Year: 2023

Somatically driven, Jonathan Meyer builds idiosyncratic movement palettes as crafts plying the waters of strange lands that can delight, baffle, and open new vistas. A gymnast in high school, Jonathan Meyer discovered dance at Oberlin College with Nusha Martynuk and Ann Cooper Albright. After a capoeira immersion in Brazil with Maestre Medicina, they completed a Cunningham-focused program at UNC Greensboro. Meyer has danced with The High Risk Group, Pierre-Paul Savoie, Asimina Chremos, and The Seldoms. In addition to dance, Meyer has worked with at-risk youth in wilderness therapy programs in Utah teaching primitive skills, and is a Certified Practitioner of Body-Mind Centering®. In 2002 Meyer created Khecari in Taos, New Mexico. In 2006, they moved to Chicago, and shortly thereafter began their intensive collaboration and partnership with Julia Rae Antonick, which inculcated Meyer to the value of critique, rigor, and fierce compassion in artmaking. Meyer and Antonick co-direct Khecari,presenting their choreographic collaborations as well as their individual work. Meyer has been a CDF Lab Artist and RDDI participant, a Meier Achievement Award winner, and an artist in residence at Djerassi, Ragdale, Hambidge, Abigail, The Kohler Art Center, Links Hall, The Chicago Cultural Center, and The Chicago Park District.

a radical embracing of somatic personhood

all people (human and non-) are of equal worth
(equity: moving towards equality may need unequal means)
all are vital to the greater ecosystem we all share
beauty means seeing one loved or lovable
all people are lovable and therefore all are beautiful

body is vital

we are here to be bodies together
in vulnerability and power
in shared space
in shared experience

art is vital

we are here to make and share art
(aesthetics: how values show up in the work)
to expand our collective sense of the possible
to create worlds, detailed and nuanced, with rigor
that finely focus attention
(sloughing assumptions, the quotidian, our normative burdens)
on the abstract, non-linear, non-narrative
so as to empower audience agency

crafting safe(r)/brave(r) spaces and experiences

to invite those entering in with informed consent
to plunge into the painful as well as the joyous
so as to offer pathways out of patterns that no longer serve
and strengthen our intersubjective bonds

we mean all to feel welcome and wanted at our work

not all individuals will have an interest in our art
but disinterest or dislike should be individually determined
(where it is demographically determined, we have failed)

reclaim “morality”

it is just this:
making choices
based on compassion and love

Photo (credit: Dan Merlo)

Jon Siskel (b. 1967, Chicago, IL) is a documentary filmmaker committed to telling stories that have entertained and inspired audiences since he and Greg Jacobs co-founded Siskel/Jacobs Productions in 2005. Siskel has produced and directed documentaries that have played across the United States and around the world. Siskel’s films have showcased subjects as disparate as a high school poetry slam competition (Louder Than a Bomb) and a biography of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (Unexpected Justice), and explored issues at the intersection of education and social justice (No Small Matter).  Jon is an Emmy award winner for 102 Minutes that Changed America, a documentary about the events of September 11, 2001, produced for the History Channel. Siskel’s work has also been featured on Discovery, A&E, OWN, PBS and National Geographic.  Jon’s latest film is the short documentary, MEMORIAL, about the July 4th mass shooting and one of the memorials that reflected the power of healing through art, love and community in his hometown, Highland Park, Illinois.

“From national teacher strikes, to cacerolazo protests in Chile, to indigenous struggles against austerity and Amazon oil extraction in Ecuador, I can’t help but think that every movement for social change starts both with the inequitable material conditions that created it and also a narrative of how the past and future collide with the present. The novel, with all its vast interiority and universe-bending possibility, is vital to that.”

Michael Zapata’s fiction, which is formed from stories of exile and unstable realities, has been described in the New York Times as “hypnotizing” and in Axios as an important “part of the growing Latinofuturism movement.” He is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. He also currently serves on the boards of Stories Matter Foundation and MAKE Literary Productions. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.

Memphis Public Libraries: WYPL Radio and the Library Channel

NPR/WWNO: The Reading Life with Michael Zapata

Rachel Niffenegger uses curious and experimental media to create interior psychological portraits. Rooted in expanded painting her specters are pulled from the folds of psychedelic clay, spiraled through mirrored metal work and meticulously rendered in colored pencil from an archive of visions conjured in concert with generative technologies. Her work has been included in museum shows at the Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem, the Netherlands;  the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and in gallery shows in New York, Berlin, Chicago, Liverpool, Denver, and Milwaukee, among others. Niffenegger, born in Evanston in 1985, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Rachel attended the de ateliers residency in Amsterdam NL in 2011. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.