We are thrilled to share our ten Boston-based artists selected to join this year’s Matched Savings Program for our third year of partnership with the City of Boston!
Alexander Davis is a performer, dance maker, and fiber artist who believes that all three mediums have the unifying power to create empathetic and dramatic responses from diverse audiences. Often drawing from pop culture, Alexander engages in performances that display the innate theatricality of everyday life and the universality of the human experience. Their performances illuminate underrepresented queer narratives and connect people to other people, the past to the present, and memories to dreams.
Moving forward, Alexander looks forward to investing in video and photographic documentation of their process, performances, and final products to improve their applications for residencies, grants and performance opportunities on a local and national level. These advancements will propel them into the next steps of their career, and allow them to continue building the momentum they have already gathered over the past three years.
Dancer, dance maker and dance producer Kristin Wagner creates small, intimate contemporary dance works to resonate with average, every day people. In sourcing movement from human habits, customs and compulsions, Kristin designs a physical vocabulary that is both unique and universal, resulting in work that is both deeply personal and incredibly ubiquitous.
Kristin is now institutionalizing her producing experience into Lady BOS Productions, a professional production company with a focus on presenting and cross-pollinating the work of local femme-identifying artists. Over the next two years, Lady BOS Productions will grow to sustain educational programming, several interdisciplinary events, and at least one major dance theater production per year.
Photo credit: Timothy Avery Photography
Seraah (Isnard Dupoux) is an interdisciplinary artist. His interests in the corporeal, ethereal, somatic, and the idea of the body as a conduit for myth-making/allegory are central to his work. Seraah values the ephemera of performance, which he often combines with intentional sound, light displays, a use of voice, physical movement, video and image to create sensorial inquiries into time.
Seraah would like to invest in software instruments to improve the overall sound quality of his music. Outside of the performance context, the higher quality sounds is more likely to attract clients for freelance composition and music production work.
As an educator, artist, and entrepreneur, Timothy Hall draws inspiration from his lived experiences to chart the nuances of blackness, masculinity, and the beauty of life. Timothy is the co-owner of HipStory, a digital media production company dedicated to creating and showcasing the work of marginalized identities within media. He strives to help people build resiliency to do the things they care about.
Timothy is looking forward to continuing to build a community of art makers and to navigating the complex world we live in through his art. In order to do so, Timothy needs to upgrade key pieces of equipment, including his saxophone. After playing saxophone for twenty years, Timothy finds his current instrument is no longer suiting his artistic needs. By improving the equipment he has to work with, Timothy looks forward to uncovering his true potential and the potential of those he collaborates with.
Growing up in Tehran, an exposure to Persian art and Iranian politics increased Azita Moradkhani‘s sensitivity to the dynamics of vulnerability and violence that she explores in her art-making process. The female body, and its exposure to different social norms, is central to her work. Through her drawings and body castings, she examines displacement as an unnatural state we experience when we find ourselves insecure in our own body.
Azita wants to take her practice further by transferring her drawings onto the actual fabric she works with. Learning and exploring fabric printmaking techniques will help her to approach her body of work in a more tangible way, and using new media such as cloth will emphasize the marks of history and memory on the body. Through this process, Azita will step back from two-dimensional work and create more complex layers of three-dimensional objects to interact with.
Ruby Rose Fox is a musical multimedia artist that combines theater, dance, and video. She focuses on stories that are the hardest to tell and offers cathartic experiences to her audience as a result. Ruby has tackled topics in her work from the emboldened KKK in Trump’s America to the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville to consumerism to internet bullying.
Securing home production equipment is the next step in Ruby’s career. Music production equipment will drastically cut her costs and let her invest cash and time into other parts of her career.
Corinna D’Schoto works in layered forms of painting, sculpture, and installation. Playing with representation and reduction, she questions the relationship between the image and the painted object. Her practice distorts the familiar and intimates the alien to reinterpret how people navigate memory.
Corinna envisions creating lines of hand printed wallpaper featuring patterns made out of silhouettes of figures engaged in a variety of forms of invisible labor, from domestic to industrial. She likes the idea of re-inserting these histories into interior, domestic, and intimate spaces and enjoys the crossover from wallpaper’s traditional decorative form into a form that holds space for, and honors, histories that are often unobserved.
Autumn Ahn is interested in performance as a site of live space. Her artistic focus lies in the nature of that site as an eroding archaeological world and also as a conceptual figuration of consciousness.
Autumn plans to grow her business through the purchase of a new website model. While her previous website serves its purpose well, the advanced upgrades in internet technology have left her in need of re-mapping the structure. For Autumn, this means updating the site host and its overall content.
As a multi-instrumentalist, sound engineer, and music producer Christopher Pegram does everything from making tracks for rappers and singers to recording and collaborating with other musicians to create art that far surpasses one single vision. Finding the voice to reach out and work with other artists in his community has helped Christopher face the challenges of pursuing a career in the arts.
Christopher looks forward to expanding and professionalizing his studio equipment. These upgrades will not only improve the quality of his work but will also aid in building connections with other artists.
Alexis Scheer is a playwright, actor, and producing artistic director of Off the Grid Theatre. Her plays are brazenly millennial and fiercely feminist, and reflective of her experience as a Jewish Latina. Alexis is passionate about creating theatre that pushes the boundaries of artistic ability and engenders social empathy.
As a young millennial theatre artist, Alexis hopes to achieve increased visibility as a game-changing Latinx leader through the creation of high quality social media content. She plans on acquiring critical equipment to make, record, and share her work in addition to traveling for research and development opportunities.
Our 2019 programming in Massachusetts is possible because of our wonderful funders & partners, specifically the Barr Foundation, Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation, The City of Boston and the United States Department of Agriculture.