Artist Trust supported 21 artists with the 2005 Artist Trust/ Washington State Arts Commission Fellowships. Each recipient will receive an unrestricted cash award of $6,000. The award recognizes an artist’s creative excellence and accomplishment, professional achievement and continuing dedication to their artistic discipline. In 2005, the Fellowship Program received a total of 315 applications from artists working in Craft, Media, Music and Literature.
The information included in each grant recipient profile below is based on each recipient’s application materials submitted at the time of application.
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CRAFT
Ross Palmer Beecher* (King County) is a Seattle artist who makes works out of recycled materials, including aluminum cans, presidential lanterns, and punched metal tombstones. Often working with the quilt form, Palmer Beecher has received numerous awards, including the Betty Bowen Memorial Award (Seattle Art Museum, 2002). She is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery (Seattle) and her work is collected in various public and corporate art collections, including the City of Seattle’s Portable Works Collection, Safeco, Tacoma Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, and Microsoft Corporation. Beecher has also received numerous public commissions, including works made for the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, Harborview Medical Center (Seattle), and the Tacoma School District (as part of the Washington State Arts Commission’s public art program). Working with re-contextualization of iconic images, Palmer Beecher brings unusual materials into her variations on such images as the American flag, as well as historical events and personalities.
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Jean Hicks (King County) is a Seattle-based artist who holds degrees in history, Spanish, and education. She studied classical millinery under Wayne Wichern, while her sculptural perspective on working with felt as a primary material has been influenced by work in ceramics, especially studies at the Escuela de Artes y Applicadas de Deseños in Vittoria-Gasteiz, Spain. Developing her own distinctive style of hand-blocked felt, Jean Hicks founded Erratica Handmade Felt, a business that distributes her work and takes commissions, as well as working collaboratively on various performance-based projects. Additionally, Hicks works within gallery contexts and on interior design projects. Her work is held in numerous private and museum collections and has been exhibited widely at such venues as the Smithsonian Museum, The Ohio Craft Museum, American Crafts Gallery (Cleveland), Penland Gallery, and Kirkland Arts Center among others. Hicks is also a returning instructor at schools including Pratt Fine Arts and Penland School of Crafts (NC).
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Allen Moe (Skagit County) is a ceramics artist living in Anacortes. After receiving his BA in Ecology at UC Berkeley in 1970, Moe spent ten years working seasonally as a park ranger in Alaska’s Denali National Park and as a seabird ecologist in the Gulf of Alaska, while homesteading in the Northwestern Brooks Mountain Range. Living in the bush and being influenced by Eskimo culture, Moe became familiar with processing skins; he began to hand-build pots, covering them with caribou or fish skins, stitching them with sinew, and firing them in simple wood fires with sawdust. Moe first showed his unusual pots in galleries in Fairbanks, Alaska. Now living on the Skagit River delta for the past 16 years in a duck shack without electricity and accessible only by boat, Moe continues to work with ceramic pots and found animal skins and bones in his sculptural works. He recently built his own studio space on nearby Guemes Island. Moe has shown his work at various venues around the Northwest, including recent shows at Kittredge Gallery (University of Puget Sound), Shoreline College Gallery, and Port Angeles Fine Arts Center.
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Nancy Worden (King County) is a jewelry artist living in Seattle. She has been making jewelry for over thirty years and is currently represented by the William Traver Gallery in Seattle and Helen Druitt in Philadelphia. Her work is represented in major collections including the City of Seattle’s Portable Works Collection, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the Stedelijk Museum’s Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, as well as many private collections. She has taught widely at such institutions and artist residency programs as Central Washington University, Penland School of Crafts (NC), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (ME), and Pratt Fine Arts Center (Seattle). Her work has been featured in such national publications as Metalsmith, American Craft, and Sculpture.
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Mark Zirpel (King County) received a BFA from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has taught widely and exhibited regionally at such venues as Cornish College of the Arts, the Bellevue Art Museum, and the Kirkland Arts Center. He is represented locally by William Traver Gallery. His work is in the collections of Alaska Airlines, the Lutze Corporation, Microsoft, and Progressive Insurance. He is also the recipient of an artist’s residency at North Lands Creative Glass, Scotland, and a Creative Glass Center of America Fellowship, among other awards. Zirpel’s work crosses media boundaries in its insistence to address meaning; his current efforts are related to the human body, its organs, function, and eventual failure. Zirpel lives and works in the Seattle area, where he runs ACME Art, a printmaking, photography, and sculpture studio that works with experimental printing techniques and sculptural fabrications.
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MEDIA
Devon Damonte* (Thurston County) is an independent experimental animator who makes, teaches, and shows handmade direct motion graphics on film. He also frequently teaches workshops and lectures on direct animation at such venues as Harvard University, Ottawa International Film Festival, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Northwest Film Center (Portland, OR). Damonte was formerly the program director for Boston Film Video Foundation and the Olympia Film Festival and has worked as an arts administrator, programmer, and educator on both coasts. His animation works have screened as part of various exhibits, including Animations at PS 1 Contemporary Arts Center in New York, the Telluride International Experimental Cinema Exposition, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal. His films were recently included in screenings as part of the Visual Music exhibition at MoCA in Los Angeles and the Holland Animation Festival in Utrecht, Holland, as well as Independent Exposure at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, among others. Damonte frequently writes about experimental animation for various journals. He has worked previously as a film programmer and arts administrator, and studied at San Francisco State University and The Evergreen State College.
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Lucy Ostrander (Kitsap County) is a documentary filmmaker living on Bainbridge Island. Her Masters’ thesis for Stanford University was Witness to Revolution: The Story of Anna Louise Strong. In producing the film, she was the first American student to work with the China Film Co-Production Corporation. Witness to Revolution was broadcast nationally on PBS, on CCTV in the Peoples’ Republic of China, and on the Learning Channel in Canada. In addition, it won a Student Academy Award, the Nissan Focus Award and a CINE Golden Eagle. Ostrander’s film, East of Occidental (producer), about the history of Seattle’s International District, received a national PBS broadcast and won a CINE Golden Eagle. Choices (co-producer/co-editor), an hour-long contemporary drama aimed at preventing youth entrance into prostitution, was awarded four regional Emmys, and Home from the Eastern Sea (co-producer/co-director), a film about the history of Asian Americans in Washington State, won a Silver Apple at the National Educational Film Festival. Home was produced for the Washington State Centennial Commission and was a co-production with KCTS. Ostrander’s most recent work includes two historical films: Port Blakely: Memories of a Mill Town, which depicts the rise and fall of the largest sawmill in the world on Bainbridge Island in the first half of the century and the lives of its Native American, Scandinavian, and Japanese workers, and The Red Pines, which explores the cultural history of Japanese-American immigrants on Bainbridge Island and their relationship to the land. Ostrander is currently in production on several films including Finding Thea, a documentary on the life of Thea Foss – better known as “Tugboat Annie” – a Norwegian immigrant who founded the Foss Tugboat Company at the turn of the 20th Century and later became the inspiration for Depression-era short stories and Hollywood motion pictures.
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David Russo (King County) is a filmmaker and artist based in Seattle. His film artworks Pan With Us (2003) and Populi (2002) both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and have appeared in dozens of other festivals around the world, including Clermont-Ferrand, Telluride Film Festival, SXSW, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, among many others. Populi has been installed as a permanent media artwork at Qwest Field in Seattle. David recently completing his newest artwork, I Am (Not) Van Gogh, for One Reel and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. An environmental animation set amongst the crowds at the Bumbershoot Arts Festival, I Am (Not) Van Gogh premiered at this year’s Bumbershoot. Russo has received many awards and acknowledgements, including a “Genius Award” from the Stranger and recognition as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2003.” A new script was recently chosen by Northwest Film Forum for their “Start-to-Finish” program, whereby Russo’s feature debut, #2, will receive funding and technical assistance from the first shot to wrap.
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MUSIC
Ryan Hare* (Whitman County) is a composer and bassoonist, and is presently Assistant Professor of Music in bassoon, composition, and theory at Washington State University in Pullman. In 2000, he received his Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition from the University of Washington, where he studied bassoon with Arthur Grossman, and composition with Joël-François Durand, Richard Karpen, and Diane Thome. Devoted to new music, Hare has had the privilege of performing many new works written specifically for him while also composing his own musical compositions. Hare's music has been performed in many venues throughout the United States as well as the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany. He has performed in many of the top professional orchestras in the Puget Sound region and is the bassoonist for the Solstice Wind Quintet, composer and bassoonist with the Seattle-based new music ensemble Contemporary Chamber Composers and Players, and a member of the Seattle Creative Orchestra. He recently released a full-length CD of his compositions and collaborations, Intrada (2004 Present Sounds).
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Bill Horist (King County) is a Seattle-based composer and instrumentalist as well as a noted improviser and performer. He has performed over 600 concerts in the past nine years in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Japan, performing and/or recording with such noted artists as Bill Frisell, KK Null, Matt Chamberlain, Trey Gunn (King Crimson), Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins), Shazaad Ismaily, Eyvind Kang, Jeff Grienke, and Tucker Martine, among others. In addition, Horist has toured and recorded with a number of bands, including Nobodaddy, Phineas Gage, and Nervewheel. As a solo artist, Horist has toured the United States twice in support of his recent releases Soylent Radio and Songs from the Nerve Wheel. He has received grants and residencies from such organizations as Jack Straw and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He also improvises and composes for film, dance, and theater and recently traveled to Calgary to score a new major work with M-Body Dance Company.
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Robert Millis (King County) is a founding member of Climax Golden Twins, who have long been at the forefront of of Seattle's vanguard music scene, creating a diverse and often uncategorizable array of record releases, new media installations, performances, and works for film and choreography. Featured among these is Lovely, released in 2002 and originally created as an immersive gallery installation, as well as the score for the feature film Session Nine. Millis has released two recent solo CDs documenting music from Asia (Leaf Drunks, Distant Drums on Anomalous Records and Harmika Yab Yum: Folk Sounds from Nepal on the Seattle-based Sublime Frequencies label). A frequent collaborator, Millis has played, composed for, and improvised with numerous artists in a variety of settings, including Jesse Paul Miller, Jeph Jerman, Dave Knott, the Messenger Girl's Trio, Mary Simpson, the Phonographer's Union, Bill Horist, Jeffery Taylor, the Sea Donkeys, Scott Colburn, Don Fels, and Richard Bishop. In addition to his work as an instrumentalist, Millis also works with field recordings, electronics, collage, found sounds and whatever else comes to hand. Additionally, he recently co-curated In Resonance, a sound-based art exhibit at this year’s Bumbershoot Arts festival which featured national and international artists working with sound and video.
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Miho Takekawa* (Spokane County) Miho Takekawa is an accomplished marimba performer and arranger playing Japanese folk music mixed with jazz and Latin rhythms. Her unusual style has taken her all over the world as a performer and arranger and provided her the opportunity to play with some of the best musical talent in the Northwest. While completing her MA at the University of Washington, Takekawa received the Boeing Scholarship for excellence in percussion performance three years in a row. Originally from Tokyo, she received her BA in percussion performance and music education at Kunitachi School of Music in Tokyo and has been playing percussion for operas, musicals, symphonies, percussion ensembles, ethnic music ensembles, and jazz bands in both Japan and the United States for many years. In addition to her own releases, Takekawa has performed with various groups, including Orchestra Seattle, Philharmonia Orchestra Northwest, Contemporary Chamber Composer and Player, Seattle Creative Orchestra, and Akoma, a West African drum ensemble.
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LITERATURE
Allen Braden (Pierce County) has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witness Emerging Writers Prize, and the Grolier Prize, among other awards. Braden was the fourth and last generation to work on his family farm in White Swan, Washington, where they raised cattle, hay, grain, and hundreds of barn cats. He earned a BA from Central Washington University and has MA and MFA degrees from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Braden has published his poetry in such journals and anthologies as The Virginia Quarterly Review, Seneca Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Bellingham Review, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets 2005, and The New Republic. He has been published online by Poetry Daily, Literary Salt, Arhutus, Brevity, and Switched-on Gutenberg. His essay “Richard Hugo’s Marginal West,” appears in a recent issue of North Dakota Quarterly. Founder of The Gallery Reading Series, he teaches poetry and interdisciplinary writing at Tacoma Community College and lives in Puyallup, Washington.
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Lyanda Lynn Haupt (King County) is a non-fiction writer living in Seattle. Trained in both philosophy and natural history, Haupt received an MA in the Philosophy of Science from Colorado State University with an emphasis in ornithology. Her first book, Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds (Sasquatch Books, 2001) considers the relationship between humans, birds, and ecological understanding. Rare Encounters was featured as a Los Angeles Times “Discoveries” selection, an Utne Reader pick, and was a winner of the 2002 Washington State Book Awards. Her articles and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including Image, Open Spaces, Conservation Biology Journal, Wild Earth Journal, Birdwatcher’s Digest, and The Prairie Naturalist. Her second book, Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent, The Importance of Everything, and Other Lessons from Darwin’s Lost Notebooks, will be published by Little, Brown, and Company in March, 2006. Haupt mines Darwin’s lesser-known writings from his early expedition aboard the Beagle and his travels up and down the coastline of South America, in order to illuminate the process of discovery that shaped Darwin’s vision.
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Rebecca Hoogs* (King County) is the author of a chapbook of poems, Grenade (Green Tower Press 2005); her poems have appeared in AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, and Seneca Review, among other publications. She was the recipient of a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire (2004), as well as a Gerberding Rome Fellowship (2002). Hoogs has taught English at the University of Washington, where she received an MFA in Creative Writing in 2000 and an MA in Literature in 2004. She currently lives in Seattle where she is the Director of Writers in the Schools (WITS), an educational outreach program of Seattle Arts & Lectures that brings professional writers to Seattle public middle and high schools for yearlong residencies.
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Laurie Lamon (Spokane County) is a poet living in Spokane where she teaches creative writing and literature at Whitworth College. Her poems have appeared in journals and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Feminist Studies, Primavera, Poetry Northwest, and Northwest Review. In addition to receiving a Pushcart Prize in 2001, Lamon received a Graves Award in the Humanities in 2002, which provided her with a paid release from teaching and allowed her to conduct research for “Poetry of Witness,” a Whitworth class she teaches that explores 20th-century political poetry, poetry of extremity and survival, as well as doubt and faith. Lamon also teaches courses on contemporary American poetry and women writers and has recently developed seminars in American women poets and poets of the Holocaust and post-WWII Eastern Europe. She earned her BA from Whitworth College, her MA from the University of Montana, and a PhD from the University of Utah. Her first collection of poems, The Fork Without Hunger, was published this year by CavanKerry Press (NJ), with a foreword from renowned poet Donald Hall.
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Stacey Levine (King County) is a Seattle-based author whose books include My Horse and Other Stories and Dra--, a novel, both published by Sun & Moon Press. She received a PEN/West Fiction Award for My Horse and Other Stories. Her second novel, Frances Johnson, was recently published by Clear Cut Press of Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in such venues as American Book Review, Fence, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review and Nest Magazine among others. In addition, she recently wrote the libretto for The Wreck of the St. Nickolai: An Opera for Objects, performed at On the Boards (Seattle) and at the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, Oregon this past year. Formerly a creative writing and English instructor, she is now working on a second collection of short fiction.
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Samuel Ligon (Spokane County) is a fiction writer living in Spokane. He received his MA from the University of New Hampshire, and an MFA from New School University in New York. His novel, Safe in Heaven Dead, was published by Harper Collins in 2003, and was reviewed as a “superbly convincing first novel” (Kirkus Reviews). His short fiction has appeared in The Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Manoa, Other Voices, Cimmaron Review, and Post Road, among other publications. He currently teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers, where also serves as the editor of the literary journal Willow Springs. He is currently at work on a novel entitled All the Light of the Day which tells the story of Will Gammon and explores the idea that any first-person narrator must necessarily be unreliable.
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Tod Marshall (Spokane County) earned an MFA degree from Eastern Washington University and a PhD from the University of Kansas. His first collection of poetry, Dare Say, was the winner of the University of Georgia’s Contemporary Poetry Series. He has also published a collection of his interviews with contemporary poets, Range of the Possible. In 2003, he was selected as the Wilson Visiting Poet at Albion College in Albion, Michigan, a distinction previously given to poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, Stephen Spender, and Galway Kinnell. His work has been widely published in such publications as The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, and Denver Quarterly, among others. He lives in Spokane and teaches at Gonzaga University.
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Brenda Miller* (Whatcom County) is a creative non-fiction writer living in Bellingham, where she teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. She is the author of Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002), which was a finalist for the PEN American Center Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Forward Jewish Book of the Year. She has received four Pushcart Prizes, and her essays have appeared in numerous periodicals such as The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Utne Reader, and The Georgia Review. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2003). Her work has also appeared in several anthologies and retrospectives devoted to the personal essay, including The Pushcart Book of Essays, a selection of the best essays published in the Pushcart Prize anthologies in the last 25 years, and True Stories from the Midlife Underground (forthcoming, Doubleday, 2006). Miller is also Editor-in-Chief of The Bellingham Review.
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Ann Pancake (King County) is a fiction writer living in Seattle. Her collection of short stories, Given Ground (University Press of New England), won the 2000 Bakeless Award sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, a Pushcart Prize, the Glasgow Prize, a Whiting Award, creative writing fellowships from the states of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, a Bread Loaf Fellowship, and the Emerging Southern Women Writers Contest. Her fiction and essays have appeared such journals and anthologies as Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, and New Stories from the South. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, in Tacoma. She is currently finishing a novel about mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia entitled Strange as This Weather Has Been, told from seven different perspectives and featuring a family living in a community directly below a massive mining operation.
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*These awards are provided through generous funding from the Washington State Arts Commission.
Statistics for the 2005 Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship
Discipline # of Applicants # of Recipients
Craft 81 5
Music 54 4
Literature 140 9
Media 40 3
Location # of Applicants
King County 187
Western (excluding King County) 87
Eastern 21
Central 15
A total of 315 artists in Washington State applied this year. 21 artists were awarded Fellowships.
