Creative Expressions: Potpourri of Prize-winning Prose, Public Art, and Personal Practice - June 4, 2020

Creative Expressions: Potpourri of Prize-winning Prose, Public Art, and Personal Practice

Thursday, June 4, 2020

The SUNY Empire community has a rich and varied artist community. Come and meet our faculty, staff, student, and alumni artists to learn a little about their creative expressions, their process, and them. Our artists host a Q&A session following their presentations/performances. Featured on Thursday, June 4, will be a reading from The Masters Review Fall 2019 Fiction Contest winning story "Salt-Sea" by Zeeva Bukai; a presentation on a public art project in Plattsburgh by Anastasia Pratt; and the sharing of art as personal healing and a meditative practice by student Oju Ayọ.

Join us this week and every week in Zoom at this link - https://bit.ly/CreativeExpressionSeries.

Weekly host: Lisa D’Adamo-Weinstein

Note: If you missed our previous sessions or cannot make it this week, all of the sessions are recorded. Check them out.

Anastasia Pratt (public art), teaches Public History courses at SUNY Empire State College and also works with the Upward Bound program. She serves as the Clinton County historian and has authored several books. Music has always been a constant theme in her life. She began playing the bass when she was 10 and started singing even earlier.  Enjoying many different genres of music, throughout her life she has performed in a wide variety of instrumental and choral groups, including several local chamber and pit orchestras.

Zeeva Bukai (author) was born in Israel and raised in New York City. Her work has appeared in The Master’s Review where she won the Fall Fiction Contest judged by Anita Felicelli, McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern, Image Journal, December Magazine where she won the Curt Johnson Prose award judged by Lily King, jewishfiction.net, and the anthology, “Out of Many: Multiplicity and Division in America Today.”

Her honors include an Emerging Writer’s Fellowship at the NY Center for Fiction, and artist residencies at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island, WA, and Byrdcliff Artist Colony in Woodstock NY. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and is an academic support specialist at SUNY Empire State College. She is represented by Jessica Salky at Salky Literary Management. You can reach her at: zeevabukai.com

Oju Ayọ (artist) is a member of SUNY Empire State College's Class of 2020, having just completed her Bachelor's of Arts Degree.  Oju Ayọ took a concentration of psychology classes to further explore the ways art can be used to ease and heal the mind. Within weeks of handing in her final assignment at SUNY Empire State College, Oju Ayọ self-published a series of adult coloring books released by IngramSpark on March 31, 2020 serendipitously available as an offering for those looking for quarantine activities. To find out more about her work, visit OJUAYO.COM.