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Anthony Bannon taught high school biology and English and later was an associate vice president at SUNY Buffalo State. He was a critic for The Buffalo News and Pulitzer Prize nominee. Films he made were selected by Willard Van Dyke for the 1974 Flaherty Film Seminar. Bannon served as curator of photography at Media Study/Buffalo and director of the Burchfield Penney Art Center and George Eastman House. He secured accreditation for both museums, earned Governor’s Arts Awards and the Merit Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  Forthcoming from Steidl is his book, BEATITUDE: The Beat Attitude, photographs by Joey Tranchina, foreword by Ed Sanders

Dick Blau was born in Greenwich Village, the son of painter Albert Friedberg and actress Beatrice Manley. He grew up in San Francisco, where his mother and stepfather, Herbert Blau, were cofounders of the groundbreaking Actor’s Workshop and later the Repertory Company at Lincoln Center. A graduate of Yale and Harvard in American Studies, Dick Blau was a cofounder of the innovative American Studies Program at SUNY Buffalo, where he wrote and photographed for books on subjects ranging from Polka to Greek Roma culture. Dr. Blau later was cofounder of the internationally ranked University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Film Dept., which, like the Beats in their writing, established a new film language and provocative collaborations.
Artist, 

Peer Bode, for over four decades, has created an extensive body of video and sound work unleashing electronic media events, perception and culture. His work has been widely collected and exhibited nationally and internationally including MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the Whitney Biennial, the European Media Art Festival(Germany), Image Farm (Japan), among many others. A key figure of the Binghamton, Owego and Alfred NY schools of electronic video arts, Bode headed the Video Arts Program at the SOAD, NYSCC at Alfred University, where he co-founded the Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA). Bode is professor emeritus, Alfred University.

Andrei Codrescuis a poet, novelist, essayist, screen writer, editor, and scholar. His recent book, “A Possible Epic of Care: a Collaborative poem with Vincent Katz” (2023). Codrescu is the winner of the prestigious Ovid literature prize. He is also the recipient of the Peabody Award for the film, “Road Scholar,” the ACLU Freedom of Speech Award, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and was long listed for the National Book Award.  He was a regular commentator on NPR (1983-2016), MacCurdy Distinguished Professor Emeritus (1984-2010), and editor of Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas (corpse.org) (1983-2016). He has taught writing and literature at Johns Hopkins University and Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. 

John Kruthis a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, journalist, biographer, poet, and short fiction writer who lives in Manhattan. He plays mandolin, guitar, banjo, flute, harmonica, and sitar, often with a six-piece chamber rock ensemble called The Folklorkestra, which will soon release its new album, funded by the 2023 Chamber Music of America grant. Kruth has worked with Laurie Anderson, John Prine, Violent Femmes, David Amram, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Eizabeth Swados, Sam Shepherd, and Ornette Coleman while writing scores of articles, liner notes and biographies on  Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Roy Orbison, and Townes Van Zandt. 

Teri McLuhan is an internationally recognized, award winning filmmaker, and bestselling author. She has worked with Bollywood and Hollywood creatives as well as street unknowns. Her films include “The Shadow Catcher” (with  Donald Sutherland), “The Third Walker” (with William Shatner and Colleen  Dewhurst), and  “The Frontier  Gandhi” (with Om Puri). Her five books cover the nature of  nature and culture, the core values of diverse cultures across the planet, and divine and sacred space. She travels to South Asia regularly, writes sans arrêt, and resides in New York City.

Don Metz/ Michael BasinskiMichael Basinski and Don Metz have been working together since 1978 as members of the East Buffalo Media Association.  In 2000 Basinski founded Buffluxus and curated a series of performances as part of an exhibition entitled the Filmic Art of Paul Sharits at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Buffluxus is dedicated to performing sound works and Flux’ by artists such as Dick Higgins, Jackson Marlow , Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, and others. Tub Bunny could be an expansive paratactic form, shaped with bathos, with trajectories, made with meander, whimsey, a syndicate of all types, all categories of poetry enjambed and juxtaposed, exposed, and eroded, and fused with sarcasm and eros, humor, and the absurd, and narration, performance-text, popular song, fact, magic, myth, and the supernatural, and with confession, and with confusion, and Tub Bunny congregates compositional curves and swerves, and in particular Tub Bunny is time collage that is any mid-June, July, and the week beyond the beginning of Lammas.

Pat Oleszkomakes a spectacle of herself–and doesn’t mind if you laugh. From the personal to the political, her work is an exorcise through humor. Armed with elaborate costumes and props, she creates performances, films and spatial events, with much uttered shenanigans. She has worked from the popular art forms of the street, party, parade and burlesque house, to the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta, Lincoln Center and King Tut’s Wah Wah House, and was featured in Artforum, Ms, Esquire and Sesame Street Magazine. As a recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim, the DAAD (Berlin), multiple NEA and NYFA Fellowships, Oleszko was awarded the New York Dance & Theater Award for Sustained Achievement.

Rebekkah Palov is a time-based artist, curator. Her videos and sound-art have been exhibited at experimental film festivals and exhibitions including MassArt Boston, Museum of Arts and Design NYC, SAT Montréal, QC, Bushwick Starr NYC, Oblo Film Festival Lausanne CH and SoundFjord Gallery London UK. She is a member of the electroacoustic ensembles NowNetArts Hub and Carrier Band. Plus a researcher+curator on contemporary and historical time-based arts, immersive media (VR/AR/AI), and electronic music pioneer Harald Bode (b.1909). Rebekkah is retired Faculty, Kutztown University PA. She continues to teach media-art workshops (VSW, Harvestworks VTape). 

Jeffrey Simon had a 54-year award-winning career at The Buffalo News, including 25 years as its Art and Books Editor. His popular columns continue to this day on the powerful newspaper’s website. In continuous operation since the 19^th century, The Buffalo News once was Warren Buffet’s flagship in journalism, a Pulitzer winner.  As a teenager in the heyday of the burgeoning Beat sweep of national attention, Simon had a defiantly adolescent pleasure of preferring the poetry of Ferlinghetti and Kerouac to Ginsberg’s neo-Whitman prophecies.  But as a mature critic, Simon had the wild and wooly pleasure of contemplating Ginsberg’s outsider joy, take-in confronting the straight WASP world with his glorious three-ring otherness.