Adam Tinkle, MDOCS Director
Adam Tinkle creates, teaches, and writes about music, sound, media, and performance. At the center of Adam’s work are strategies for artistic engagement, interactivity, and pedagogy that draw on experimental music. In 2010, he co-founded the Universal Language Orchestra, a group of elementary-aged novice musicians that composed, improvised, and built their own instruments. He subsequently created several similarly path-breaking arts education programs across San Diego county, where his collaborations with his students and his audience-participatory works were shown at the Birch Aquarium, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Old Globe Theatre, and the Institute of Perception. Before moving to Skidmore in 2014, he was a founding broadcaster on KNSJ 89.1FM, San Diego’s first community radio station, where he led community workshops on radio-making and produced a weekly crowd-sourced music and documentary program. His award-winning solo performance A Mess of Things merges radio documentary with songs and video art. In May 2014, his interactive sound sculpture the Shantytown Scrapblaster was permanently installed at the Media Arts Center San Diego. For More: www.riskyforager.com, www.adamtinkle.com
Sarah Ema Friedland, Storytellers’ Institute Director
Sarah Ema Friedland received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and the International School of Film and Television in Cuba and her MFA from the Integrated Media Art Program at Hunter College. Her films and installations embrace radical approaches to form and politics. Friedland’s works have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Paul Newman Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Palestine American Research Center, the LABA House of Study, and the MacDowell Colony. She was named one of the “Top 10 Independent Filmmakers to Watch” by the Independent Magazine, is a recipient of the Paul Robeson award from the Newark Museum, and was nominated for a New York Emmy. She is currently working on a feature documentary titled Lyd, which she is co-directing with Rami Younis, and which was selected to pitch at the DocCorner Market at the Cannes Film Festival and Days of Cinema in Ramallah. Friedland is a member of the Meerkat Media Collective. www.sarahfriedland.com
Daesha Devón Harris, Senior Visiting Fellow
Daesha Devón Harris, Saratoga Sprigs native and documentary photographer and award-winning artist, creates powerful multimedia pieces that speak to social issues in a creative and compelling way. Her photos depict subjects not as victims, instead showing them in a light of determination that illuminates Daesha’s relentless optimism. Harris’ practice includes individual and collective portraits of African-American and other often-unrecognized communities in Saratoga Springs, and the use of archival and historical research and images. Her MFA show, and yet must be…my Promise Land, and 2011 show at the National Museum of Dance, I’ve Got a Home: Inside a Community of Color, draw attention to African-American youths affected by gentrification. In 2018 alone Ms. Devon Haris has had solo exhibitions at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland Oregon and the Albany International Airport gallery and has been included in many prestigious group shows including Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region at the University Art Museum in Albany and Altar: Prayer, Ritual, Offerings, MFON: Women Photographers of The African Diaspora at Photoville in Brooklyn. She was recently nominated as one of the 100 photography heroines by The Royal Photographic Society and she was recently awarded the an individual Photographer’s Fellowship from the Aaron Siskand foundation.
Jesse O’Connell, MDOCS Assistant Director
Jesse O’Connell is a documentary filmmaker whose work began at the award-winning Moxie Institute Film Studio + Lab in San Francisco, CA. She was the associate producer and assistant editor on many of Moxie’s films, including the Emmy-nominated series The Future Starts Here and films in the Let it Ripple nonprofit short-film series including Free Speech and Engage. She also worked with over 2,000 schools and nonprofit organizations involved in the Let it Ripple project, helping them to customize any of the five films for their outreach purposes.
She joined the MDOCS staff in the fall of 2015 after moving back to the east coast. She looks forward to helping students of all disciplines uncover important stories in their studies that allow us to look to the future through the lens and perspective of the past. Inspired by the challenge of highlighting the truth in the complex network of the digital landscape, she continues to explore the power of nonfiction storytelling. She has a BS in video production from Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications. www.jessewakeman.org
Andrea Casey, MDOCS Program Coordinator
Andrea Casey is a visual artist and maker in Upstate, NY. She has worked in the photography industry since 2006 as a wedding photojournalist, portrait and editorial photographer. Her current photographic work focuses on landscape, place and her natural surroundings. Andrea’s making is deeply rooted in fiber arts and wool craft. She is also the Technology Coordinator in the Art Department at Skidmore College
Angela Beallor, Documentarian in Community Co-Creation
Angela Beallor is a visual artist exploring memory, history, and politics. She was a 2015 BRIC Media Arts Fellow. A Jerome Foundation Travel Grant recipient (2013), she traveled to Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia in relation to her project Pink Lenins. Her video, I Want a Baby! REVisited (Lecture) won first place in the 2017 Sofia Queer Forum video competition. Most recently, she wrote, directed, and starred in M.G. (aka I Want a Baby! Reimagined), an experimental, queer adaptation of Tret’iakov’s play I Want a Baby!. She has been in residence at CCI Fabrika, Moscow; Vermont Studio Center; Habitable Spaces, Kingsbury, TX, and was once a resident-artist at Flux Factory (NY). Her work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Cleveland, OH) (2017); Smack Mellon (2016); SPACES (2016); Here Art Space, NY (2014); and, in conjunction with Sharon Hayes, in the Whitney Museum of American Art (2012). She holds a BS in Photo-illustration from Kent State University, an MFA from Bard College-ICP, and is currently a HASS fellow and is a Doctorate in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. angelabeallor.com
