The School of Making Thinking creates a unique environment where participants are able to develop a creative practice that challenges disciplinary conventions of art-making, thinking, and living. 

Our program asks: How does art deepen thought and provoke questioning? How is thinking enacted through creative mediums? And how can an environment be structured or resist structuring in such a way that these questions can not only be asked, but be lived as well? 

SMT was founded in 2011 and is a federal nonprofit 501c3.

Staff

Aaron Finbloom 
Co-Founder & Executive Director

Sophie Traub
Programming & Development Director

​Millie Kapp 
Education Coordinator 

Rachel James
Residency Director

Matheson Westlake
Co-Founder & Special Projects 

Josephine Decker
Director of Business Development

​Staff Alumni

Abraham Avnisan
Co-Founder & Emeritus Board Member

Adriana Disman 
Co-Director & Emeritus Board Member

Sharon Mashihi 
Co-Director & Emeritus Board Member

Mollie McKinley 
Co-Director & Emeritus Board Member

Aaron Finbloom
Co-Founder &
​Executive Director

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, performance artist and musician.  Much of his work involves re-kindling the connection between the philo-sophical and the performative by creating quasi-structured conver-sations through games, improv-isational scores, booklets, audio guides, dance maps, theatrical lectures, existential therapy and philo-sophic rituals. He is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program.

Rachel James
Residency Director

Rachel James is a Canadian artist and poet with a background in social anthropology and experimental ethnography. She has exhibited or performed throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, including at La MaMa, The Watermill Center, Essex Flowers, MoMA PS1, Spectacle, and Recess in New York, SFMOMA, Totaldobže in Riga, Kamppi Chapel in Helsinki, and The New Gallery in Calgary. As an audio documentarian James has worked with BBC Radio, Radiolab, and This American Life. She completed artist residencies at New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA), Toronto, Soma, Mexico City, Process Residency, Atlanta, and Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Clermont, KY. She has curated exhibitions and performance events in Mexico City and New York, where she lives and works. 

Molly McKinley
​Former Co-Director & Emeritus Board Member

Mollie McKinley is an interdisciplinary artist working in the Hudson Valley and New York City. Her practice incorporates video, photography, installation, and performance. Her work has been exhibited at Field Projects; Ethan Cohen Fien Arts; Anna Kustera Gallery; SPRING/ BREAK Art Fair curated by Natalie Kovacs; Matteawan Gallery Beacon; the MoMA Pop Rally; the New York Art Book Fair at PS1 MoMA; FADO Performance Art Centre, Toronto; Anthology Film Archives; the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz; and the Brucennials (2009-2014). Her work has been featured by Creative Capital; Vernissage TV Magazine; the Humble Arts Foundation; and many others. She has been involved in a number of pedagogy experiments, such as The Bruce High Quality Foundation University (New York) and The Golden Dome (Los Angeles). Her writing on the School of Making Thinking has been published in the journal Performance Research. She studied photography and film at Bard College. Her first solo exhibition in NYC opens at Pioneer Works in spring 2017.

Sophie Traub 
Programming​ & Development Director

Sophie Traub is a performing artist, actor, teacher, dramaturge, and arts org-anizer from Toronto, currently based in Brooklyn. She has studied performance and performance tech-nique extensively, with a focus in much of her work and studies on improv-isation, group process, movement, classical theatre, and embodiment. As a performance artist, Sophie has per-formed at DUMBO Arts Festival, Dixon Place, White Rabbit Festival at Red Clay Farm, the Norman Felix Gall-ery, Artscape Gibralter Point, the Microscope Gallery, Medicine Show Theater, and The Last Weekend Arts Festival. Film credits include Mother's Day (Adina Smith), Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (Decker), Fugue (Torres-Torres), Tenderness (Polson), Bite Radius (Par-sons), The Interpreter (Pollack).

Theatre acting, devising, and directing credits include This Is How I Don't Know How To Dance (SITI Company/Barrow Street Theatre), Won't Be a Ghost (Prelude 2014, Dixon Place 2015, The Brick 2016), The Beach Eagle (Dixon Place 2013). Sophie has studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, HB Studio, Studio 303, Stonestreet Studios, SITI Company Conservatory, NYU and University of Toronto.

Matheson Westlake 
​Co-Founder &
​Special Projects

Matheson Westlake is a Brooklyn-based teaching artist, writer, per-former, and theater director. Her work is highly collaborative, and seeks to create surprising connections within the context of a heightened reality. Recent projects include theatrical adaptations of The Seagull and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She received her BA in theater from Emerson College.

Adriana Disman
Former Co-Director & Emeritus Board Member

Adriana Disman is a performance art maker, thinker, and curator. Her axis of creation is always the body. Her live works have been presented in performance art spaces and contexts in Canada, the US, Europe, and India. Disman's theoretical articles dealing with performance art have been published in Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, the feminist performance art anth-ology More Caught in the Act, and she has a number of forthcoming texts in various monographs and art periodicals.

Disman is the founder and curator of LINK & PIN performance art series. She holds an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from York University and is a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, NYC. Disman gives workshops and guest lectures regularly and has taught at McGill, University of Toronto, and Abrons Art Centre, amongst others.

Photo credit: Christian Bujold

Sharon Mashihi 
Former Co-Director & Emeritus Board Member

Sharon Mashihi a New York based radio producer and screenwriter. Her audio pieces have aired on KALW, MPBN, KUOW, and Public Radio Remix. She is a graduate of the radio program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and holds a BFA in film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her most recent feature-length screenplay, The Ticket – co-written with Ido Fluk – was produced by Wendy Japhet and Pam Koffler at Killer Films and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
​

Millie Kapp 
Education
​Coordinator 

Millie Kapp has a MA in Performance Studies from New York University and BA in Visual and Critical Studies from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Professional experiences include teaching performance-based classes and workshops and visiting artist lectures at Maryland Institute College of the Arts, the University of Chicago and Stony Brook College. Kapp is a performance artist and has presented her work in Oakland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, and New York, recipient of the CAAP grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and participated in artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, the Chicago Cultural Center and the School of Making Thinking. Though her performance work is primarily dance-based, her work crosses disciplines incorporating video, sculpture and text. Kapp is also a writer and curator and has curated performance events in Chicago and New York.

Josephine Decker
Director of Business Development

Said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker, Josephine Decker aims to spark curiosity and wonder in audiences. Part of Time Warner's 150 incubator, a recent alum of the Sundance Institute's New Frontier Lab and one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, Josephine Decker premiered her first two narrative features at the Berlinale Forum 2014 to rave reviews. The films were listed #2 and #10 on The New Yorker’s Top Ten List of 2014, played about a hundred festivals around the world (including Torino, London BFI, BAM Cinemafest), won Sarasota Film Festival’s Independent Visions Award, Tangerine Entertainment’s prize for a rising female director and many other awards.  Josephine recently developed video content for the Museum of the City of New York's new Future of the City Lab, has directed content for United Way and other non-profits, and helped to produce documentaries for A&E and Discovery before moving into indie film with her feature documentary Bi The Way (SXSW, MTV’s Logo and Netflix).  Her adaptation of a dancer’s dream – in which she explored formerly incarcerated individuals’ surreal first days out of prison (part of collective: unconscious) -- premiered in Narrative Feature Competition at SXSW 2016 and has received over 500,000 views as part of its innovative free release on BitTorrent and Vimeo.

Her third narrative feature, starring Molly Parker and Miranda July, is currently in post-production, and this fall, she incubated a dance-theater-film hybrid at Princeton University with butoh choreographer Vangeline.

Abraham Avnisan 
Co-Founder & Emeritus Board Member

Abraham Avnisan is an artist, technologist and educator whose work is situated at the intersection of image, text, and code. He holds M.F.A. in Art and Technology Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an M.F.A in Poetry from Brooklyn College. Abraham works as a freelance computer programmer and lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses on mobile app development and immersive virtual environments.

​Abraham has presented and exhibited his work at the Libraries at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, the Vild med ORD literary festival in Aarhus, Denmark, the &NOW Conference of Innovative Writing, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA), The Electronic Literature Organization conference, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Word Weekend event. His work has been published in the ISEA Symposium Proceedings, Stonecutter, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Drunken Boat, New Delta Review, and others. He is the recipient of the Rosen and Edes Foundation Semi-Finalist Fellowship for Emerging Artists and The School of the Art Institute’s New Artists Society Merit Scholarship.