Artists Space

Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in northern California. His books, often concerned with ecology, include Mojave Ghost, Be With, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and the desert novel The Trace. Gander’s Japanese co-translations include Alice, Iris, Red Horse: Poems by Gozo Yoshimasu, Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (Best Translated Book Award), and Names and Rivers by Shuri Kido. He’s also translated fifteen books from Spanish language poets.

Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. From 1972–2013, she worked exclusively as Eiko & Koma performing their own choreography, earning awards from MacArthur, United States Artists, American Dance Festival, Dance Magazine, and the first Doris Duke Artist Award. Since 2014, Eiko has been directing her own projects. A series of site-specific solo work, A Body in Places, became the subject of her 2016 Danspace Platform that brought her a Special Bessies Citation, an Art Matters and the Anonymous Was a Woman award. A Body in Fukushima brought Eiko and historian/photographer William Johnston repeatedly to Japan's irradiated landscape, producing presentations, exhibitions, films, and a book. In the Duet Project, (2017-), Eiko collaborates with Ishmael Houston-Jones, Joan Jonas, DonChristian Jones, Iris McCloughan, Beverly McIver, and Mérian Soto. I Invited Myself (2022-) presents exhibitions and screenings of her media works. www.eikootake.org

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, translational, and scholarly arts, and teaches at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Environmental Arts + Humanities Lab. She is the author of five full-length books, including Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism, The Republic of Exit 43, a cross-genre documentary of two New York landfills, and From Dame Quickly. Her translations and critical work surrounding Amelia Rosselli, a polyglot refugee from Fascist Italy, won the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/De Palchi Book Award. She has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers to sound counter-histories of sites ranging from a tract of Trajan’s aqueduct on Rome’s Janiculum Hill to Michigan’s Quincy Copper Mine, and her visual poetry has been installed and performed at venues ranging from the Kunstverein München to the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art. Her chapbooks include SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts, featuring librettos for mixed-reality performance with Judd Morrissey and Ava Aviva Avnisan, and as curating poet, with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse.