Nancy Manter,
artistic director

Lysbeth Ackerman

Nancy Bowen

Karen Davidson

Susan Lerner

Casey Mallinckrodt

Sam Shaw

Jody Silvio

Advisory Board:

Eduardo Bohorquez

Jennie Cline

Stephanie Cotsirillis

Niki Fox

Susan Dowlng Griffiths

Steve Kursch

Cynthia Livingston

Patricia Phillips

Carol Shutt

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Jane Alexander is known for her outstanding career as an actress on stage and screen. She has appeared in a dozen feature films including "The Great White Hope", "All the President’s Men", "Kramer vs Kramer", "Eleanor and Franklin", "Testament", and "The Cider House Rules". She has appeared in more than 40 plays in regional theaters, community theaters, summer stock, Off-Broadway and in 14 plays on Broadway including "The Great White Hope, "Shadowlands" and "The Sisters Rosensweig". She has also performed in 26 television films. She has received over 30 awards, including an Emmy for "Playing for Time", a Tony award for "The Great White Hope", and 4 Oscar nominations. She also has received 12 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in recognition of her outstanding career and contributions.

She is a life-long "birder", a wildlife lover, and an advocate for peace. These interests have led her to take part in many organizations such as the American Bird Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Society, WAND and Peace Action. Governor Pataki recently appointed her a Commissioner of Parks Recreation and Historic Preservation for New York State (the Taconic Region), a job which she loves doing.

In l993, she took a 4-year hiatus from her acting career to serve as Chairman of The National Endowment for the Arts. Many credit her with saving the NEA from being shut down by the 104th Congress led by Newt Gingrich. This experience is related with insight, humor and passion in her book, Command Performance – an Actress in the Theater of Politics.

POETRY READING

Tom Sleigh is an award-winning poet and a dramatist. He teaches at Dartmouth College and at the New York University Graduate Creative Writing Program. He lives in Cambridge, MA and New York City. He will read from his latest book, Dreamhouse. He also wrote Waking and received in 1999 the Shelley Award of the
Poetry Society of America, A National Endowment award, and the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Funds Writer's Award. He has had his work published in the Boston Review of Books, The HarvardReview, The Yale Review, the Boston Phoenix among others.

SCULPTURE

INSTALLATIONS FOR SENSING BALANCE

Nancy Davidson is a sculptor and digital artist who is known for her gargantuan colorful weather balloon sculptures that explore ideas about humour and pleasure. Her most recent solo exhibition was at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York. She will be included in the Corcoran Biannual at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. in December 2002. She is a Full Professor of Painting at Purchase College, SUNY. Nancy will be installing a weather balloon sculpture either off the coast or on the grounds of COA.

Ellen Driscoll is a sculptor known for her installations and public projects, most notably As Above, So Below for the new Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Her work is included in major private and public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art. She is a Professor of Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Ellen will be doing a poetic temporary installation made of string and weights in the Turrets Building.

Greg Lock is a digital artist and sculptor who works with real objects and virtual reality. He creates uninhibited interventions in various three dimensional spaces. He has held residencies recently at the IDEA (Innovation in Digital and Electronic Arts) Centre in Manchester, England. He hails from England but is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Sculpture at Purchase College, SUNY. Greg will be doing a GPS mapping of the local area and transferring that data into a sculptural form.

PHOTOGRAPHY and DRAWINGS

A DELICATE BALANCE: MAINE & NEW YORK RESPONDS TO 9/11

This exhibition includes drawings and photographs which document personal responses to the tragic events of September 11. Lorie Novak and Nancy Bowen will show photographs of the ad hoc memorials built around the city to commemorate the missing. Susannah Heller will show drawings done of the World Trade Center and the area when she had a studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. Mimi Gross will show sketches done on the site of the people involved in rescue and clean up efforts. Rebecca Howland will exhibit drawings and visual poems made as her neighborhood was thrown into chaos.

Lorie Novak is a photographer and media artist who chairs the photography department at New York Univeristy.

Nancy Bowen, Assistant Professor of Sculpture, is a mixed media sculptor who lives in Brooklyn. Using clay, glass, steel, hair and other unusual materials, her work explores metaphors of the body and other types of organic form. She has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe and has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the European Ceramic Work Center. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Hunter College (CUNY).

Susannah Heller is a painter who lives in Brooklyn and is represented by Olga Korber Gallery in Toronto.

Mimi Gross is a multi-media artist who is represented by Salander-O'Reilly Gallery in New York.

Rebecca Howland is a painter and poet who lives in Tribeca.

Curtis Wells, photographer and proprietor of the "Last Waltz" in Southwest Harbor. Curtis' photograph, Bass Harbor Marsh, is the signature photograph for LandEscapes 2002. He will exhibit additional photographs from around Maine of ad hoc memorials made after 9/11.

FILM:

Judith Dwan Hallet is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has been making films for 25 years. She was the Senior Producer for National Geographic Television for their weekly TV series EXPLORER. In 1991, Judy formed her own company: Judith Dwan Hallet Productions, Inc. Since then she has continued to produce and direct documentaries for PBS, The Discovery Channel, Arts and Entertainment, and TBS.

Nancy Andrews is an award-winning filmmaker. Currently she is on the faculty at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, where she teaches performance art, video making and film history.

PANEL DISCUSSION

Patricia Phillips, New Paltz, New York. Dean at the School of Fine and Performing Arts, SUNY New Paltz, Ms. Phillips has published much of her art criticism and writings on sculpture, public art, and architecture. Her work is reknowned in both the art and architectural worlds, and has had a major impact on joining the two disciplines. She is Executive Editor of Art Journal, a publication from the College Art Association. She formerly served as the assistant chair of environmental design at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. Ms. Phillips will moderate the symposium and participate in the panel at the Northeast Harbor Neighborhood House.

Nancy Princenthal, art critic, writer and curator, and member of the faculty at Princeton University. She is a contributing editor to Art in America, Works on Paper and writes for other prestigious magazines and catalogues.

Dr. Joseph LeDoux, neuroscientist and Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University's Center for Neural Science. He is the author of The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life and co-author of The Integrated Mind. His most recent book is Synaptic Self.

Carl Little, author of Title Art of the Maine Islands and Watercolors of John Singer Sargent, and Director of Communications and Marketing at the Maine Community Foundation in Ellsworth. Little is a regular contributor to Art in America (where he was formerly associate editor), Art New England and Ornament. He edited and wrote a preface for the forthcoming "Haystack: 50 Years of Discovery" (University of Maine Press).

WORKSHOP LEADERS

Paper Making -- Sue Gosin is the founder of Dieu Donné Papermill in New York City. For more than 25 years, Ms. Gosin has made archival paper for conservation labs at the Library of Congress and has collaborated with artists on 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional art made of handmade paper pulp.

Faerie House Building -- Betsy Williams is an author, lecturer and teacher. She has an extensive knowledge of plant lore, history and seasonal celebrations. Her gardens and floral work have been showcased in many books, national magazines and newspapers. She summered in Machias for years, and attended Colby College. Her husband and book illustrator, Ned, summered in Bar Harbor.

Young People's Animation -- Nancy Andrews (see entry above under Film.)

Video Editing -- Mark Lipman, a filmmaker, producer and editor who lives in Boston, Mass. Among his films are Finding Our Way, Harvest of Dreams and Holding Ground which was broadcast nationally on public television. He is a member of New Day Films, a national distribution cooperative for social issue films, and has worked at NOVA and for Eyes on the Prize.

FINALE

Susan Osberg, originally from Maine is a choreographer and dancer from New York City and will be performing a dance entitled Listening Shell/ Spiral Bones; Music Composed by Jon Gibson from CD Stalling into Elation, excerpt:Three Lives and Something, (1999); backdrop by Nancy Manter.

Downeast Drummers, "Numbasahake," specializing in west African rhythms: Stu Gillam, Craig Shoppe, and Gale McCullough.

Alicia Manter, author of Fairies of Fable Island, a middle-grade chapter book which is a work in progress, will read from her book at the Friday morning Fairy House Building Workshop. Ms. Manter has been writing for children for 17 years. She is also a
full-time mother and household manager, civic and school volunteer.

Board Members

Nancy Manter, is a visual artist who lives in New York City and on Mount Desert Island and is on the Visual Arts faculty at Princeton University and previously taught at Parson's School of Design and New York University. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She will have a fall installation of her recent work entitled "Tracking: Fog, Mud and Snow". Ms Manter is originally from Maine and from a family of artists and physicians, hence, the founder and Artistic Director of Mount Desert Symposium in the Arts, "LandEscapes."

Jennie Cline is a free lance computer support specialist (focusing on graphic design and production, computer training, web page design, video scrapbooks and other computer oriented projects) who has been working with technology since 1984. She resides in Andover, Massachusetts on the campus of Phillips Academy where she and her family have been active participants in the residential educational environment since 1979. Summers find her on Mount Desert Island, Maine where her computer support continues, but with ample diversions. She has been involved with producing educational publications, organizing philanthropic groups, supporting educational outreach programs and coordinating campus events and projects. Ms. Cline serves as the LandEscapes webmaster, workshop coordinator and executive assistant to artistic director Nancy Manter.

Karen Davidson, an award-winning designer, has brought consummate skill and creative vision to a wide variety of projects for over 15 years. She has helped conceive, shape, and produce the visual elements of more than 600 illustrated books and art catalogues, educational projects, posters, annual reports, guidebooks, brochures, press kits, and letterhead systems. These projects have been commissioned by publishers, corporations, museums, foundations, and other cultural institutions. She recently was project manager for a collaboration between the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, Pilobolus Dance Theatre, and the Ringing Rocks Foundation to honor a Navajo Medicine Women, Walking Thunder. Ms. Davidson serves as the graphic design consultant to LandEscapes and in a general advisory capacity.

Casey Mallinckrodt is a visual artist and works in radio hosting shows about Jazz and food. Casey was a co-coordinator of the 2000 Scarecrows/Higher Elevations exhibit at Beech Hill Farm. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the College of the Atlantic at which many of this summer's events take place.

Jody Silvio, is an educational administrator for Montgomery County Public School, a large, metropolitan Washington DC school system of 137,000 students, where she works in the area of communications and community outreach. Ms. Silvio will serve as a public relations advisor and coordinator for event cuisine. Ms. Silvio coordinated events and cuisine for the 2001 Land Escapes and the 2000 sculpture exhibition "Scarecrow/Higher Elevations" held at Beech Hill Farms.

Advisory Board

After pursuing a career as a professional dancer, Susan Dowling (Griffiths) became a television producer at WGBH, PBS’s flagship station in Boston. From l982 to 1993 she was the Executive Director of the WGBH New Television Workshop, the renowned experimental wing of the station where many of today’s established artists created their early work, such as Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and William Wegman. She produced over 25 video art and videodance programs - many shown nationally and internationally. She received one of the first "Bessie" awards in 1984 for her work in videodance.

She was Co-Director with David Ross of The Contemporary Art Television Fund (1983-1989), Executive Producer of the public television series, NEW TELEVISION, co-creator and executive producer with Susan Sollins of "Art:21 – Art in the Twenty-First Century", which aired nationally on PBS in September 2001 and January 2002.

Dowling serves as an advisor to Educational Television for Cambodia (ETC), an organization formed to establish an educational television station in Cambodia that will acquire and produce programs supporting two objectives: children’s education, and revival of traditional Cambodian performing arts. She also takes great pride and pleasure in being an advisor to LandEscapes.

Lucy Weismann was born in New York City and graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1998. She is interested in using the arts to explore and challenge social taboos, especially those surrounding women’s blood, birth, sex and ritual. She currently studies film at the New School and is working on her next short, entitled "Faking It." Her first film, "In the Red," played at numerous festivals around the US and abroad.