James Dennen, Christian Faur, Brianna Rhodes, Michael “Blakk Sun” Powell, and ETHEL

James Dennen has worked in venues and festivals across the US and abroad. He was the founding director of the nationally acclaimed company ED, whose experiments in improvisation—seen at Steppenwolf and Lookingglass in Chicago, among other spaces—explore and expand the limits of presence in the theater. On video, Dennen’s experimental work with live performance, improvisational techniques in narrative development, and documentaries earned a New Television Award through the Center for New Television funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. His scholarly work on improvisational theory and practice has been published in Drama Review and the New England Theatre Journal. Dennen has taught courses on performance theory and practice, acting, directing, devising, dramatic literature, improvisation, documentary filmmaking, expository writing, and public speaking at Harvard and Brown Universities, Kenyon College, and Denison University, where he joined the faculty in 2017.

Christian Faur serves as the director of collaborative technologies for the fine arts at Denison University. Over the past 20 years, Faur has been an integral part of the university's creative endeavors, playing a pivotal role in enriching music, theater, and dance productions through his expertise in video projections and multimedia installations. 

Faur's educational background is a testament to his interdisciplinary approach, holding a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Northridge, California, and a Master of Fine Arts in New Media from the University of Danube, Kerns, Austria.  

His contributions have garnered recognition within the arts community. In 2010, his stage design for Available Light Theatre won the Best Stage Design award from Columbus Alive. He collaborated with composer HyeKyung Lee on Dreaming in Colours, a VJ projection exhibited at the Columbus Museum of Art in 2015. His work reached another milestone in 2019 when his animated paintings were featured alongside a live orchestra performance of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." Faur is a two-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, in 2013 and 2021. 

Brianna Rhodes is an Ohio native and graduate of The Ohio State University Department of Dance. Currently, she is working as a freelance dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher throughout Columbus, Ohio. Alongside dance, she is a poet, a spokeswoman for Aunt Flow (a free feminine product company), a model, and a small-film actress. As a teacher, Rhodes is driven by the Black dance experience. She teaches children a fusion of Black dance styles along with their history as a catalyst for growth and expansion of the entire body, mind, and soul. Her talents span concert, street, and commercial dance. Her professional career has taken her nationally and internationally to places like New York City, Bermuda, and Brazil. All around, Rhodes creates from the point of view of a young, Black, queer artist, who serves as a vessel for all. She uses her art to provide healing, storytelling, and comfort especially in spaces where it is needed the most. Rhodes is inspired by the African proverb “ubuntu,” which serves as a reminder to help those who come after while remaining true to the ones before.

Michael “Blakk Sun” Powell is the director of outreach and new initiatives at Healing Broken Circles, where he works with formerly incarcerated people to build and operate alternatives to punitive systems of incarceration and deficiency-based social services. 

Blakk Sun is a multifaceted artist whose creativity spans many mediums. Through music, he reflects on the life he’s lived and the life he aspires to achieve using sound to evoke emotion. Witty bars create imagery to assist you in seeing the familiar in a new way. Bass, snaps, and synths guide you on the journey and act as the heartbeat to his words.

Blakk Sun’s poetry is more inquisitive in the exploration of ideas. Whether weighing in on American history or pondering the chapters of his own love story, Blakk Sun is vulnerable and expressive. 

Blakk Sun started acting to develop skills in characterization and to increase his reach as an artist with a message. Playing roles not tailored to his personal life opened up the ability to learn, grow, and inspire vicariously through someone else’s story.

Established in New York City in 1998, the string quartet ETHEL sets the contemporary concert standard: “indefatigable and eclectic” (New York Times), “vital and brilliant” (New Yorker). Composer performers Ralph Farris (viola), Kip Jones (violin), Dorothy Lawson (cello), and Corin Lee (violin) fuse uptown panache with downtown genre mashup. ETHEL has performed across the United States and worldwide, released nine feature albums, guested on over 40 recordings, won a Grammy with jazz legend Kurt Elling, and toured with Todd Rundgren and Joe Jackson. ETHEL champions the art and music of today, forging human connections across sound and style.  

At the heart of ETHEL is a collaborative ethos—a quest for common creative expression, forged in listening and community. The quartet designs productions that inspire engagement, such as The River, featuring Taos Pueblo flutist Robert Mirabal, and Signature Sessions, a supercharged survey of the quartet’s 25 years of inspired music making.