Meet Our 2017 Residents

Sharon Mashihi is a New York based radio producer and screenwriter.  Her audio pieces have aired on KALW, MPBN, KUOW, and Public Radio Remix.  Most recently, she has been producing interview segments for Studio 360 at WNYC.  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 – is being produced by Wendy Japhet and Pamela Koffler at Killer Films.

Joe Smoth *link to website if there is one 

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

DDL is an audio-based performance in the guise of  a lecture on storytelling.  In DDL, I use the basic principles of formulaic screenwriting, as detailed in Robert McKee’s Story, to “teach” the story of a real-life documentary subject who appears live with me on stage.   On one level, my performance is a lecture on story structure. On another, it is the presentation of a story from one person’s life told alternately through interview tape, the person’s live reading of transcripts from a previously recorded interview, and my own live narration.  Instead of a presenting a previously edited documentary, I collaborate with a story subject to perform one on stage.
DDL is an exploration of the relationship between documentary subject and documentary maker. How does a documentarian create empathy in the telling of a subject’s story? In my live telling of the story with the subject present, I attempt to provide the subject with more agency while hi-lighting the ways his agency is lost in service to the story.
I always want to be talking about poetics while stretching, maybe on a mountain somewhere, in a strange outfit? Wild hair, lace, surrounded by stacks of books about affect theory and monstrosity and feminist experiments in writing. Lisa Robertson (poet crush): “She wanted to tell about it but not necessarily in language”. I am deeply ambivalent about my relationship to academia and so I have taken a few years off to organize poetics clubs with genius friends and read everything Lauren Berlant’s ever written. (Bios terrify me but I’m too too excited to meet all of you).

Kathy Bremaker 

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

I spent a significant portion of my time at SMT weeping in nature. My background in theatre and experimental poetics, my deep-rooted affection for the hysteric, my 24-year-old angst, my faith in my therapist, all these congealed together to leave me hyperembodied and practically telepathic. I was socially paranoid, I was talking to trees about my angst, I was letting myself announce my struggle as theory-in-process. Wanting "to tell about myself but not necessarily in language" (Lisa Robertson), I presented a triptych of intimate, half-finished performances in the basement of the Yellow House. Some texts that informed the shpiel: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, anything Jeanne Randolph, Anne Bogart on terrorism, and family diaries from the 80's."
Karisa Butler-Wall grew up in Seattle and lived in Brooklyn before moving to Minneapolis, where she is now is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation focuses on the sexual and racial politics of health in 20th century American culture. While at the School of Making Thinking she intends to accomplish absolutely no dissertation research whatsoever.​

Adodidactic Broomholder

FAIL- toward a queer practice and politic

​Inspired by Judith Halberstam’s recent book, The Queer Art of Failure, this project investigates the personal and political implications of failure. Drawing inspiration from a stylistic tradition of queer failing that ranges from the wry humor of Oscar Wilde and grand refusals of Bartleby the Scrivener to the doomed romances of lesbian teen films and aesthetic disgrace of Jiggly Caliente, this project asks: What would it mean to rethink failure as style or practice? Rather than defining failure as a lack of success, might we be able to imagine “success” as only one path among many possible modes and styles, which might open space for queerer ways of being in the world? Through a series of conversations, exercises and experiments with the larger SMT community, I hope to not only probe the epistemology of failure as a political objective, but work toward developing a practice of failure as embodied experience.
Karisa Butler-Wall grew up in Seattle and lived in Brooklyn before moving to Minneapolis, where she is now is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation focuses on the sexual and racial politics of health in 20th century American culture. While at the School of Making Thinking she intends to accomplish absolutely no dissertation research whatsoever.​

Adodidactic Broomholder

FAIL- toward a queer practice and politic

​Inspired by Judith Halberstam’s recent book, The Queer Art of Failure, this project investigates the personal and political implications of failure. Drawing inspiration from a stylistic tradition of queer failing that ranges from the wry humor of Oscar Wilde and grand refusals of Bartleby the Scrivener to the doomed romances of lesbian teen films and aesthetic disgrace of Jiggly Caliente, this project asks: What would it mean to rethink failure as style or practice? Rather than defining failure as a lack of success, might we be able to imagine “success” as only one path among many possible modes and styles, which might open space for queerer ways of being in the world? Through a series of conversations, exercises and experiments with the larger SMT community, I hope to not only probe the epistemology of failure as a political objective, but work toward developing a practice of failure as embodied experience.
Karisa Butler-Wall grew up in Seattle and lived in Brooklyn before moving to Minneapolis, where she is now is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation focuses on the sexual and racial politics of health in 20th century American culture. While at the School of Making Thinking she intends to accomplish absolutely no dissertation research whatsoever.​

Adodidactic Broomholder

FAIL- toward a queer practice and politic

​Inspired by Judith Halberstam’s recent book, The Queer Art of Failure, this project investigates the personal and political implications of failure. Drawing inspiration from a stylistic tradition of queer failing that ranges from the wry humor of Oscar Wilde and grand refusals of Bartleby the Scrivener to the doomed romances of lesbian teen films and aesthetic disgrace of Jiggly Caliente, this project asks: What would it mean to rethink failure as style or practice? Rather than defining failure as a lack of success, might we be able to imagine “success” as only one path among many possible modes and styles, which might open space for queerer ways of being in the world? Through a series of conversations, exercises and experiments with the larger SMT community, I hope to not only probe the epistemology of failure as a political objective, but work toward developing a practice of failure as embodied experience.
Karisa Butler-Wall grew up in Seattle and lived in Brooklyn before moving to Minneapolis, where she is now is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation focuses on the sexual and racial politics of health in 20th century American culture. While at the School of Making Thinking she intends to accomplish absolutely no dissertation research whatsoever.​

Adodidactic Broomholder

FAIL- toward a queer practice and politic

​Inspired by Judith Halberstam’s recent book, The Queer Art of Failure, this project investigates the personal and political implications of failure. Drawing inspiration from a stylistic tradition of queer failing that ranges from the wry humor of Oscar Wilde and grand refusals of Bartleby the Scrivener to the doomed romances of lesbian teen films and aesthetic disgrace of Jiggly Caliente, this project asks: What would it mean to rethink failure as style or practice? Rather than defining failure as a lack of success, might we be able to imagine “success” as only one path among many possible modes and styles, which might open space for queerer ways of being in the world? Through a series of conversations, exercises and experiments with the larger SMT community, I hope to not only probe the epistemology of failure as a political objective, but work toward developing a practice of failure as embodied experience.
Karisa Butler-Wall grew up in Seattle and lived in Brooklyn before moving to Minneapolis, where she is now is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation focuses on the sexual and racial politics of health in 20th century American culture. While at the School of Making Thinking she intends to accomplish absolutely no dissertation research whatsoever.​

Adodidactic Broomholder

FAIL- toward a queer practice and politic

​Inspired by Judith Halberstam’s recent book, The Queer Art of Failure, this project investigates the personal and political implications of failure. Drawing inspiration from a stylistic tradition of queer failing that ranges from the wry humor of Oscar Wilde and grand refusals of Bartleby the Scrivener to the doomed romances of lesbian teen films and aesthetic disgrace of Jiggly Caliente, this project asks: What would it mean to rethink failure as style or practice? Rather than defining failure as a lack of success, might we be able to imagine “success” as only one path among many possible modes and styles, which might open space for queerer ways of being in the world? Through a series of conversations, exercises and experiments with the larger SMT community, I hope to not only probe the epistemology of failure as a political objective, but work toward developing a practice of failure as embodied experience.
As a historian, I can’t tell you anything for certain, unless it happened fifty years ago or more, but provisional evidence suggests that I am ABD in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where I study U.S. political ideology and discourse, internal relations, and war. Two tomes of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History, published this year, list me as the assistant editor, which suggests that I held that position during their production. On its website and official documents, I am listed as one of the board members of Reacting to the Past, a pedagogy that pushes students to navigate the major crises in world history through the liminal space of role-play.

My notes and the books imbricated in lopsided piles in my apartment indicate that my current research examines the positioning power of the terms "conservative" and "conservatism," and the way they mark out affiliations and values in the nineteenth-century American political imagination. The thrust of this textual ephemera elides the meaning of conservatism as a body of evolving ideas, and, instead of excavating conservatism as a single, coherent political ideology, it concerns the political work that "conservatism" does in its distinct social and historical settings.

August Nails It 

Sticks and Stones

1. Find areas, or lumps of nature that are decaying, rotting, and collecting themselves into piles. Ornament these piles with found, man-made, self-made items. Compose an image on this site and orchestrate a photograph. Make a series of 5-10 installations/photographs. Consider the backdrop. Wake up early. Study the site for the installation. Study the light.

2. Create small structural moments in nature. Materials can include tape, string, glue, and paint. Force nature to do something. Control the aesthetic. Keep it small and minimal. Document in a way that allows the scale to become ambiguous or questionable. Make drawings from this imagery.

3. Paint some rocks and make sculptures with them. Piles of painted rocks. Document in various ways. How do these assembled sculptures change when seen in nature? studio? gallery?

4. Collect similar sticks. Paint. Pile. Document.

​5. Write statements throughout the process of this work.
As a historian, I can’t tell you anything for certain, unless it happened fifty years ago or more, but provisional evidence suggests that I am ABD in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where I study U.S. political ideology and discourse, internal relations, and war. Two tomes of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History, published this year, list me as the assistant editor, which suggests that I held that position during their production. On its website and official documents, I am listed as one of the board members of Reacting to the Past, a pedagogy that pushes students to navigate the major crises in world history through the liminal space of role-play.

My notes and the books imbricated in lopsided piles in my apartment indicate that my current research examines the positioning power of the terms "conservative" and "conservatism," and the way they mark out affiliations and values in the nineteenth-century American political imagination. The thrust of this textual ephemera elides the meaning of conservatism as a body of evolving ideas, and, instead of excavating conservatism as a single, coherent political ideology, it concerns the political work that "conservatism" does in its distinct social and historical settings.

August Nails It 

Sticks and Stones

1. Find areas, or lumps of nature that are decaying, rotting, and collecting themselves into piles. Ornament these piles with found, man-made, self-made items. Compose an image on this site and orchestrate a photograph. Make a series of 5-10 installations/photographs. Consider the backdrop. Wake up early. Study the site for the installation. Study the light.

2. Create small structural moments in nature. Materials can include tape, string, glue, and paint. Force nature to do something. Control the aesthetic. Keep it small and minimal. Document in a way that allows the scale to become ambiguous or questionable. Make drawings from this imagery.

3. Paint some rocks and make sculptures with them. Piles of painted rocks. Document in various ways. How do these assembled sculptures change when seen in nature? studio? gallery?

4. Collect similar sticks. Paint. Pile. Document.

​5. Write statements throughout the process of this work.
As a historian, I can’t tell you anything for certain, unless it happened fifty years ago or more, but provisional evidence suggests that I am ABD in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where I study U.S. political ideology and discourse, internal relations, and war. Two tomes of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History, published this year, list me as the assistant editor, which suggests that I held that position during their production. On its website and official documents, I am listed as one of the board members of Reacting to the Past, a pedagogy that pushes students to navigate the major crises in world history through the liminal space of role-play.

My notes and the books imbricated in lopsided piles in my apartment indicate that my current research examines the positioning power of the terms "conservative" and "conservatism," and the way they mark out affiliations and values in the nineteenth-century American political imagination. The thrust of this textual ephemera elides the meaning of conservatism as a body of evolving ideas, and, instead of excavating conservatism as a single, coherent political ideology, it concerns the political work that "conservatism" does in its distinct social and historical settings.

August Nails It 

Sticks and Stones

1. Find areas, or lumps of nature that are decaying, rotting, and collecting themselves into piles. Ornament these piles with found, man-made, self-made items. Compose an image on this site and orchestrate a photograph. Make a series of 5-10 installations/photographs. Consider the backdrop. Wake up early. Study the site for the installation. Study the light.

2. Create small structural moments in nature. Materials can include tape, string, glue, and paint. Force nature to do something. Control the aesthetic. Keep it small and minimal. Document in a way that allows the scale to become ambiguous or questionable. Make drawings from this imagery.

3. Paint some rocks and make sculptures with them. Piles of painted rocks. Document in various ways. How do these assembled sculptures change when seen in nature? studio? gallery?

4. Collect similar sticks. Paint. Pile. Document.

​5. Write statements throughout the process of this work.
I always want to be talking about poetics while stretching, maybe on a mountain somewhere, in a strange outfit? Wild hair, lace, surrounded by stacks of books about affect theory and monstrosity and feminist experiments in writing. Lisa Robertson (poet crush): “She wanted to tell about it but not necessarily in language”. I am deeply ambivalent about my relationship to academia and so I have taken a few years off to organize poetics clubs with genius friends and read everything Lauren Berlant’s ever written. (Bios terrify me but I’m too too excited to meet all of you).

Kathy Bremaker 

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

I spent a significant portion of my time at SMT weeping in nature. My background in theatre and experimental poetics, my deep-rooted affection for the hysteric, my 24-year-old angst, my faith in my therapist, all these congealed together to leave me hyperembodied and practically telepathic. I was socially paranoid, I was talking to trees about my angst, I was letting myself announce my struggle as theory-in-process. Wanting "to tell about myself but not necessarily in language" (Lisa Robertson), I presented a triptych of intimate, half-finished performances in the basement of the Yellow House. Some texts that informed the shpiel: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, anything Jeanne Randolph, Anne Bogart on terrorism, and family diaries from the 80's."
I always want to be talking about poetics while stretching, maybe on a mountain somewhere, in a strange outfit? Wild hair, lace, surrounded by stacks of books about affect theory and monstrosity and feminist experiments in writing. Lisa Robertson (poet crush): “She wanted to tell about it but not necessarily in language”. I am deeply ambivalent about my relationship to academia and so I have taken a few years off to organize poetics clubs with genius friends and read everything Lauren Berlant’s ever written. (Bios terrify me but I’m too too excited to meet all of you).

Kathy Bremaker 

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

I spent a significant portion of my time at SMT weeping in nature. My background in theatre and experimental poetics, my deep-rooted affection for the hysteric, my 24-year-old angst, my faith in my therapist, all these congealed together to leave me hyperembodied and practically telepathic. I was socially paranoid, I was talking to trees about my angst, I was letting myself announce my struggle as theory-in-process. Wanting "to tell about myself but not necessarily in language" (Lisa Robertson), I presented a triptych of intimate, half-finished performances in the basement of the Yellow House. Some texts that informed the shpiel: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, anything Jeanne Randolph, Anne Bogart on terrorism, and family diaries from the 80's."
I always want to be talking about poetics while stretching, maybe on a mountain somewhere, in a strange outfit? Wild hair, lace, surrounded by stacks of books about affect theory and monstrosity and feminist experiments in writing. Lisa Robertson (poet crush): “She wanted to tell about it but not necessarily in language”. I am deeply ambivalent about my relationship to academia and so I have taken a few years off to organize poetics clubs with genius friends and read everything Lauren Berlant’s ever written. (Bios terrify me but I’m too too excited to meet all of you).

Kathy Bremaker 

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

I spent a significant portion of my time at SMT weeping in nature. My background in theatre and experimental poetics, my deep-rooted affection for the hysteric, my 24-year-old angst, my faith in my therapist, all these congealed together to leave me hyperembodied and practically telepathic. I was socially paranoid, I was talking to trees about my angst, I was letting myself announce my struggle as theory-in-process. Wanting "to tell about myself but not necessarily in language" (Lisa Robertson), I presented a triptych of intimate, half-finished performances in the basement of the Yellow House. Some texts that informed the shpiel: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, anything Jeanne Randolph, Anne Bogart on terrorism, and family diaries from the 80's."
I always want to be talking about poetics while stretching, maybe on a mountain somewhere, in a strange outfit? Wild hair, lace, surrounded by stacks of books about affect theory and monstrosity and feminist experiments in writing. Lisa Robertson (poet crush): “She wanted to tell about it but not necessarily in language”. I am deeply ambivalent about my relationship to academia and so I have taken a few years off to organize poetics clubs with genius friends and read everything Lauren Berlant’s ever written. (Bios terrify me but I’m too too excited to meet all of you).

Kathy Bremaker 

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

I spent a significant portion of my time at SMT weeping in nature. My background in theatre and experimental poetics, my deep-rooted affection for the hysteric, my 24-year-old angst, my faith in my therapist, all these congealed together to leave me hyperembodied and practically telepathic. I was socially paranoid, I was talking to trees about my angst, I was letting myself announce my struggle as theory-in-process. Wanting "to tell about myself but not necessarily in language" (Lisa Robertson), I presented a triptych of intimate, half-finished performances in the basement of the Yellow House. Some texts that informed the shpiel: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, anything Jeanne Randolph, Anne Bogart on terrorism, and family diaries from the 80's."
I always want to be talking about poetics while stretching, maybe on a mountain somewhere, in a strange outfit? Wild hair, lace, surrounded by stacks of books about affect theory and monstrosity and feminist experiments in writing. Lisa Robertson (poet crush): “She wanted to tell about it but not necessarily in language”. I am deeply ambivalent about my relationship to academia and so I have taken a few years off to organize poetics clubs with genius friends and read everything Lauren Berlant’s ever written. (Bios terrify me but I’m too too excited to meet all of you).

Kathy Bremaker #9

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

I spent a significant portion of my time at SMT weeping in nature. My background in theatre and experimental poetics, my deep-rooted affection for the hysteric, my 24-year-old angst, my faith in my therapist, all these congealed together to leave me hyperembodied and practically telepathic. I was socially paranoid, I was talking to trees about my angst, I was letting myself announce my struggle as theory-in-process. Wanting "to tell about myself but not necessarily in language" (Lisa Robertson), I presented a triptych of intimate, half-finished performances in the basement of the Yellow House. Some texts that informed the shpiel: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, anything Jeanne Randolph, Anne Bogart on terrorism, and family diaries from the 80's."
I always want to be talking about poetics while stretching, maybe on a mountain somewhere, in a strange outfit? Wild hair, lace, surrounded by stacks of books about affect theory and monstrosity and feminist experiments in writing. Lisa Robertson (poet crush): “She wanted to tell about it but not necessarily in language”. I am deeply ambivalent about my relationship to academia and so I have taken a few years off to organize poetics clubs with genius friends and read everything Lauren Berlant’s ever written. (Bios terrify me but I’m too too excited to meet all of you).

Kathy Bremaker #9

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

I spent a significant portion of my time at SMT weeping in nature. My background in theatre and experimental poetics, my deep-rooted affection for the hysteric, my 24-year-old angst, my faith in my therapist, all these congealed together to leave me hyperembodied and practically telepathic. I was socially paranoid, I was talking to trees about my angst, I was letting myself announce my struggle as theory-in-process. Wanting "to tell about myself but not necessarily in language" (Lisa Robertson), I presented a triptych of intimate, half-finished performances in the basement of the Yellow House. Some texts that informed the shpiel: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, anything Jeanne Randolph, Anne Bogart on terrorism, and family diaries from the 80's."
I always want to be talking about poetics while stretching, maybe on a mountain somewhere, in a strange outfit? Wild hair, lace, surrounded by stacks of books about affect theory and monstrosity and feminist experiments in writing. Lisa Robertson (poet crush): “She wanted to tell about it but not necessarily in language”. I am deeply ambivalent about my relationship to academia and so I have taken a few years off to organize poetics clubs with genius friends and read everything Lauren Berlant’s ever written. (Bios terrify me but I’m too too excited to meet all of you).

Kathy Bremaker #9

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

I spent a significant portion of my time at SMT weeping in nature. My background in theatre and experimental poetics, my deep-rooted affection for the hysteric, my 24-year-old angst, my faith in my therapist, all these congealed together to leave me hyperembodied and practically telepathic. I was socially paranoid, I was talking to trees about my angst, I was letting myself announce my struggle as theory-in-process. Wanting "to tell about myself but not necessarily in language" (Lisa Robertson), I presented a triptych of intimate, half-finished performances in the basement of the Yellow House. Some texts that informed the shpiel: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, anything Jeanne Randolph, Anne Bogart on terrorism, and family diaries from the 80's."
I always want to be talking about poetics while stretching, maybe on a mountain somewhere, in a strange outfit? Wild hair, lace, surrounded by stacks of books about affect theory and monstrosity and feminist experiments in writing. Lisa Robertson (poet crush): “She wanted to tell about it but not necessarily in language”. I am deeply ambivalent about my relationship to academia and so I have taken a few years off to organize poetics clubs with genius friends and read everything Lauren Berlant’s ever written. (Bios terrify me but I’m too too excited to meet all of you).

Kathy Bremaker #9

Deconstructed Documentary Live (DDL)

I spent a significant portion of my time at SMT weeping in nature. My background in theatre and experimental poetics, my deep-rooted affection for the hysteric, my 24-year-old angst, my faith in my therapist, all these congealed together to leave me hyperembodied and practically telepathic. I was socially paranoid, I was talking to trees about my angst, I was letting myself announce my struggle as theory-in-process. Wanting "to tell about myself but not necessarily in language" (Lisa Robertson), I presented a triptych of intimate, half-finished performances in the basement of the Yellow House. Some texts that informed the shpiel: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, anything Jeanne Randolph, Anne Bogart on terrorism, and family diaries from the 80's."