Courses
In The Studio
Term
Category
Modality
Instructor(s)
- (-) Alia Swersky
- (-) J. Gordon
- Paul Lebel
- BC Campbell
- Daniel Goody
- Winnie Westergard
- Zoe Crago
- Brad Taylor
- Chelsea Cook
- David Taylor Gomes
- Ellen Forney
- Geof Alm
- Jeff Brice
- Jimmy Shields
- Lauren Boilini
- Leanna Keith
- Lily Hotchkiss
- Lucie Baker
- Meg McLynn
- Nicole Beerman
- Nikki Rice
- Robynne Raye
- Samar Abulhassan
- Sarah Bixler
Life Drawing
J. Gordon
J. Gordon brings over two decades of experience as an artist, educator, and curator, to his classrooms. Gordon earned his BFA and MFA in painting from the University of Kansas and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts respectively. While his current professional practice centers primarily around the medium of drawing, he incorporates aspects of traditional and contemporary painterly practices in both his teaching methods and mixed media art works.
Gordon is a recipient of multiple scholarships and awards, as well an artist fellowship from the state of Delaware. He has taught drawing at many colleges, art centers, and museums including the Tacoma Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He is currently represented by Gallery Strega, where he also plays a supporting role in exhibition design and curation.
Improvisational Practices
Alia Swersky
Alia Swersky is a movement artist, performer and educator deeply engaged in dance improvisation, durational time-based art, film, site-specific work, and environmental installation. She is an artist and an educator with degrees from Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA in dance from the University of Washington.
Her artistic path over the last two decades has been shaped by this yearning for deep and meaningful connections with people and places. As a co-creator, ritual maker, and a “horizontal” director, Alia seeks to touch others through dance, somatic presence, vulnerability, and fierceness. Her work ranges from full audience participation to intimate acts of One-to-One performances, site-specific dances for film and live performance, as well as durational time-based art that includes physical acts of endurance, repetition, stillness, subtlety, singing, soft energetic grace, abstraction, caricature, and a deconstruction of clichés such as extreme high femme expressions. Her teaching and art-making seek to create practices that embrace endurance on stage and in life as acts of resistance, resilience, release, and beauty.
As a performer, Alia has also toured nationally and internationally as a member of the LeGendre Performance Group and has performed in the works with many Seattle artists, some of which include The Maureen Whiting Company, Khambatta Dance Company, Jurg Koch, KT Niehoff, and Salt Horse.
As an educator, she has taught at Cornish College of the Arts for sixteen years and in the Seattle community at Velocity’s Strictly Seattle Festival, and the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (SFDI). She was a long time Co-artistic director of Dance Art Group (DAG), a non-profit organization that promotes the practice and appreciation of dance and somatic education in the Seattle area, including the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation.