Mini-Residency with  Asian Arts Initiative (AAI) & Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival (PAAFF)

Memory, Vein: the collected tales by Noemi Charlotte Thieves

Noemi Charlotte Thieves makes art, theater, films and photos, with the occasional sculpture for good measure. She writes of spies and supernatural prophets, Y2K conspiracies and the relationship between memory and fiction. She's written work shown as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival (2016), shown artwork at the Hot Bits erotic film festival (Philly, 2017), and has published poetry in the comic-poem anthology InkBrick. She is currently writing 007 fan-fiction titled Bondage, and is working on a video series chronicling her own memories and their often loose connections to various movies, called, Memory, Vein, for which she won the Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change grant in 2019. She plans to start a religion committed to the worship and study of art, cinema, aesthetics and materials.

Memory, Vein: the collected tales is a live mix of film commentary, interviews with audience members, and a shared memory making experience where in we will view scenes from films as well as whole movies and share our associated memories we have linked with them, whether directly related or not. 

Half Magic by Joseph Ahmed

Joseph Ahmed is a Philadelphia-based theater artist whose work expands into dance, circus, and interactive performance. He is a company member with the Barrymore Award-winning Tribe of Fools, and performed for several years as part of Almanac Dance Circus Theatre. With Daniel Park and Arianna Gass, he is a co-founder of the interactive performance company Obvious Agency, found at www.obvious-agency.com, which creates original work and partners with universities and cultural institutions such as the Barnes Foundation. As a director, actor, and dancer he has worked throughout the city with companies such as Curio Theatre Company, Philadelphia Asian Performing Artists, First Person Arts, ON THE ROCKS, and Team Sunshine Performance Corporation. He holds a BFA in Theater Arts from Boston University.

Half Magic is the autobiographical story of a biracial white/South Asian child raised on stories of white heroes. Joseph Ahmed uses physical theater, storytelling, and circus techniques to explore the childhood narratives and social structures that led him to self-identify as white for most of his young life. What place is left in his Bengali heritage after a lifetime of white protagonists?