Artist Biographies
Welcome
Bennett Lorber '64 is chair of the Academic Affairs Committee of the College's Board of Managers. In addition to being an award-winning clinician and the Thomas M. Durant Professor of Medicine at Temple University, he is also a painter and musician.
Poets
Nathalie Anderson — a poet and librettist — directs Swarthmore's Program in Creative Writing. Her books include Following Fred Astaire, which won the 1998 Washington Prize from The Word Works; Crawlers, which received the 2005 McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; and Quiver, forthcoming from Penstroke Press. She has authored libretti for the three operas The Black Swan; Sukey in the Dark; and an operatic version of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia — all in collaboration with the composer and Associate Professor of Music Thomas Whitman '82 and Philadelphia's Orchestra 2001. A 1993 Pew Fellow, Anderson currently serves as poet in residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.
Kinei Braithwaite '08 graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in Spanish. She has had the pleasure of having several poems published in Read, America (A Place in the Woods, 2008). Currently, she is a Spanish tutor and aspires to be a translator of poetry.
W.D. Ehrhart '73 is the author or editor of 18 books, including Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir and Beautiful Wreckage: New & Selected Poems. He is an ex-Marine sergeant, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wales, and teaches history and English at the Haverford School, where he also coaches winter track and sponsors the student arts magazine. He lives in Philadelphia with his family. His newest book The Bodies Beneath the Table will be published by Adastra Press later this year.
Daisy Fried '89 is the author of My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn't Mean to Do It, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She's been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew fellowships for her poetry. Poems from her current book in-progress have appeared recently in The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She won Poetry's Editor's Prize for "Sing, God-Awful Muse," a feature article about Paradise Lost and breastfeeding. Fried will return to Swarthmore next fall to teach creative writing.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips '96 is the author of The Ground: Poems (2010) and When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness: Essays on African American Poetry (2010). His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, and Callaloo, among others. His translations from the Catalan have appeared in numerous venues, including Best European Fiction 2010 and The Review of Contemporary Fiction as well as in commissioned work for PEN American Center and Barcelona's Institut Ramon Llull. Phillips has been a Mellon Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at Harvard and at Columbia's Graduate School of the Arts. Currently, he is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Stony Brook, where he also directs the Poetry Center.
Performing Artists
Pallabi Chakravorty teaches both lecture-based and studio courses in the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore. A visual anthropologist by training, her specialization is Kathak dance technique and performance analysis. She is the founder and artistic director of the contemporary Indian dance ensemble Courtyard Dancers. Chakravorty studied Kathak under Guru Bandana Sen in Kolkata for more than 20 years. Her interdisciplinary scholarly work has been published in many journals. She is the author of Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women, and Modernity in India and the co-editor of two other books, Performing Ecstasy: The Poetics and Politics of Religion in India and Dance Matters.
Mark Loria '08 is a freelance pianist, organist, and conductor residing in New York City. His principal teachers include pianists Marcantonio Barone and Clifford Korman, and composer Gerald Levinson. In the past year, he has worked as assistant conductor and keyboardist for Orchestra 2001 as well as substitute organist for the Church of Saint Teresa in Staten Island, N.Y. While at Swarthmore, he performed with Gamelan Semara Santi and served as assistant conductor of the Swarthmore College Orchestra. He received a B.A. in music from the College.
Diditi Mitra is a tenured assistant professor of sociology at Brookdale Community College. She began learning Kathak at a very young age in Kolkata, India. In the United States, she continued training in Kathak with Janaki Patrik and Satya Narayan Charka. Since 1998, Mitra has been learning Kathak from Pallabi Chakravorty. She has performed with the Courtyard Dancers, led lectures and demonstrations of Kathak, assisted Chakravorty in teaching Kathak, and served as a reviewer for the annual Erasing Borders Dance Festival organized by the Indo-American Arts Council in New York.
Jumatatu Poe '04 hails from California, by way of Philadelphia. He holds an M.F.A. in dance from Temple University and has trained at Philadanco and the Jacob's Pillow and Illadelph Legends festivals. As a member of Kariamu & Company: Traditions, he has performed in the works of Charles Anderson, Oscar Araìz, Myra Bazell, Marianela Boan, Silvana Cardell, Clyde Evans, Phil Grosser, Kun-Yang Lin, C. Kemal Nance, Merián Soto, Leah Stein, and Kariamu Welsh, among others. Poe is one of the resident choreographers of Susan Hess Modern Dance's Choreographers' Project (Philadelphia) and artistic director of IdiosynCrazy Productions. Currently, he is a faculty member at Swarthmore College and University of the Arts.
Amelia Sinkin is currently a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been studying ballet since age 5. Upon entering high school, her focus changed from ballet to modern dance, which she continued to study throughout college. While in college in Boston, she became interested in Kathak and began taking classes under Gretchen Hayden, a disciple of Pandit Chiresh Das. Sinkin moved to Philadelphia in 2008 and began studying with Pallabi Chakravorty and dancing with the Courtyard Dancers.
Michele Tantoco, a dancer and movement educator living in Philadelphia, is a member of the Leah Stein Dance Company, with which she has performed in local/international outdoor, site-specific works as well as "on stage." She has collaborated with many Philadelphia-based choreographers including Meg Foley, Jumatatu Poe, Kate Watson-Wallace, Myra Bazell, Charles Anderson, and Nichole Canuso. Tantoco holds a B.A. in biology from Bryn Mawr College and is focused on investigation of the human 'body' through academia, performance, choreographic process, and teaching. Tantoco teaches yoga and Pilates-based classes, and contemporary dance technique.
