The Bay Area's Hub for Asian Pacific American Community Arts Since 1972
APAture 2015: Future Tense
Opening & Closing Reception | Artist Bios
Opening Reception
Originally from Washington, D.C., Joseph Nontanovan has traveled the globe spreading his love for music, movement, and self-expression. He is the former artistic director of Culture Shock Dance Troupe (Los Angeles and D.C. chapters), a nonprofit youth outreach organization and professional dance company. He currently teaches and performs throughout the Bay Area, and also works as an onsite sous chef for local companies. His passion for sharing food and building community have led him to pursue a B.A. in individualized studies at Goddard College, focusing on personal and collective story through the intersection of art, food, and community. Through the organization of community events and his most recent work as a prep cook for an exclusively Lao pop-up restaurant, he is transforming personal stories and experience into material for his new venture into writing and spoken word performance.
Caroline Calderon is a queer Pinay originally from Los Angeles, currently residing in San Francisco. When she's not spitting poetry, singing, or playing the guitar, Caroline works with the Bill Sorro Housing Program of Veterans Equity Center helping individuals and families find affordable housing, and with Pin@y Educational Partnerships she teaches ethnic studies at the University of San Francisco.
Closing Reception
MEnD Dance Theater Company are a group of performing artists whose aim is to use art as a form of activism. Directed by Grace Alvarez, their work roots itself in seeking social justice. As a result, MEnD rely on research and engagement through their own identities and the people they serve. Utilizing multidisciplinary forms of art and communication onto stage, they are interested in bringing awareness to audiences to spark transformation. MEnD strongly believe that by challenging themselves through movement and using it as their primary tool of communication, they can push their capabilities to connect to who they are as human beings as well as their audiences. As performing artists and educators, they have performed and taught workshops throughout the Bay Area. To fix, to repair damages, to heal and recover, to mend: they hope to do this not only for their audiences and ourselves but also for those whose stories have been lost.
Robert Marquez is a regular KSW volunteer who moved to the City in 2001, originally immigrating from Orlando, Florida. In the 1990s he had the privilege of being the designated pointless feature writer for a couple of years at the Florida Flambeau, formerly an independent daily, and then stopped writing for public consumption. He is both proud and cured of his Southern heritage in which he grew up watching rockets hurl humans toward the stars. He'll be reading a piece that was started last year at a KSW writing workshop.