Artist Bios

Abecedarium: NYC Directors and Programmers

Lynne Sachs
Director
Artist: Elutriate, Foudroyant, Georgic, Lapidary, Selenography, Umbel, Xenogenisis, Yashmak
Segment Director: Audile, Bibliomancy, Culminant, Diglot
Videographer: Kermis, Nosogeography

Lynne Sachs makes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Her work embraces hybrid forms, combining memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include live performance with moving image. Sachs has made 35 films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, BAM Cinemafest and Art of the Real at Lincoln Center. Her work has also been exhibited at the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other venues nationally and internationally. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana and China Women’s Film Festival have all presented retrospectives of Lynne’s films.  In 2020, Lynne had her sixth NYC premiere at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight with her Film About a Father Who, a feature length experimental documentary. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts. Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems in 2019.  Lynne lives in Brooklyn with her husband filmmaker Mark Street with whom they have two daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs. Lynne’s website is www.lynnesachs.com.

In Choi
Blog programmer and designer

Originally hoping to be a computer animator, In Choi studied digital arts and computer science. Amusingly, he has now lost all his interest in the art of animation. Instead, he found himself delving into interactive multimedia, software engineering, hypertext, and film. Presently, he is trying to establish himself as a user interface developer while keeping his options open for different artistic roles. As with any artistic medium one is working, he strongly believes his goal is to create an experience that does not persuade the audience, but always entertains and occasionally (hopefully) touches. In lives in Los Angeles.

Rebecca Shapass
Design Consultant

Rebecca is a filmmaker and multi-media artist born, raised, and based in New York City. Her art and image-making practice revolve around an interest in exploring femininity in all of its forms and expressions. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she completed a degree in Film & TV and Art History.  When not making art, Rebecca can be found co-directing DV8 Film Festival, a DV and Super 8mm, 48-hour film festival, teaching workshops, or hanging out with her cat, Loki.   Rebecca is part of Smack Mellon’s 2018-19 Artist Studio Program where she will also be a NY Community Trust Van Lier Fellow. She has also been a resident at NURTUREart and Signal Culture.

Collaborators on 2008 Flash Version of Abecedarium:NYC

Susan Agliata
Co-director and Flash Designer
Videographer, editor: Kermis, Open City, Vaticinate
Segment Director: Culminant, Diglot, Holus Bolus, Biliomancy, Audile

Susan Agliata earned a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. During her studies, she concentrated in the Moving Picture Arts, including experimental film/multimedia installation, and curatorial studies, experimenting with diverse forms of the moving image in both physical and virtual space. In 2003 Agliata attended the International School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam concentrating in film/video installation and curatorial studies. In 2004, upon return to Sarah Lawrence, these studies culminated in an in-depth study of the definitions and methodology of “Expanded Cinema” as well as a study of “Hypertext and Hypermedia Theory.” Weaving together literature, history and personal journeys her films and web-based projects are multi-layered non-linear journeys through other places, both mental, physical and temporal. In her work, Agliata explores the concepts of cultural assimilation, the complexity of emotions in regards to familial experience and obligation, and the conflicts between consciousness and physical being. www.susanagliata.com.

Joseph Tekippe
Programmer (Flash/Actionscript) and Design Consultant
Co-Designer: Bibliomancy, Audile

Joseph Tekippe is an intermedia artist who works at an intersection of technology, music, and performance. He studied intermedia performance at the University of Iowa before moving to New York to earn his MFA from the School of Visual Arts. His work and writing have been featured in ACM-SIGGRAPH, AIM27 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, PS122, and elsewhere. Joseph currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
http://bfafinearts.sva.edu/people/joseph-tekippe/

Our original Abecedarium:NYC 2008 Artists

Alisa Besher
Segment Director: Culminant
Audio recorder: Audile

Alisa Besher was born in Moscow and raised in America. She is a fan of duality and paradoxes and is intrigued by peculiarities, absurdities, obscurities and fruit. Working with collage and splintered home videos in her spare time, she is currently in a post-graduate daze, trying to whittle away spare time into a sculpture worthy of her B.F.A.

Beth Botshon
Director: Inquiline, Jerrybuild, Moffette
Segment Director: Audile, Culminant, Diglot

Beth Miranda Botshon completed a Master of Fine Arts in Integrated Media Arts at the City University of New York, Hunter College. Over the past several years, she has been teaching, traveling and shooting extensively in New York City, Mexico, and Central America. Beth’s documentaries advocate for local and global change by giving voice to individuals who are marginalized and face various challenges within their communities.
http://www.bethbotshon.com/

Janine Fleri
Director: Welkin

Born in Vermont to native Long Islanders, Janine Fleri is a writer, filmmaker, and videographer currently residing in Queens. www.j9fleri.com

David Gatten
Director: Rete

David Gatten is a filmmaker, Henry James fan, recent Guggenheim fellow and aspiring audio book artist, who makes bookish films about letters and libraries, lovers and ghosts that are filled with words, some of which you can even read. His work has shown around the earth planet in museums, festivals, biennials, galleries, archives, access centers, elementary schools, storefronts, on sides of buildings and once on a barge that was floating down river. You can find his films in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago but he can rarely find his glasses. http://davidgattenfilm.com/

Barbara Hammer
Director: Zenana

Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made over 80 works in a career that spans 30 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. She recently had a Tribute Retrospective at the Chinese Cultural University in Taiwan. Her experimental films of the 1970’s often dealt with taboo subjects such as menstruation, female orgasm and lesbian sexuality. In the 80’s she used optical printing to explore perception and the fragility of 16mm film life itself. Her documentaries tell the stories of marginalized peoples who have been hidden from history and are often essay films that are multi-leveled and engage audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. Hammer was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Fall 2005 at the Bratislava Academy of Art and Design, Slovakia; she received the first Shirley Clarke Avant-Garde Filmmaker Award in October 2006. She lives and works in New York City.  barbarahammer.com

Heather Kramer
Videoographer: Holus bolus

Heather grew up in a suburb of Seattle learning to appreciate rain. She attended high school like the normal teenager, but she felt anything but normal. Which is probably the normal teenager. Regardless, her Visual Communications class opened up a world of film, design and photography helping her realize, there’s no place more perfect than New York City. She attended New York University. She built the inside of a post-apocalyptic space station in March, 2008. Heather is considering photography, production design and running away.

George Kuchar
Director: Pelagic

Born with a twin brother, Mike, in 1942 on the Isle of Manhattan, we mainly grew up in the Bronx and were schooled in the world of commercial art. I supported myself, and my hobby of making 8mm movies, with paychecks from that Midtown Manhattan world of angst and ulcers. Earning enough money to switch to 16mm in the 1960s (1965), both of us started splicing together bigger strips of film and lugging around heavier projectors. The burgeoning underground film movement, which at that time was in full swing, gave us an outlet for our work and we continued grinding out our separate visions on celluloid. In the very early 1970s I was invited to teach filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute and have been there ever since. I came over with my dog but now use my cats as screen stars (sometimes) as he passed away. I became a traitor to the film department when 8mm video camcorders came on the market and jumped ship to start up in that dinghy medium. I enjoyed it and then sailed on to Hi-8, mini-DV and Digital 8. I don’t regret it one bit. I’m still in the film department because I still make pictures that move even though there’s a lot of “stills” in this sentence. I started making moving pictures in the 1950s so there’s a whole pile of them in my closets (over 200).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kuchar

Ethan Mass
Director: Typhlology

Ethan Mass began lighting for film as a student at New York’s School of Visual Arts. His work attracted the attention of New York-based film and video artists and among those with whom he collaborated are Maria Beatty, Carolee Schneeman and Abigail Child. He photographed Hilary Brougher’s feature “The Sticky Fingers Of Time” in 1996 and has since shot features on 35mm and Super16mm film and on video, using MiniDV and Hi Definition. Balancing creative and commercial work, he has worked for a broad range of broadcast and cable clients. Ethan lives in Manhattan.
www.imdb.com/name/nm0557053/

Scott Nyerges
Co-director: Nosogeography

Scott Nyerges has been making short films and videos since the late 1990s. His work has been shown in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and the International Computer Music Conference in Barcelona, Spain. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. www.nyerges.com

Erik Schurink
ABC Weblink research and numerous acrostic poetry entries

“Alchemist by chance, designer Erik finds gold hidden in Jamison’s knees, Lubalin’s marks, Neruda’s odes, Pei’s qi, Rembrandt’s sunbeams, Tinguely’s uselessness, vowels, Whiteread’s xanadus, yesterday’s zaniness.”   Erik Schurink is a designer of interactive, cultural and art exhibitions. He is a poet, and an assemblage sculptor. He and his wife Rita host salons and art events at their home, presenting poets, dancers, musicians, chefs, film makers, painters, playwrights, and storytellers. He approaches exhibit design as interactive storytelling, his sculptures as celebrations of entropic emergence, while his poems are recipes for momentary environments. In his art he intends for people to gather in conversation.  Schurink was born in the Netherlands. He holds a BFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He moved to New York in 1983, and lives in Brooklyn.

Erika Yeomans
Director: Quidnunc

Erika Yeomans has created an extensive body of work in theater, mixed media and film. As the co-founder and artistic director of the performance company Doorika (1990-1999), she collaborated with various artists to create multimedia and theater projects in Chicago and New York.