CAI was honored to be able to partner with the BPO and other leaders in Buffalo's cultural community to make FinnFest USA 2015 a success.

As one of our 2015-16 pilot projects, CAI is excited to bring dynamic NY-based Ensemble Signal to UB for two non-consecutive weeks: Feb. 8-12 and April 30-May 5.

Jennifer Nugent, internationally acclaimed dancer, teacher, and choreographer, danced with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance co. from 2009-14 and David Dorfman Dance from 1999-07, receiving a "Bessie" award for her work. 

Nathan Heidelberger is a composer of diverse instrumental and vocal music. His pieces range in character from the uncannily beautiful to the unrelentingly didactic. 

Neil Wechsler’s play Grenadine won the 2008 Yale Drama Award, an international prize for emerging playwrights. 

Stella Ebner’s work has been exhibited and collected by museums across the country. As a visual artist, Ebner draws from contemporary American vernacular to create images that transform the everyday into iconic images.    

Laura Kaminsky is a composer of opera, orchestra and chamber works, and vocal and choral music performed in the U.S. and abroad.    

Rebecca Allan is a visual artist, writer and former Western New York resident known for abstract paintings inspired by landscape ecology, botany and geology. Her work explores watershed environments of the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, the Gulf Coast, Lebanon, France, and Norway. 

New York based artists Laura Kaminsky (composer) and Rebecca Allan (visual artist) were in residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center for a multi-media residency entitled, The Inspiration Between Music and Art, April 27- 29, 2017. 

Internationally celebrated visual artist, performer and storyteller Shantell Martin will be in residence at the University at Buffalo March 11 to June 25 as part of the university’s Creative Arts Initiative (CAI) offering a multifaceted program that will include the opening of her first solo museum exhibition, titled “Someday We Can,” at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and creation of a permanent public mural in Buffalo's Eastside neighborhood.

Since arriving in the US in 1980 from his native country Brazil, Cyro Baptista has emerged as one of the premier percussionists in the country. During his Spring-Summer 2017  Residency, Baptista is working with Buffalo sculptor Shasti O’Leary Soudant and UB students on the creation of a unique sculpture/percussion instrument to be installed in the Percussion Garden at Artpark.

Rima Yamazaki is an independent documentary filmmaker who specializes in contemporary art and architecture. Yamazaki used her Fall 2017 CAI residency to create a documentary film, Learning from Buffalo, about architecture in Buffalo, NY, in partnership with Preservation Buffalo Niagara. 

It's 1901. Lynch mobs swarm the South; Emma Goldman’s anarchist movement hits the streets; and WEB DuBois’ NAACP is on the horizon. All set the stage for the spectacular Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. "At Buffalo" is a new musical in development that will take you on a haunting and evocative musical journey through the turbulent discoveries and performances of race in post-Civil War America. During their Fall 2017 CAI residency, the Creative Team of "At Buffalo" will conduct site-specific rehearsals and concert readings of At Buffalo and work with the Buffalo Museum of Science, and Torn Space Theatre.  

Deadria Harrington is a New York City based creative producer, artist and member of the Producing Artistic Leadership Team of The Movement Theatre Company [TMTC] and a member of the creative team developing "At Buffalo," a new musical theater performance based on the 1901 World Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. During their Fall 2017 CAI residency, the Creative Team of "At Buffalo" will conduct site-specific rehearsals and concert readings of At Buffalo and work with Buffalo Museum of Science, Torn Space Theatre.    

Khalil Sullivan is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, playwright, educator, and a member of the creative team developing "At Buffalo," a new musical theater performance based on the 1901 World Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.During their Fall 2017 CAI residency,the Creative Team of "At Buffalo" will conduct site-specific rehearsals and concert readings of At Buffalo and work with Buffalo Museum of Science, Torn Space Theatre.  

Williams is a writer, director, translator, and a member of the creative team developing "At Buffalo," a new musical theater performance based on the 1901 World Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.During their Fall 2017 CAI residency,the Creative Team of "At Buffalo" will conduct site-specific rehearsals and concert readings of At Buffalo and work with Buffalo Museum of Science, Torn Space Theatre.

An alumnus of Harvard University and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Dr. Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin⎯ a.k.a. Dr. Amma ⎯ creates artistic works based on archival research and writes about late-19-century black performance.  Bridging the worlds of academia and arts/entertainment, she is a university professor who also has worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities, National History Day, Inc., and A&E Networks/The History Channel (THC) and whose award-winning creative research has appeared nationally and internationally at festivals, conferences, and in academic journals.

Olivier Pasquet is a composer, music producer and visual artist. His work is based on the writing of audio visual compositions and synesthesia. His generative pieces, both minimalistic and maximalistic, are contextualized within a rationalist theory-fiction universe. His compositions are sound-based, visual, and material. Pasquet will use his Fall-Spring CAI residency to create an interactive sound and light sculpture for the Eleanor and Wilson Greatbatch Pavilion of Frank Lloyd Wright's Martin House Complex.

The Wooster Group is a company of artists who make work for theater, dance, and media. The Wooster Group's CAI residency will include four performances of THE B-SIDE: “Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons” A Record Album Interpretation, workshops with UB students, and public discussions.

Israeli-born painter, philosopher, psychoanalyst and writer Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is considered to be a prominent figure among both the French painters' and the Israeli art's scenes. Etthinger's CAI residency will include an exhibition of her work at the UB Anderson Gallery along with the creation of an associated catalogue featuring photographic reproductions of Ettinger’s work and essays by prominent scholars in psychoanalysis and art history. Ettinger will also work with UB visual arts students, and offer a 3-week graduate-level seminar, gallery talks for UB students and the public, and a public lecture. Her residency is being held in partnership with the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture.

Conductor, composer and violinist Jaakko Kuusisto enjoys an extensive career that was launched by a series of successes in international violin competitions in the 1990s. Kuusisto's CAI residency will coincide with the New York debut of his Trumpet Concerto by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. His residency will include open rehearsals, public lectures and appearances, and working with UB music students.   
 

Joshua G. Stein is the founder of Radical Craft and the co-director of the Data Clay Network, a forum for the exploration of digital techniques applied to ceramic materials. Stein will use his Fall 2017 CAI residency working with a number of different UB units and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery on a project entitled "Delta Mountains."

600 Highwaymen is the moniker for artistic duo Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone. Since 2009 they have devised seven original works, presenting nationally and internationally at venues such as the Under the Radar Festival In New York City and Centre Pompidou and Parc de la Villette in Paris. (Read more...)

Kruck will photograph, sketch, and ultimately produce a series of relief prints (woodcut prints) of the Niagara Power Authority Intake Gate structures by the “Niagara Scenic Parkway” in Niagara Falls, NY, and the surrounding Niagara river area in Buffalo. (Read more...)

For their CAI residency, Duo Axis will curate and present of a concert experience that examines the nature of duo playing itself. (Read more...)

Rapid expansion and abandonment as a result of industry boom and bust cycles is a recurrent phenomenon in American history, one that has forged our national character and defined our migrations. Lyman has always been interested in these places - in the hard labor, raucous living, personal sacrifice, loneliness, enormous optimism and great risk that quickly fills them up, and then of course, how the din of voices quiets down, leaving echoes and remnants in its wake. (Read more...)

The Hayley-Laufer Duo champions adventurous voice-and-piano repertoire of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and seeks to expand the boundaries of voice-and-piano composition by commissioning works from innovative composers. Their mission is to continue the grand Lied duo tradition by presenting audiences with the most audacious and exciting vocal music of today. (Read more...)

Helen Simoneau Danse will come to UB for a 3-week residency in order to create a new dance work while integrating the University of Buffalo students in all stages of the process as well as offering the larger dance community an inside view to their creation and methodologies. (Read more...)

Bartosik’s CAI residency will center around the development of a long-term choreographic project, "I hunger for you (1-2)"(working title), a two-phase, dual-venue work which marks the culmination of Bartosik's extensive examination into deeply internalized forces of faith, violence, life force, and compassion pulse through bodies that exist in a mesmerizing, starkly beautiful, often dangerous world. (Read more...)

Koichi Yamamoto is an artist who merges traditional and contemporary techniques so as to develop unique and innovative approaches to the language of printmaking.  (Read more...)

Urban Bush Women (UBW) seeks to bring the untold and under-told histories and stories of disenfranchised people to light through dance.  (Read more...)

Eniola Dawodu is a British-born Nigerian based between Dakar, Senegal and Brooklyn, NY.  Working as a textile artist and costume designer, Dawodu is engaged in the cultural archiving of memories, methods, and magic concerning West African textiles and aesthetics of style and self-presentation.   (Read more...)

In an effort to facilitate healing and promote critical discussion and creative self-expression during these unprecedented times, Just Buffalo Literary Center presented its STUDIO Poetry Series in fall 2020 for the first time ever in a virtual format. The University at Buffalo’s Creative Arts Initiative funding provided crucial support to ensure a successful season and secure Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Anne Boyer.

Comunidades Visibles (Visible Communities): The Materiality of Migration brought together artworks by six first- or second-generation immigrant Latinx artists. In conjunction with this exhibition, which was at the Albright-Knox Northland from Feb. 12-May 16, 2021, the Creative Arts Initiative partnered with the AKAG to host a series of films selected by the artists.

Sam Van Aken is an award-winning contemporary artist and Syracuse University professor of sculpture who has developed a project called Tree of 40 Fruit Project in which the artist hand-grafts trees that bear over 40 different kinds of stone fruit including peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries and almonds. 

“Five Songs for Fillmore Avenue” is an interdisciplinary performance project specially conceived by Collins to take place in poetic conversation with the recent construction of Torn Space’s Light/Station on Buffalo’s East Side, a project designed by Christopher Romano, Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University at Buffalo.