Beyond Campus
Amanda Choo Quan (Critical Studies MFA 17) is a Trinidadian-Jamaican writer, performer and organizer currently based in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, Mona, where she earned Brodber-Pollard prize, and of CalArts’ MFA in Creative Writing, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She has attended Callaloo and Cropper Foundation workshops, the Juniper Summer Institute, the Scottish Universities Summer International School, and was most recently granted a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. Her work can be seen in Callaloo, in STAY MAD Zine, or on various stages across LA. In terms of weather, she prefers heat; in terms of work, she enjoys writing about displacement, intimacy, and evil.
Giovan Alonzi (Critical Studies MFA 17) is a poet and musician from Van Nuys, CA. His writing has appeared in VOLT, PANK, Entropy, The Believer, and other publications. At CalArts, his thesis was awarded the Emi Kuriyama Memorial Thesis Award. He currently teaches writing composition at East Los Angeles College and creative writing at Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory. Once, he heard poetry was theft.
Amanda and Giovan share their space at the REEF residency together, working on a multi-tiered project that examines the relationship between racism, cognition, and language. They are particularly interested in how white and black people perceive “whiteness” and “blackness,” what group acts of racism suggest about an individual perpetrator’s negotiation with their own identity, how academic concepts of race affect everyday language, and how American racial dynamics influence the way racism is spoken about throughout the African diaspora. During their time at the REEF, they will be hosting readings and presentations, as well as putting together a small publication.
Sichong Xie seeks to be a cultural organizer who utilizes body-based sculptural forms (masks / costumes / objects) transforming discarded materials and disregarded spaces by using the tools of humor and absurdity. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, she investigates these forms and movements within global communities to reconsider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices.
In the summer of 2016, she was a fellowship artist in the Watermill Center for Performance in Long Island, NY. During the six-week intensive workshops and practices, she collaborated with five other actors and dancers, creating a piece called Everyday Objects, a three-hour endurance performance integrating dance, experimental theatre and installations. In the summer of 2017, Sichong Xie has been chosen to participate in the Hauser & Wirth Somerset exchange residency at Bath School of Art & Design, Bath Spa University. She also did a five-hour endurance performance Walking With The Disappeared at the Hauser & Wirth Somerset gallery.
Her practice deals with issues of identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the surreal characteristics of her body in the ever-changing environment. Her current body of work explores Chinese culture versus American culture, her female gender versus the patriarchy that is reflected in municipal sculptures in China, and Chinese Communist politics versus the “only one child” generations.
Find Dany Naierman at the juncture of analysis, media production, and performance. His projects reassemble narratives through original research that result in making. The themes of his work encompass body identity within landscapes overtaken by industrial automation, and the reactivation of inherent archives within landscapes. Often a performance lecturer within his academic path, Dany is also 50% of DANyDANY, a musical duo. He served as art director, technical director and producer with the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and holds an MA in Aesthetics and Politics degree from CalArts. A Venezuelan artist, he was born in Caracas and is currently based in Los Angeles.
Matt Town was born in Florida on November 30 1989. Town’s work considers a sense of community and one’s role within it, a sense of justice, the significance of family, issues of racial tension and a sense of social class and place, and what it takes to question these.