Creative Collaborators

DANIEL KELLY

Creative Director, Composer, Pianist, Filmmaker, Interviewer Daniel Kelly’s music has been declared “powerfully moving” by Time Out New York. He has created a prolific body of work that includes Shakespeare in Jazz, Blind Visionaries, and Rakonto, meaning “story” in Esperanto, an interview-based, concert-length performance that has been commissioned by 13 different performing arts centers across the United States. The most recent Rakonto, commissioned by The King Center in Melbourne, FL, resulted in a 90-minute film that celebrates the lives of people in the community living with various disabilities which was aired locally in June 2021.

Kelly is a recipient of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award and has received funding from Chamber Music America Residency Partnership Grant and the New York State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant. He has produced more than 350 concerts as co-Founding Artistic Director of Connection Works, an artist-run music organization based in Brooklyn that has received generous support from the Aaron Copland Fund. He has worked with Grammy award-winner Joe Lovano, NEA Jazz Masters Dave Liebman & Shelia Jordan, and MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipients Dafnis Prieto and Steve Coleman. He has performed with Grammy award-winning jazz legends Michael Brecker and Joe Lovano, hip-hop star Lauryn Hill, and modern classical giants the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Kelly has released five CDs of original compositions, including World, which blends Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music and features guest DJ, RJD2; Duets with Ghosts, which combines samples of voices from old archival recordings with a hard-edged Downtown New York electric quartet; Portal, an improvised solo piano suite that arose from his series of improvised solo piano concerts; Emerge, a new take on the jazz piano trio, infusing it with the energy and drive of rock music; and Rakonto: A Sounding of Community Voices which features the voices and stories of immigrants living in one of New York City’s most ethnically diverse communities.

THE SEEING WITH PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTIVE

Exhibited in galleries around the world, the haunting and poetic images of The Seeing with Photography Collective are created by a group of visually impaired, sighted and totally blind photographers. They use a dynamic process called “light painting” which transports the viewer into their unique dream world of surreal portraits. The visually impaired or blind photographers work with a sighted assistant to create an image based on a vision in their mind’s eye. The results are riveting, dramatic images that have helped these artists to heal through their work. Coming from diverse backgrounds and life experiences, they share an awareness of sight loss, along with the determination to dialogue and integrate their images into a more universal context. The Collective’s work has been exhibited worldwide and can be seen in the book Shooting Blind published by Aperture. www.flickr.com/people/seeingwithphotography/

MARK ANDRES

Photographer and Director, The Seeing with Photography Collective Mark Andres studied photography at Brown University and at the New York University/International Center of Photography graduate program. He began working with the legally blind in 1985 and teaches at the Visions Services for the Blind. He has been director of the Collective for over 30 years.