YoungArts

Cinematic Arts Chair / Andrew Hevia (2003)

A youngArts alum from 2003, Andrew studied visual arts at New World School of the Arts High School before attending the film program at Florida State University. After graduating, Andrew moved briefly to San Francisco before returning to Miami to join an up-start regional film event called "the Borscht Film Festival." He has produced a number of short films, edited two feature length projects and is currently developing his first feature film as writer/director. Andrew has been vegetarian for over 26 years. He has also won a Telly Award, but has not yet won an Emmy, an Oscar or a Golden Globe. He still cannot play his banjo.

Dance Chair / Courtney Blackwell (1998)

Courtney Blackwell currently holds the position of Director of Career Services at The Juilliard School. She joined the staff in 2006 as performance coordinator for the Jazz Studies program, where she led the Juilliard Jazz Ensembles and Orchestras on tour to locations including Qatar, Spain, Costa Rica, South Carolina, and Utah. Her professional performance background includes work as a soloist with Ballet Theater Munich and appearances with Netherlands Dance Theater, and the Thang Dao Dance Company. Courtney is a certified Pilates instructor and has taught in Germany, Texas, and New York. She has attended Columbia University and The Juilliard School where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a major in dance.

Jazz Chair / Pascal Le Boeuf (2004)

Breath the music of jazz pianist, Pascal Le Boeuf, a spinner of webs constructed with beauty, emotion, and maturity.  Winner of the 2008 International Songwriting Competition and the 2006 Independent Music Awards, Pascal has emerged as one of the most admired new voices in jazz. 

Part of a growing New York jazz scene characterized by hypnotizing rhythms, alternative rock, and the influences of artists such as Radiohead, Herbie Hancock and Brad Mehldau, the 24-year-old Pascal Le Boeuf utilizes innovative rhythmic concepts to connect with his audiences on a musical and emotional level.  Downbeat Magazine describes him as having “a strong percussive element to his playing, which he combines with a keen sense of dynamics.”

Mr. Le Boeuf performs and tours frequently with his jazz piano trio, Pascal's Triangle, which features bassist Linda Oh and drummer Joe Saylor.  Pascal's Triangle first performed together as the rhythm section in progressive jazz group, the Le Boeuf Brother's Quintet, at the 55bar, a Greenwich Village dive bar famous for cultivating underground contemporary jazz.  After working together as sidemen in various projects they decided to form their own trio to further develop their approach to improvisation.  

His most recent album features his twin brother Remy Le Boeuf, Ambrose Akinmusire, Marcus Strickland, and Clarence Penn (among others).  "This group has an impressively self-assured new album, "House Without a Door", which reaches for the gleaming cosmopolitanism of our present era." (New York Times) Although Pascal performs primarily as a leader, he can also be heard as a side-man with Clarence Penn (Maria Schneirder's Orchestra), Myron Walden (Brian Blade's Fellowship) Allan Harris, and Kevin Eubanks.

Pascal's upcoming album, "In Praise of Shadows" (as the "Le Boeuf Brothers") is set to be released this September 2011 and will feature Henry Cole, Linda Oh, Mike Ruby, Nir Felder, Remy Le Boeuf and the Myth String Quartet.  Supported, in part, by a generous grant from the Edward and Sally Van Lier Foundation of the NY community Trust, this album represents a new direction based on modern production techniques, electronics and Pascal's debut as a vocalist with the Le Boeuf Brothers.  

Pascal earned B.M. and M.M. degrees at the Manhattan School of Music as the recipient of the Michael W. Greene scholarship and graduated a Van Lier Fellow.

Music Chair / Ben Pila (2002)

Benjamin Pila is the only classical guitarist that has been chosen to be a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. Mr. Pila has performed in Alice Tully Hall, Avery-Fisher Hall and the Kaplan Penthouse in New York’s Lincoln Center, at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and in Harris Concert Hall in Aspen, Colorado. Mr. Pila was also invited to perform at the 2007 and 2008 September 11^th Commemoration Ceremonies at Ground Zero in New York City.

Mr. Pila’s playing has been featured on the Today Show on NBC as well as on the National Public Radio program From the Top. He was awarded ASCAP’s Best Performance of a Contemporary Work and was voted Young Artist of the Year in the Florida Chapter of the American String Teacher’s Association. Mr. Pila was the grand prize winner of the Tampa Bay Symphony’s Concerto Competition and has won prizes in the ASTA National Solo Competition, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts YoungArts Competition, the National Guitar Workshop Solo Competition, and the 8^th Annual Texas International Guitar Competition. Mr. Pila was also the first guitarist to receive the Ruth Eckerd Hall Scholarship in the Performing Arts.

Benjamin received his Master’s degree from The Juilliard School studying under Sharon Isbin and his Bachelor’s degree from Florida State University studying with Bruce Holzman. He is currently pursuing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Southern California under Scott Tennant of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet and Adam del Monte.

Photography Chair / Chris Bowman (2007)

Chris Bowman, 2007 photography finalist and presidential scholar, will be graduating from The Cooper Union in the fall with a degree in fine arts. He is currently the photography chair for NFAA's Alumni Association as well as a freelance photographer and scholar. His interests include bicycle riding, public transportation, karaoke, as well as a mixture of creative endeavors. His deepest passion, however, is art education, which has led to a continued involvement with YoungArts.

Theater Chair / Kenyon Adams (1997)

Kenyon Adams has performed internationally as an actor, musician and singer-songwriter. He is the recipient of the Greer Garson Foundation Award for Acting, a Level One Young Arts Award, and was named a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts under Bill Clinton. Kenyon received his BFA in Theater from Southern Methodist University, Meadows School of the Arts in 2001.

 In 2004, he collaborated with Director Sarah Peterson and jazz legend Willie Ruff to stage Long Wharf Theater’s critically acclaimed production of Langston’s Hughes’ Black Nativity, for which he composed original music and performed a leading role. Other theater credits include Cinderella (Inside Broadway NYC), Richard III (Elm Shakespeare), Bloodknot, Ah! Wilderness!,, My Children, My Africa!, Translations, and Blind Lemon (Akin Babtunde).

In 2010, Kenyon made his feature film debut as Jason in the narrative feature, Lucky Life, which made it's US and world premiere's at Tribeca Film Festival and Moscow International Film Festival, and is currently premiering in countries around the world.

Kenyon has appeared on various musical recordings as a vocalist and songwriter, including a collaborative worship album with Douglas Feil, Arlington Jones, and members of Kirk Franklin's Nu Nation. 2002 marked the release of his debut album, Songs for the Road. As a solo performer and singer-songwriter he has shared the stage with artists such as Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame’s The Lovin’ Spoonful, as well as Ten Shekel Shirt, Derek Webb, Down Here, Water Deep, 100 Portraits, Darien Cunning and Mighty Purple. Kenyon has enjoyed leading worship for church communities in Dallas, Connecticut and New York and continues to perform original music in New York City. 

As an advocate for cultural renewal through the arts, Kenyon has served as Artistic Director of Hall Neighborhood House and Assistant Director of Yale University’s Open End Theater. Kenyon helped to establish The Space, a multi-cultural arts venue in New Haven, CT and was a member of the Axiom Community and Chetstone Manor, both of which explored a theology of missional living for the arts community.

Kenyon studied theology and culture as a Gotham Fellow at the Center for Faith & Work, Redeemer Presbyterian Church where he currently serves as Arts Ministries Coordinator. He lives In Queens, NY with his wife, Emily.

Visual Arts Chair / Annie Blazejack (2005)

Born and raised in Miami, Florida, Annie Blazejack, attended the magnet arts high school, New World School of the Arts. 

She moved to Providence, RI where she attended Brown University. She studied broadly: painting, art history, comparative literature, and Spanish language, among other things. After graduating, she was an educator at the Providence Children's Museum via their AmeriCorps program. She designed hands-on science-based after-school programs, and learned about the general goings-on of a non-profit museum, especially the exhibit design process.

Home in Miami again, she coordinated an art studio and exhibit space in downtown Miami -- the Flagler Arts Space. She also works as an art conservator, patiently cleaning and repairing paintings with Rustin Levenson Conservation.
Next year she’ll head to Boston to get an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Art.
Then, inevitably, she’ll be back in Miami.

And a bit about her artwork:

The artworks she’s been making for the past several years, mostly paintings and drawings, document invented rituals, adventure-performances she creates with her dearest friends. The 'Full-Spectrum Auto-Baptism' exemplifies what she means: Six women emerge from the sea, dressed in long white dresses, almost indistinguishable from each other on this cloudy day. They step into depressions in the sand: vats of dye. They stand still, holding hands, all in a line. Slowly, color seeps up their dresses. Red, orange, yellow -- a whole spectrum. The women baptize themselves in a patient painting process, each becoming more completely herself, more completely individual as she is colored.

She learned to paint at New World School of the Arts High School. The mantra there was Faster, Bigger, Brighter. They painted intuitively, un-self-consciously, constantly, manically. She still values this painting style, and seeks to integrate it into a more thoughtful process. So this year, her painter friend Geddes and she have performed a monthly painting conversation: they sit facing each other, surrounded by paints and water buckets, piles of white paper and colored scraps. They each paint twelve paintings over the course of twelve hours: Geddes paints for an hour, then sets her painting before Blazejack. Blazejack responds to her painting with a painting of her own, and then deliver their response to one another, etc. The process helps them work through ideas, free images from our glutted subconscious, re-combine images and ideas in permutation after permutation, communicate with and pay attention to each other in a language un-stymied by social convention, patterns of speech, and linear thinking. They each have 168 one-hour paintings piled in our rooms, paintings that are both seeds for new works (the project is a performance designed to generate other performances) and evidence of a meaningful painting ritual. The project has left Blazejack full of ideas.

annieblazejack.com
flaglerartsspace.com

Voice Chair / Megan Gillespie (2004)

Mezzo-soprano Megan Gillespie is a second year Masters student studying with Patricia Misslin at the Manhattan School of Music where she earned her Bachelor of Music degree.  In March, Megan performed for the Sundays at Two recital series in Rolling Hills, California.  

Ms. Gillespie’s performance credits include the roles of Misstress Quickly in Falstaff and Maddalena/Giovanna in Rigoletto under the baton of Tom Muraco, Dido in Dido and Aeneas directed by Dona D. Vaughn and conducted by Jorge Parodi, and the Grandmother in Griffelkin (cover) in the MSM Opera Studio.  Other roles include l’innocente in L’Artesiana (cover) for Opera Orchestra of New York at Carnegie Hall, Emily in Fortune’s Favorites, the Third Sister in Barab’s World Premier of Everyone Has to be Free, 2nd Cercatri / 2nd Conversa’ in Suor Angelica with One World Symphony, and Gossamer Beynon and Rosie Probert and the dramatic role of the Female Narrator in the World Premier of Michael J. Lewis’ opera, Under Milk Wood.  

Invited to join the Central City Opera Studio Artist Program in 2007 and in 2010, Ms. Gillespie sang the role of the VI Espri in Cendrillon and performed roles in a variety of opera scenes such as that of Isabella in L’Italiana in Algeri, Carmen, Hansel in Hansel and Gretel, Marcellina in the Marriage of Figaro, and the Third Lady in The Magic Flute.

Ms. Gillespie has received numerous awards and grants from such distinguished organizations as the Fe Bland Vocal Competition, the Beverly Hills Music in the Mansion and LACMA Sundays Live, the MET National Council Auditions in Washington D.C., Opera Florham, AMTL Recital Award in Carnegie Hall, Birgit Nilsson Scholarship, National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, Five Towns Music Competition, Palm Springs Opera Guild, the Intimate Opera Company, Palisades Symphony Young Artist Competition, and the Kiwanis Music Scholarship. 

Ms. Gillespie will earn her Masters degree Friday, May 13th, 2011.

Writing Co-Chairs / Ian McKenzie (2007) and Constance Parng (2002)

Ian is a 2007 Writing Alumni and graduate of Pratt Institute. He will be attending grad school in the fall.

Constance Parng is a writer born and raised just outside Chicago. With an early interest in storytelling, she was a winner of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts: YoungArts Gold Award for Writing. Constance was also one of 20 young artists honored by the President of the United States by White House Commission with the Presidential Scholar in the Arts medal for her work as a writer. She attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts on a merit scholarship and received her BFA in Dramatic Writing with honors. 

Her various works—Curious Beautiful of the Dancing Infinite, Gracie Sing Your Heart Out, They Look At You Sideways, and The Ta Ta Song of the Aftermore have had readings and productions in NYC. She was honored by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx as the 1st place winner of the North Suburban Library Foundation's short fiction contest for her story The Fire Feeding Heartbeat of Tap Water Rain, which was published in the Longmeadow Journal.

Constance is also an actress. She was the winner of the New York Innovative Theater Award for Best Actress in a Featured Role in 2009. The award recognized her portrayal of the dangerous and heartbreakingly vulnerable Betty Ting-Pei in the award-winning production of Lee/gendary at the HERE Arts Center.  Constance, now a resident of Los Angeles, continues to act on screen and on stage.  She is currently in the process of writing two new screenplays.