ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of interdisciplinary artists Qiujiang Levi Lu, Jackson-Pratt, Anna RG, and Zosha Warpeha as Artists-In-Residence presenting new works in the 2025 season.
Founded by Suzanne Fiol, since 2006, ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence series has served a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support artists in the local community. The program encourages selected NYC-based artists to take unprecedented creative risks in reaching the next stage in their artistic development, providing residents with a stipend plus production, marketing and curatorial support to create and present up to three new works over the course of a year.
Qiujiang Levi Lu (卢秋江) is a NYC-based performance artist, improviser, composer, and educator. Their work transforms the body into a sonic object through interactions with movements and audio technology exploring identity, sound, and space. Lu designs customized feedback systems with cyborg-like body augmentations inspired by Objectophilia/animism. These include special microphones, speakers placed within bodily orifices, and an augmented amplified laptop. Their resulting performances consist of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations building upon ancient Chinese drumming traditions to manifest body dysmorphia, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality. Lu is the second-prize winner of The International Electronic Music Competition 2023. Their works have been featured at international festivals and venues such as MATA Festival, High Zero Festival, IRCAM Forum, SEAMUS conference, E-Flux, and NIME conference. Lu has also been an artist-in-residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm SE. Lu is currently a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jackson-Pratt (Seany Nuelle) is a multimedia artist based in Queens. Over the last decade Seany has honed a body of work focused on highly dynamic, saturation-based audio. He also creates large-scale paintings and visual works that coincide with audio performance. His current focus is to draw an obtainable line between extreme audio/sound/music works, (albeit noise or otherwise) and the visual language. Sonically he strives to make music that is “unignorable” and “hyperconscious” in nature through the use of rapid editing, and diverse and often polarizing sound sources, all mixed with a distinctly human touch. Performances combine these approaches with visual works on reactive or symbolic surfaces. Seany has long worked within the greater NYC DIY community, and under the moniker Jackson-Pratt, he has performed in over 10 countries across the globe.
Anna RG works in composition, sculpture, community organizing, towards possibilities of Sick Music making and listening. For a decade, she toured with her research-based ballad project, Anna & Elizabeth, their 2018 Smithsonian Folkways album called a “radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do”(The New Yorker). They performed at Carnegie Hall, Big Ears Festival (where she was guest curator of traditional music), NPR’s Tiny Desk and many other venues not currently accessible to high risk artists. Anna has collaborated widely with musicians including the Aizuri Quartet, Lonnie Holley, Glen Hansard, Paul Wiancko and Jim White, and has won blue ribbons in fiddle contests across Appalachia. She holds an MFA in sculpture from Bard College, is a MacDowell Fellow, and recently exhibited at Tulca (Galway). She is a member of RAMPD (Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities), and cofounder of AIRNYC (Artists In Resistance NYC) which operates a free lending library of air purifiers.
Zosha Warpeha is a composer-performer working in a meditative space at the intersection of contemporary improvisation and folk traditions. Using bowed stringed instruments alongside her own voice, her long-form compositions and freely improvised performances explore transformations of time and tonality. She performs primarily on Hardanger d’amore, a sympathetic-stringed relative of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, and her current work is heavily informed by the cyclical forms, rhythmic elasticity, and the physical momentum of Nordic folk music. Warpeha’s debut solo release on Relative Pitch Records, silver dawn, has been lauded as a “breathtaking dialogue between Warpeha and her instrument; tradition and experimentation; community and place” (Jacob Kopcienski, I Care if You Listen), her compositional process “subverting tradition not as a political act, but as a point of departure” (Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street). Her work has been supported by the US-Norway Fulbright Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. She holds bachelor's degrees from the New School of Jazz & Contemporary Music and Eugene Lang College in New York City and a master’s degree in Nordic folk music performance from the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo.
