Creative Capital

Professional Development Program Workshop Leaders

Core Curriculum
Internet for Artists
Literary Artists Workshop
Verbal Communications
Spanish Language
Online Learning

Core Topic Leaders:

Jackie Battenfield – Promoting Your Work
Jackie Battenfield is an artist who is known nationally for her luminously colored paintings and prints of natural forces. For the last twenty years, Battenfield has made a living from her art. A survey of her graphic works, Moments of Change, was shown at the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond, Virginia and is traveling to the University Museum of Art at Tucson, Arizona. Galleries throughout the United States represent her work including:  Addison-Ripley, Washington, D.C., Addington Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, Michele Mosko Fine Art, Denver, CO and DM Contemporary, New York. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Award, the Warren Tanner Award and the David Alfaro Siqueiros Award from Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. Her work is represented in over 500 collections worldwide including: The New York Public Library, New York, The Zimmerli Art Museum, Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, Palmer Museum, Pennsylvania and five United States Embassy Collections around the world. In 1981, Battenfield helped to found the Rotunda Gallery, a nonprofit exhibition space in Brooklyn where she worked as Director for nine years, overseeing its development into a stable, dynamic arts organization. She has also served as President of the Board of the Lower East Side Printshop in New York. Battenfield is a popular motivational speaker on the challenges of sustaining a successful career. She has been in the vanguard of teaching professional practices to artists, first as seminar director for the acclaimed Artist in the Marketplace Program (AIM) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and currently in the graduate program at Columbia University. Battenfield is the author of The Artist's Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love, Da Capo Press, 2009 now in it's fifth printing. A translation of her book will be published later this year in South Korea. For more information: www.artistcareerguide.com 

Colleen Keegan – Strategic Planning
Colleen Keegan is a partner in Keegan Fowler Companies, an equity investment and consulting firm specialized in providing strategic planning and business affairs services for companies in the communications and entertainment industries. Previously, Keegan was a principal in The Strategic Planning Partnership. Her client list includes American Express, Bandai, Citi Group, ESPN, FM Japan, Hanna-Barbera, Paramount Pictures, Sprint, Sony New Technologies and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Keegan served as the president of Pacific Arts Video Production and Washington Video Services prior to establishing Keegan Fowler Companies. She has also worked as a producer for MTV Networks, WETA and Showtime. Keegan developed the Strategic Planning Program at Creative Capital where she currently serves as Co-Chair of the Endowment Committee. She has served on numerous Boards of Directors including the American Refugee Committee, the MS Foundation, Texas Film Commission, Emily's List, the NOW Legal Defense Fund and Senator Dianne Feinstein's Advisory Council.

Aaron Landsman – Funding Your Work
Aaron Landsman is a playwright, performer and teacher. His sited performances include: Appointment, a series of works for single viewers in small offices, presented in New York and Oslo, and upcoming in Austin; Open House (2008), commissioned by The Foundry Theatre and presented in 24 New York City homes; and What You’ve Done (2005), a co‐production of Houston’s DiverseWorks Art Space and Project Row Houses. His stage plays have been presented in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Minneapolis, as well as in Sweden, Norway and Belarus. Aaron has appeared in the work of many directors, choreographers and composers. Since 2004 he has performed with Elevator Repair Service Theater, touring three continents and appearing Off-Broadway, most recently in the company’s acclaimed production Gatz. He has taught at The Juilliard School and NYU and guest lectured at many colleges and universities including Columbia and Stanford Universities. Aaron is also an advocate for artists in Belarus and Turkey, whose freedom of expression are under threat. Aaron is an Artist-In-Residence at HERE, where he is developing a new interactive theater work, City Council Meeting. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Johanna S. Meyer and their son Harold Emmett Landsman.

Artist Leaders:
(links to Creative Capital grantee profiles)
Erika Blumenfeld
Ellen Bruno
Chris Doyle
Matthew Geller
Jeffrey Gibson
Barbara Hammer
Maureen Huskey
Sue Johnson
Daniel Alexander Jones
Beverly McIver
Jennifer Monson
Tracie Morris
Richard Move
Joanna Priestley
Amelia Rudolph
Sue Schaffner
Dread Scott
Andrew Simonet
Ela Troyano
Victoria Vazquez

Internet For Artists LEADERS:

Matthew Deleget
Matthew Deleget is an abstract painter and curator. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia, and Australia. He is a member of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation’s Artist Advisory Committee and American Abstract Artists. Matthew has received awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Brooklyn Arts Council, and The Golden Rule Foundation, and his work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Flash Art, Artnet Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Basler Zeitung, among others. In 2003, Matthew founded MINUS SPACE, a platform for reductive visual art on the international based in Brooklyn, NY. MINUS SPACE’s website is used by more than 800 people daily from 150 countries worldwide. Matthew has also organized 20 solo and group exhibitions over the past three years at both MINUS SPACE’s project space in the Gowanus, Brooklyn, as well as other collaborating venues on the national and international levels. MINUS SPACE exhibitions have been reviewed in ARTnews, New York Sun, Houston Public Radio, NYFA Current, New York Magazine and Artnet Magazine, among others. From 1998-2009, Matthew worked at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), where he founded and directed all information programs for and about artists, including NYFA’s website, classifieds, magazine, learning area and other online resources. In addition to his work with Creative Capital, he is also a consultant to the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Matthew holds an MFA in Painting and an MS in Theory, Criticism and History of Art, Design and Architecture from Pratt Institute. To learn more, visit matthewdeleget.com.

Steve Lambert
Lambert made international news just after the 2008 US election with the New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency and lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art), and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab and the Yes Men. Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Prix Ars Electronica, Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council and others. His work is in the collections of The Sheldon Museum, the Progressive Insurance Company and The United States Library of Congress. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC and CNN and been reported on in multiple outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s, The Believer, Good, Dwell, ARTnews, Punk Planet and Newsweek. He was a Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York from 2006-10 and is faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Steve is a perpetual autodidact with (if it matters) advanced degrees from an art school and a state university. He dropped out of high school in 1993. To learn more, go to visitsteve.com.

Brad Lichtenstein
Brad Lichtenstein is a documentary filmmaker whose work appears mostly on PBS, including Frontline and Now with Bill Moyers. With Lumiere Productions he produced With God on Our Side: The History of the Religious Right, André’s Lives, a portrait of the “Jewish Schindler;” Caught in the Crossfire, about Arab New Yorkers after 9/11; and the BBC/Court TV co-production of Ghosts of Attica, for which he was awarded a Dupont-Columbia Award for Excellence in Journalism. His credits also include the Discovery Channel’s Safe, about women seeking refuge from domestic violence, Army of One, about recruits who joined after 9/11, and A Lion in the House, about kids battling cancer. His film company, 371 Productions, produced Almost Home, about a year in the life of a nursing home. 371 is currently producing As Goes Janesville, a documentary how a Midwestern community survives the closure of their General Motors plant, and the Creative Capital funded What We Got: DJ Spooky’s Quest for the Commons, a documentary-fiction hybrid about the over-privatization of what belongs to the public. Brad‘s films are supported by many foundations, including Ford and MacArthur, as well as the Independent Television Service. He is also the founder of docUWM, a documentary center based in the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee film department.

Eve Mosher
Eve Mosher is an artist working to activate public space through artistic interventions focused on environmental issues. In order to extend the primarily short-lived and performative nature of her work, she has tapped into a variety of technological resources, including online community building efforts and in so doing has created an international audience and team of collaborators. She is utilizing social media to expand and engage her audience and community and is in the process of developing open source tools addressing the issues in her work. She has exhibited internationally, received grants from New York State Council on the Arts, New York Department of Cultural Affairs, City Parks Foundation and the San Francisco Art Commission. Her work has been profiled in many outlets including the New York Times, Le Monde, ARTnews, and Good Magazine, featured on Planet Green and TF1 (French News) television channels and written up in many blogs including Gothamist, Treehugger and Inhabitat. To learn more, visit evemosher.com.

Blithe Riley
Blithe Riley is an artist working with video, performance and installation. Her work has been shown at such venues as Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, P.S.1 MoMA in New York City and at Pittsburgh Filmmakers and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Riley received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. In addition to her own work, she has organized and programmed video screenings since 1998. Prior to Creative Capital, she served as a media producer at the Video Data Bank in Chicago. To learn more, visit blitheriley.net.

Sue Schaffner
Sue Schaffner is a New York City based photographer and part of the public art duo DYKE ACTION MACHINE! (DAM!), founded by herself and Carrie Moyer in 1991. DAM!s projects have been in exhibitions all over the U.S. and Europe, including Mixing Messages, the 1997 survey of contemporary graphic design at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, White Columns, Exit Art, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France and the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany. Straight to Hell: 10 Years of Dyke Action Machine!, a retrospective exhibition originated at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and traveled to DiverseWorks, Houston, in November 2002. Sue was the recipient of a Creative Capital grant for the DAM! project, Gynadome: A Separate Paradise. Sue's photos are published under the alias Girl Ray, and include portraits of featured media personalities for magazines. Her photos have appeared in Men’s Health, People, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, Esquire and Wired. Her stock photography library is licensed internationally by Getty Images and Corbis.

Dread Scott
Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. He first received national attention in 1989 when his art became the center of controversy over its use of the American flag. President George H. W. Bush called his work “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced his art. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum and DeBeyerd Center for Contemporary Art in the Netherlands. In addition to his Creative Capital funding for the project Lockdown, Dread has been awarded a Mid-Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship in Photography and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Sculpture and in Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Art.

Literary ARTISTS WORKSHOP LEADER:

 Ethan Nosowsky
Ethan Nosowsky is Editor-at-Large at Graywolf Press and Consultant for Innovative Literature at the Creative Capital Foundation. Previously he was an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has edited books by Jeffery Renard Allen, Emily Barton, Elias Canetti, Geoff Dyer, Stephen Elliott, John Haskell, J. Robert Lennon and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among many others. He also teaches in the Creative Writing program at Columbia University and has written for Bookforum, the San Francisco Chronicle and Threepenny Review.

Verbal Communications WORKSHOP LEADER:

 Kiby Tepper
Kirby Tepper is a Licensed Marriage, Family and Child Therapist (LMFT) in Los Angeles. He sees a range of clients in private practice, with emphasis on clients who have social anxiety, relational problems and past trauma. Additionally, he works as a consultant, combining his experience as a performer, writer and therapist to help people develop verbal communication skills for a variety of areas: public speaking, fundraising, conflict resolution and presentations. His client list has included Hyundai America, Washington Mutual, L’Oreal, Columbia University Law School and many more. His entertainment background includes co-authoring the Robin Hood” musical sequence for the Oscar™-winning’ Shrek; he was commissioned to author lyrics for a proposed Broadway production of the Oscar™-winning film, Gladiator; he co-authored the musical Lola, presented at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference; and is adapting the film A Room With a View (with Emmy™ winning composer Craig Safan) for the musical theatre. His acclaimed performances of his own music and lyrics have been presented everywhere from the Pasadena Playhouse to Carnegie Recital Hall; and he has performed on Broadway (On Your Toes), on television (Cheers, Wings, Kennedy Center Honors) and at numerous regional theatres. He has maintained a long-running association with Los Angeles’ Center Theater Group/Mark Taper Forum as a regular contributor of speeches and special musical material for special events, having written for Carol Burnett, Sydney Poitier, John Lithgow, Lily Tomlin and more.

Taller de Desarollo para Artistas LEADER:

Ela Troyano
Ela Troyano is a Cuban-born filmmaker and a 2008 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow in Media. Her Creative Capital project, La Lupe Queen of Latin Soul, was nominated for an Alma Award and broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens (2007). Troyano is co-editing a book of essays on La Lupe for Duke University Press (2010) and writing a new feature script, Fever. Select films include her cult feature Latin Boys Go To Hell (1998) and the award wining Carmelita Tropicana (1994). As a theater director she is working with Carmelita Tropicana on “Utopia Emoticon” currently at Joe’s Pub and will direct Ricardo Bracho’s Puto for the Company of Angels in LA (2010). Select awards include a screenwriting workshop at Sundance with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and funding from the Rockefeller, the Ford and the Jerome Foundations, the Independent Television Service, Latino Public Broadcasting and New York State Council on the Arts.

Online Learning LEADER:

Matthew Deleget
(see bio in Internet for Artists section above)