Curator Bios:ALYA HOWE -UK born dance,performance artist.Alya Howe, an award recipient for her Performance Art both nationally and internationally has performed with companies and in her own works through out the USA and Europe. Dancing with modern dance greats, the Jose Limon Dance Company, Kei Takei; and improvising for tabla legend Zakir Hussein.Alya has been a part of the tradition of Salon’s since childhood and was a member of the famous London Salon “606”.Relocating from teaching at the State Ballet School in Greece to Philadelphia to join Danceteller and to teach at the Laban Inst. NYC she later moved to the Roaring Fork Valley to raise her daughter and transition from a hectic performing career. Founder of Under Alya’s Umbrella a performing arts organiztationunder which Alya is currently the performing arts programmer of 3 local series; the Poetry Market, Writ Large; a storytelling series as well as curating the Salon's sometimes with renoun Salon Curator Andrea Clearfied. Recently Alya has been artist residence at the Launch Pad, Carbondale where she had sell out performances for her Dance Initiative commissioned works “Vacuum” and “the HEaRD”.Alya presented dance, storytelling and poetry at the Colorado Creative Industries Summit, created“Nature in Translation” a commission from Wilderness Workshop featuring the works of sculptors Charmaine Locke and James Surls. Recenly Alya returned from Amsterdam where she studied GAGA dance and GAGA people and hopes to further her studies in this form. 2018 began a collaboration with Thunder River Theatre Company’s director Corey Simpson in choreographing for the play “Dead Man’s Cell Phone”She was a featured poet at local 5 point Film Festival, WildFest and Mountain Fair.Over the past year Alya created new works for the Women's Voices Project and is working on a new commission to open Oct 27 2019 at the Wheeler Opera House.Alya’s dream is to create a small mountain town performing arts circuit giving local performers the opportunity to perform.This dream is beginning to be realized as Under Alya’s Umbrellas Programing is now being presented by both the Wheeler Opera House in the Sunset Sessions and by Carbodnale Arts at the Launchpad. - More atwww.alyahowe.orgAndrea Clearfield is an award-winning composer of music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, dance, and multimedia collaborations. Clearfield creates deep, emotive musical languages that build cultural and artistic bridges. She has been praised by the New York Times for her “graceful tracery and lively, rhythmically vital writing”, the Philadelphia Inquirer for her “compositional wizardry” and “mastery with large choral and instrumental forces”, the L.A. Times for her “fluid and glistening orchestration” and by Opera News for her “vivid and galvanizing” music of “timeless beauty”. Her works are performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. Among her 150 works are ten cantatas including one commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra. She is a recipient of a 2016 Pew Fellowship and a 2017 Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts and has also held fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Copland House among others. Passionate about building community around the arts, she is the founder and host of the renowned Salon featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, and world music now celebrating its 31st year and winner of Philadelphia Magazine’s “Best of Philadelphia” award. More atwww.andreaclearfield.com