PEW FELLOWSHIPS IN THE ARTS
1998 PANELISTS

Bill Arning is an independent curator and critic. From 1985 to 1996 he was director and chief curator at White Columns Alternative Arts Space in New York City. He has mounted solo exhibitions for artists such as Glenn Ligon, Gary Simmons, and Fred Wilson. He curated many group exhibition at White Columns including "The Strange Power of Cheap Sentiment," "Verisimilitude and the Utility of Doubt," and "Stonewall 25, Imaginings of the Gay Past." His independent projects have included "Outside Possibilities," an outdoor sculpture festival for the Rushmore Festival of Theater, Dance, and Visual Art, "The Most Important Thing In The World," for the Alternative Art Fair, and most recently "Flow Considering Liquiform," for Independent Curators, Inc. Bill has been a contributing editor for Bomb magazine since 1991 and he also writes exhibition reviews and short features for Art in America, World Art, the Village Voice, and Poliester among others.
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Tom Butter is a sculptor. He received a B.F.A. from the University of the Arts (Philadelphia College of Art) and an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Albright-Knox Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Frederick Wiseman collection, among others. He has had several solo exhibitions of his work mounted and has been included in group exhibitions at several venues including The New Museum, Curt Marcus Gallery, Diane Brown Gallery, the Walker Art Center, and P.S.1, among others.
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Lorene Cary is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Cary received her M.A and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and pursued additional graduate study at the Sussex University in Falmer, England (M.A.). She has been a guest lecturer on issues of writing, race, and education at the University of Pennsylvania, Illinois Weslyan University, Westtown School, Georgia State University, and Rutgers University. She has been a contributing editor for Newsweek and an Associate Editor for TV Guide. Cary has published two books of fiction, The Price of A Child and Pride, and a memoir titled Black Ice. Her articles have appeared in American Visions, Essence, and the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1994, she received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
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Linh Dinh is a poet and translator. He was the founder and editor of The Drunken Boat, a local literary journal. His work has appeared in Sulfur, American Poetry Review, Manoa, New Observations, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. A native of Vietnam, he has translated Vietnamese poetry in addition to writing original poems and prose including translating an anthology of Vietnamese folk poems and proverbs and he is currently working on a collection of Nguyen Huy Thiep's stories. In 1996, Dinh edited Night Again, a collection of contemporary fiction from Vietnam. Recently, he edited a special issue of the American Poetry Review called the Philly Edition which included work of a wide variety of poets from the greater Philadelphia area. In 1993, he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
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Karin Higa is the curator of art for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Prior to assuming her current position, Higa was the Associate Director of the Artists in Residence program of the New York Foundation for the Arts. She received a B.A. from Columbia University, an M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles where she is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Art History. From 1990-91 she participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She has organized several exhibitions including: "Relics from Camp: An Artist's Installation by Kristine Yuki Aono and Members of the Japanese American Community," "Japanese and Japanese American Painters in the United States: A Half Century of Hope and Suffering, 1896-1945," "The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942-1945," and "SITEseeing: Travel and Tourism in Contemporary Art."
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Wendy Lesser is the founding editor and publisher of The Threepenny Review, a quarterly magazine of arts and society that she started in 1979. She is the author of four books including A Director Calls, and His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art. Among her awards and honors are a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities grants, an Artspace Foundation grant for New Writing in Art Criticism, and a Jackson/Phelan Award for Nonfiction Prose. Lesser was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. She is a freelance writer and book reviewer for such publications as The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The New Republic, The Yale Review, among others. Lesser received a B.A. from Harvard University, an M.A from King's College, Cambridge University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
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Reginald McKnight is a writer of fiction and nonfiction work. He has published several books including The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas and Moustapha's Eclipse, both collections of short stories, a novel titled I Get on the Bus, and a work of nonfiction titled African American Wisdom. His most recent book, White Boys was published in 1997. His work has appeared in several publications included The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Story, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Among his awards are an O'Henry Award for "The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas," a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, A Whiting Writer's Award, a Pushcart prize for "The More I Like Flies," and a Fellowship from Bread Loaf. McKnight's work has appeared in several anthologies including Ancestral House, Calling My Name, and New Stories From the South, The Years Best. He received an A.A. from Pikes Peak Community College, where he also received the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1990, a B.A. from Colorado college, and an M.A. from University of Denver. He is currently professor of English at the University of Maryland.
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Paul Muldoon was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. He chairs the writing program at Princeton University where he lives with his wife--the writer Jean Korelitz--and their daughter Dorothy. Mules and Earlier Poems (1985), Why Brownlee Left (1981), Quoof (1983) and Meeting the British (1987) are available from Wake Forest University Press. Madoc and Selected Poems were published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
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David Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright, and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity. Mura's most recent book of poetry, The Colors of Desire, won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library. His first, After We Lost Our Way, won the 1989 National Poetry Series Contest. He has also written A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography & Addiction. Among his awards are a Lila Wallace-reader's Digest Writers Award, a US/Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, two NEA Literature Fellowships, two Bush Foundation Fellowships, two Loft-McKnight Awards, several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and a Discovery/The Nation Award. Mura's poems have appeared in several anthologies including: The Language of Life edited by Bill Moyers and The New American Poets of the ‘90s and in publications such as The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and The New Republic. He has written numerous essays about race and multiculturalism for such publications as Mother Jones, The New York Times, The Utne Reader, and The Hungry Mind Review, among others. Mura has written and performed several performance pieces. He collaborated with the writer Alexs Pate on a multi-media performance piece titled Secret Colors which premiered at the Walker Art Center. Mura received a B.A. from Grinnell College and an M.F.A. from Vermont College.
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Eileen Neff is an installation artist and critic. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Leeway Foundation. In 1994, she received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Eileen holds an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, a B.F.A. from The University of the Arts (Philadelphia College of Art), and a B.A. from Temple University. She has created installations for solo and group exhibitions nationally, including venues such as the Rosenbach Museum and Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and Carnegie-Mellon University Art Gallery, among others. She has participated in artists residencies at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia and La Napoule Art Foundation, La Napoule, France. An arts writer as well as practitioner, she regularly writes reviews and essays about the visual arts in the Philadelphia region, and has been an art critic and writer for Art Forum magazine since 1989. In 1994, she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
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Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a poet and critic. Author of eight books of poetry , including The Imaginary Lover, which won the 1986 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has appeared in American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Ms., The Nation, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, Tikkun, and many other journals. Her poetry has been widely anthologized and has been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic. She is also the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America and Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is professor of English at Rutgers University.
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Judith Shea is a sculptor who has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her one person exhibitions have included "Selected Works: 1979—1994," at Max Protetch Gallery in New York, "Recent Sculpture," at John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, and "Monuments and Statues," at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, in New York. Her work has been part of numerous group exhibitions including " In the Garden, In the Galleries, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, "El Sueno de Egipto," at Centro Culturale de Arte Contemporaneo, in Mexico City, and "Encontros: Luso-Ameriocnos de Arte Contemporanea," at the Gulbenkian foundation in Lisbon, Portugal. Among her grants and awards are two Visual Arts Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest International Artists Award, and a Rockefeller Foundation Resident Fellowship to Bellagio Study and Conference Center. Her sculpture can be found in many public collections including: The Brooklyn Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
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Rebecca Sinkler is the former editor of the New York Times Book Review, a position she held from 1989 to 1995. She joined the New York Times in June 1985 as previewing editor of the Book Review and served as deputy editor from 1985 until 1989. Prior to joining the Times, Sinkler had been with the Philadelphia Inquirer for 10 years. From 1975 to 1979, she worked on the magazine and from 1979 to 1985, on the Book Review. Sinkler received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. She is currently writing a book on family memoirs.
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Renee Stout is a sculptor and installation artist. She has received grants and awards from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Pollack Krasner Foundation, and she received an artists residency at Northeastern University in Boston through the Afro-American Artists in Residence Program. Her work is included in the collections of the National Museum of American Art, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, among others. Several solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted and her work has been part of many group exhibitions including "American Kaleidoscope: Themes and Perspectives in American Art," National Museum of American Art, "Gather Visions: Selected Works of African-American Women Artists," Anacosta Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, and "Art on the Edge: Metaphysical Metaphors," The High Museum.
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