 |
|
 Mitchell is the founder of the critically acclaimed Black Earth Ensemble and Black Earth Strings. Mitchell’s compositions reach across sound worlds, integrating new ideas with moments in the legacy of jazz, gospel, pop, and African percussion to create a fascinating synthesis of “postmodern jazz.” With her ensembles, as a featured flutist, and as a music educator, Mitchell has been a highlight at art venues, festivals throughout Europe, the U.S. and Canada.
 Reid is an accomplished cellist who has studied and performed nationally and internationally. Reid’s work is composed with a beginning and end with space for improvisation for individuals in an ensemble. Her goal within the residency is to develop scores and use them as tools to encourage more classical cellists to explore jazz and improvised music styles in order to better absorb the dialect of the musical language.
 Chandwaney is a professional theater artist who has performed in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. She is the founding Executive Director of Rasaka Theater Company, Chicago’s first and only South-Asian American Ensemble. During her residency, she will conduct a planned re-working of her play, Gandhi Marg.
 Montreal is a writer, teacher, and performer. She has penned six plays, the latest being the Gift of Tongue, about a young woman’s journey to reclaim peace through rhythm and rhyme. Her residency plan is to re-work Stolen, a ten-minute play about a 40-something immigrant woman living the American dream on a borrowed identity, into a full-length play.
 Nesbit says of her work, “In small egg tempera landscapes, I revisit the ambiguous territory where Self and environment blur, opening up multiple interpretations. Using photographs as an aid to memory, I set out to describe long forgotten moments of my childhood and early adulthood.”
 Owens is a figurative artist who wants people to look beyond the outer layer of skin, and search the many levels of personality and humanity within. To look beyond the masks — the many faces we all wear. She wants people to appreciate, in particular, the range of surface appearance among African-Americans and then look longer and deeper to find the beauty, both obvious and hidden. |
 |
