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Alchemy of the Reset with Natalie G. Diaz
Alchemy of the Reset is a conversation series hosted and created by Senior Fellows Brett Cook and Liz Lerman and YBCA Chief of Program Meklit Hadero. The Senior Fellows program centers interdisciplinary artists and curators who are interested in developing systems and structures that catalyze artist-driven change as leaders in our organization and in the life of our community.
In the wake of current social crises, including both COVID and ongoing racist police violence, our society must do the work to leap forward, to transform. Already, we are seeing glimmers of this. Over several weeks, Cook, Lerman and Hadero will be dialoguing with thought leaders, including artists, scientists, educators and more whose work points us to some of these new systems. In line with the characteristic community building backgrounds of Cook and Lerman, this is about a heart and human centered approach, with opportunities for audience connectivity and engagement.
Natalie G. Diaz
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at Arizona State University. She splits her time between the east coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.
Hosts:
Brett Cook is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who uses creative practices to transform outer and inner worlds of being. His public projects often involve community workshops featuring arts-integrated pedagogy along with contemplative practices, performance, and food to create a fluid boundary between art making, daily life, and healing.
Teaching and public speaking are extensions of Cook’s social practice that involve communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He has taught at all academic levels in a variety of subjects, and published in academic journals at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Columbia and Harvard Universities. In 2009, he published Who Am I In This Picture: Amherst College Portraits with Brett Cook and Wendy Ewald through Amherst College Press.
Cook has received numerous awards, including the Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Richard C. Diebenkorn Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recognized for a history of socially relevant, community engaged projects, he was selected as a cultural ambassador to Nigeria as part of the U.S. Department of State’s 2012 smARTpower Initiative and an inaugural A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art in 2014. Cook’s work has been featured in private and public collections including the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery, the Walker Art Center, and Harvard University.
Meklit Hadero is an Ethiopian American vocalist, songwriter, composer and cultural activist making music that sways between cultures and continents.
Her innovative take on ethio-jazz has taken her around the world, from her home base of San Francisco to her home city of Addis Ababa (where she is a household name). Hadero has founded and led many creative and cultural initiatives, from musical collaborations to performance series. She is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Senior Fellow, former codirector of the Red Poppy Art House, and has served as an artist in residence at New York University and Harvard University.
Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker, and the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance, and the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to various publics from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and outcomes that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011. She was an artist-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 2011, and her most recent work, Healing Wars, toured across the US in 2014-15. Lerman conducts residencies on Critical Response Process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance performance at such institutions as Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the National Theatre Studio, among others. Her collection of essays, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press and released in paperback in 2014. In 2016 Lerman was named the first Institute Professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she is building a lab focused on creative research.