Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of The First Rule of Swimming (Little, Brown, and Company, 2013), Stillness: and Other Stories (FSG, 2003) and The Stone Fields (FSG, 2004). Her work has also appeared in Zoetrope, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Harpers & Queen, the Utne Reader, TriQuarterly Review, The Alaska Review and National Geographic, among others.
Brkic has been the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writer’s Award. Stillness was named a Barnes and Noble Discover pick, a 2003 Chicago Tribune “Best Book” and a 2003 New York Times “Notable Book”. The Stone Fields was shortlisted for a Freedom of Expression Award by the Index on Censorship. She lives outside of Washington, DC, with her husband and son, and teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University.
Šejla Kamerić is a Bosnian artist, born in Sarajevo, who works with various media such as film, photography, objects or drawings. The all-pervading element in her work are her—often uneasy—memories, which she uses as a power source by sharpening the focus of the present through the burden of the past. She received the ECF Routes Princess Margriet Award for Cultural Diversity in 2011, the DAAD-Berlin Artist Residency Fellowship in 2007, and the Special Award at the October Salon, Belgrade in 2005. In 2004 she won the ONUFRI Prize of the National Gallery of Arts, Tirana, Albania. Her first short film ‘What Do I Know’, premiered in Corto Cortissimo section of Venice International Film Festival and circulated over 40 film festivals, winning the Golden Pram for the Best Short Film awards at the Zagreb Film Festival and the Adana Film Festival.
Her work is included in European collections such as Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; ERSTE Collection, Vienna; Deutsche Telekom, Bonn; and Vehbi Koç Foundation in Istanbul. Recent solo exhibitions include Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2012); Kunsthaus Graz (2012); MSUM Ljubljana (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2011); and MACBA, Barcelona (2011).
Rebecca Jinks is a historian of comparative genocide and humanitarianism at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm?(Bloomsbury, 2016) explores the way in which representations of the Holocaust have influenced how other genocides are understood and represented. Focusing on Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Armenia, she uses film, literature, photography, and memorialisation to explore the resonances and divergences between narratives about and visualisations of these genocides. Her current projects (focused on Bosnia and Armenia) involve humanitarianism, photography, and gender.
Christian Mason is part of a new breed of British composers, and a rising star of the classical world. His emotionally rich and mysterious music has been commissioned, performed and broadcast in the UK and internationally, by the likes of the BBC Proms, the Philharmonia and Munich Chamber Orchestra, and the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus, to name a few.
Remnants is his second collaboration with ERRATICA, following 2014’s ‘Reunion’, part of Triptych (also premiered at the Print Room).
Andrew Cronshaw is a British multi-instrumentalist and producer who has a long career both as a musician, in recent years leader of Finnish/Armenian/ British band SANS, and as a writer on roots musics, particularly those of the Nordic, Baltic, eastern and central European and Iberian regions, for fRootsmagazine, The Rough Guide to World Music, etc.
In conjunction with Serbian singer Svetlana Spajić he made—and released in 2008 on his Cloud Valley label—the CD Žegar Živi: field recordings of a group of amazingly resilient Serbian singers who’ve moved back to their village of Žegar in the rocky hill-country of Dalmatia in Croatia to try to pick up the threads of their lives and rich musical traditions after the region, their homes and livelihoods, were shattered by 1995’s Operation Storm. While beautiful and now peaceful, it’s still depopulated. The album consists of Dalmatian traditional acapella group vocals often using the wild beating-against-drone technique of groktenje, as well as diple playing, toasts, goat-calling and church-bell ringing.
Patrick Eakin Young is a director, designer, artist, and artistic director of ERRATICA, originally from Toronto, Canada, now living and working in the UK. He attended Columbia University in New York where he studied English and Comparative Literature. He has assisted directors in the US both regionally and off-Broadway, held observerships at both the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House, assisted for the South African artist and director William Kentridge, and been a fellow of the Atelier Opéra en Création at the Festival D’Aix-en-Provence, France. Since 2007, he has been directing and producing contemporary musical spectacles through ERRATICA: most recently, La Celestina (2015) at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and Triptych (2014) at the Print Room, London. His work has also been presented in Johannesburg and Toronto.
Zrinka Bralo is a journalist from Sarajevo and has been involved with refugee and human rights since she was exiled in 1993. She set up the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns in London (now Right to Remain) and supported 100 families and individuals against unjust deportation. She is executive director of Migrants Organise (formerly the Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum) in London. She served as a commissioner of the Independent Asylum Commission, the most comprehensive review of the UK protection system and is a winner of the 2011 Voices Of Courage Award by the Women’s Refugee Commission in New York.
In September 2015, in response to the recent refugee crisis she has lead civil society response in the UK and is a founding chair of the National Refugee Welcome Board. As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian, OpenDemocracy and The Huffington Post, and her evidence about biased media coverage of immigration to the Leveson Inquiry into the Ethics of the British press was included into the Leveson report and recommendations.
Maria Brock’s research is located at the interstices of the humanities and social sciences, and evaluates the psychosocial dynamics of transitional and post-transitional societies focusing on the former Eastern Bloc, and the former GDR and Russia in particular. Her doctoral dissertation Moments of Russianness : locating national identification in discourse investigated national identification by applying psychosocial methodology to discourses produced in Russia during the era of ‘Putinism’ (2000- ). Further publications have reflected on the role of negative affect in reactions to the case of Pussy Riot, the status of memory objects and ‘museums of the everyday’ in the proliferation of post-socialist nostalgia in East Germany, and on the critical potential of irony.
Her postdoctoral research project at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Cinematic Identification and Uses of the Past,examines the impact of cinema on subjective representations of history, using the example of Russian and German films that speak of the (recent) socialist past. Previously, she held a teaching fellowship at the LSE and a research fellowship at the Department of Psychosocial Studies (Birkbeck).