Bios
David Bloom is contributing translator and copy editor for USArtBerlin, and was born in Heidelberg, Germany, to a family from New York, NY. He played the piano professionally for fifteen years, including a stint at the bar Marie’s Crisis in NYC. He received his dance training primarily at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, where his teachers included Dieter Heitkamp, Marc Spradling, Nora Kimball, and José Biondi.
Jean-Ulrick Désert is a conceptual and visual artist. He received his degrees at Cooper Union and Columbia University (New York) and has lectured or been a critic at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Humboldt University and l’école supérieur des beaux arts. Désert’s artworks vary in forms, from billboards, actions, and paintings to site-specific sculptures, videos, and objects and emerge from a tradition of conceptual-work engaged with social/cultural practices. www.jeanulrickdesert.com
Désert has exhibited widely, including at such venues as The Brooklyn Museum, Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), and NGBK (Berlin), in galleries and public spaces in Munich, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Ghent, and Brussels. He is the recipient of awards, public commissions, and private philanthropy, including from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (USA), Villa Waldberta/München-kulturreferat , Kulturstiftung der Länder (Germany) and Cité des Arts (France). Désert established his Berlin studio in 2002. www.jeanulrickdesert.com
Sarah Goodrum is a journalist, comedian, and a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation project examines the culture of the exhibition of photographs in the German Democratic Republic, and her specializations include German and Central European art, modernism, and the history of photography and photojournalism.
Her publications include reviews and features for Bookpage, Los Angeles Magazine online, Pasadena Weekly, the Goethe Institute’s online cultural news, and Afterimage. She has received funding for her research and study from the Conference Group for Central European History, DAAD, the Borchard Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She is currently based in Berlin, Germany, where she will be a pre-doc Fulbright Fellow for the 2012–2013 academic year, affiliated with the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam.
kate hers, visual artist and cultural producer, founded USArtBerlin with the support of the Public Affairs Office of the US Embassy in March 2011. Working in the field of social art practice, her work seeks to rethink and reshape notions of transnational and cultural identity, often through different modes of communication and public interventions. Her projects manifest often in multiple mediums including: performance, sound, drawing, video, internet blogging, installation, and in commodities such as food products, posters, zines, flash cards, and games.. www.estherka.com
Elana Katz is a conceptual artist working primarily in the areas of performance and photography. Her most recent work focuses on consciousness of time, historical perception, and locations of erased history. Dealing with the body through live performance is a fundamental aspect of her artistic practice. Often working from a historical basis, Katz’s work confronts cultural conventions, critically examines the complexity that lies within contradictions, and thus aims to create, in one way or another, an experience of unlearning the assumed. www.elana-katz.com
Melissa Longenecker is a conceptual and visual artist whose practice is as mercurial as it is systematic. Melissa works in mediums ranging from text and sound, to drawing, performance and film and combinations thereof. Her interest lies in tapping histories and creating generators, aiming to court the instability of the slightly unbalanced flywheel, to cultivate wildness and new understanding through measured investigation.
Her work has been shown in The National Gallery-Veletrzni Palac. Prague, The Byzantine Museum of Athens, Centre Pompidou, Paris, as well as in various exhibitions in Vienna, Tokyo, NYC, and Los Angeles, among others. She has also held residencies in the UK, Finland, and NYC. In addition, from an early age she began working with various nonprofit organizations and universities teaching art and art history to at-need populations. She holds an MFA in New Genres from The University of California Los Angeles.
Melissa Maldonado studied dance and art history in New York at Columbia University, and is a copy editor for USArtBerlin. She moved from New York to Berlin in 2000 and has explored a number of different career paths in the arts, ranging from hip-hop performer to art consultant to flamenco and modern dancer. www.melissamaldonado.com
In 2000 she founded the hip-hop dance company cultural diffusion, which performed throughout Berlin from 2000 to 2003. She has created and performed solo pieces for events on cultural discourse at the Hungarian Embassy in Berlin and for the Eine Welt, Eine Zukunft podium discussion series organized by the GIZ, BMZ, and KfW.
She was invited to participate in the Choreographer’s Workshop at Impulstanz in 2008, where she worked together with the group International Festival on the collective Sweat the Movie project. She has worked and performed with such choreographers as Marc Bogaerts, Sven Seeger, Be van Vark, Gilbert Coutrin, and Jessyka Watson. www.melissamaldonado.com
Michael Markwick is a painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. He was born and raised by Dutch and Sri Lankan immigrants in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He received his BFA from Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI, USA) in 1998, and was awarded an MFA from Indiana University (Bloomington, IN, USA) in 2002. www.michaelmarkwick.com
Nominated for numerous awards, residencies, and grants, he recently received a Basisstipendium from the Mondriaan Fund. His work resides in a variety of private and corporate collections in the EU, North America and Asia, including the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (BE), The Frans Masereel Centrum (BE), Indiana University (USA), and the Hong Kong Graphic Arts Center (CN). He is currently represented by Galerie In-Vorm in Hasselt-Stevoort, Belgium. His Berlin studio was established in 2005. www.michaelmarkwick.com
Paula Ross is a visual artist working in a variety of media. A native of Detroit, MI, she holds an MFA in studio art from the University of California, Irvine. Her work often combines the aesthetics and possibilities intrinsic to the traditions of both painting and the technological arena of digital techniques. www.paulaross.net
Christopher Shore, USArtBerlin staff photographer, was born in New Orleans and has been making photographs since the late 1970s, developing darkroom skills through working for his university newspaper. ceshore.com
After living in New Orleans and Seattle, he left the United States in 1999 for a year in Dresden Germany, followed by a decade in Japan before returning to Germany to live in Berlin and concentrate on photography.
ceshore.com
-Mike Terry is a photojournalist and mixed media artist based in Berlin, Germany, and is a staff photographer for USArtBerlin. While his work has primarily been in the US, focusing on the American West and South, he has also spent time in Germany, India, and Haiti. www.miketerryphoto.com
He earned a bachelor degree in communications from the University of Utah in 2010, and is currently working on a MA in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin with support of funding from the DAAD. www.miketerryphoto.com