The 202Studio

Ethan Foote is a bass player who made a name for himself in multiple genres including rock, jazz, contemporary classical, and folk music. As a composer, he is rooted in the traditions of jazz, Western classical, and folk, he writes and plays in many contexts, including theatre and interdisciplinary art. Ethan’s current focus is as a composer and performer of concert music, much of which may be described as falling on a spectrum between classical music and jazz.

Joyce Winslow has served as media strategist, speechwriter, and media liaison for the Administrator of Medicare, has worked as vice-president of corporate communication for two nonprofit associations and a Gannett TV station, and was Assistant Director of Proposal Management for Accenture. She is also a published and award-winning author of poetry and short stories and has taught at the University of Pittsburg, Temple University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and locally at The Writer's Center.

Brian Wilbur Grundstrom is a composer who has written works for orchestra, opera, film, theater, chorus, piano and chamber ensembles. His music is performed across the globe, and in 2016, his album entitled An Orchestral Journey was released by Parma Recordings and distributed by Naxos. Brian is currently working on an opera based on For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway.

Lupi Quinteros-Grady is President and CEO of the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC), and has worked in the field of youth development for 20 years. LAYC offers over 50 programs and services in academics, arts and recreation, job readiness, safe housing, and health and wellness, serving over 4,000 youth and families each year across the District, Maryland, and Virginia.

Aziza Claudia Gibson-Hunter has exhibited in Washington DC, Maryland, New York, Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Florida, Great Britain, Argentina and Poland. A co-founder of Black Artists of DC, she represented BADC during Art Basel Miami 06, in the Design District. Ms. Gibson-Hunter completed a banner for the Washington DC Art Walk as part of a public art piece erected on the grounds of the former Washington DC Convention Center, and her “Wall of Unity” was completed in August of 2017 and installed in the Ron Brown College Preparatory High School in Washington DC.

Adam de Boer is a prize-winning painter who has exhibited nationally as well as in the United Kingdom, Indonesia and Colombia. He explores his Dutch-Indonesian heritage through his work and addresses broader themes of cultural hybridity, race, gender and sexuality. De Boer’s art encourages sustained engagement with cultural differences in order to address the racist and xenophobic response to colonization. The mix of conflicting aesthetics, made with both modern and traditional techniques, encapsulates these themes.

Richard E. Cytowic, MD, MFA is best known for returning synesthesia back to mainstream science after decades of disbelief. Today, synesthesia is recognized as fundamental to understanding the human mind and the human condition. How do we understand people who are not like us? How do non–synesthetes understand cross–sensory metaphors like “loud color” or “sweet person?” These are just some of the questions this captivating perceptual trait raises. Dr. Cytowic holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University and is an alumnus of Duke, Wake Forest, and George Washington Universities, along with London’s National Hospital for Nervous Diseases. He is currently Clinical Professor of Neurology at George Washington University.

Packer studied music composition at the California Institute of the Arts (MFA) and at the University of California, Berkeley (PhD). He pursued post-graduate study in computer music in Paris, where he was a composer in residence at IRCAM (Institute for the Research and Coordination of Acoustics), Centres Georges Pompidou. In 2001, after over ten years of research into the history, theory, and practice of multimedia, his book, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, co-authored with Ken Jordan, was published by W.W. Norton with a companion Website sponsored by Intel.

Susan Fisher Sterling is the Director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) is the only museum solely dedicated to celebrating the achievements of women in the visual, performing and literary arts. The museum’s collection features 3,000 works from the 16th century to the present by more than 800 artists. The museum also conducts multidisciplinary programs for diverse audiences and maintains a Library and Research Center.

Stephanie is the co-founder of Capitol Movement, a nonprofit with a mission to build better lives through dance. Utilizing traveling classrooms, Capitol Movement is able to provide dance education to schools and community partners in need of arts education programming, in the effort to make dance accessible and affordable in the DC metropolitan area.

Christopher is an award-winning social documentary photographer, interventionist, and clinical social worker. His photographs capture pain, longing, torment, despair, hope, and love within the faces and forms of his subjects. His images are unsympathetic, and communicate the inner emotional trauma of the homeless, the addicted, and of the lonely, as well as pride and the strength of human bonding experienced by addicts in recovery.

Melvin Deal has been an artist, educator, director, dancer, choreographer, and musician for nearly 60 years. He received a BA degree in Fine Arts & Education from Howard University in 1965, and is the Founding Executive Artistic Director of the African Heritage Dancers and Drummers.

Carla is the co-founder of Dance Place in Washington, DC and for thirty-six years served as its Founding Director.  Under her leadership and with support from the Board of Directors, Dance Place became the second independent organization in the United States to own and operate a facility for the training and presentation of dance. In August 2017, Carla transitioned to Director Emerita, in which role she remains on Dance Place’s teaching faculty, youth program staff and serves as a consultant.

Sheila began her artistic career in the 1970s as a writer and poet. She has written and produced several staged readings/performances, appeared in the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, and was a founding member of Free DC the Writer's Workshop. In the 1990s she began working in fine art, sculpture, and public art. Recent commissions have included public art for the New St. Elizabeths’ Hospital, Anacostia High School, Community of Hope Conway Clinic, and St. Elizabeth East and the Concord Apartment Building in Crystal City.

Poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller is the author of several collections of poetry, and his anthology "In Search of Color Everywhere" was awarded the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 1994. He has been the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine in the United States, and was founder and director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, which presented African American poets and poets of color to the general public. Miller’s poetry has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, Hungarian, Chinese, Farsi, Norwegian, Tamil and Arabic

Washington City Paper describes Bill as a “painter, musician, filmmaker, curator, presenter, promoter, and all-around patron of the arts,” He is the founder of dc space, District Curators, and DC Alley Museums. From 1985 - 1992, he served as a member of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Although much of his work over the years has been “behind the scenes,” Bill had his first solo exhibition as a visual artist at Logan Fringe Arts Space in 2016.

As a painter and mixed media visual artist, Judy is inspired by the idea of quest in western culture and how it is inspired by fear and desire. Other influences in her art include gender roles and iconic images in 16th century Northern Italian painting and action narratives in historical Japanese painting. As a result, her inspirations are translated into mixed media works consisting of painting and screen-printing.

Christylez Bacon is a GRAMMY® Nominated Progressive Hip-Hop artist and multi-instrumentalist from Southeast, Washington, DC. He has collaborated with artists from various cultural backgrounds, ranging from the Hindustani & Carnatic music of India, the contemporary Arabic music of Egypt, and the music of Brazil. Christylez was the first Hip-Hop artist to be featured at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and is the recipient of multiple honors awarded by the Washington Area Music Association including 2013 Artist of the Year.

Masha is the executive director for Tango Mercurio. The organization offers dance classes for adults, classes on organizing social dance events, along with an outreach program. The Queer Tango Project teaches both types of tango, and is aimed at helping LGBTQ individuals feel like they matter by providing a place to go and learn a new skill. The Veteran's Outreach program is a free dance/movement therapy program for Veterans and their families.

Steve Shulman is the executive director of Cultural Tourism DC, a nonprofit organization with a mission to deliver experiences and learning opportunities in the areas of heritage, international exchange, and humanities. Working in partnership with local government, business, and tourism agencies, the organization envisions Washington, DC as a city rich with diverse culture and heritage that generates civic pride and economic prosperity in neighborhoods.

Tony Gittens is the founder and director of Filmfest DC, the Washington, DC International Film Festival. He previously served as executive director of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for 11 years, from 1997-2008. 

Gittens has been a fixture on the Washington cultural scene since the 1960s, when he was a campus leader and student newspaper editor at Howard University. In the 1970s, Gittens was the first manager of the then-influential Drum and Spear bookstore in Columbia Heights. Later, he founded the Black Film Institute at the University of the District of Columbia, which brought foreign and U.S. films by black talent to public attention.

Charles Stephenson, co-author of The Beat! Go-Go Music from Washington DC, is a cultural and political activist. For over twenty-five years, he has been identified with the evolution of go-go music in Washington, DC. He emerged as a respected advocate and promoter of go-go music in a time when various political leaders were critical of the music and the “element” associated with the genre. In 1971, he co-founded the Malcolm X Day Celebration in Washington, DC, which has been recognized nationally for being the longest and largest to celebrate the legacy of Malcolm X, the slain human rights leader.

In 1984, Stephenson was appointed as a commissioner for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and served as the Commission's chairperson from 1996-1999.

Jennifer Nelson is a Washington-based theatre professional with more than 40 years of experience as an actor, playwright, administrator, professor, and director. She previously served for 11 years as the Producing Artistic Director of the African Continuum Theatre Company, where she directed more than 20 full productions and readings, and is a 26-year veteran of Living Stage Theatre Company, the former community outreach program at Arena Stage. Nelson has directed productions at Ford’s Theatre, Round House, Woolly Mammoth, Theater of the First Amendment, Theater J, and more. As a playwright, Nelson won the Helen Hayes/Charles MacArthur Award for Most Outstanding New Play for her play, Torn From the Headlines. She has taught at UCLA, George Washington University, and American University, most recently teaching “Theatre for Social Change” as an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University.

Kim Roberts is the founder and co-editor of two literary journals. She established Beltway Poetry Quarterly in 2000 and co-founded of the Delaware Poetry Review in 2007. She the author of five books of poems: The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017), Fortune’s Favor: Scott in Antarctica (Poetry Mutual, 2015), Animal Magnetism (Pearl Editions, 2011), The Kimnama (Poetry Mutual/Vrzhu Press, 2007), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1994). Kim is also the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018), and editor of the anthology Full Moon On K. Street: Poems About Washington DC (Plan B Press, 2010).

Kim has published widely in literary journals throughout the US, as well as in Israel, Canada, Ireland, France, Brazil, and New Zealand, and has been featured in over 40 anthologies.

Sunny Sumter is Executive Director of the DC Jazz Festival, a nonprofit service organization established in 2004 to present jazz-related cultural and educational programs in the nation’s capital. Its signature programs are the annual DC JazzFest held each June, the year-round DC Jazz Festival Education Program; and the Charles Fishman Embassy Series. In 2018, the DC Jazz Festival was the recipient of the DC Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in Creative Industries. 

Prior to her tenure at the DC Jazz Festival, Sumter held management/director positions with the Aspen Institute, National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.

As a professional vocalist, Sumter has performed at some of the finest festivals, performance venues, and clubs in the U.S. and internationally.

Catherine Auld is Assistant Director of Economic Regeneration for the City Council of Sunderland, the District of Columbia's sister city in the United Kingdom. She has led Sunderland’s engagement with international partners, including Washington, DC since 2006. The city of Sunderland started their artistic relationship with the District through the Artomatic event, which brought artists from Sunderland to DC. The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Sister Cities grant program has since supported numerous cultural exchanges between DC and Sunderland, and the other sister cities of the District.

Barbara Frank is known for her allegorical imagery. Her paintings and drawings catalog dreams, experiences, and her study of how the brain works. She is the recipient of The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund Award (2016), The MacDowell Colony resident fellowships, and a Cafritz Foundation Resident Fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and is included in corporate and private collections. The Archives of American Art has collected her papers for her important role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

Willona Sloan has published non-fiction, fiction, and poetry in publications such as AudioFemme, BlazeVOX, Bohemia, Fresh Cup, Paste, Publishers Weekly, The Rumpus,  Washington Post and Words Apart.  She teaches creative and professional writing workshops in the Washington, DC area at the Writer’s Center and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and has also led workshops in partnership with The Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature and the Reykjavík International Literary Festival. Willona is an alum of the VONA and Hurston/Wright writing workshops.

Chuck Hicks has been the chair of the DC Black History Celebration Committee for over 25 years. He has been a collaborator on numerous events aimed at empowering and celebrating the contributions of African-Americans, especially in our nation’s capitol. Chuck is known for building a community-based organization that works to protect the history of African-Americans in DC, as well as supporting any marginalized peoples and all social justice issues.

Assane Konte is founder, artistic director, choreography, and costume designer of KanKouran West African Dance Company. His career as a professional dancer began at age 15 with Ballet Africaine de Diebel Guee of Dakar, Senegal. In 1983, along with his childhood friend and master drummer, Abdou Kounta, Assane founded KanKouran West African Dance Company. He has promoted cross-cultural appreciation and understanding by his dedication to preserving and sharing Africa’s rich culture through dance and music. In 2019 Assane was awarded a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Malik’s artwork explores the African-American historical and religious experience, examining the "relationships between history’s truths, unearthed by contemporary scholars of African descent, and its detrimental, but more accepted falsehoods, perpetuated for centuries."  A graduate of McKinley High School in Washington, DC, in 1997, Malik created FIND ART information bank, an artist’s locator & resource service, for the purpose of assisting clients with broadcasting opportunities to the arts community and assisting the arts community with locating opportunities.

Kristen is a percussionist, vocalist, teacher and organizer living and working in  Washington, DC. In 2000 she helped initiate the activist drumming ensemble Rhythm Workers Union, known for its hand-built drum cart the “MotherDrumShip,” and its legions of drummers who created a spectacle at hundreds of protests, rallies and events through 2007. Since 2008, Kristen has lead an intergenerational, all-women’s West African drumming performance troupe called the Bele Bele Rhythm Collective.

Artist Lisa Marie Thalhammer creates paintings and public murals to uplift and empower, to explore interconnectivity, raise consciousness and communicate uplifting messages. As a feminist activist and member of the LGBTQ+ community, Lisa Marie’s artworks frequently communicate messages of strength and hope.

David Furchgott is the founder, and former president and chief executive officer, of International Arts & Artists, which began as a one-person arts service organization in 1995. Over the span of David's 20+ years leading IA&A, the organization has grown to become a local and national leader in cross-cultural and international exchange, working with artists, museums, and cultural organizations around the world.

Dana Tai Soon Burgess is a leading American choreographer, dancer, and culturalfigure. His artistic focus explores the idea of cultural “confluence” and many of Burgess’ dances have tended to focus on the “hyphenated person” – someone who is of mixed ethnic or cultural heritage – as well as issues of belonging and societal acceptance. He has served as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department for over two decades, an appointment he uses to promote international cultural dialogue through “the global language of dance”.

Julianne Brienza is the founder and chief executive officer of Capital Fringe. Since the first festival in 2006, Capital Fringe has presented hundreds of productions that have been attended by thousands.

Wendy Woodson is a choreographer, writer, director, and video artist and Artistic Director of Present Co. Inc., established in 1980 in Washington D.C. and now based in Amherst, MA. To date Woodson has created more than 100 works for the stage, screen and exhibition that have been presented throughout the US and in Europe, Australia and New Zealand at such venues as the Washington Project for the Arts, Dance Place, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Jacob’s Pillow, the Emerson Majestic Theater, LaMama NYC and LaMama Melbourne, Wolf Trap, Jacob's Pillow, the DeCordova and Virginia Museums of Art, the Victoria Immigration Museum of Melbourne, among others, and at various colleges and universities in the US and abroad.

Maestra Victoria Gau has conducted Capital City Symphony for 22 seasons. Well-known in the Washington, DC area for her work as Artistic Director and Music Director/Conductor of the Other Opera Company in Bethesda, Maryland, which she co-founded in 1992, she has also served as music director for such Washington area companies as The Washington Savoyards, Victorian Lyric Opera Company, Annapolis Opera Musicales, the Eldbrook Opera Ensemble, and the IN-Series.

Joy Zinoman founded the Studio Acting Conservatory in Washington, DC in 1975. Three years later, she established the Studio Theatre. She continues to build on her career spanning over four decades as an acclaimed "Titan of DC Theatre" with a new home for the Studio Acting Conservatory in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC. 

Marjuan Canady, a native Washingtonian with Trinidadian/African-American roots, is an award winning entrepeneur, writer, performer, director, educator and producer for both film and the stage. Canady is the founder and CEO of her multimedia production company, Sepia Works. She is the CEO / Author / Co-Creator of the children’s media brand, Callaloo. Originally conceived as a theatrical play, Marjuan has led her team in building Callaloo into a global brand consisting of books, puppet shows, digital content, animation, arts education programming and merchandise.

Joyce Muis Lowery is the founder of Art Enables; Tony Brunswick is the current executive director. Established in 2001, Art Enables believes that artists with disabilities are vital to a robust arts landscape and should be afforded the opportunity to pursue art as a vocation and career. Art Enables works with artists that experience a broad range of developmental and cognitive disabilities as well as mental health challenges including autism, Down syndrome, traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, among others.

Laurel Farrin is a mixed-media artist and painter, and holds a BFA from Ohio University-Athens and an MFA from the University of Maryland. She was an artist-in-residence at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM; Yaddo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts, both in New York; and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Exhibitions include Lesley Heller Gallery; NY, NY; Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY; The Bronx River Art Center; The Albany International Airport; Carroll Square Gallery, Wash. DC; Roswell Museum and Art Center; the Des Moines (Iowa) Art Center; the Florida Center for Contemporary Art in Tampa; Spaces in Cleveland, Ohio; Anton Gallery; the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Washington Project for the Arts, in Washington, D.C.

Nejla Y. Yatkin, an award-winning and critically acclaimed choreographer, is a recent 2018 Drama Desk Award nominee, a 3Arts Award fellow and a Princess Grace Choreography recipient. Nejla hails originally from Germany bringing a luminous and transcultural perspective to her creations. Her focus is regularly drawn to the role that memory and history serve in constructing identity, causing and resolving conflict and transforming cultural tensions into deep, authentic moments of human connections.

Kimberley Bush is the Executive Director of the DC Shorts Film Festival, and the Director of Art and Cultural Programs at the DC Center for the LGBTQ Community in Washington, DC. She has been active in the DC arts scene for over a decade, and has helped give exposure to many artists and members of the LGBTQ community through both DC Shorts and the DC Center.

Lou Stovall's prints and drawings are part of numerous public and private collections throughout the world. Though his craft is that of a printmaker, Stovall's passion for art extends beyond a single medium. He gives the same care and attention to his archival framing and furniture construction as he does to his intricate prints and drawings. Under Stovall's direction, Workshop, Inc., founded in 1968, has grown from a small but active studio primarily concerned with community posters into a professional printmaking facility. Through Workshop, Stovall has made a unique effort to build unity among artists in Washington, DC and to encourage, by his own example, service in the community.

As a playwright, Mary Hall Surface's work has been featured at Seattle Children's Theatre, Dallas Children's Theatre, Arizona's Childsplay, Honolulu Theatre for Youth, the National Gallery of Arts, the Folger Shakespeare Library, as well as more than 15 productions at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in every region of the United States, as well as in Ireland, France, Peru, Germany, Italy, Taiwan and across Canada. She's also a director, educator, and producer, as well as the Founding Artistic Director of the Intersections Festival at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, DC.

Martha Jackson Jarvis is an artist known for her mixed-media installations that explore aspects of African, African American, and Native American spirituality, ecological concerns and the role of women in preserving indigenous cultures. Her installations are composed using a variety of natural materials including terra-cotta, sand, copper, recycled stone, glass, wood, and coal. Her outdoor urban public sculpture, site-specific rural sculpture, and more portable sculpture addresses issues of culture, particularly Southern African-American, and history.

Karen Zacarias is an author, playwright, and educator. Her awards include: New Voices Award, 2010 Steinberg Citation-Best New Play, Paul Aneillo Award, National Francesca Primus Prize, New Voices Award, National Latino Play Award, Finalist Susan Blackburn, Helen Hayes for Outstanding New Play. Karen is the first playwright-in-residence at Arena Stage in Washington, DC and has taught playwriting at Georgetown University. She is the founder of Young Playwrights’ Theater, an award-winning theater company that teaches playwriting in local public schools in Washington, DC. YPT won the 2010 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from the White House as one of the most innovative arts programs in the nation.

Nancy Schwalb is the founder and Executive Director/Artistic Director of the DC Creative Writing Workshop. She has an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been teaching creative writing at Hart Middle School since 1995. Her work has been published in the GW Review, the Washington City Paper, Vanity Fair, Barragua, Argus, and the English Journal. She has served as a teaching fellow for the Kennedy Center and is a six-time Larry Neal Award winner. Schwalb also founded the Youth Poetry Slam League.