Lost Spring

ANAIS ALEXANDRA TEKERIAN (playwright, actress, singer) has performed in theatre and film around New York. Credits include Fault Lines (Invisible City Theatre Company), Blood and Honey (Theatre in the Flesh), Disappeared (Richmond Shepard Theatre), Returning (HERE), Lorca (Blue Heron Art Center), The Faith Project (the Tank), Valiant (Fringe Festival), and Howling (La MaMa).  Her multi-media play, Tangled Yarn, created with Kevork Mourad, premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2010, and was presented at Alwan for the Arts, the Lycée Français La Pérouse, San Francisco, and the Berkshire Fringe in 2011, followed by Waterlogged at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2011.  Along with singers Teni Apelian and Yeraz Markarian, she founded Zulal, an Armenian a cappella folk trio, which has been featured on WNYC’s New Sounds (NY’s NPR station), and has toured the United States and Canada, performing in such venues as Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Symphony Space, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, along with performances for Cirque du Soleil and The Silk Road Project.  With flamenco guitarist Anna Garano, she has performed at the Neue Galerie, Alwan for the Arts, and San Francisco’s Union Square, among other venues. A native San Franciscan, she earned her degree in theatre from Yale University and now resides in New York.

(www.zulal.org; www.ansahman.com)

KEVORK MOURAD (artist, director) was born in Syria and received his MFA from the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts in Armenia. He is represented by the Galerie Claude Lemand.

As a visual performer, he is an active member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, with which he has performed around the world, (and with whom he appears in the documentary The Music of Strangers). He has performed at the Lincoln Center Atrium, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard University, the Festival du Monde Arabe de Montréal, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.

ANNA GARANO (guitarist and composer) received a degree in classical guitar from the Conservatorio Tartini of Trieste, and in Music History (University of Trieste) specializing in contemporary music. She later studied Indian and Arabic music at the International Institute of Comparative Music of Venezia. She studied flamenco guitar with such masters as Paco Serrano, Manolo Franco, Manolo Sanlucar and, most notably, with Paco Peña at the Rotterdam. Nowadays she composes and performs her own music as well as arrangements of traditional music, as a soloist and with musicians of varied origins, in Italy and around the world. 

AMBER STAR MERKENS (dancer), originally from Newport, Oregon, began her training with Nancy Mittleman. She received her BFA from The Juilliard School, under the direction of Benjamin Harkarvy, performing works by Paul Taylor, Martha Graham, Jose Limón, Jiri Killian, Lar Lubovitch, and David Parsons, among others. After dancing two years with the Jose Limón Dance Company, she joined the Mark Morris Dance Group in 2001, with which she performed internationally. A featured dancer, she inherited Mark’s own roles in Dido and Aeneas, Ten Suggestions, and Rondo. A recipient of the Princess Grace Award, she is also a doula and photographer.

MARJORIE FOLKMAN (choreographer) danced as a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group (1996-2007), Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Sara Rudner, and Merce Cunningham’s Repertory Understudy Group, among others. Choreographic projects have included Oresteia, Der Ferne Klang and Le Roi Malgré Lui for Bard Summerscape Opera, Paul’s Case for the Prototype Festival/New York and collaborations with Contemporaneous music ensemble. A graduate of Barnard College where she is currently a member of the Dance faculty, Folkman holds an M.A. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and is a Ph.D. candidate at the Bard Graduate Center/New York researching Eastern European interwar visual culture and its intersections with performance.