Alexandra Chang and Adam Forman, Co-Directors
ALEX CHANG is an electric and acoustic harpist and associate professor of practice at Rutgers University-Newark at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media. She has more than two decades of experience in arts administration and program development as a curator, musician, and teacher and researcher at NYU and Rutgers University-Newark, where she incorporates interdisciplinary embodied performance and improvisation within her teaching with her courses: Global Jazz and Art, EcoArt, and Decolonizing Practices. Among her interdisciplinary arts organizing, she focuses on the arts and environment and centering BIPOC communities and narratives.
Her musical practice finds its foundations in free jazz, indie rock, Celtic and new music and her classical training. Her work explores entanglements and embodied practices through the concepts of free jazz and improvisation and the ways in which music moves through us and puts us in relation and dialogue with others. Her interest in interdisciplinary collaborative practices attends to how improvisation opens up our sentience, our emotional and empathic relations around us and beyond as intertwined beings for connection and healing. She has performed on the harp with the Black and Asian Solidarity Collective in New York, with performance artist Joana Craviero, American Harp Society, and in collaboration with the Rock City Falls Trio with Improv Spaces. She gave an improv-based lecture and workshop in November 2023 titled “Black and Asian Solidarity Through Jazz & the Arts: How Do We Care Beyond Ourselves?” at Columbia University Teachers College at the Spencer Conference Building Racial Solidarity Across Black and Asian American History in K-20 Education.
She was co-curator of and on the organizing committee for The Drop: Urban Art Infill, a two-week multidisciplinary arts festival engaging with visual art, fashion, design, and music and the environment in two 8000 square foot spaces and outside along 25th Street in Chelsea NYC under the High Line during 2009 in collaboration with Cardinal Investments, Areaware, Cue Foundation for the Arts, and Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2017, she partnered with the March for Science and People’s Climate Marches for a week-long program of Art x Science x Climate engagements at the Dupont Underground in Washington DC with the Climate Working Group. In April of 2020, she curated three days of live online interdisciplinary arts programs with Earth Day Live.
She also founded and directs the inter-institutional NYU Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange that has been running continuously since 2013 internationally with conferences, exhibitions, events, and studio visits with artists, scholars, and arts practitioners. She was co-founder of Dream So Much artist collective from 2001-2009, which brought access to the arts to the public in alternative and public arts spaces in NYC and Brooklyn and featured emerging urban artists alongside well-known artists, as well as interdisciplinary collaborations in design and architecture.
She curated the Pew-funded project for the Asian Arts Initiative in 2018 titled (ex)Change: History, Place, Presence, which featured artists creating new commissioned public arts projects presented across the city of Philadelphia ranging from new music performances, interdisciplinary interactive public installations, movement and poetry, a literature festival, and a public mosaic installation. She also was lead curator and researcher of the multi-venue exhibition Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art at the Chinese American Museum and California African American Museum in Los Angeles as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time II: LA/LA. She was awarded the ArtTable New Leadership Award in 2019.
ADAM FORMAN is a classically trained drummer/percussionist who has performed in a wide range of musical settings. He has worked with composer/director/multi- instrumentalist Joe Fee and innovative collective IKTUS Percussion. His deep focus on improvisational practice and sensibilities allows for inventive syntheses of his experiences in experimental musical performance, including his punk and indie-rock influenced work.
In addition, he has rich experience working in collaborative experimental performance and interdisciplinary practices with music, improvisation across genres, and with the administrative aspects of running musical spaces and the creative musical direction of ensembles. While a manager at the legendary Carroll Music studios in New York, he spent years organizing large scale orchestral concerts and Broadway productions as well as working closely with experimental chamber ensembles and touring bands.
He has significant performance experience including at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Austin, Texas as a member of Talujon Percussion Quartet and with the Argento Chamber Ensemble, Fireworks Ensemble, and Greenwich Village Orchestra, as well as with the Manhattan Symphonie across China, and on large-scaled cruise ships and in
theaters throughout New York City. He was also drummer for the bi-coastal band Butterscotch Stanley for more than a decade.
Recently he’s been exploring composing and rearranging music that would inspire unique, improvised-based performances. Adam’s arrangement of free jazz master Masahiko Togashi’s Pray was performed by the Rock City Falls Trio at their recent concert titled Equilibrium: a collaborative improv in September 2023.
Together, Alex and Adam mounted Equilibrium as a part of their development of Improv Spaces. Funded by a Saratoga Arts Community Arts Grant, the performance featured Alex on electric harp, Adam on drums, Jason Handron on double bass, and live painting with artist Christian A. Mendoza and was performed live in-person at Rock City Falls, NY and was streamed online. The performance engaged with the artists’ lived experiences of a world on a delicate perch amid current climate-induced crises of soaring temperatures, flooding rains, and an uncertain futurity, while navigating a search for healing, balance, and empathic connection.
As co-directors, Adam and Alex’s collaboration together becomes a balance in terms of creative and administrative direction, as well as developing a broad range of interdisciplinary programs.
BOARD
Joseph Bruchac, Board Member
Born and raised in the Adirondack foothills where he still makes his home in the house in Greenfield Center, NY where his grandparents raised him, JOSEPH BRUCHAC is an award-winning author with over 180 books, a traditional storyteller and musician.
He is an enrolled citizen of the Nulhegan Abenaki Nation and a member of its Elders Council.
His storytelling and musical performances, which he has offered throughout the United States and in Europe, including at the British Storytelling Festival, Old Songs, Clearwater Revival, the Kennedy Center, the Champlain Valley Festival and the National Storytelling Festival, draw on the rich traditions of the Wabanaki and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations, whose elders have been his teachers for more than half a century.
His many books for young readers may be found in nearly every school library in the United States and he was named in 2023 the Poet Laureate of his hometown of Saratoga Springs, NY and awarded a major fellowship by the Academy of American Poets.
Jonathan Lo, Board Member
JONATHAN LO is a visual artist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer formally trained as a classical pianist. His compositions draw from his multicultural background to explore the intersection of sound and image across various musical traditions, including electronic, hip-hop, jazz, and international genres.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Before starting a creative career, he worked at an investment bank, an economics think tank and consultancy, and a Wall Street financial training firm.
After the transition, Jonathan has dedicated his career to guiding and mentoring mission-driven cultural and social impact organizations through creative storytelling and design. Over the last decade, he has led design initiatives across various companies and industries – at agencies including Mirada, The Partners, and 2×4; and as design director at in-house design departments including Virgin Orbit, Shop Architects, and The Broad Foundation. He has worked with mission-driven clients and collaborators, including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Broad Center, and NRG Station A. Outside the workplace, Jonathan is a passionate climate change activist, serving as the Chair of Marketing and Communications at Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project Los Angeles chapter.
As an artist, Jonathan has performed an original song at the 2022 NAMM Show while exhibiting an immersive live painting performance at the 290 Mulberry exhibition in New York. He has DJ’d widely around Southern California, performing original mash-ups and mixes while assisting Raul Campos on Nocturna at KCRW in Los Angeles.
Jonathan is also a lecturer at California State University, Long Beach, in the Department of Design’s Human Experience Design Interactions (HXDI) program and at Otis College of Art and Design. He believes that by bringing my professional experience into the classroom, he can help students elevate their thinking by developing their perspective to create more empathetic creative projects that positively impact our society.
Eva Sackal, Board Member
EVA SACKAL is a “why” excavator, brand architect & renovator with nearly 20 years of experience working with various size organizations from start-ups, to veteran non-profits, to a multi-billion dollar private equity firm.
Prior to entering the field of brand development and marketing, Eva worked in the nanotechnology, security and defense sectors delivering covert marking systems for anti-counterfeiting and military related applications from initial concept to final, standard-issue product. It is during this time that Eva first developed her passion for unearthing the “why” behind a business, product, service or experience and the critical nature of building clear, compelling communication with her audiences.
In addition to her professional consulting, Eva is passionate about creating experiences that foster connection within the community, or within oneself, such as through participating in the arts as a means to nourish the mind, body, and spirit while awakening the senses. This is evinced in her transformation of an antiquated craft show into the Markets at Round Lake which, during its first year, showcased the curated works of more than 60 artisans through four distinct markets. Annually, thousands of attendees peruse through the open green spaces in the center of the historic Village of Round Lake, New York, all the while being serenaded by the talents of local musicians. It remains a regional favorite among artisans and attendees alike.
Eva holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from High Point University and completed an International Affairs program at Oxford University. She is listed as co-inventor on two patents, trains in krav maga self-defense, and is attempting to learn the cello.
IMPROV SPACES 