artist bios

Echo Eggbrecht

Echo Eggebrecht was born December 14, 1977, in Bangor, Maine. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New American Painting, Harper's Magazine, n+1, McSweeney's, Shankpainter, Rose Metal Press, The Provincetown Banner, and Art, Antiques and Auction. She lives and works in New York City.

Todd Forsgren

Todd Forsgren grew up along the shores of Lake Erie, just west of Cleveland, Ohio along a major migratory bird flyway. John James Audubon’s monograph Birds of America and Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America were the first pieces of artwork he loved. He spent days studying and trying to emulate Peterson and Audubon as a bird-watching teenager. As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College in Maine, Todd studied biology, focusing on using molecular biology to explore ecosystem ecology. However, when he picked up a camera during his senior year, he realized that his youthful passions of bird watching and gardening lay in photography rather than biology. After graduation in 2003, Todd studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In addition to his bird photographs, Todd has spent much of his time photographing urban and community-based agriculture projects in the US and Cuba. Next February, Todd will begin a Fulbright Fellowship to look at new agriculture projects in Mongolia.

Laura Levine

Native New Yorker Laura Levine is a self-taught artist whose paintings, photographic portraits, and illustrations have been exhibited internationally. Her work has been shown at La Luz de Jesus, CoproNason Gallery, the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland, the Museum of American Illustration, The Museum of the City of New York, Museo Colecciones ICO in Madrid, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and is included in the collections of the Museum of International Folk Art, the House of Blues, and the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Blab!, and The New York Times Magazine and she has won awards from American Illustration, Communication Arts, The Society of Illustrators, and Print Magazine. Her cover for the premiere issue of Blue Magazine was named one of the top forty magazine covers in the past forty years by the American Society of Magazine Editors. In her spare time Levine is the proprietress of Homer & Langley's Mystery Spot, an unusual antique/oddities/junk shop in the Catskill Mountains.

Carrie Marill

Carrie Marill was born in 1976 in San Francisco, CA. She graduated from San Francisco State University in 2002 with a BA in painting and received a MFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY in 2004. Her work has been published in New American Paintings, Southwest Art, The New Times, LA weekly, and LA Times and has been exhibited throughout the United States in California, New York, Seattle, Miami, Texas, and Arizona. She is the recipient of several awards including The Contemporary Forum Artist Grant in 2005 and is a nominee for the 2008 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant.

Christina Muraczewski

Christina Muraczewski received an MFA in painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. She lives and works in the Santa Fe Art Colony in downtown Los Angeles, CA. Muraczewski has exhibited in Los Angeles galleries including Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Sabina Lee Gallery, The Brewery Project and had her first solo show at Haus Gallery in Pasadena, CA.

Victoria Neel

New York-based artist Victoria Neel received her BFA from the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio in 1996 and an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000. She has also studied lithography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and painting and photography at Pont-Aven School of Art in Pont-Aven, France. Victoria’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Provincetown Museum, and she has had solo exhibitions at Hudson D. Walker Gallery in Provincetown, MA, Sol Koffler Gallery in Providence, RI, and Baumgartner Gallery in New York City. Victoria was also a resident at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown twice, in 2000-2001 and 2001-2002.

Lamar Peterson

Lamar Peterson was born in 1974 in St. Petersburg, Florida, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He will be the subject of a five-year survey in 2008 at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (traveling with catalogue), and has had previous solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles; and Deitch Projects, New York. He has exhibited in numerous group shows including the Fifth International SITE Santa Fe Biennial 2004, New Mexico; The Drawing Center, New York; and the Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (upcoming).

Jason Polan

Jason Polan is an artist from Michigan living in New York City. He has exhibited work all over the United States and Europe. He is a member of The 53rd Street Biological Society and Taco Bell Drawing Club. He is currently working on The Drawing Project and is attempting to draw every person in New York. Polan's illustrations and projects have appeared in Metropolis Magazine, The New Yorker, and ARTnews and his books have generated wide acclaim. His book Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art is a cult favorite.

Amy Ross

Boston-based artist Amy Ross attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1998 to 2000. Prior to that, she earned a BA in Religious Studies from Connecticut College in 1994 and a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School in 1997. Amy has had solo shows at Jen Bekman Gallery, New York, NY; Allston Skirt Gallery in Boston, MA; the Schlosberg Gallery at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA; and Motel Gallery in Portland, Oregon. She has been in a two-person show with Sue Coe at Overtones Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and with Robert Gutierrez at Irvine Contemporary in Washington, DC. In the past two years, she created wall drawings for Going Ape: Animals in Contemporary Art at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA; On the Wall at Cleveland State University Art Gallery, Cleveland, OH; and The Drawing Show at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA. Amy's works on paper have been shown in numerous group shows in the past year, including Why Look at Animals at ArtSpace in New Haven, CT; Flight Plan at Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York; and Modern Edens at Spur Projects, Portola Valley, CA. Her work has been reviewed in The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Portland Mercury, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Art New England.

Alec Soth

Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the recipient of several major fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations and was awarded the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His work is represented in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Soth's photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials. Sleeping by the Mississippi, his first monograph, was published by Steidl in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then Soth has published NIAGARA (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), and Dog Days, Bogotá (2007). Soth is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis and is an associate photographer with Magnum Photos.

Amy Stein

Amy Stein is a photographer and teacher based in New York City. Her work explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is featured in many private and public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Nevada Museum of Art, SMoCA and the West Collection. In 2006, Amy was a winner of the Saatchi Gallery/Guardian Prize for her Domesticated series. In 2007, she was named one of the top fifteen emerging photographers in the world by American Photo magazine and she won the Critical Mass Book Award. A monograph of her series Domesticated will be published in fall 2008. Stein was raised in Washington, DC, and Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a BSc in Political Science from James Madison University and an MSc in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In 2006, Stein received her MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She currently teaches photography at Parsons The New School for Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Luke Stephenson

Luke Stephenson was born on New Years day, 1983 in Darlington, North East England. His work has been featured in publications such as Dazed and Confused, Art Review, The New York Times Magazine and Kilimanjaro Magazine. He has exhibited work at Exit gallery in London, The Festival Internationale Mode et de Photographie in Hyéres France in 2006 and the Jerwood Photography Awards in 2005.

The key elements within Luke's work are centered on the perceptions we hold of others and the objects with which we surround ourselves. Life in Britain and the British psyche are deeply ingrained within him and provide a constant source of inspiration. Elements of quirky humor are used in his pictures to highlight a characteristic that may lead the viewer to a variety of conclusions; some intended, some personal to the viewer alone. Stephenson explains, "I want my pictures to provide the basis of a thought, but for the viewer to finish the story."

Keith Taylor

London-born Keith Taylor is a photographer and printmaker now living in Minneapolis. Completely self-taught, he specializes in the historical processes of platinum-palladium, photogravure, and 3-color gum dichromate. As a printmaker for other photographers for nearly thirty years, he has printed exhibitions and portfolios for Eve Arnold, Alec Soth, Beth Dow, Rondal Partridge and Cy DeCosse amongst others. His personal work has been published and widely exhibited across the US and the UK, and is in many private and corporate collections. He also writes for British photographic publications, and lectures and teaches on the historical processes.

Bret Teunissen

Bert Teunission was born in Ruurlo, the Netherlands, in 1959. In 1996, Bert started to make a series of photographs in houses that still have the “old and antique available daylight.” This is a series of photographs about a certain atmosphere that Bert knew from his childhood. The work is made in Holland, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Great Britain and Japan and will find its continuation around the world. Teunission uses light in the same way that it was used by the great Dutch masters like Vermeer and Pieter de Hoogh in their paintings to produce images within living spaces that speak to a way of life itself. His first show in New York was in September 2000. In the spring of 2007, a book of Teunission’s work was published by Aperture in New York, accompanied by an exhibition at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.