(57) Artist Talks

David L. Caruso (57) (he/they) is a playwright and translator from Minneapolis. His plays include Sävë thë Whälës, etc. (Finalist, National Playwrights Conference, Terrence McNally New Play Incubator, Keneda/Alliance National Graduate Playwriting Competition, and Playwrights Realm Fellowship), Through Hike (Finalist, Int'l Thomas Wolfe Playwriting Competition, Semi-Finalist, National Playwrights Conference), Forest Knowledge (Company One, Acts of Joy Series), and Bill & Stephanie (High Honors, Wesleyan University). David has developed work with Playdate Theatre, Company One, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and the Boston University School of Theatre. As a dramaturg, David has collaborated on plays at Cherry Lane Theatre, Dixon Place, and Wesleyan University, and written for the Walker Art Center’s journal, South Wall. David has taught Intro to Creative Writing at Boston University. They are an upcoming Writing Fellow at Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY), where they will write a new play and finish a new translation. David graduated from Wesleyan University with High Honors, and from Boston University with an MFA in Playwriting.

Véra Haddad (57) is a collaborative filmmaker, educator and visual artist making experimental documentary video works often in concert with drawing, photography and installation. Much of her work functions as a portrait practice using an assortment of visual and sonic approaches to create expressive documentations of people and their stories. She earned a BFA from the Cooper Union and an MFA from UCLA in the New Genres department. She was awarded the 2021 Center for Documentary Studies at Duke's Lange-Taylor prize for documentary photo with text, alongside her collaborator Sam Richardson.

Naima Lowe (57) is Black queer disabled writer and artist who creates performances, texts and videos using transgressive and radical traditions of Black utterance. Her work is imbued with ritual and music; steeped in the liberatory ethos of improvisation. She earned her BA from Brown University and MFA from Temple University. Her work has been shown at Anthology Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Wing Luke Museum, MiX Experimental Film Festival, National Queer Art Festival, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and the Henry Art Gallery. She’s held residency fellowships at The Bemis Center, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center and The Lighthouse Works. Naima is a 2023-24 Mabou Mines SUITESpace Resident, and previously she was a 2021-2022 Mid America Arts Alliance Interchange Artist Fellow, recipient of the 2022-23 Mid America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Award, and a recipient of a 2022 Jazz Road Creative Residency. Naima resides in Tulsa, within the Muscogee Creek Nation Reservation, where she spends her time being free and talking to animals.

A Hawthornden Castle Fellow, Ryan D. Matthews (57) has also been recognized with fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Millay Colony, Ucross Foundation, and others. He was recently nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and was a semi-finalist for the 2021 George Bennett Fellowship from Phillips Exeter Academy. His work has appeared most recently in Lit Hub, Litro, Joyland, and the Michigan Quarterly Review.