FRANCISCO ARAGÓN
The author of the poetry collection, Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press). His work has appeared in a range of anthologies and journals both print and web-based. He directs Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institue for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

REGINALD BAYLOR
The artist's paintings feature a utopian world wholy his own - he supplants drab suburbia with candy-colored neighborhoods, transforms the common flower garden into a hard-edged terrain of idealized specimens and renders the quintessential 1950's family in high-key neon.

BEAR COUNTRY
The familiar folk rock mainstays of harmonica, bass, and keyboards give way to layers of happy beat overtones and lyrical diversity to form the distinctive sound of Bear Country. Inspired by an eclectic array of musical genres, Bear Country is the sing-it-out-loud answer to all of your questions about broken hearts and swimming in the sea.

JOHN BISSONETTE
Conflating the techniques and imagery of overtly sentimental, lowbrow fine art reproduction with decidedly high-end techniques of painting and ink-jet printing on canvas, Bemis Center resident John Bissonette juxtaposes the very notion of “high” and “low.” In an homage to the glossy and the programmatic, Bissonette invites the viewer to search for deeper meaning in the common language of culture in art that transcends mere cliché and iconography. Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Bissonette earned his MFA in 2006 from the University of Tennessee. When not exhibiting his work nationally, he is a lecturer at his alma mater.

JOHN HENRY BLATTER
The idea of art as experience is a large part of John Henry Blatter’s work. He uses various forms of video and sound to create pieces as intimate as family photos and as public as virtual gardens to invite viewer participation. He explores topics ranging from the struggle to define and understand self-identity to anxieties and fears of how others perceive us. The artist earned his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Blatter’s awards and honors include two Scope Emerging Artist Grants from the Scope Art Foundation and a Jacob Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education.

DAVID BOWEN
The whimsy of the mechanical meets the mechanics of whimsy in the work of Bemis Center resident David Bowen. All manner of gizmos and gadgets use light-sensitive cells, dancing do-dads, wind-powered pencils and other wacky wizardry in animating ghosts in the machine. Bowen’s work breathes life into the inanimate and confers sentient status on the otherwise spiritless. His ingeniously engineered kinetic and robotic contraptions become eerie automatons that act as interactive drawing devices. Bowen earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota, where he works as an assistant professor at its Duluth campus. His BFA came from the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, IN.

JODY BOYER
An intermedia artist originally from Portland, Oregon, Jody Boyer is also a fellow and education specialist for the Iowa West Foundation, an organization that has targeted 50 sites for the placement of public art in and around Council Bluffs, Iowa. Boyer is a co-founder of Echotrope, a nomadic arts organization that curates experimental video, film and new media in traditional and non-traditional venues across the Midwest. She will be a participant in the panel discussion Creative Age Communities.

CAPGUN COUP
The sonic schizophrenia of Capgun Coup has evolved from an earlier homage to avant-noise into a full-blown explosion of indie-house-party-punk-pop.  The ragged clashes with the refined in the nerd rap world of Sam Martin, Greg Elsasser, Eric Ohlsson and Andy Matz.  Their debut work is Nebraskafish on the Team Love label.

COLUMBIA VS. CHALLENGER
From frenetically fast-paced to soulful and grooving, the synth-pop sound of Columbia vs. Challenger is Josh Miller (keyboards, vocals and saxophone), Theo Wiesehan (bass and guitar) and Evan Todd (percussion).  Inspired by the likes of Devo and the Talking Heads, the trio’s music is a dancey mix that plays off of 80's super-pop melodies that are a simple, straightforward, solid and always quirky.  

ED DADEY
As director of Art Farm, Ed Dadey knows that art can find a home just about anywhere. Art Farm is a rarity, a residency program located in a rural setting where the sun and stars measure time and space is shaped by a proximity to the sound of silence. The program in Marquette, NE (Pop. 282) exists to offer artists, writers, performers, and others the studios, time, and resources for pursuing their range of expression. Dadey will be a participant in the panel discussion Art Incubators: Building the Creative Environment.

(DOWNTOWN) OMAHA LIT FEST
Nationally renowned novelist Timothy Schaffert is also the founder and director of the (downtown) omaha lit fest. The most recent of his three novels, “Devils in the Sugar Shop,” was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and his “Singing and Dancing Daughters of God” was the work chosen for the Omaha Public Library’s Omaha Reads: One Book/ One City program in 2007.  His panel discussion, Cover Me: Authors and Designers Discuss the Art of Book Cover Design will feature area authors and literary professionals in a conversation on the intersection of visual art and literature with a special emphasis on the role of cover art in the world of publishing.  Schaffert is also the director of the Nebraska Summer Writer’s Conference and contributing editor for the literary journal Prairie Schooner.

THE EPICENE FURIES
Emphasizing the power of the spoken word in language-driven performances, the women poets, playwrights and scholars of The Epicene Furies are as entertaining as they are enthralling. Conspiring Texts will have them delivering the speeches of Barack Obama as epic poetry.  Experience the debut of Conspiring Texts before the troupe takes this and other works to the sidewalks of Denver during the Democratic National Convention this August.  The Epicene Furies’ participation in Bemis08 was coordinated by group member Katie F-S, a veteran of the National Poetry Slam competition and director/ensemble member of Spoken Words at the inaugural New Ways/New Works Festival at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She can be found most Wednesday nights at Mick’s Music and Bar in Benson where she hosts a poetry event.

EUPHORIA
Euphoria is Jordan Elsberry, a member of the band Shiver Shiver, who also performs during Bemis08. The Fremont native is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he was awarded a scholarship from the Earl Family Fund for Excellence in Jazz Studies along with a Regents Scholarship. Elsberry has also performed as part of Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead, a program sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts through their “Jazz Stars of Tomorrow” series.

ADAM FRELIN
Whether naturally occurring or staged, Bemis Center resident Adam Frelin’s videos and photography use compelling narrative imagery to speak to the intersection of the man-made and the natural. His fictional constructs, often involving sculptural pieces that may become nothing more than props to fuel a larger story, have poetic qualities that expose the stark realities of a mundane, yet oddly incendiary environment. His works become arresting mementos of momentary collisions between the artificial and the natural. Frelin earned a BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, PA and a MFA from the University of California. His works have been viewed widely throughout the United States, Asia and Europe.

MAGDALENA GARCIA
Magdalena Garcia is the executive director of Omaha’s El Museo Latino, the first combined Latino art, history and cultural center in the Midwest. Located in a historic 1887 brick and red tile roof building in the heart of equally historic South Omaha. The museum, in addition to its exhibition programs, develops educational programs that include lectures, slide presentations, films, art classes, workshops, demonstrations, art history classes, gallery talks, guided visits, and dance classes. Garcia will be a participant in the panel discussion Creative Age Communities.

MARK GILBERT
A Scottish-born artist and an artist-in-residence at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Mark Gilbert has been involved in two pioneering projects that have been featured on the CBS Nightly News— painting a series of portraits of patients and their caregivers and teaching medical students how to improve their observation skills through drawing. He has been exhibiting in both solo and group exhibitions throughout the UK, Canada and the US since 1990. Gilbert will be a participant in the panel discussion (un)Healthy? Wellness, Creativity and the Arts.

CAROLINE GORE
In her current body of work, Bemis Center resident Caroline Gore translates environments into site-specific interventions by punctuating elements of these spaces with gold leaf.  A dialogue between art and the everyday lives of individuals is formed when her works are placed in the public sphere, often in the street, and seldom noticed. Gore developed this concept in response to “in-attentional” blindness, the forces and attitudes that so often prevent us from seeing our everyday habitat.  Gore received her MFA from East Carolina University (Greenville, NC) and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA), and she is an assistant professor of art at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI where she lives and works.

HEARTLAND COMMUNITY FLUTE CHOIR
Founded in 2003 by University of Nebraska at Omaha music professor Christine Beard, the Heartland Community Flute Choir is a non-auditioned ensemble of over thirty members who play on C flutes, piccolos, alto and bass flutes. With a repertoire that spans a diverse range of works from classical masterpieces to popular tunes, the organization is co-sponsored by the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the Nebraska Flute Club and Gemeinhardt/Gemstone Musical Instruments. The Choir will perform a program of original works at Bemis08: Creativity Festival.

AMY HORST
Amy Horst is the Community Arts Department Head for the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI, a non-profit organization established in 1967. Its mission is to encourage and support innovative explorations in the arts and to foster an exchange between a national community of artists and a broad public that will help realize the power of the arts to inspire and transform our world. Horst will be a participant in the panel discussion Art Incubators: Building the Creative Environment.

JANELLE IGLESIAS
Bemis Center resident Janelle Iglesias describes her work as “deep play,” an excuse to be intimately involved in an everyday quest for the poetry and possibilities in all things. She creates contradictions that range from the serious to the ridiculous and from the common to the magical. Iglesias, who also collaborates with her sister in an effort they call Las Hermanas Iglesias, earned a BA in cultural anthropology from Emory University in Atlanta Georgia before pursuing her MFA in sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth in Richmond, Virginia.

LESLIE IWAI
Trained as an architect, Leslie Iwai explores the formation of space as an experiential event and her work often exists between architecture and sculpture. Her public art project, “Sounding Stones,” energized and elevated discourse on the definition and role of public art when a plan to move the work to a new location stirred protests from a group of surrounding homeowners and support from the art community and beyond. In 2005 the Bemis Center selected Iwai for its Community Artist Fellowship, an award that recognizes the local artists who contribute to the community through their work. Iwai earned her MS degree from Wayne State College in Wayne, NE in math and chemistry and her masters in architecture at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, VA. She will be a participant in the panel discussion Creative Age Communities.

RACHEL JACOBSON
Rachel Jacobsen is the founder/director of Film Streams, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the cultural environment through the presentation and discussion of film as an art form. She had previously worked In New York City for the Theater for a New Audience, public radio station WYNC, and Miramax. Jacobsen will be a participant in the panel discussion Creative Age Communities.

JASON KALAJAINEN
Jason Kalajainen is the executive director of the Ox-Bow school of art and artists residency , which has a campus located in Saugatuck, MI and offices in Chicago. After almost a century, Ox-Bow's mission has remained consistent – to serve as a haven for the creative process through instruction, example, and community. Today, the relationship between Ox-Bow and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, forged by founders Frederick Fursman and Walter Marshall Clute, remains strong. This mutual commitment to preserving and nurturing the artistic process has benefited generations of professional, student, and amateur artists. Kalajainen will be a participant in the panel discussion Art Incubators: Building the Creative Environment.

ANDREA LOEFKE
The German-born Bemis Center resident is an installation artist and sculptor who creates dream worlds in spaces where the familiar and the fantastic are anchored to the real and the temporal.  Assemblages of varied scale and made of a complex conglomeration of materials, so often vibrant and candy-colored, evoke fairy tale worlds where whimsy and playfulness invites new levels of discovery into the realm of environments, hierarchies and interactions as objects compete for your attention.   Loefke lives and works in both Brooklyn, New York and Leipzig, Germany and her work has been shown in both countries as well as in Canada.  She was awarded a fine arts scholarship at Kent State University before going on to complete her MFA work at Ohio State University.

LOOM
Brent Crampton, hailed by The Reader as a “Deep House Pioneer,” recently celebrated his second year of loom - Weaving the Social Fabric Through Dance. Loom is the call-out-the-fire-marshal soirees that have garnered him back-to-back Omaha Arts and Entertainment Awards as best DJ for the series that helped turn an erstwhile sleepy and sedate Benson neighborhood into the dance capital of Nebraska.  Hosted by Jay Kline, the loom crew includes ill-loom-inating body painting by Justin Queal and family along with percussionists Shif-D and Jason Horacek (djembe, bongos, congas, dijeridu and other things that go thump in the night).  Also joining the loom team is GroovefellaZ, the internationally renowned urban dance group. The eclectic fusion of jazz, African and Latin rhythms will merge with funk and soul as the trademark sights and sounds of loom echo through the Bemis Center galleries in a dance party to end all dance parties as Bemis08: Creativity Festival works up a good sweat to close the second night of the event.

ERIC LOPEZ - WILSON
A former resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE, is a 2006 BFA graduate of Cornell College in Mount Vernon, IA.  Most recently, Lopez has concentrated on translating the experience of painting by animating the same concepts and emotions in performance pieces.

JOEY LYNCH
A co-founder of Tugboat Presents, a non-commission gallery that exhibits high-quality, cutting-edge artwork, Joey Lynch brings his own uniquely irreverent style to his vibrant and often provocative screen-printings. Lynch was selected to design much of the merchandise available at Bemis08. Originally from South Dakota, Lynch now lives and works in Omaha, NE. Tugboat Presents is an offshoot of the Lincoln-based sister space, Tugboat Gallery, which he co-founded with fellow artists Peggy Gomez and Jake Gillespie.

CECIL MCDONALD, JR.
The photographs of Cecil McDonald, Jr. depict everyday moments of life in domestic spaces. McDonald carefully stages scenarios with his wife and children that convey the power of photography to capture life's emotional rhythms, from the dramatic to the mundane.

DAVID MATYSIAK
Bemis Center resident David Matysiak is a songwriter, singer and guitarist for the Omaha rock band Coyote Bones. In Telephono, his most recent endeavor, Matysiak sends songs into cyberspace to be modified, mutated and sometimes even maligned before being returned by often-times random composers and musicians in a project that explores the outer limits of what it means to collaborate.

MIN | DAY
Founded in 2000 by E.B. Min and Jeffrey L. Day, Min | Day is a multi-disciplinary design practice with studios in San Francisco, California and Omaha, Nebraska. Because they are reluctant to specialize in one project type, their work ranges from institutional projects to residential and furniture design. Rather than looking to a particular building type, they seek projects with potential for innovation in methodologies of practice, materials and fabrication, and programming in an approach that searches for unique opportunities hidden in the facts of the project at hand.

OCTOPUSES GARDEN ART ALLIANCE
The Octopuses Garden Art Alliance’s goal is to provide opportunities for new, creative experiences that offer therapeutic benefits while bringing diverse groups of people together as peers, thus helping to eliminate negative prejudices and stereotypes. They are also working to build the local community through art. They provides art classes, workshops, and special projects for everyone in our community, specializing in the inclusion of people with mental illness and developmental disabilities as well as affordable projects to include people of low income. Every surface is a canvas to The Octopuses Garden Art Alliance and festival visitors are invited to pick up some chalk and leave their own mark on Bemis08.

OMAHA MODERN DANCE COLLECTIVE
& UNO'S THE MOVING COMPANY
Taffy Howard and Kathy Bass of the Omaha Modern Dance Collective and Josie Metal-Corbin of UNO’s The Moving Company will collaborate to bring modern dance to the Bemis Center). The OMDC is an independent organization that works with the area-wide dance community to pool resources for the development of modern dance. Founded in 1935, The Moving Company is the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s internationally recognized modern dance group. Metal-Corbin was named 2004’s College/University Dance Educator of the Year by the National Dance Association for her work with the intergenerational company whose mission is to create new works and to restage historical pieces. The groups will be collaborating at Bemis08: Creativity Festival to develop a site-specific exploration of the power and poetry of the human form that responds directly responds to Therman Statom’s Gallery 1 exhibition, Nascita.

OMAHA PUBLIC LIBRARY
Storytelling, the most ancient of all endeavors in the arts, comes to life in an interactive experience coordinated by the Omaha Public Library and led by Dorothy Bockerman of OOPS, the Organization for the Purpose of Storytelling.  Bockerman is a retired educator and past president of OOPS, whose storytelling events allow all people to find their voices.  The event is being organized by Omaha Public Library staffers Mary J. Mollner and April Earl, both longtime community advocates for the appreciation of storytelling and the joy of reading.

KIRSTEN CASE PENROD
As manager of leadership and workforce development for the Young Professionals Council, Kirsten Case Penrod strives to make Omaha one of the top communities in which young professionals want to live and work. The mission of the group, an arm of the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, is to create excitement about living in Omaha in order to attract and retain diverse young professionals. She will be a participant in the panel discussion Creative Age Communities.

TOMIKO PILSON
Informed by classical figure painting, creates work rooted in the grand narrative tradition. As a woman of mixed racial and ethnic heritage, she also draws from her many experiences as an "other," generating a synthesis of the two. Her paintings transport viewers to imagined places, such as lush jungles of distant lands, which explore "dangerous territory."

MICHELE RICHEY
In a historic 115-year old building nestled on 50 wooded acres in the Germantown Hills section of Peoria, IL is the Prairie Center of the Arts. Co-founder Michele Richey manages a residency program that attracts emerging and established artists from around the world to provide opportunities for research and development of new work in a facility that embraces the Peoria area community. Richey will be a participant in the panel discussion Art Incubators: Building the Creative Environment.

AILI SCHMELTZ
Sculptor, installation artist and painter Aili Schmeltz, a current Bemis Center resident, is a product of the vinyl-clad, shag-carpeted, wood-paneled, polyester-plastered and Styrofoam-packaged tract home suburbia of the 1970’s. What better materials could there be for works that address the triumph of the artificial, the antiseptic and the arcane as the anthropological totems of our times? The common and the comfortable give way to the hideous and humorous when seen from the vantage point of a “stranger in a strange land.” The Los Angeles-based artist has shown her work extensively across the United States. She earned an MFA in sculpture from the University of Arizona after a BFA in printmaking and painting at the Kansas City Art Institute.

BILL SEIDLER
A community activist and director of the Bancroft Street Farmer’s Market, Bill Seidler is the owner of 10th & Bancroft LLC. He previously participated in the Bemis Center’s Art 4 Omaha Project 3, where Bancroft Elementary School students designed public art banners that were installed on the façade of Seidler’s building on the southeast corner of 10th & Bancroft Street. Seidler will be a participant in the panel discussion Creative Age Communities.

ARTUR SILVA
The artist works with a host of digital media to create outsized "productless" ads that explore the ways commercial products are packaged, advertised and distributed. By incorporating elements from advertising, his installations suggest the fragmentation of the contemporary visual world and the manner in which diverse cultures reflect that imagery.

SHELTERBELT THEATRE
For almost fifteen years, the Shelterbelt Theatre has been producing award-winning and crowd-pleasing new plays by local writers. Scott Working, founder and artistic director of the Shelterbelt, will be presenting Micro Theatre, a series of short, original dramatic works that will feature many of the most talented writers and actors in the area. Working is also a member of the theater faculty at Metro Community College.

SHIVER SHIVER
With a signature style and a sizzling stage presence, Shiver Shiver is rooted in the grandest of glam traditions. Chase Thornburg drums and sings while Jordan Elsberry sings and plays both keyboards and laptop to deliver original pop that is fresh, catchy and complex.

BRYCE SPEED
A former resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE, Bryce Speed earned a BFA in painting and drawing at the University of Mississippi and a MFA in the same disciplines at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.  He currently teaches at both the University of Nebraska at Omaha and at Metropolitan Community College, also in Omaha.

THERMAN STATOM
Therman Statom is one of the world’s leading artists in reinventing glass as an artistic medium. He has exhibited internationally at venues such as the Cleveland Museum of Art (OH), the Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), the Denver Art Museum (CO), the Kulturhuset (Stockholm, Sweden), the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (Sapporo, Japan) and the Centro Cultural de la Raza (Ensenada, Mexico). Statom’s work is featured in numerous private and public collections world-wide, including the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts (MI), the Afro-American Museum (CA), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, (Washington D.C.) among others.

CAITLIN STROKOSCH
Caitlin Strokosch is the executive director of the Alliance of Artists Communities, an offshoot of the MacArthur Foundation that was founded in 1992 with seed money from the foundation and from the National Endowment for the Arts. This influential national organization is committed to contributing to America’s cultural vitality by supporting diverse residency programs and advocating for the development of creative environments that advance the endeavors of artists.  As a special guest of Bemis08: Creativity Festival, Strokosch will introduce and frame the three-day festival with a keynote address before returning later the same day to moderate a panel discussion on artist-in-residency programs and how they enrich the cultural fabric of America and beyond.

SUSANN SUPRENANT
A founding member of BlueBarn’s Witching Hour, Susann Suprenant has been creating contemporary performance projects in collaboration with Omaha area artists for the past eight years, including scripted plays, stage adaptations, devised theatre, and site-specific performances. Her collaborations focus on movement-based training and performance composition, often in response to mythological and canonical imagery. A recent participant in the popular Slide Jam series at the Bemis Center, her Bemis08: Creativity Festival work is an attempt to offer renewal and to honor the personal cost of the creative process in an interactive installation that explores themes of exile, ritual, and community.

THOMAS SVOLOS M.D.
A psychoanalyst and member of the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis, Thomas Svolos M.D is also an adjunct professor and vice-chair of the department of psychology at Creighton University. His writings on psychoanalysis and related subjects have been published in five languages. Svolos will be a participant in the panel discussion (un)Healthy: Wellness, Creativity and the Arts.

BRIAN TAIT
Long-time graffiti artist Brian Tait understands the power of attention-grabbing designs and he leveraged those skills into a successful sign company. His latest venture, b.tait studios, broadens the scope of his work in a multidisciplinary enterprise that includes a wide range of painting, design, sculpture, and contemporary furnishings efforts.

SUSAN TILLETT
Susan Tillett is the executive director for the Ragdale Foundation, the fourth largest writers' and artists' retreat program in the country. Since 1976, Ragdale has provided thousands of writers and artists with an enriching environment free from the interruptions of daily life through its residency program, community arts program, and pristine, historic grounds. The Foundation is located in Lake Forest, Illinois, 30 miles west of Chicago. Tillett will be a participant in the panel discussion Art Incubators: Building the Creative Environment.

THU TRAN
Thu Tran is a self-confessed food-ophile on a perpetual quest for the ultimate "visual MSG." Her vibrant works, spanning diverse media and ranging from drawings of whimsical worlds to decadent social experiments, are characterized by an engaging sense of glee and willful experimentation with form and the role of the viewer.

UNO ARTIFICIAL MUSIC INITIATIVE
AMI is the music technology ensemble of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, whose participation in Bemis08: Creativity Festival is being organized by Kenton Bales, the Robert M. Spire professor of music composition, technology and theory at UNO.  Bales will be joined by AnDrue Humphrey and Charles Lime in an extended ambient music program that will act as an often discordant backdrop to all of the equally discordant goings-on during the festival.  Bales has twice been named the Nebraska Composer of the Year by the Nebraska Music Teachers Association and his varied works have been performed by artists across the United States as well as in Europe.  A member of the Analog Arts Ensemble, Bales also serves as an organizer of ARTSaha!, Omaha’s new music festival.

UNO PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE
Directed by professor Tomm Roland, the UNO Percussion Ensemble is a student organization known for its varied programs that incorporate a wide range of percussion styles. Mixing classical works, contemporary masterpieces, world drumming and rock influenced pieces with occasional explosions of guttural yelling and screaming, this group will present a special high-energy performance peppered with all manner of thumps, clangs and rat-a-tat-tats for Bemis08: Creativity Festival.