g u e s t h o u s e

(residencies, interdisciplinary collaborations, performances, workshops)

CoLab 2023

Grace Brabo (performance/writer)

Alexsandro Bravo (performance)

Melody Decker (costume)

Yuxdi Farias (performance art/theater)

Sveta Moroz (design/jewelry/visual art)

Kayla Perez Ramsay (performance/film)

Big Mouth Unique -Mathilde Amiot & Joshua Thwaites (fabric arts/visual art)

Funding for this program is provided in part by Creative Sonoma, Trust for Mutual Understanding, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Imaginists’ donors.

CoLab 2022

CoLab includes artist residencies, interdisciplinary collaborations, and related events throughout the year. Residencies gives space and time for artists to disrupt their process and work collaboratively. The 2022 CoLab Residents are:

Annabelle Anderson (visual/fine arts) is a multimedia artist born and raised in Sonoma County. She moved to Olympia Washington in 2018 and attended The Evergreen State College, where she received her Bachelors of Arts in 2022. Annabelle has experience in drawing, painting, ceramics, printmaking, and Adobe programs; often working with one or more of these mediums at a time. Her work typically incorporates aspects of specific landscapes, narratives, and attention to the extraordinary aspects of ordinary life. She recently relocated to Healdsburg and is currently a part of a residency cohort with The Imaginists. She is working in collaboration with artists Yareny Fuentes and Rae Lipman as well as assembling a series of ceramic vessels that portray a visual narrative.

Jon Bernson (interdisciplinary): is an Emmy Award-winning media artist who has spent the last 25 years working at the intersection of film, theater, audio-visual art and music. He is a former artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, Playwrights Foundation, and The Space Program. Learn more about all of his projects HERE

Yareny Fuentes Jara (performance): has been working with the Imaginists since 2011 when she was 12 years old! Over the span of 11 years, Jara has participated in many projects including El show el arte es medicina, Spin-Off, Maguey, Stop That Show, and How Rain Found a Home in the Sky. She is currently a teaching artist with the Imaginists’ public school theater residency programming.

Rae Lipman (performance) has been acting their whole life, graduating from Santa Rosa HighSchool ArtQuest in 2021 where they collaborated with the Imaginists on The Final. Most recently they interned as stage manager for the Imaginists’ SDA: Someone Dies Again in May, and played Medium Alison in Left Edge Theatre's production of Fun Home in September. After a year of traveling, they are excited to continue planting roots with local theater companies in Sonoma County. 

Farrah McAdam (dance): Calling on her 20+ years of various movement experiences and gatherings, Farrah McAdam is a dance educator, choreographer, and artist in the Bay Area who is invested in equitable, collaborative environments where history and critical thinking are investigated just as much as physical embodiments. She currently teaches through Sonoma State University and the Luther Burbank Center, has performed with CALI&CO Dance, Kristen Daley, and Liz Lerman to name a few, and has been honored to perform at ACDA’s 2016 Nationals at The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. Farrah has been a guest educator and choreographer around the West Region- including Arizona State University, Scottsdale Community College, Modesto Community College, San Jose State, Fresno State University, and Sonoma State University. She holds a B.A. in both Psychology and Dance and is currently pursuing certification through Rennie Harris University’s first ever cohort group as a C1 Candidate.

David Roby (playwrighting/performance): David Roby is a playwright, actor and director. He has enjoyed a career in theatre spanning over thirty years. He is the author of Personified, Mercy Me, Arts and Sciences, I Invented the Sandwich…, Unseen Character and many others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including The Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award presented by The John F. Kennedy Center and VSA Arts in Washington, D.C. Roby is also a theatre educator working in universities, colleges, high schools, professional companies and community arts centers. He is one of the country’s leading authorities on the work of Tennessee Williams having served as the Tennessee Williams Scholar, Tennessee Williams Fellow and the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South.

Supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

C.K. Itamura (g u e s t h o u s e resident 2021)

C.K. has moved into a corner of the Imaginists’ big space to work on “syzygy” .

C.K.Itamura is an interdisciplinary artist based in Sonoma County, California. She creates conceptual, visual, performance and community engagement art fused with elements of social and cultural anthropology to engage diverse intergenerational audiences throughout the North Bay and Bay Area in the exploration of preventative, rather than palliative possibilities.

“People sitting in different vehicles will experience the same traffic jam in different ways: one may miss a flight and be apprehensive of the rescheduling they need to do; one may be late for school and be worried they will miss a lesson; one may spend time listening to the news; one may need to use a restroom and be experiencing physical discomfort; one may spend the time musing about someone they love. Each individual will have their own personal interaction with the same traffic jam and they will derive their own narrative about it. The traffic jam is art.” — C.K.Itamura

Here’s her website

Rachael Dichter and Allie Hankins (g u e s t h o u s e residents 2021)

We are pleased to be working with Allie and Rachael to pilot our residency programming. We saw their work, When We, in 2018 at Alternativa’s Fresh Festival (Directors' Kathleen Hermesdorf & Albert Mathias). We would eventually learn that Rachael grew up in Santa Rosa and that she still has many ties here. We invited Rachael and Allie to perform When We at our first “micro festival” Artist Occupied in October 2018. Since then we have been in conversation with them about residency programs. Allie and Rachael will be working on a new piece in our space April 19- May 15.

“We’ve been working together for the past six years, creating duet work. We’re interested in undercutting ideas of logic and language by subverting the mind’s ability to decipher meaning. In our time here we’ll be exploring obfuscation through twinning and energetic presence and absence--asking the viewer to determine if we are really there, and if we are two, or just one. We have developed a practice of hiding in plain sight with a desire to question the line between public and private. We trouble closeness by highlighting intimacy, sensuality, temporality, and the body, and we interrogate our assumptions around togetherness, exploring the possibility of being alone onstage with each member of the audience simultaneously.”

Tuesday May 11: Work in process performance live streaming on the Imaginists Facebook page at 8 pm. The piece is about 30 minutes long and then we’ll have a conversation with Allie and Rachael about their process, work, and time at the Imaginists.

Rachael Dichter is a San Francisco based dancer, performer, choreographer and curator. She makes work about closeness. About the shortest distance and shortening the distance between things - between people. She grew up on the ocean and in the mountains and forests of Northern California, performing as a ballerina attending Mills College. She studied performance and classical techniques in New York and Bangalore, India and danced with Fougere Dance in Brussels Belgium. Her own work has shown locally and in Berlin, Cork, St Erme France, Portland, and Seattle. She was a 2015 Danceweb Scholar, a 2017 Artist in Residence at Caldera, a 2019 Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, and a Robert Rauschenberg Residency recipient. She has been lucky to collaborate with a number of fierce and talented folks and for four years she co-curated the San Francisco based live arts festival THIS IS WHAT I WANT. Vimeo

Allie Hankins is an artist based in Portland who recently performed in a dream wherein she announced "Today I am Truit" before jumping into a pool. The next day she learned that 'truit' is a word used by the lucid dreaming community to mean 'trout'. She is an inaugural resident artist at FLOCK, a dance center & creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists spearheaded by Tahni Holt, and in 2013 she co-founded Physical Education, a support group of sorts, comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups & lectures, curates performances, and teaches workshops nationally. Allie’s current endeavors include learning American Sign Language, preparing to teach step aerobics, and doing one-on-one portrait sessions over zoom. Her website is alliehankins.com, Vimeo, Physical Education