Musician Kurt Rohde is a viola player, teacher, and composer who is fascinated with the codification of failure in current culture, and is always searching for ways to incorporate notions of catastrophe into the way he makes work. He is Artistic Advisor with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Artistic Director of the Composers Conference, a curator at the Center for New Music, teaches music composition at UC Davis, and works with emerging musicians helping them find creative paths to practice in their life. He has received the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, fellowships from the Radcliffe-Harvard Institute for Advanced Study and Guggenheim Foundation, as well as awards from American Academy of Arts and Letters, Barlow, Fromm, Hanson, and Koussevitzky Foundations. His album, It wasn’t a dream?, was released on Albany Records in winter 2020.

New York-based artist Marie Lorenz’s work is rooted in the exploration and narrative of New York City’s waterfronts. Combining psycho-geographic exploration with highly crafted, material forms, Lorenz uses boats to create an uncertain space and bring about a heightened awareness of place. In 2005, she started her Tide and Current Taxi project, taking people around the New York Harbor in a boat built from salvaged materials, using the tide to guide her navigation. Solo exhibitions include Waterways, at the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, Vermont; Tide and Current Taxi, at the Rib Gallery in Rotterdam; and Graybelt, a multimedia project funded by the Bridging Barriers research initiative, at the University of Texas in Austin. She is the recipient of many awards and residencies, including the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Lorenz received an MFA from Yale.

Dana Spiotta’s fiction focuses on the complications of identity by interrogating how we experience the “self” and what constitutes consciousness; the tension between our interior lives and the external world; and how we are shaped by the intersection of economic, political, technological, and historical forces. Spiotta is the author of four acclaimed novels: Innocents and Others, which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Eat the Document, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Rosenthal Foundation Award; and Lightning Field. Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and awarded the Rome Prize in Literature. In 2017, she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She is a 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her latest novel, Wayward, will be published in 2021. She lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University Creative Writing program.