Dennis J Bernstein lives in San Francisco. He is the award-winning host/producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on public and community radio stations across the United States. Bernstein is the recipient of many awards for his work, including the 2015 Pillar Award in Broadcast Journalism. In 2009, Pulse Media named him one of the “20 Top Global Media Figures.” Bernstein’s articles and essays have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Denver Post, Philadelphia Enquirer, Newsday, The Nation, Dallas Times Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Mother Jones, Village Voice, The Progressive, Vibe Magazine, Spin Magazine, Toronto Globe, Kyoto Journal, Der Spiegel, and many more. Bernstein is the author of Henry Hyde’s Moral Universe, and the co-author of two decks of political trading cards, Friendly Dictators and The S&L Scandal Trading Cards. He founded The Muriel Rukeyser Reading Series in Park Slope Brooklyn, and broadcast it over public and community radio in New York City; the series was named after his friend and mentor, the late poet and biographer, Muriel Rukeyser. Bernstein also produced the first complete live, 35 hour broadcast of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the U.S. at New York’s Bloomsday Bookstore. He is author of the poetry collection Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom, which won the 2012 Artists Embassy International Literary Cultural Award. His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, The Chimaera, Bat City Review, The Progressive, Texas Observer, ZYZZYVA, Red River Review, and numerous other journals. Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple, writes that Special Ed “is art turned to us through the eyes of love.” Carol Smaldino says in The Huffington Post that the poems remind us how “we are all connected to the sorrows as well as to the grandness of being human.” Bernstein’s earliest  poems appeared as a chapbook, Particles of Light, with woodcuts by Stan Kaplan. His artists’ books/plays French Fries and GRRRHHHH: a study of social patterns, co-authored with Warren Lehrer, are considered seminal works in the genre, and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Georges Pompidou Centre, and other museums around the world.

Warren Lehrer is a writer/designer known as a pioneer in the fields of visual literature and design authorship. His books, acclaimed for capturing the shape of thought and reuniting the oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling with the printed page, include: A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley; Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America (with Judith Sloan); The Portrait Series (four-book suite); GRRRHHHH: a study of social patterns (with Dennis Bernstein and Sandra Brownlee); French Fries (with Bernstein); i mean you know; and versations. He has received many awards for his books and multimedia projects including: the Brendan Gill Prize, the Innovative Use of Archives Award, the IPPY Outstanding Book of the Year Award, the International Book Award for Best New Fiction, three AIGA Book Awards, two TDC Awards, a Media That Matters Award, a Prix Arts Electronica Award. He is a 2016 Center For Book Arts Honoree for “innovative and pioneering achievements in the Art of the Book” and a 2019 recipient of the Ladislav Sutnar Prize “for lifetime achievement in visual literature and design.’’ He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, NY State Council and NY State Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller, Ford, Greenwall, and Furthermore Foundations. His work has been exhibited widely and is in many collections including MoMA, L.A. County Art Museum, The Getty Museum, The Walker Art Center, Georges Pompidou Centre, and Tate Gallery. Lehrer is also a performer, and has co-written four plays, one opera, co-composed two audio CDs, and he co-produces audio works with his wife Judith Sloan. He is a frequent lecturer and presenter at universities, art and literary centers throughout the U.S. and internationally. Lehrer is the Leff Distinguished Professor at Purchase College, SUNY, and a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). With Sloan, Lehrer founded EarSay, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to portraying the lives of the uncelebrated in print, on stage, on the radio, in exhibitions, concert halls, electronic media, and through educational programs in public schools, community centers, and prisons.

SELECTED PRESS ON BERNSTEIN & LEHRER

Dennis J Bernstein

“Dennis J. Bernstein is a hero to me because of his dedicated, unflinching reporting of real news on Flashpoints, at KPFA in Berkeley, California. But his fearless pursuit of the truth about what is happening in our rapidly transforming world did not prepare me for the beauty, depth, not-one-word-mislaid perception of this amazing book. Each word, each line, each thought has a weight, a texture, a surprise all its own. With its moving preface, in which Dennis shares his own struggles as a young child with special needs, Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom is that unusual gift literature can be: We are connected to humanity in ways we might never have even considered or imagined before. Above all it is art turned to us through the eyes of love.”
Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, author of The Color Purple

“Come into the special ed classroom, where the kids who don’t fit in anywhere else spend their day. For these kids—real kids Dennis J. Bernstein taught in the New York City public schools before he became an internationally known investigative journalist—pistols, switchblades, police cars and hunger are more instructive than textbooks. Special Ed is about daily life under the siege of poverty, racism, and class warfare. We come to know these kids intimately: Gloria, whose mother was disappeared in Guatemala and whose friendship with Marilyn rescues her from trauma-induced silence; Paulie, who “finds tears in the mirror’s eyes” but thinks of himself as tough and defies the gang-guys who threaten to drop him from the roof of the projects; Regina, who sells nickel bags before class and gets high alone in the gym before giving a heart-wrenching performance of a poem by Langston Hughes. Dennis J. Bernstein loves these kids fiercely, and we come to love them too as the collection unfolds. In these stunning, understated poems, these poems unafraid to name the darkest facts of our world and yet continually informed with compassion, we find ourselves in Rilke’s world of beauty and terror. To depict with love, as Bernstein does, is indeed to transform, the way a shattered guitar and broken glass are transformed by the kids in the special ed classroom into art and jewels.”
Anita Barrows, PhD, poet, child psychologist, translator (with Joanna Macy) of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Special Ed: Words in disorder that create a resemblance of order in the vagabond brain. Dennis J. Bernstein words hit me hard; everything about the short, whimsical poems gave me hope, desire, peace and a hint of madness. Life breathes through his poems. Special Ed is a collection of snapshots, some in colors, some in black and white, but never in grey. Like helium balloons hovering over a party, Dennis’ poems travel in multiple directions: they find their way into your soul waiting to be popped by a creative cloud tucked away deep inside. Special Ed is a must read for all, to allow freedom to slip through and to tear off the labels that conceal the true human nature behind short, oppressing, limiting letters that specialized education is so found of! I love nothing more than starting each of my Education graduate classes with one of Dennis’ poems and letting the words play their magic!”
Laurence Emmanuelle Hadjas, PhD, UCLA

“Be warned: this is not the pretty poetry that makes you smile knowingly at the talent of even the most impoverished lives made quaint. It’s rather the gift to the reader of sad, tragic, even brutal information. It’s the jolt to the body as some of the words land viscerally in the gut. And at other moments, it’s the dreamy reverie of a child, a teacher, or the reader that cradles a torn to bits but still beating human life — a possibility in rhythms that will no doubt want to be reread and become remembered… Their humanity brings us to the door of the harshest and saddest emotions, and the awareness that there was then as there is now, poverty and crime and lack of caring in the too often divisive United States of America. The poems are small, and they are small but packed stories…  This is the stuff that could haunt those of us ready to hear…”
Carol Smaldino The Huffington Post

“Wow. I’ve just read/finished Special Ed, and I’ve got chills. Truly. I’m reminded of a phrase, I think from Yeats, re: The Easter Rising, and the resultant repression by the Brits, “…a terrible beauty is born…” Beautiful. Terrible. Wonderful. Delight dances with dread, dig me? I read more than your poems, D.B. (Dennis Brutus?); when I read/hear/see the malevolence aimed at teachers today by the political whores of corporate charter – pimps, I think of your Mrs. Edwards – brilliant, insightful, sensitive – and – aware opened. In several of your pieces, you say “My kids” (var.) but I hear/read: “we kids,” for they are you – essentially – and couldn’t be more if y’all shared DNA markers. They are you separated by the veil of time. You/we are all “slow,” “retarded,” “pea-brains” in a vast, slashing, slicing machine called school, which destroys over ½ its victims.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal, award-winning journalist and (former deathrow) prisoner

When I was a kid, “special ed” became a putdown synonymous with equally degrading terms such as retard, bozo and eventually faggot. This was, after all, high school, a place not of education but conformity which succeeds through domineering aggression. Thankfully there are teachers like Dennis J. Bernstein, whose first book of poetry after a long career as teacher and investigative journalist, gives voices to his special ed students and his history as a non-diagnosed dyslexic student. Here in short, strong and often funny and sad and always thoughtful poems, a chorus of forgotten students are given a platform. They raise to the occasion, as does Bernstein, who treats them as equals and understands them for their shared humanity. It’s hunger and poverty and violence as much as brainpower or the lack thereof that makes a student unruly and/or distant, but they never need be disengaged. Through these poems we see that a teacher may not always be a poet, but the best teachers are poets in the classroom, creating an environment that engages students. That, like a great poet, is a creative talent and one sorely lacking in chapbooks and classrooms, but in abundance here. That’s good news, and better still knowing there are more poetry volumes coming from Bernstein. Look for them and learn.
Peter Landau, Author of Underground with Nickelan Wand; BookOne Kid City; Schmuck: Faith, Fatherhood and Foreskin

“Dennis J. Bernstein has an uncanny sense of voice—sometimes he will offer us an off-the-wall line, sometimes an oblique snatch of phrase, and always these lines and phrases will be streetwise and witty and hip. Yet behind the wit and wisdom, there is an eerie subtext of futility, like a moron beating his head against a stone wall… And behind the subtext there is still another subtext of acceptance, like a bright angel spreading his wide wings of recognition. Layers and layers. As if these voices weren’t enough bedazzlement, the visual layouts of these poems on the page also make for instant patterns, magic placements, and simultaneous type styles. And at their best, these layouts recreate the kinetics of perception as unerringly as Haiku. Here is all the pain and grace of parents, of prisons, and of perception. And it is all done in such an artful plain style that one wonders how so much meaning can be embodied in so small a place. Dennis Bernstein’s work is intuitive and keen and deep, in the wonderful and loving and fearless tradition of  Langston Hughes, Kenneth Patchen and Muriel Rukeyser.”
William Packard, the late poet, editor publisher of Design Quarterly

“Dennis J. Bernstein’s short poems are polished jewels.”
Nina Serrano, Josephine Miles/PEN Oakland Awardee, Open Book, Poet to Poet radio host

“Bernstein is (among other things) a sound poet, and previous books by these two men [Bernstein and Lehrer] have had double or triple identities as book, performance, and audio recording. A full set of reading resources for their books might include an eye for visual sequence, an ear for poetry, a voice for reading aloud, and a sense of adventure… Bernstein uses a lot of neologisms. If you’re the sort who likes your Finnegans Wake straight, and hold the scholarship, please, then you might want to try Bernstein’s narratives without benefit of glossary once, as I did. But the definitions are very helpful. Ja joone, for example is related to its hononym jejune and means ‘a deep wanting or sense of emptiness.’ And gorra, a pervasive term on pages of overlaid gorra shapes, means (sure enough) ‘the sound and act of rokas mating’ the etymological echoes of ‘gore” may well be relevant)… The roka is a captivating creature who occupies the center of the book. She is first introduced in six wordless spreads… After a long visual sequence of remarkable beauty in which the roka shapes multiply and overlay, a simple poetic text tells of roka’s birth from rock, her clumsy relationship with gravity, her difficult emotional development ‘with a heart smashed by desire’ and ‘an outrage against lonliness’—until (‘somewhere between a blind roll and discovery’) the sky of our tears dries up, roka meets roka, and the old miracle of procreation comes in being.’…[GRRRRHHHH] is a magnum opus that invents a new mythology, from the begin, and sets out to replace Eden. I celebrate this wonderfully audacious and fundamentally human project.”
Fine Print Betsy Davids

Dennis J. Bernstein, for me, carries out the best of Elsa Knight Thompson’s Tradition at Pacifica Radio. He positions himself on the unsafe side. He honors his listeners by exposing them to viewpoints that will make them uncomfortable… Dennis collaborated with me in breaking a series of investigative reports during the Gulf War, exposing the Pentagon’s plans to occupy Kuwait—plans formulated even before Congress had approved sending troops to the region in the first place. Dennis did more to get the information out to the public than anything PNS, with all of its outlets to the newspaper world, could do.”
Sandy Close, MacArthur Genius Award Winner, founder of Pacific News Service and The New American Media

“Dennis J. Bernstein’s ongoing commitment to investigative reporting and fearless approach to broadcasting crucial information about some of the most controversial issues of our time is an example to be modeled.”
2015 Pillar Award in Broadcast Journalism 9th Whistle Blowers Summit, Washington D.C.

“We are honored to present the Jessie Meriton White Service Award to Dennis J. Bernstein who has demonstrated an example of responsible, humane, pathbreaking investigative journalism.”
Dr. Lawrence Weiss, President, Friend’s World College

“Undercurrents [anchored and produced by Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight] has established itself as an investigative force capable of breaking important news. Its coverage of Central America often supplies stories overlooked or misunderstood by the larger more powerful news outlets. Bernstein and Knight are relentless in their criticism of the Bush administration, particularly with regard to foreign policy, as they were of its predecessor.” ELLE Magazine

“Undercurrents is probably one of the most important radio programs in history. At Fair, we are in a position to know which alternative media outlets have impact. Undercurrents really makes a difference. Its mix of investigative journalism and on the spot global reports has galvanized its audience.”
Jeff Cohen, co-founder and former executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Currently Director of the Park Center for Independent Media, Ithaca College, author of Cable News Confidential.

If you want to know the facts about this country’s NSC/CIA shadow government and its “low intensity war” on Nicaragua you can (1) Wait for the New York Times to “discover them next summer” or (2)listen to WBAI’s Contragate Show weekdays at 8am.”
The Village Voice

“Unquestionably, one of the most important programs reporting on covert operations engaged in by the United States. . . an indispensable source of information.”
Michael Ratner, noted civil rights attorney, co-founder, former President, Center for Constitutional Rights

Warren Lehrer

“In Warren Lehrer’s books… words take on thought’s very form, bringing sensory experience to the reader as directly as ink on paper can allow…  Once considered too far ahead of his time… Now the times are beginning to catch up to him.”
The New York Times Book Review Julie Lasky

“In Warren Lehrer’s ingenious, one-of-a-kind novel, A Life In Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, we see all the covers of all 101 books supposedly written by the narrator over the last several decades… A tour-de-force!”
Studio 360 Kurt Andersen

“In Warren Lehrer’s extraordinary books, full of typographic innovation, he seeks to trap thought, sound and speech in time and space on the printed page. The result is theater… The reader (viewer/listener) experiences the pathos within the mundane aspects of everyday life… reality, fantasy, along with art and literature, travel parallel but inseparable roads..”
Print Magazine Philip Meggs

“One of the most imaginative and ambitious book artists of our time.”
American Book Review Richard Kostelantetz

“We honor Warren Lehrer, innovator and boundary breaker, for his unique marriage of writing and typography… for extending the often rarified field of book arts to the broader worlds of contemporary design, art and literature… Like the person himself, his books are often very funny, yet caring and deep. They are nuanced and sophisticated works that take on serious issues of our day—war and peace, immigration, popular culture, the health care, criminal justice, education and entertainment industries, and the future of the book…”
The Center for Book Arts 2016 Honoree

“A Life In Books is a book-lover’s fictional treat of books that never were… Ultimately, it is about how the sadness of life is transformed into art, and how life requires constant adjustment, constant compromise, and the will to find the funny line at which you won’t compromise… As Whitman said, ‘I contain multitudes,’ and Bleu Mobley contains 101 books. Wonderful!”
Bookworm, KCRW Michael Silverblatt

“In A Life In Books, author and graphic design visionary Warren Lehrer crafts a vivid kaleidoscopic odyssey that frames one man’s life through not one, but one hundred different books—and book jackets. In this quirky, yet unmistakably modern evocation of the illuminated manuscript, Lehrer’s book reminds us that we are what we do. And, for that matter, what we publish.”
Design Observer Jessica Helfand, founding editor

“A stunningly unique take on the novel that unabashedly explores the relationship between narrator and reader, as well as the fragile and often blurry line that distinguishes truth and fiction. With A Life in Books, Lehrer has upended the modern novel form and its narrative limitations, creating a rich and engaging story through visual literature. Mindblowing… reality bending… a laugh riot and visual feast.”
2014 IPPY Outstanding Book of the Year Award “MOST ORIGINAL” Independent Publisher

“Lehrer pioneered what might be best termed “typographic performance” in the 1984 book/play French Fries, a hot type cacophony of word and image that is today considered by historians one of the lynchpins of the deconstructionist era… While [Crossing the BLVD] can be viewed as an astute urban sociological study (Margaret Mead meets Jane Jacobs), more importantly it highlights the richness (as well as a little darkness) of a poly-cultural critical mass representing the sights and sounds, customs and mores of ‘the new’ New York. It is eloquent, poignant, and smartly designed… an entirely satisfying piece of design and authorship.”
Eye Magazine Steve Heller

“Books such as French Fries [1984] challenge readers to explore the act of reading; to break with the usual linear pattern, vary the pace, look back on earlier passages, or skip ahead. Lehrer’s typographic experiments anticipated new directions in 1990s graphic design. With his ‘Portrait Series’ published in 1995… he showed how ‘visual literature’ could be used to engage broader audiences… Lehrer’s books evoke the subjective experience of their subjects with great particularity and vividness, suggesting the possibility of a new literary genre that makes full use of design’s rhetorical dimension.”
No More Rules: Postmodern Design Rick Poynor, Yale University Press

“Lehrer creates a rich soundscape in the reader’s imagination… correlating the rhythm of language to the way the mind works… His books explore the rich dissonance of sound and life surrounding each of us… challenging the line between life and art…”
Afterimage Nancy Soloman

“A celebratory chronicle of the immigrant experience in New York, Crossing the BLVD is a Whitman-esque book that reveals a staggering array of humanity… [It] chronicles life in Gotham in both its despair and boundless promise.”
Winner 2004 Brendan Gill Prize (awarded annually by The Municipal Art Society of NY to the creator of a book, music composition, play, painting, sculpture, landscape or any other work of art which best captures the energy and spirit of New York.)

“Immigrant life in Queens, as told in the intimate, rich, comic, ironic and sad stories so often seen but not heard in America’s big cities…  The first-person narratives are engaging… The stories are so different, and yet many of the immigrants’ lives are so similar… What links them all is the desperation and desire that brought them here. As one immigrant says in Crossing the BLVD, ‘America can do without you, but you can’t do without America.’ ”
The Washington Post Lynne Duke

“In A Life in Books, Lehrer has designed a sort of Chinese puzzle whose myriad ideas, stories and characters—from all parts of the globe—intersect, overlap, and dovetail… Like Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Ben Katchor, Lehrer participates in the search for fresh and innovative ways to show, as well as tell, his many stories. Astonishing.”
The Brooklyn Rail Robert Berlind

“A Life In Books is a masterpiece of visual storytelling, boldly integrating illustration and typography into its engaging story.”
Largehearted Boy David Gutowski

“A Life In Books challenges readers to rethink the relations of the novel to the image, and of the whole book to our contemporary world… It succeeds beautifully as a hybrid between the graphic novel and the novel… and suggests new potentials for literary fiction.”
Eye Magazine David Banas

“We honor Crossing the BLVD for exploding the paradigms of oral history and reinterpreting them for our multimedia century… for its boldness and creativity as it charts a lasting record of this vibrant, diverse community in New York City—the new Ellis Island.”
Winner 2003 Innovative Use of Archives Award Archivist Round Table of Metropolitan NY

“What often gets lost in the national debate on immigration is the human dimension, an understanding of the lives of those people who give up everything to come here. Crossing the BLVD lets them tell their stories… We see the subjects’ faces in the photographs, hear their voices, and enter into their lives through cherished mementos they have carried from home to home… Crossing the BLVD is a powerful social record… Extraordinary stories… a living work of art.”
The New York Times Benjamin Genocchio

“New York’s undersung borough of Queens, home to the new Ellis Island (the airports), is the most diverse county in the country today, and documentarians Lehrer and Sloan have innovatively brought it to life… A poetic, arresting, vividly printed mosaic.”
Publisher’s Weekly – Best Books of 2003

“Crossing the BLVD is a one-of-a kind amazingly designed book… portraits of immigrant Americans, images of their belongings, maps, riveting stories, and innovative typography combine to bring these lives up off the page…” The Utne Reader – Best Books/CDs of Independent Culture 2004

“A Life In Books is a tour de force of graphic design, illustration and writing. Exploiting a wide range of illustration styles to delight the eye, Lehrer offers a funny, thought-provoking and refreshing twist on the graphic novel.”
Huffington Post Ken Carbone

“In the era of cookie-cutter books and rubber-stamped stories, Warren Lehrer’s A Life In Books is fresh, original, idiosyncratic, beautiful, and important.”
Rabih Alameddine novelist and painter, author of Koolaids, The Perv, Hakawati, and I, the Divine

“Crossing the BLVD boldly carries the tradition of oral history into the 21st Century… an electrifying collage of voices, faces, and spirits, capturing the true elasticity and inclusiveness of American culture.”
Eve Ensler, author, oral historian, performer The Vagina Monologues

 “This stunningly innovative book goes beyond pathos and into the kaleidoscope of experience that defines real immigrant life, in all of its complexity… The cumulative effect… does not feel like dodging deadly traffic on mean streets. It’s more akin to stepping off the Queens’ Number 7 train on a sunny Saturday. In Crossing the BLVD, the words of New York’s immigrants soar, in print and in sound as well… Crossing lets you listen and browse and understand.”
City Limits Debbie Nathan

“Crossing the BLVD collects the searing first-person stories of 79 Queens residents, recent immigrants from everywhere. Each profile is a collage of text and image, and the pages of this book frequently incorporate two or three narratives plus notes and bold photographs of the participants, their streetscapes, and iconic artifacts. The effect is dazzling but organic and appropriate; documentary artists Lehrer and Sloan have produced a collective oral history as vibrant as a live event. Strongly recommended for public and academic collections.”
Library Journal Janet Ingraham Dwyer

“Lehrer’s intriguing books are studies in human dialogue and the poetics of communication… Translating the spoken word into the visual word is not new. It is rooted in several historical experiments and Lehrer has ingeniously extended earlier efforts by exploring the most subtle nuances of the genre… His defiance of rules and established traditions has led him to new and adventurous modes of typographic expression and communication…”
American Typography Today: 24 American Typographic Designers Rob Carter, Van Nostrand Reinhold

“Crossing the BLVD is a paradigmatic American studies text. It is an innovatively designed, beautiful, moving, funny, stimulating, horrifying, and illuminating book… The people profiled in this book of migration stories remain tangibly alive in your memory… More than a book for American studies scholars or students, it is a pleasure to read — a book to be read for the sheer enjoyment of it.”
American Quarterly Kirsten Swinth

“A Life In Books is unlike any book I’ve every read before. Fascinating!”
Books On The Nightstand Michael Kindness

“I have never seen a book like Crossing the BLVD. It is a remarkably beautiful, lovingly put together example of bottom-up journalism.”
Amy Goodman Anchor and Executive Producer Democracy Now!

“Crossing the BLVD brims over with the energy, heart and spirit that went into creating this important work. A fitting tribute to the world it so lovingly documents.”
Dave Isay Documentary public radio artist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, Story Corp founder

“Crossing the BLVD is a turbo-driven eye-witness guide with riveting first-person testimonies… artful, complex, and exhilarating…”
The Guardian John L Walters

“I’ve been interviewing authors and doing books for 24 years, and I can tell you, Crossing the BLVD is one of the best books I’ve ever read! It’s so innovative, so rich, so fabulous. The book is beautifully designed. It’s like a work of performance art. Thank you, thank you, thank you [Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan] for putting this book into the world and giving a voice to these people. ”
The Faith Middleton Show Faith Middleton, Connecticut Public Radio

“The real Queens is not about Archie Bunker or airports — it’s about wildly diverse neighborhoods, each with a distinct flavor and character. Lehrer and Sloan’s work narrates the lives of immigrants who’ve made New York’s biggest borough their new home.”
TIME OUT NY Selected Gift Guide 2003

“Lehrer’s books defy conventional notions of writing and bookmaking… Collectively, the subjects [of The Portrait Series] make up a riveting group of eccentrics… Their stories echo in your mind long after the sound of them has ceased…”
The Chronicle of Higher Education Zoe Ingalls

ANIMATION COLLABORATORS

Andrew Griffin is an award winning violist, composer, and orchestrator, currently the viola chair for the Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud. He has performed in such diverse settings as Saturday Night Live, Radio City Music Hall, and in the viola section of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. An active copyist, editor, and arranger, his credits include: Kidding (Showtime); Ride the Cyclone (Off-Broadway); Lempicka (Williamstown Theater); Witness Uganda (Off-Broadway) and many more. Griffin received his Bachelor’s Degree with honors from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Master’s Degree at Rice University.

Najebah Al-Ghadban is a designer and collage-artist from Kuwait. Her collage work has been featured in The New York Times, The Baffler, and Anxy magazines. Currently, she practices design at the NYT Mag Labs. She also writes poetry and is developed a platform for digital artists’ books.

Brandon Campbell is a designer/animator/illustrator currently based in Atlanta, working at CNN Creative Marketing as Senior Designer. Until 2018, he lived in Brooklyn and worked as Senior Designer at Comedy Central’s On-Air Creative Department. Campbell is also musician and composer. 

Austin Shaw is a motion designer and Assistant Professor of Design at Western Washington University. For nearly 20 years he has worked as a motion designer for clients including Target, Ferrari, Fedex, McGraw Hill, Ralph Lauren, VH1, and Spotify. Austin is the Author of Design for Motion: Fundamentals and Techniques of Motion Design.