ARTISTS
photo by Candace Hope
HOLLY WREN SPAULDING
Poet Holly Wren Spaulding grew up in an intentional community in rural northern Michigan, surrounded by artists and activists who were engaged in social and political experiments that centered on creativity, peacemaking, self-reliance, and ecological thinking.
Since those formative days, she has collaborated with performing artists, composers, and filmmakers, while developing a particular affection for what happens when she shares studio space with printers and book artists.
Holly has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net awards, and her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Witness, The Ecologist, and in Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction (Wayne State University Press, 2018), and We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rose of Global Anticapitalism.
Previous poetry collections include Familiars (2020), If August (2017) and Pilgrim (2014), all from Alice Greene & Company. In 2021, St. Brigid Press brought out a special edition of her chapbook Fire. Her chapbook, Between Us, is due out in 2022.
She lives on the southern seacoast of Maine where she runs Poetry Forge.
PENELOPE HILLFRAU
Hillfrau is a puppeteer, performer and stuff-maker. A real believer in the great beauty and importance of Cheap-Art, she has spent many years writing and producing original works around the United States, Mexico, Europe, Venezuela and Taiwan. She has been working with The Bread & Puppet Theater for over 10 years and has collaborated with many interesting characters and theater companies (including her own, The Flying Donkey Theatre). She lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina with her family, cats and chickens.
PRIYA DARSHINI
Taking her roots from Indian Classical music, Priya’s knowledge of music from all over the world has resulted in a fresh, imaginative and fascinating new sound. She displays an exciting combination of range, technique, unconventional compositions, a feminist perspective, and a unique prodigious voice. Priya has collaborated with a wide range of artists from GRAMMY® Award winners Roy “Futureman” Wooten; Jeff Coffin, Philip Lassiter, Silk Road Ensemble’s ShaneShanahan; as well as Pearl Jam, JakeShimabukuro, Max ZT, Karsh Kale, House of Waters, Alam Khan, Eligh, and many more. In 2020, Priya released her debut album - Periphery - on Chesky Records, and was nominated for a GRAMMY® Award for Best New Age Album. Based out of Brooklyn, New York, Priya has sung for over one-hundred television and radio commercials, as well as recorded for several award-winning and chart-topping Indian movie sound tracks. She is also an actor (The Letters), ultra marathoner, entrepreneur (The Wind Chasers –organizing extreme ultra marathons in the Himalayas and the south of India), and an environmental advocate. She is a trustee of the Mumbai-based non-profit organization Jana Rakshita – an NGO working with underserved pediatric cancer patients, and building infrastructure for schools, with a focus on education for girls. She is also on the advisory board for the International Wildlife Co-Existence Network. Priya Darshini has been featured in several distinguished newspapers and magazines including Rolling Stone India, ELLE India, Vogue India, and many more.
JERRON BLIND BOY PAXTON
A vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Paxton's style draws heavily from blues and jazz before WWII and is influenced by Fatts Waller and Blind Lemon Jefferson. According to Will Friedwald of The Wall Street Journal: Paxton is "virtually the only music-maker of his generation playing guitar, banjo, piano and violin to fully assimilate the blues idiom of the 1920s and '30s, the blues of Bessie Smith and Lonnie Johnson.
CHENDA COPE
Cope is a musician, performer and visual artist recently relocated from Philadelphia to Massachusetts where she just completed her MFA in Studio Art at UMass Amherst. Her interest, cross-discipline, has always been in creating spaces for people to come together in fleeting moments of community through music making, performance creating, object fixing, giant outdoor puppet show building…etc! In form and content, her work is an exploration of care and crisis, asking/wondering/proposing how we can still take care of each other while living inside the pervasive web of capitalism and its ethic of disposability.
NOAH HARRELL
Harrell is a performer, builder, teacher, director, and puppeteer originally from Burgaw, NC.
He has worked internationally with El Teatro Indigena de la Sierra Tarahumara in Mexico, Friches Theatre Urbain in Paris, and has been an active member of the Bread and Puppet Theater of Vermont since 2008. He is co-founder and co-director of the Rural Academy Theater. Noah studied at Trinity College in Connecticut and received a MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design.