Sarah Hennies / Susan Silton / Lynne Thompson

Artists

• Sarah Hennies

  Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues, including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles, including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, Ensemble Dedalus, Mivos String Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire. She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award and a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts and has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, and the New York State Council on the Arts. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.

• Susan Silton

  Susan Silton is based in Los Angeles. Her interdisciplinary projects engage multiple aesthetic strategies to mine the complexities of subjectivity and subject positions—often through poetic combinations of humor, discomfort, subterfuge and unabashed beauty. Silton’s work takes form in performative and participatory projects, photography, video, installation, and text/audio, and has been exhibited/presented nationally and internationally at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Luis De Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; LAXART, Los Angeles; ICA/ Philadelphia; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, among others. Projects include the 2022 film/audio installation Bursting in air (co-presented with LAND, Los Angeles Nomadic Division); the commissioned site-specific performance Quartet for the End of Time (2017), produced by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division); the site-specific opera, A Sublime Madness in the Soul (2015), which presented through the windows of the artist’s then-studio in Downtown Los Angeles; and the multilayered book project Who’s in a Name? (2013). In November, 2015, Silton’s Whistling Project was included in SITE Santa Fe’s year-long series of exhibitions, SITE 20 Years/20 Shows, which included a commissioned performance by Silton’s women’s whistling group, The Crowing Hens. She has received fellowships and awards from the Getty/California Community Foundation, Art Matters, Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles, Durfee Foundation, The Shifting Foundation, and Fellows of Contemporary Art (FOCA), among others. More recently, Silton was awarded an LA Metro commission for permanent installation in the Wilshire/Fairfax subway station. The first major traveling survey of Silton’s work, Diving into the Wreck, curated by USC art historian/writer Andy Campbell, will open at the Blaffer Museum in Houston in January 2026.

  www.susansilton.com

• Lynne Thompson

  Lynne Thompson was Los Angeles’ 2021-22 Poet Laureate and is a Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, Start With A Small Guitar, and most recently, Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. Her fourth collection, Blue on A Blue Palette will be published by BOA Editions in the spring of 2024.  A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the George Drury Smith Award for  Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from Beyond Baroque, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series to study in Kenya and the Vermont Studio Center. An attorney by training, Thompson sits on the Boards of The Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In June of 2022, she completed her four-year service as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, and  Copper Nickel, as well as the anthology Beat No Beat, among others.

  www.lynnethompson.us