how to play cello from her Dad, Lawrence Coloff.

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geo blake

geo blake, with a background in communication, gender, and vocal performance, investigates relationships through an ever-evolving cocktail of media. Undoubtedly inspired by their upbringing in las vegas, blake utilizes sound, light, movement, and handmade materials to interrogate paradoxes in identity and culture. By closely examining power, sex, movement, and transaction, they invite their audiences to explore new worlds they build both on stage and in private.

https://geoblake.com/

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brynn asha walker

brynn asha walker (she/they) is a light-skinned, biracial, queer, neurodivergent, disabled, trans, nonbinary woman, applied theatre and performance artist, director, scenographer, writer, performer, scholar, maker, facilitator, joker, as well as an avid learner and educator. She is the Co-Founder and Co-Creative Director of The Seeing Place, where she facilitates weekly, community building workshops and performance labs that drive towards participatory action and art within a non-hierarchical, anti-oppressive space.

Her current projects incorporate performance and interactive media art with participatory methods of Forum Theatre, Process Drama, and Playbuilding to problematize social issues and imagine new possibilities with collaborators of all ages and levels of ability in the public sphere. She also teaches performance for Playwrights Horizons Theater School, and has taught acting for The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, and Theatre Production for CUNY Hunter College. Member of Actors Equity Association, Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, and The National Alliance of Acting Teachers. MA in Applied Theatre from CUNY School of Professional Studies, MFA candidate in Theatre and Performance at The New School and Performance and Interactive Media Arts at Brooklyn College.

https://theseeingplace.org/

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Noah Crandell

Noah Crandell is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary theater maker and performer from Minneapolis. His work explores the body’s relationship with time and violence. Noah likes exploring memories, lies, repetition, sound, images, and wigs. His solo show memory boys premiered at Dixon Place in 2017. He was accepted into the International Director’s Symposium with La MaMa in Spoleto, Italy in 2018, working alongside The Talking Band and Stefanie Batten Bland. On screen, Noah has performed in the short film Toe Tag with David Pittu as well as episodes of Law & Order and Poker Face. Noah’s most recent work, My Name Is Jennifer, an 18-hour endurance theater-installation, premiered February 2023 at TheaterLab, and he was an artist in residence at Otion Front Studio in April 2023. Noah holds a BFA in Acting from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

@noahcrandell

Arielsela Holdbrook-Smith

Arielsela Holdbrook-Smith is a Ghanaian-American artist and community health professional based out of New York City, originally from Los Angeles. Their work explores storytelling, Afro-Diasporic expressions, collective healing, social equity, and the transdisciplinary integration of arts, media, and public health. Much of Arielsela's creative work is collaborative in nature, navigating performance and movement art as a form of oral history and intergenerational knowledge-sharing. Arielsela holds a Masters in Public Health, with a concentration in Community Health Science and Practice, from New York University School of Global Public Health.

Chi

Chi is an interdisciplinary artist interested in nothing and everything who likes to make art anyway the universe beckons. He is against being against things, but also against being for things. He makes puppets out of recycled plastic, paints color blind paintings, plays genreless music, tries not to act when he’s acting, and is currently trying to learn how to do all those things all at once. He is the lone survivor of a gaggle of inner children after playing a mental Squid Game led by a team of therapists. He is not an international fugitive, nor in the witness protection program. So feel free to contact him at your earliest convenience.

https://mrtchiarella.wixsite.com/chi-pieces

Jay

Jay's work tightropes the boundary between speech and sound, often taking the form of creative/critical hypertexts, performances, and installations. Inspired by posthumanist ideas, they challenge anthropocentrism, using technology and multimedia to articulate technological, ghostly ways of being. Jay studied music, technology, and literature at Oberlin College and Conservatory.

https://joshuareinier.com/

Alexander Grudzinski

Alexander Grudzinski is a multi-faceted performance and sound artist who focuses on imagery of clowns and heavy face paint to elicit feelings of isolation, displacement, and comedic tragedy in their work. By documenting their performative work through collage and warped photography, "GRUDZINSKA" fully leans into ideas of a world that has been disfigured in a half-unsettling half-comforting way through both imagery and sound.

https://grudzinska.neocities.org/

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Kerosene Jones

Kamikaze Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores extended vocal technique, queer hauntologies, and ritualized erotic transcendence. Utilizing counterarchival impulse and experimental research procedures, Jones endeavors to provide both sonic and ceremonial sanctuary for the ghosts of public sex. His work across mediums has been featured by Art Omi, Anthology Film Archives, Black Mountain College Museum, Center For Performance Research, Montez Press Radio, Wave Farm, The Poetry Project, and Onassis USA. He was a founding member of the poetry and performance collective The Anchoress Syndicate, and the host of the podcast “Pure Garbage: An Oral Examination of John Waters.” He is the current arts editor of WUSSY Magazine.

@kerosenejones_

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Donghwi Han

Donghwi Han is a Korean graphic designer and media artist who creates theater experiences and performances using new media and interactive graphics. In December 2021 he directed Little child, a production of Yeonjak written by Anthony Kim (Ansan Arts Center, Korea). He designed a concept of virtual space for the WEATHER# online multimedia opera (Spoleto, Italy, 2021). Donghwi directed the media facade opening show, a culture night in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Cheongju, 2021). He curated and designed the exhibition 'Relationship and distance' with team <관사거기> (Seoul, Korea). He designed Telematic Embrace, a telematic performance performed live online. He holds a BFA from the Seoul Institute of the art in the School of Media Arts Visual Design, and an ADA from the School of Design, Seoul Institute of the arts.

http://www.donghwihan24.com/21

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Eamon Fogarty

Eamon Fogarty is a composer, songwriter, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and audio archivist who was born in the state of New Hampshire. He has composed, recorded, and performed in a broad range of capacities and contexts, including numerous bands, choral groups, free improvisatory ensembles, puppet theater productions, and even a surf video or two. He currently lives in New York City.

https://www.eamonfogarty.com/

Dorothea Elena

Dorothea Elena is an actress, writer, and producer from Manila, Philippines. She is currently a teaching artist in several New York city schools as well as a resident artist for Spellbound Theatre and Hedgepig Ensemble Theatre. She has performed for La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Rattlestick Playwrights, The Flea Theater, and many more. She has performed in various theater companies back home as well such as Repertory Philippines, PETA (Philippine Educational Theater Association), and CCP (Cultural Center of the Philippines) to name a few. She also earned BroadwayWorld’s Best Featured Actress for her performance with Repertory Philippines. She is a co-founder of RiffRaff NYC, a theatre company that highlights immigrant stories and voices. She is often seen in Bryant Park where she practices her juggling and flow arts.

https://www.dorotheagloria.com

@dorotheagloria