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Artist Profiles
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"There was a confidence in the studios during APPEX, but no arrogance.
It allowed a kind of generosity to flow that in turn allowed everyone
to let go of their assumptions, to rest in an open place, waiting for
new meaning to arise." Victoria Marks
In the summer of 1997, thirty-eight artists from Asia and America convened at UCLA for five weeks of intensive, disciplined process of face-to-face artistic exchange and creative experimentation. To meet the APPEX artists check on side bar to your right.
National
Dance/Media Fellows
Ellen Bromberg has been creating dances for companies and solo artists throughout the country for over 20 years. Having performed with Utah's Repertory Dance Theater, she was most influenced by the work of Anna Sokolow and Jose Limon. She has received numerous awards and grants for her work including two NEA Choreography Fellowships, two Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, a 1994 Choreography Fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the 1992 Bonnie Bird Choreography Award. Her choreography has been performed throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Korea and Japan, and has been broadcast nationally on PBS Television's "Alive From Off Center." Ms. Bromberg has been commissioned to create new work by many companies and presenters including The American Dance Festival, The Yellow Springs Institute, The Laban Centre in London, Ballet Arizona, and KQED TV in San Francisco. Ms. Bromberg has held faculty positions at numerous colleges and universities. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
Lisa Gross is a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles with her husband Adam and their three children. Originally from New York, Ms. Gross earned a bachelors degree in Choreography at Bard College, then danced professionally in New York with Aileen Passloff, Joanna Haigood and the Zaccho Dance Company and Albert Reid. While at Bard, she became interested in film as an extension of her choreography work. She attended the NYU sight and sound workshop and worked as a freelance production assistant. Within a short time, Ms. Gross became a producer of television commercials and completed writing her first screenplay. Later moving to Northern Westchester, she began her work at Barnspace, a dance collective located in Katonah, NY. Like her, most members were professional dancers who had moved out of the city and were struggling to manage lives as both artists and mothers. While participating as a dancer and choreographer, she continued her film work by making a short documentary on Barnspace and directing a multi-media piece that included dance, film and narration. In 1995, the film production company, Pictures In A Row, was started with director Peter Lang. Currently, Ms. Gross is writing a screenplay, and developing a dance film on the human connections and random groupings of streetlife in Hollywood.
Johannes Holub is an independent videographer with 25 years experience specializing in documenting dance. His work in the field began in 1972 with modern dance pioneer Charles Weidman. At this time he also began his association with the Dance Collection of The New York Public Library. Since then he has worked for literally hundreds of performing artists, both here and abroad, and numerous festivals. Mr. Holub documented 35 dances by master choreographer Erick Hawkins over a ten-year period; most of these were two-camera productions commissioned by the Dance Collection of the NYPL. Another achievement came with the unique opportunity to document 20 years of performances by the Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Theater, a repertory company for emerging black dancers and choreographers. In another fruitful association, he documented ten years of performances by the Mannes Camerata, a critically acclaimed early music ensemble. In addition to performance documentation, Mr. Holub has collaborated with choreographers on dance for the camera, directed and edited multi-camera productions live in performance, directed instructional dance and music videos, and edited programs, promotional videos and commercial spots.
Laura Margulies is an independent animator living and working in New York City, transplanted from Hawaii. She currently teaches animation at New York University and is working as a color designer on MTV’s animated show "Daria." She has worked on "Beavis and Butthead," "The Head," "Downtown" as well as on assorted music videos, animated pilots and commercials. Although her MTV job is in the traditional style of animation, her own animation is done with oil paints on glass, painting and filming each frame. Ms. Margulies has done various oil-painted spots for MTV and has made numerous films of her own. Having a background in and a persistent need for dance in her life, she has focused her films on dance. She is at work on a short (approximately five minutes) oil-painted animation about Afro-Brazilian dance in which she films Afro-Brazilian dancers and percussionists as reference for the animation. This film was supported partly by a 1997 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Ms. Margulies hopes to finish this film before the end of the year and plans to continue working with oil paint and dance at the core of her films.
Bridget Murnane, producer, director, writer, and editor, is known for her creative treatments of dance film. Her animated film, Tournants, interpreted the history of concert dance in cutouts and premiered at the First Grand Prix Video Danse. Her 1989 short, For Dancers, an omnibus of four disparate dance sequences, screened in over 30 international festivals, received numerous awards and made its broadcast premier on the PBS’s "New Television." In 1994, Ms. Murnane produced her first feature film, Odile and Yvette at the Edge of the World, which premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and is currently in theatrical release. Her film/video, Speakeasy women talkin’ mostly ‘bout men, received the Stuart Dabbs Award for Most Creative Film in 1995 from the American Motion Picture Society and her most recent film, The Black Boots, won awards at Worldfest Charleston, Black Maria Film Festival, Worldfest Houston, and the Schikaneder Short Film Festival, screened internationally in numerous festivals and was broadcast on the PBS’s "New Television." Ms. Murnane received an M.Ed from Lesley College in 1977, an M.A. in Dance from UCLA in 1985, and an M.F.A. from the UCLA Film School in 1990. She taught film and video production at the University of Texas at Austin from 1991-1993, and is presently teaching film production at Emerson College, where she received the Irma Mann Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award.
Evann Siebens, director, cinematographer, choreographer and dancer, specializes in dance films. She studied at Britain’s Royal Ballet School and the National Ballet School of Canada, then danced professionally with the National Ballet of Canada and as a soloist with Bonn Ballet. Ms. Siebens attended New York University, where she directed and choreographed Train Sketches, Fly by Swinging and Creation Myths. She also directed, choreographed and edited do not call it fixity…., an experimental dance film, which won awards at Grand Prix International Video Danse and the Canadian International Annual Film & Video Festivals and screened at Georges Pompidou Centre Videodanse 96, International Music Festival, Canal Dansa Videofest, Dance on Camera Film Festival and Moving Pictures Film Festival, in addition to numerous other festivals, and was featured on "The Spirit of Dance." Ms. Siebens works as a freelance cinematographer, shooting artists including Bill T. Jones, Jose Navas and Yannis Adoniou and as the Director of Photography on the feature, The Madness Channel. She also collaborates on videos with choreographers Ann Moradian and Kayt Lucas and her latest dance film, POTHEAD, is a "social commentary" on the occasional pretentiousness of art and language. Future projects include a dance film on Western Canadian farming communities and a documentary on popular dance forms found in nightclubs and raves.
Graduate Student Fellows
Mark Eby is a photographer and videographer whose primary area of research and documentation has been Melanesia. He grew up in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the son of American missionaries, and returned in 1989 to produce a documentary on the goldrush of Mount Kare. In 1992 he accepted a position to teach high school performing arts at Aiyura in the Eastern Highlands. He was awarded a Fulbright grant in 1995 to conduct a video and photographic survey of the diversity of traditional dance across Melanesia. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in dance ethnology in the World Arts and Cultures program at UCLA.
Sharon Kinney has enjoyed an exciting and successful career in dance as a choreographer, performer, and teacher in both the professional and university worlds. As a returning professional, she is currently a lecturer and MFA candidate at UCLA in the Department of World Arts and Cultures, concentrating on choreography for video and film. Before coming to UCLA, she was an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Department of Dance and Choreography for fifteen years. Ms. Kinney’s professional dance credits in NYC, include the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Twyla Tharp and Dancers, and Dan Wagoner Dancers. She began choreographing her own solo and group works in 1977 and has choreographed over thirty dances for the proscenium stage. In 1980, she choreographed the movie "Popeye" and from that time on she has worked on three motion pictures and several professional dance video projects. In 1995, she choreographed, produced and directed her own dance video "Choreographic Journey". She has been able to cross over from her duties teaching in the university setting to diverse professional activities that include her work in video and film, choreographing for the stage, and traveling to Asia to teach in Japan, Hong Kong and Korea. Her most recent achievement was to be selected as one of two graduate students to be accepted in the UCLA National Dance/Media Project to take place Winter Quarter 1998.
