2018 ARTISTS

Bossa Nova under the stars! A late night romantic open air concert on the outdoor stage featuring A Lua Alicia, a wonderful NYC Brazilian band led by our own Chrissy Armstrong, backed up by some first rate NYC musicians, Paul Armstrong, Gustavo Amaranto, Yunior Terry, Ze Mauricio and Luis Ebert.

EVENTS: July 27th

A professed Southern Gothic, alt-country blues singer/songwriter based in Johnson City, TN, Amythyst Kiah’s commanding stage presence is only matched by her raw and powerful vocals—a deeply moving, hypnotic sound that stirs echoes of a distant and restless past.

EVENTS: August 3rd

Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn have been dubbed “the king and queen of the banjo” (Paste Magazine). Béla Fleck is a fifteen-time Grammy Award winner who has taken the instrument across multiple genres, and Abigail Washburn a singer-songwriter and clawhammer banjo player who re-radicalized it by combining it with Far East culture and sounds. With a musical partnership like no other, the two present music that feels wildly innovative and familiar at the same time.

EVENTS: July 21st

Ben Sollee is a cellist, singer-songwriter, and composer known for his political activism. He has performed and collaborated with numerous artists including Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn. He has been invited to perform and speak on sustainability at a number of festivals including South by Southwest Music, TEDx San Diego and Richmond, Telluride Mountainfilm, EarthX and more. He was the inaugural Five Senses Festival’s musician in residence and is glad to be back.

EVENTS: August 3rd

Caitlin Sollee is the Foundation Coordinator at the Little Loomhouse in Louisville, Kentucky. This Festival, join Caitlin in weaving while in a beautiful natural landscape! Each student will complete their own nature tapestry to take home, experience weaving on table top loom and will have the opportunity to collaborate together on a woven teepee structure. Students will explore the festival site for bits of nature to include in their art, working to create woven masterpieces that will engage each of their five senses.

EVENTS: August 2nd, 3rd & 4th

Capoeira Sul da Bahía has been in Santa Barbara since 2000. Contra Mestre Chin has dedicated his life to capoeira and take his teachings as well as his students very seriously. Their mission is to spread the tradition and art of capoeira and its roots to everyone, children and adults alike.

EVENTS: July 27th

Cassandra Purdy is a vegetarian chef with 25 years of cooking experience, from Greenpeace ships to shamanic retreats in India to private chefing in NYC. She specializes in seasonal, farm-sourced foods, and loves teaching how to make cooking part of a spiritual practice. She is currently working on a book about her experiences as a chef around the world called, Biting the Hand.

Cassandra will be the Festival’s on-site chef!

C.C. White’s unique, soul-flavored chant performances effortlessly enrapture audiences, lifting their vibrations sky high with powerful, soaring call-and-response vocals and masterful musicianship. Her critically acclaimed album, This IS Soul Kirtan!, debuted on top of the iTunes World Chart. She continues to tour all over the World, delivering a divine message of love and hope, and embracing audiences with her huge heart and moving, uplifting voice.

EVENTS: July 28th

Claire Messud is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Author of six works of fiction including her most recent novel, The Burning Girl, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

EVENTS: July 21st

Dani Shapiro’s books include the memoirs, Hourglass, Still Writing, Dani Shapiro is the best-selling author of memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, Slow Motion and most recently, Inheritance (2019). A sought-after speaker, Dani provides a stirring window into spirituality, relationships, tragedy, community and the artistic process.

She lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

EVENTS: July 27th

Edmar Castaneda is one extraordinary harpist. Revealing qualities in the instrument that you have never even imagined possible, Castaneda merges innovation and his ancient Colombian folk music to create a moving and unique voice on the global new jazz stage. And, with a wealth of innovative collaborators, Castañeda continues to spark creativity with his instrument.

EVENTS: July 26th

Pilobolus Education and Community Outreach Manager Emily Kent will be leading two one-hour workshops to help older adults reconnect with their bodies and environment.

EVENTS: July 26th & August 2nd

Gabrielle Hamilton is an American chef and author. She is the chef/owner of Prune, a restaurant in New York City, and the author of Blood, Bones, and Butter, a memoir.

EVENTS: July 27th

Jampa Stewart began his training in Zen meditation at age 16 with Roshi Philip Kapleau. Since then, he has trained with outstanding leaders in the global community. Jampa is a Senior Healing Tao Instructor and Chi Nei Tsang Instructor, certified by the Universal Healing Tao, and is the co-founder of Healing Tao USA. He received his Masters of Science in Oriental Medicine from Southwest Acupuncture College (SWAC) in Santa Fe.

EVENTS: July 21st, 26th, 27th, 28th & August 2nd, 3rd, 4th

Jessica Jane Russell is a passionate advocate for creativity. Evolving her own practice in service of the children of our community, she is a creative entrepreneur and teaching artist. In 2017 she founded ARTROOM Atelier, a creative space for children and families, located on the Arts Factory, Bantam, CT, which offers all ages of children process based art classes, playdates, and parties.

EVENTS: July 21st, July 27th, July 28th & August 2nd, 3rd, 4th

The John Cushing Big Band is a 19 piece dance band dedicated to bringing you an all-inclusive investigation of emotion and release - for the sake of art, the perseverance of jazz culture, spontaneity, and freedom to feel as one experiences the world. Under the curation of John Cushing, the band features a body of their original work, and reinterpretation of folk musics from throughout the Americas.

EVENTS: July 21st

Joshuah Campbell is a singer-songwriter and actor originally from Cheraw, South Carolina. His performance practice trots the lines between genres, and does not shy away from using music as a tool for social justice. Joshuah has a BA from Harvard College and is a student at Union Theological Seminary.

EVENTS: July 26th

Julian Fleisher is a restless creative spirit: a singer, writer, composer, producer and performer living in New York and traveling where his music takes him. Throughout Fleisher’s ongoing prolific career, he composed the music for John Cariani’s Almost, Maine, the most produced play in America, has authored The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide (Riverhead), and is currently host of WNYC Studios’ The Naked American Songbook.

EVENTS: July 27th, 28th

Edward Bilous, composer, artistic director, and educator, is the Founding Director of the Center for Innovation in the Arts at the Juilliard School. His long relationship with Pilobolus has yielded 5 collaborations including “On The Nature of Things” and “Night of The Dark Moon”. Other compositions include “Lucid Dreams” written for the American Composers Orchestra and “Mission Eternity” for Beyond the Machine.

EVENTS: August 2nd

Lela is an RYT 500-hour certified Yoga Teacher. She completed her first teacher training while living in Seattle in 2015, through Corepower Yoga, and completed a 300-hour advanced teacher training at Sanctuary Power Yoga in 2018. When she’s not teaching yoga at Valley Spirit, Lela works as a business consultant and artist. She lives in Washington, CT with her boyfriend Sam Funk and their dog, Waverly.

EVENTS: July 21st, 26th, 27th, 28th & August 2nd, 3rd, 4th

Mark Seliger’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world and have frequently featured in magazines like Rolling Stones, Vanity Fair, GQ, Italian Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and many others. He is also the recipient of the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, Lucie Award, Clio Grand Prix, Cannes Lions Grand Prix, The One Show, ASME, SPG, and the Texas Medal of Arts Award.

EVENTS: July 26th

Matthew Whitaker grew up surrounded by music. He is currently studying classical piano and drums at The Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School in NYC, the only community music school for the blind and visually impaired in the US. Matthew has received the “Outstanding Soloist Award” from Jazz at Lincoln Center's Charles Mingus High School Competition & Festival and the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival. He also received The Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award winner for his original song 'Emotions!"

EVENTS: August 2nd

Political, outspoken and passionate, Chilean singer-songwriter and activist Nano Stern has created his own musical language – an otherworldly sound that blends the youthful exuberance of folk music mixed with years of classical and jazz training against the powerful force of traditional Chilean revolutionary songs. What has emerged is a brilliantly layered confluence of indigenous, African, European and North and South American musical influences that reverberate with a soulfulness and originality unlike any other.

EVENTS: July 27th

The New York Academy of Art combines intensive technical training in the fine arts with active critical discourse. Academy students are taught traditional methods and techniques and encouraged to use these skills to make vital contemporary art. The Academy serves as a creative and intellectual center for all artists dedicated to highly skilled, conceptually aware figurative and representational art.

EVENTS: August 2nd

Nicole Krauss is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award and Orange Prize, and The History of Love, which won the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Medicis, and Femina Prizes. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

EVENTS: August 2nd, 3rd

Nortec Collective Bostich + Fussible emerged from the burgeoning Tijuana electronic scene, performing a style of music that they invented called Nortec - a fusion of Norteño ("from the North") and Techno, a collision between the style and culture of electronica music, characterized by dance beats, fused with traditional forms of Mexican music. Over the years, the group has garnered multiple Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations and has toured the globe, gracing the stages of Coachella, Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, The Opening Ceremony of the Panamerican Games, Austin City Limits, the Hollywood Bowl, SXSW, Glastonbury, and more.

EVENTS: July 26th

For 45 years, Pilobolus has tested the limits of human physicality to explore the beauty and the power of connected bodies. We continue to bring this tradition to global audiences through our post-disciplinary collaborations with some of the greatest influencers, thinkers, and creators in the world. Finds us @pilobolus: facebook - instagram - youtube - twitter #pilobolus

EVENTS: July 21st, 27th 28th & August 4th

Randy Polumbo lives and works in New York City and Joshua Tree, California as a visual artist, master builder, and designer. A graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art, his work has been exhibited internationally. He has exhibited recently at Coachella, Bombay Beach Biennale, Bass Museum in Miami, Art Basel Miami Beach and Burning Man. Recent exhibits include Steven Kasher Gallery, Imago Gallery, Paul Kasmin Gallery, BoxoFFICE, and High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, CA.

Find his work on site at the Festival!

Violinist Simone Porter has been recognized as an emerging artist of impassioned energy, interpretive integrity, and vibrant communication. In the past few years she has debuted with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and with a number of renowned conductors, including Gustavo Dudamel, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Stéphane Denève, Nicholas McGegan, Ludovic Morlot, and Donald Runnicles.

EVENTS: August 2nd

Violinist Sumire Hirotsuru, born in Oita, Japan, has multifaceted interests in music, education, and media. She often performs with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, has recorded video game soundtracks including Final Fantasy series, and has served as a co-concertmaster of the Juilliard Orchestra. She founded Smilee Entertainment LLC in 2018 and has published her first book in Japan on February 15th, 2019.

EVENTS: July 21

Grammy nominated songwriter Terry Radigan mixes her gritty Brooklyn sensibility with a deep respect for classical American roots, country and soul. She has had her songs covered by a wide variety of artists including Ashley Macisaac, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless and Anúna. She is also a member of the musical group VickiKristinaBarcelona.

EVENTS: July 28th