ELIOT FISHER ’01 is on a year’s leave of absence from teaching Media Arts at Santa Fe Prep to work with his multimedia performance collaborative, ARCOS Dance. In August, the group performed their original show, The Warriors: A Love Story, at the Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest performing arts festival. The show received a four-star review from The Scotsman newspaper and Mervyn Stutter’s “Spirit of the Fringe” award—and even had a few audience members from back home, including Dorothy Melander-Dayton ’07. After Scotland, Eliot returned home and drove to artist residencies (in Oregon and Wyoming), which he and his collaborators (his wife Erica Gionfriddo and friend Curtis Uhlemann) were awarded to work on their next production. Eliot is grateful for the opportunity to develop his practice as a working artist more deeply; he encourages art students from the Meem and the Green Room to pursue the paths of their creative impulses.
During the road trip to his residencies, Eliot also connected with many alumni, mostly from his own class of 2001, who make up a few of the lifelong friends he made at Prep: Tara Kohn, whose Art History class he sat in on at Northern Arizona University would make her legendary Prep teacher Anita Ginocchio proud; Jesse Watson ’02, who is finishing up an impressive doctoral dissertation at Berkeley on Chinese history; Sara Naegelin, who recently completed an MBA in Design Strategy that is allowing her to integrate her talents in design and marketing to develop innovative socially engaged projects; Elan Walsky, whose award-winning Coalition beer is an imposing presence in the micro-brew mecca of Portland; Dave Davenport, now an undeniable force-of-nature at the animation studio Laika (Coraline, The Boxtrolls); Alexi Horowitz ’08, who finished up his studies at Reed College (between fantastical adventures around the world) and is currently working as an independent radio journalist and reporting on urgent ecological issues; Sam Johnson ’02, who continues to impress with his creative endeavors, which have manifested in recent years in epic artistic projects at Burning Man—and have prompted him to pursue an MBA at Boise State, in order to realize ever larger-scale collaborative pieces. After leaving the residency in Wyoming, Eliot plans on connecting with more alumni (among others) in Denver before heading down to Santa Fe for the wedding of Jon Chakeres to his fiancée Jeralee Hartman.