One Year Together, Apart: An NSE Celebration

Musician and writer George Grella is the Music editor for the Rail. His performing experience includes playing jazz, classical and improvised music at CBGB, the original Knitting Factory, and Weill Recital Hall. As a composer, he has produced chamber music, opera, electronic music, and has created music for dance and cartoons. He is an important voice in music criticism, serving as a critic at the New York Classical Review and the author of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, the first jazz title in the 33 1/3 series from Bloomsbury.

One of his generation’s extraordinary talents, Dan Tepfer has earned an international reputation as a pianist-composer of wide-ranging ambition, individuality and drive. Tepfer has performed around the world with some of the leading lights in jazz and classical music; he has also crafted a discography striking for its breadth and depth. Tepfer has also composed for various ensembles beyond jazz. His piano quintet Solar Spiral was premiered in 2016 at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, with Tepfer performing alongside the Avalon String Quartet. Tepfer earned global acclaim for his 2011 Sunnyside album Goldberg Variations / Variations. Tepfer’s newest album, Natural Machines, stands as one of his most ingeniously forward-minded yet.

Writer Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts are Family, which was shortlisted for The Center For Fiction’s First Novel Prize and is a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, AGNI, New York Times, Guernica, and other publications. Maisy was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Queens, New York. She currently lives in Newark, NJ.

Author of the novel A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (Harper Perennial, 2014), Will Chancellor is currently writing an alternate history of the Soviet space program titled The Meaning of Certain Dreams. He edits fiction at the Brooklyn Rail. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, Lit Hub, The New York Times Magazine, Interview, Electric Literature, The White Review, and The New York Times. He recently wrote on the Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda for David Zwirner books (Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo).

Brooklyn-based writer Ayanna Prescod is the founder of OurBKSocial Inc., a digital platform dedicated to the people and places of Brooklyn, NY, in 2013. She is a theater journalist with featured work in Broadway Direct and Exeunt NYC, a rotating co-host on Token Theatre Friends podcast, and is Theater co-editor at the Brooklyn Rail.

Brooklyn-based writer and arts journalist Billy McEntee has contributed to The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, American Theatre, Observer, and others. He’s taught with The School of The New York Times, works at Playwrights Horizons, and is a Theater Co-Editor at the Brooklyn Rail.

An arts administrator, dramaturg, and producer. He has been with SPACE on Ryder Farm since November 2017 and is currently the Associate Director of Artistic Programs. Previously he worked in the literary departments of Playwrights Horizons and Williamstown Theater Festival. Additionally, he has read scripts for the O’Neill Theater Festival and the New Voices Festival at Players by the Sea. As a freelance dramaturg and director, he has worked on productions of Sondheim on Sondheim (Porchlight Music Theater), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Rabid Bat Productions), Sweeney Todd and Cabaret (Northwestern), and several new plays. He also has extensive experience working with cheese.

Michael Breslin is a writer, performer, and producer who works in theater, film, and television. His plays have been presented by New York Theater Workshop, Ars Nova, Exponential Festival, Queer New York International Arts Festival, Dixon Place, and the Yale Cabaret. Outside of Fake Friends, some of his favorite collaborators include Em Weinstein (Arden, Candace), Jeremy O. Harris (…the feels, kms), and Amauta Marston-Firmino (YELL!). Fake Friends is a Brooklyn-based theater and media company led by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley. Cat Rodríguez and Ariel Sibert are core members. Fake Friends mix and remix original text with material drawn from modern drama, pop culture, method acting, technology, and dance, pastiching from performance forms like reality TV and capital-R Realism.

Art historian and editor based in New York City, Benjamin Carlos Clifford received his Ph.D. from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2019, writing his dissertation on the controversial status of painting and its relation to a rhetoric of postmodernism that developed in the late 1970s. He has worked at the Jewish Museum and in MoMA’s Department of Photography, and has taught at NYU, Adelphi University, and Christie’s Education. Currently, he serves as an ArtSeen for the Brooklyn Rail, and is revising a chapter of his dissertation for publication.

A novelist and an art critic who teaches at Loyola Marymount School of Law. Yxta writes about Community Constitutionalism, Criminal Law, Property Law, Gender Justice, and Law and Literature. She also writes about the relationship between law and visual, conceptual, and performance art. She has published law review articles in the California Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, The Michigan Journal of Race & Law, and has a work on Boyle Heights, the 5th Amendment, and gentrification forthcoming from the N.Y.U Journal of Law & Social Change. She has published six books and won a 1999 Whiting Writer’s Award.

Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., has curated the exhibitions John Everett Millais (Tate Britain, Van Gogh Museum), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate Britain and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), and River Crossings (Olana and Cedar Grove, Hudson and Catskill, New York). He is a co-author of the monograph Cecily Brown (Phaidon, 2020), and a Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.

A Brooklyn-based artist working across choreography, performance, and video. His work has been presented in NYC by AUNTS, Center for Performance Research, New York Live Arts, and Underdonk Gallery, and nationally at Satellite Art Show (Miami) and Yeah Maybe Gallery (Minneapolis). He has been a resident artist at Chez Bushwick and a Fresh Tracks artist at New York Live Arts. His collaborations with Sara Gibbons as the duo TALL GIRLS DANCING have been presented by Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, and Movement Research at the Judson Church. As a performer, he has worked with many choreographers and directors including Keely Garfield, Catherine Galasso, Shandoah Goldman, Paul Matteson, Julie Mayo, Rady & Bloom, RoseAnne Spradlin, and Ash R.T. Yergens.

Orlando Hernández is an interdisciplinary performer working primarily in tap dance. He incorporates elements of theater, percussion, research, and improvisation to create unique experiences of collective rhythm and reflection. As an actor, he has performed in productions by Trinity Repertory Company, the Brown/Trinity MFA Program, Spectrum Theater Ensemble, and Arte Latino of New England. He collaborated with dancer and choreographer Danielle Davidson and cellist Adrienne Taylor, and is a member of the Boston-based tap dance company Subject:Matter. He works as a teaching artist for Trinity Rep and Rhode Island Latino Arts.

Writer, editor, and critic Jessica Holmes’s writing features regularly in BOMB, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail, where she also edits the ArTonic column. Other bylines include Vanity Fair Spain, The Magazine Antiques, and The Woman’s Art Journal. Recent exhibition catalogue contributions include Judith Braun: My Pleasure (Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College), Ellsworth Ausby: Somewhere in Space, Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s (Eric Firestone Gallery) and Markus Linnenbrink: THEREARESPACESTHATBREATHE (Museum of New Art, Portsmouth). Previously she served as Editor-in-Chief of the arts publication Degree Critical. For nearly two decades, she worked for the Calder Foundation, including 6 years as its Deputy Director.

A Brooklyn-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art received the 2016 PEN America award for biography, Nancy Princenthal is the former Senior Editor of Art in America and is a contributor to many other publications including The New York Times. She is the author of Hannah Wilke, Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s, and a co-author of two recent books on women artists; a third, Mothers of Invention will be released this spring. She has taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Princeton University; Yale University; and the School of Visual Arts.

Anselm Berrigan is the poetry editor for the Brooklyn Rail, and author of a number of books of poems, most recently Pregrets, from Black Square Editions.