ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Artists aim to interpret the world, and draw on personal experiences to develop work that creates an impact. To realize that goal, they need space, support, and guidance. As an artist-led institution, this was the genesis for the National Sawdust Artists-in-Residence program.
National Sawdust’s Artist-in-Residence program offers structured opportunities for artists to develop new work based on pertinent social or political themes, experiment with new sounds leveraging state-of-the-art technology — including the Meyer Sound Constellation® Acoustic System and Spacemap® Multi-Channel Panning System — and learn about the art of making art from industry leaders and the most renowned musicians in the field today.
Through peer interaction, discussion groups, formal lectures, mentorship, and performances of their work for the National Sawdust season, participants deeply explore the creative process and gain insights that can be applied to the professional development of their work.
2022 Toulmin Fellows
2022 Toulmin Fellows
National Sawdust and the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU welcome the 2022 class of Toulmin Fellows: Adji Cissoko, Val Jeanty, Jihye Lee, Tiffany Rea-Fisher, Emily Wells, and Kara Wilkes. Special thanks to the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation for the Arts for their continued support and commitment to fostering collaborations between women choreographers and composers. Each Toulmin Fellow will receive mentorship from established leaders in the cultural sector. These mentors (to date) are Alicia Adams for Tiffany Rea-Fisher, Darcy James Argue for Jihye Lee, Joe Goode for Kara Wilkes, Nona Hendryx for Val Jeanty, Alicia Graf Mack for Adji Cissoko.
The Toulmin Fellowships provide these six fellows financial support, time, and space to develop their work, as well as continued programming and infrastructure for the growing Toulmin alumni community at both National Sawdust and Center for Ballet and the Arts.
About the Mentors
For over two decades, Alicia Adams has been presenting work from national and international arenas at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. As Vice President of International Programming and Dance, she produces the distinguished international theater series World Stages each year. Since 1997, Alicia has curated and produced major international festivals including most recently Artes de Cuba, an unprecedented festival in 2018 that brought together 400 Cuban and Cuban American artists. She also curates the Center’s Contemporary Dance programming and annual Lunar New Year Celebration. Active in the performing arts community, Alicia has served on numerous boards and planning committees including the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, the Caine Prize for African Writing (UK), Africa 95 (UK), the All Roads Project of National Geographic, Chair of the International Society of Performing Arts (ISPA), Executive Committee of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), the National Dance Panel of the New England Foundation on the Arts, the Advisory Council for Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Circle World Arts. In 2011 she received the APAP Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award for exemplary service to the field of presenting. She is also an elected member of the Cosmos Club. In 2013, Adams was awarded the Insignia of Member First Class of the Royal Order of the Polar Star by the Swedish government. In 2014 Adams was awarded Insignia of Knight, First Class, of the Order of the Lion of Finland by the Finnish government.
Darcy James Argue made his mark with his critically acclaimed 2009 debut Infernal Machines. 2013 saw the release of Brooklyn Babylon, which, like Infernal Machines before it, earned the group nominations for both GRAMMY and JUNO Awards. His most recent recording, Real Enemies, released in the fall of 2016, earned a third consecutive GRAMMY nomination and has been praised as “wildly discursive, twitchily allusive, a work of furious ambition… deeply in tune with our present moment” by The New York Times’ Nate Chinen.Proclaimed “a mind-blowing example of truly great, era-defining jazz composition, and a contender for album of the year” by London Jazz News’ John L. Walters, Real Enemies is a 13-chapter exploration of America’s fascination with conspiracy theories and the politics of paranoia. Argue recently collaborated with GRAMMY-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, arranging, orchestrating, and conducting her “macabre, majestically relevant” (New York Music Daily) original song cycle Ogresse. In 2015, Argue was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition and a Doris Duke Artist Award. He has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, the Jazz Gallery, the Manhattan New Music Project, the Jerome Foundation, and BAM, as well as ensembles including the Danish Radio Big Band, the Hard Rubber Orchestra, the West Point Jazz Knights, and the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos.
Joe Goode is a choreographer, writer, and director widely known as an innovator in the field of dance for his willingness to collide movement with spoken word, song, and visual imagery. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, and the United States Artists Glover Fellowship in 2008. In 2006 Goode directed the opera Transformations for the San Francisco Opera Center. His play Body Familiar, commissioned by the Magic Theatre in 2003, was met with critical acclaim. The Joe Goode Performance Group, formed in 1986, tours regularly throughout the U.S., and has toured internationally to Canada, Europe, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Goode is known as a master teacher; his summer workshops in “felt performance” attract participants from around the world, and the company’s teaching residencies on tour are hugely popular. He is a member of the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in the department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. Goode and his work have been recognized by numerous awards for excellence including the American Council on the Arts, the New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie), and Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (Izzies).
Revolutionary art-rock Artists, Nona Hendryx is a vocalist, songwriter, music technologist, a producer of experimental theater, short films and author, a creator of Augmented and Virtual Reality experiences with multiplayer games inspired by Afrofuturism. Tackling social issues, love and politics, Hendryx’s career spans decades of sound and style evolution. She is one of the groundbreaking group Labelle who created the No.1 worldwide hit ‘Lady Marmalade’ (Voulez Vous Coucher Avec Moi C’est Soir?” The Songwriter, Hendryx, came into her own as a solo artist post Labelle. Nona’s Solo career has seen her engage with an impressive lineup of collaborators (Prince, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Terri Lynn Carrington, Esperanza Spalding, Bono, George Clinton, Keith Richards) a short list. Her music has ranged from soul, funk, and R&B to hard rock, new wave and new-age to uncategorizable.
Today, Hendryx remains the Queen of Transformation; creating and writing music for experimental and commercial theatre and film, developing AR, VR, MR and Immersive in person and digital projects. Nona is Ambassador of Artistry in Music at Berklee College of Music, Boston and Boston Conservatory, Resident Artist at Barnard College’s Movement Lab. Nona pushes the creative boundaries of Music, Art and Technology collaborating with Visual Artists, Theaster Gates, Robert Wilson, Nick Cave, Carrie Mae Weems with Indigenous Visual Artist Virgil Ortiz and Choreographer Francesca Harper for the Limon Dance company.
Alicia Graf Mack began her inaugural season as the Dean and Director of the Dance Division at The Juilliard School in fall 2018. She enjoyed a distinguished career as a leading dancer of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and was a principal dancer with Dance Theatre of Harlem and Complexions Contemporary Ballet. She has also danced as a guest performer with Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, Beyoncé, John Legend, Andre 3000, Alicia Keys and Jon Batiste. She has appeared in numerous galas and festivals and has performed in honor of such legends as Arthur Mitchell, Jessye Norman, Carmen De Lavallade, Judith Jamison and Masazumi Chaya. Graf Mack graduated magna cum laude with honors in history from Columbia University and holds an MA in nonprofit management from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2016 she was given the honor of the Diversity Business Leaders Award by the St. Louis Business Journal. In 2007, Smithsonian magazine named her an American Innovator of the Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of the Columbia University Medal of Excellence, an annual award given to an alumnus who has demonstrated excellence in their field of work. In 2008, she delivered the keynote address to the graduates of Columbia University’s School of General Studies. As a dance educator, Graf Mack most recently taught as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Houston and was a visiting assistant professor at Webster University. She is a co-founder of D(n)A Arts Collective, an initiative created to enrich the lives of young dancers through master classes and intensives.
