Martien van Agtmaal
made his debut as a novelist with The Objective, a fictional account of a melancholy translator, a tropical doctor in a tree house, a group of friends on the road, a doomed quest for love and a wandering honeyblonde cat. The novel was nominated for the Anton Wachter and the Hebban Debut Prizes. Living and working in Amsterdam, Van Agtmaal is an editor at De Optimist and De Nieuwe Garde.
https://martienvanagtmaal.nl/
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Jeff Babcock
is an American expat cinephile and cultural activist who’s made a life out of programming “forgotten movies that should have been classics, neglected flicks, lesser-known gems… films that are disappearing.” He shows them in Amsterdam’s off spaces at affordable prices, 4 or 5 nights per week. Babcock was the recipient of the AFK Amsterdam prijs voor de kunst in 2019.
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Victor Chakravarty
was born in Denmark but lives now in Paris, writing, performing, making films and art. His research often focuses on collective memories and subjectivities, the intersection between vandalism and creation, anachronisms and temporal structures. He co-founded the Scandinavian literary journal Addenda and served as its editor for many years.
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Barnabás Bergendi
Born in Slovakia, Barnabás Bergendi made his debut as a director in 2018 with a production of Vyrypaev’s “Drunks.” As an actor, he has appeared in numerous domestic and international film productions, including The First Two, Sunset, Captives, Now or Never, and several productions for NETFLIX and Disney+. https://www.e-talenta.eu/members/profile/barnabas-bergendi
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Andrei Codrescu
is a Romanian-born poet, novelist, essayist and screenwriter who emigrated to the United States in 1966. He is a winner of the Ovid Prize for poetry and the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar (which will be screened at the Moving Center Literary Festival). Most Americans remember him as a commentator for 30 years on National Public Radio. His recent books include No Time Like Now (2019), The Art of Forgetting (2016) and The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (2009)
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Fruzsina Dezsi
is a “theater esthete,” playwright and a permanent staff member of Hungary’s TÁP Theater, whose dramas balance the philosophical world, burlesque, theological debate and street music. Her award-winning play, “A helyzet ura” (King of the Castle, a political satire) is currently being performed by the KultBazaar Association. She will give a dramatic reading from that play with Barnabás Bergendi at the Moving Center festival. https://proprogressione.com/en/pillar/pp-green-en/
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Jody Echegaray
worked in film and television production for 20 years, primarily in visual effects. He shares a patent for the facial and body performance capture system developed for Polar Express and contributed to films like Air Force One, Avatar, Harry Potter, Sin City and Superman Returns. Today he is a clinical psychologist in private practice. He will be a panelist in our session on “AI and the Arts.” https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodyechegaray/
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Sarah Falkner
is a writer, editor, healthcare professional, educator and interdisciplinary artist. Currently an editor for both Fence Magazine and Books and Sky Press Books, her first novel, Animal Sanctuary, won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2011. “My process-heavy multimedia interdisciplinary artistic practice is often site-focused and initiated in encounters with environments: it is oracular, ritualistic, and animist in nature.”
http://sarahfalkner.com/
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Robert Horvitz
writes about art and electronic media. He was art editor of the magazines published by the Whole Earth Catalog and is now a regular contributor to Trebuchet magazine. An American resident of Prague since 1991, his “day job” is managing Grant Thornton Advisory’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications Practice. His drawings have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and elsewhere.
https://horvitz.multiplace.org/
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Nicholas Kahn
collaborates with Richard Selesnick in making fictitious histories set in the past or future, tarot decks, paintings, photographs, sculpture and books. Kahn and Selesnick have participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions worldwide and have works in over 20 collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. Their most recent book is 100 Views of the Drowning World. http://kahnselesnick.biz/
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Nina Knaack
is a contemporary art historian and writer, preoccupied with digital, crypto and AI art. She has worked at the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and Huis Marseille (museum for photography) and writes for Culture3, Right Click Save, Nifty Gateway, PROOF.xyz, Transient Labs, Highlight, Art On Internet, Tableau and many others.
https://www.ninaknaack.com/
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Margarita Manev and Martin Pruška
co-founded Zeměloď (Earthship) with Pavla Furmánková. Earthship is an off-grid home built largely from recycled materials and local clay on a 22,000 m2 plot of forested land near the town of Sázava in the Czech Republic. It is the first building of this type in Central Europe, intended as a demonstration and training center for sustainable architecture. Manev and Pruška will lead a workshop at the Moving Center Literary Festival in Prague to explain the construction techniques and ideas represented by Earthship.
http://www.zemelod.cz/
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Paul Manwaring
is the founder of the Internet of Things (IoT) Living Lab, a citizen engagement consultancy in Amsterdam (NL), and co-founder of the City Innovation Exchange Lab with the Chief Technology Officer of the City of Amsterdam. He is also a poet and will read his poetry at the Moving Center festival in Amsterdam. https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-manwaring-b7b9ab89/
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Dawn McGuire
is the author of four poetry collections: Sleeping in Africa, Hands On, The Aphasia Cafe and American Dream with Exit Wound. She has won several poetry awards, including the 2013 Indie Book Award for Poetry, the Troubadour Prize (UK) and the National League of American Pen Women. She is also an adjunct professor of neurology at the Neurosciences Institute of Morehouse School of Medicine, where she works with wounded military veterans with chronic pain and shattered minds.
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Christine Otten
Dutch writer, performer, and theater maker―is driven by a commitment to social issues. Her breakthrough book, The Last Poets, was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize and has been adapted for the stage. The multifaceted Otten is co-founder and presenter of a literary variety show, and creator of the theater project Prison Monologues. She teaches creative writing to prisoners. https://christineotten.nl/
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Melinda Reidinger
has a doctorate in cultural anthropology and is currently teaching “Food and Culture” in CET’s Academic Programs in Prague. Born in the US, she has lived in the Czech Republic for 26 years and translates Czech academic and literary texts. Her first book, The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic, was published in 2023. She is currently working on her next book, a dystopian novel titled Swarm Box.
https://substack.com/@melindareidinger
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Anastasiia Revutska
is a dancer, choreographer and costume maker from Kyiv who moved to Prague when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022. “Tribal bellydancing” is how she describes her style: “a combination of folk, modern [and] classical choreography in a proper way to highlight the beautiful movements of each.” When she performs at MCLF, she will be joined by Czech videographer Tomáš Obermaier. Before settling in Prague, Tomáš lived in countries of the Middle East and Western Europe. Shamanic rituals are his primary interest.
Youtube
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Eden Roding
performances usually combine dance with spoken poetry, because (she says) “I think the word is a movement.” Studying now at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the Hague, her piece titled “My Dream” won the Kunstbende prize in dance in 2023.
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David Sater
is a writer (mythographer) & visual artist (drawing/printmaking/books), experimental filmmaker, & aspiring alchemist currently dividing his time between upstate New York & Oaxaca, Mexico. He is the chymical author of the forthcoming Hum, or, The Breathing Stone, an illuminated novel. He runs the imprint Polycephalos Press.
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Derek Sayer
is “British by birth, Canadian by choice… Since the 1990s the core of my work has been a trilogy of books… that take the city of Prague as an alternative vantage point from which to excavate what Walter Benjamin called the dreamworlds of modernity. These are The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998); Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (2013); and Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (2022). Retirement has given me not only more time to write, but freedom to do so in a way that is not driven by the targets of ‘impact’ and income…”https://dereksayer.substack.com/publish/posts
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Julian Semilian
is a filmmaker, author and translator whose 2024 film, Fish have No Psychiatrists: A Day with Andrei Codrescu, will have its European premiere at MCLF. He describes the film as “a creative documentary collage [offering] us odes to personal experiences and free-wheeling perspectives outwitting easy category, a playful paean countering totalitarianisms.” Semilian will be present at the screening, as will his subject, to talk about the film and answer questions.
https://www.juliansemilian.com/
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Ondřej Štindl
is a Czech journalist, novelist, screenwriter, film and music critic. He won the Ferdinand Peroutka Prize for journalism, the Czech Lion Prize for his screenplays, and the European Union Prize for Literature for his novel So Much Ash. He has worked as a DJ at Radio 1 in Prague since the beginning of nonstate broadcasting in the early 1990s.
https://www.echo24.cz/author/ondrej-stindl
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Thornton Sully
is “the anti-editor. Rather than sipping a scotch and soda in the teacher’s lounge in Oxford, he was opening a Bintang to share with his pet orangutan in the jungles of Borneo, collecting stories and experiences that muscle their way” into readers’ minds. As the editor-in-chief of A Word with You Press (est. 2009) and Assisted Legacy (founded 2002), he has helped hundreds of writers tell their stories with clarity and passion. The topic of his MCLF workshop will be “Attribution: The Under-rated Tool at Your Disposal.”
https://awordwithyoupress.com/
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Shahab Tolouie
is an exiled Iranian composer, story-teller, guitarist and singer who fuses Persian and Flamenco musical styles into something he calls Ethnoflamenco. The English world premiere of his storytelling/musical autobiography, “My Way,” will be at Moving Center in Prague.
https://shahab-tolouie.com/
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Noah Tortelli
is an Italian/American singer and songwriter based in Prague who takes influence from folk, reggae, funk and blues creating his own sound. He is the lead singer of the band Kintsugi.
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Adam Trachtman
is a graphic novelist, traveller, and street photographer. He worked for over 20 years as a creative art director on films, commercials and music videos for a wide range of clients, from LucasFilms to Tarantino. His latest book, Immersion: Premium Tales of Assimilation in the Post-Communist Eastern Bloc, combines eleven true stories about what happened when he rode around the region on a motorcycle in the 1990s. He teaches animation and special effects at the Prague Film School.
https://www.adamtrachtman.com/
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Johana Ulrychová
is the Cultural Program Coordinator at the Milan Kundera Library in Brno., where she oversees projects that celebrate the legacy of Milan Kundera, while also addressing broader European themes and educational initiatives. Previously, she served in diplomatic roles at the Embassies of the Czech Republic in Sofia and London.
https://www.mzk.cz/studovny/knihovna-milana-kundery
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Otto M. Urban
is an art historian, author, editor and chief curator of the DOX Center for Contemporary Art. Before DOX, he was head of the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and director of the 19th Century and Classical Modern Art collection in Prague’s National Gallery. He has written several books about decadence in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as many monographs about artists whose exhibitions he organized.
https://www.dox.cz/en/about-us
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David Vaughn
is a British writer and broadcaster. A former BBC Prague correspondent, he was editor-in-chief of the international service of Czech Radio for 8 years. His latest book, Hear My Voice (set in Central Europe on the eve of World War 2) won the Czech Book Readers’ prize in 2015.
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Peter-Jan Wagemans
is one of the most widely played composers in the Netherlands although he is little known outside his home country. Between 1990 and 2012, he was the artistic director of Rotterdam’s DoelenEnsemble for new music. Before his retirement, Wagemans was the head of the composition department at Rotterdam Conservatoire. His presentation at MCLF will be supported by Czech violinist Natálie Kulina, who performs with various contemporary music ensembles and orchestras, chamber music groups, theaters and in her own solo projects.
https://www.peter-janwagemans.nl/
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Lynae Zebest
describes herself as a“weirdo, artist, chemist, author, queer occultist. Chaotic Neutral.” She makes and sells tarot cards, nail polish in unusual colors, aromatic cosmetics and other exotic items. So obviously she will be on the “AI in the Arts” panel to give an outsider’s perspective. https://www.instagram.com/panavatar/
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Lucien Zell
is founder of the Moving Center Literary Festival. Born in California, he has published half a dozen books of poetry as well as the experimental novel Invisible Bars (in both Czech and English editions). He is also a singer-songwriter, actor and photographer.
https://moving-center.org
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