​Founders, Alumni Staff & Emeritus Board

Aaron Finbloom 
Co-Founder & Executive Director

Matheson Westlake
Co-Founder & Special Projects 
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Abraham Avnisan
Co-Founder & Emeritus Board Member

Adriana Disman 
Co-Director & Emeritus Board Member

Mollie McKinley 
Co-Director & Emeritus Board Member

​Rachel James
Residency Director

Sharon Mashihi 
Co-Director & Emeritus Board Member

Millie Kapp 
Education Coordinator 

​anique vered
Curatorial and Strategic Development Consultant

Aaron Finbloom
Co-Founder &
Former ​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 poet and artist with a background in experimental ethnography. She has presented her work in the United States, Canada, and Europe, including at Miguel Abreu Gallery and Essex Flowers in New York City, Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, The New Gallery in Calgary, and Totaldobže in Riga. Her poems have been published by The Recluse and Form IV. As an audio documentarian she has worked with BBC Radio, The Magnum Foundation, WNYC, The Organist, and others. She holds an MFA from Bard College, an MA from the University of Toronto, and has taught seminars on performance scores and essay films. She lives in New York City. 

anique vered
Curatorial and Strategic Development Consultant

anique vered is an artist-researcher, development practitioner and community leader. She has over ten years experience in collaborative, interdisciplinary communities of practice through groundbreaking, cross-sectoral initiatives in research and cultural environments. anique is currently focused on bridging speculative and critical theory with development practice through explorations that cultivate a “response-ability” to existing and forthcoming social, political and environmental conditions. She specializes in strategic interventions and inclusive, generative techniques across levels of society with the intention of transforming the orientations and apparatuses that enable individual, collective and planetary wellbeing. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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.
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