Join us for the opening night of 20 Years of Grace Fest, a reunion of sorts, uniting performance artists whose memorable work has shaped Grace Space over the past twenty years. Night 1 features an evening of performances by Jana Astanov, Jeremy Slater, Stacy Lynn Smith, and Sarah Trouche.
Jana Astanov is an interdisciplinary artist, astrologer, and a co-founder of CREATRIX Magazine, an online platform dedicated to art and spirituality. Her work spans performance, installation, photography, sound, and writing, exploring the body as a site of transmission within a larger cosmic and ecological field. Working through her ongoing practice Artist as Medium, she develops performances that draw on ritual traditions, trance states, astronomy, astrology, and sensory environments to activate collective perception. Astanov’s work engages planetary cycles, and ancestral knowledge systems, bridging ancient cosmologies with contemporary artistic forms. Originally from the Mazurian Lake District in Poland, she is currently based in the Shawangunk Mountains in New York, where her practice remains closely connected to land, sky, and seasonal rhythms.
Jeremy D. Slater is a multidisciplinary artist working in the areas of sound, video, computer art, performance, and installation. Born in Reading, England, Jeremy is a graduate of both SUNY College at Buffalo and the School of Visual Arts, where he earned an MFA in Computer Art. His sound work uses field recordings as a foundation for creating processed drones with guitar, objects, ambient noise, and environmental sound. His performances include live video that is ambient and reactive. His video work includes single- and multi-channel videos for screenings and installations incorporating sound and ephemeral sculpture.
Stacy Lynn Smith is a neurodivergent, Black mixed-race performing artist and improviser, choreographer/director, filmmaker and Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water, a restorative justice organization by and for those affected by childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Smith’s practice synthesizes various lineages of improvisational forms, somatics, experimental theater and butoh alongside embodied trauma research.
Sarah Trouche is a French-Armenian visual artist working across performance, sculpture, photography, and video. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2007), she also holds a Master of Fine Arts from ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles (2007) and a Master in Performance-Making from Goldsmiths, University of London (2008). Trouche uses her body as a primary medium to address social and political issues, giving voice to marginalized communities and confronting collective trauma. Her performances have taken place around the World. Named Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2019), she founded and directs the Winter Story in the Wild Jungle company and the Perform festival.