Creative Residency 2021 Jurors:
Performing Arts

Meet the jurors who are helping us select the Performing Arts participants for the 2021 Creative Residency program.

Reggie Garrett has performed throughout the US and Canada for many years presenting mostly original songs mixed with pop covers and traditional folk ballads. His music is quite diverse tapping into urban acoustic Folk music, Gospel, Latin rhythms, Blues, Celtic and many other forms.  He has been compared to acoustic legends Richie Havens and Bill Withers by the national folk publication Dirty Linen. He doesn’t consider himself to be a Bluesman. Even so, Living Blues magazine featured him in an article in the August 2018 issue. Garrett was trained and educated as an artist, receiving his B.A. in fine arts from Williams College, and An M.A. in painting from SUNY Albany. Since then he has spent time as a starving artist in New York City, worked as a systems engineer for IBM, worked in computer center planning and disaster recovery planning for Rainier/Security Pacific Bank, and taught English, history and math at the high school level. Garrett also taught in a special program at Shoreline Community College that guided high school dropouts into and through college. Through it all, he has worked as a musician — as a bassist and vocalist in several rock bands, more recently as a vocalist and guitarist, both solo and with his own ensemble “Reggie Garrett & the SnakeOil Peddlers.”

Robin Holcomb has performed internationally as a pianist, vocalist and the leader of various ensembles in venues including Carnegie Hall, The Meltdown Festival, The United Nations, Teatro Manzoni, Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Moers Music Festival, The Festival of Perth, The Hong Kong Arts Festival, and the Guimarães, Verona, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Earshot Jazz Festivals. Following Sundanese gamelan performance studies at U.C. Santa Cruz and several years sharecropping tobacco in North Carolina, she was active in New York for many years as a composer and performer with deep roots in the downtown avant-garde as one of the original Studio Henry mavericks. She has lived and worked in Seattle since 1989. The Big Time, Little Three, Rockabye and Robin Holcomb are four recordings of her music on the Nonesuch label. Other recordings include The Point of It All and Solos (Songlines), and John Brown’s Body (Tzadik). She is a founder and co-director of The New York Composers Orchestra and WACO, ensembles for which she is also conductor, pianist, and a principal composer. She is a featured performer on Bill Frisell’s Nashville and Kaddish. Holcomb has been commissioned to create scores for dance, film, and theatre. Her distinctive extended song cycles reflect subjects ranging from Rachel Carson to utopian communities of the Pacific Northwest. Most recently, We Are All Failing Them, a sidewise regard of the Donner Party with film and magical objects, premiered at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum. Current projects include a solo recording and a commission from The Philadelphia Orchestra. “Ms. Holcomb’s long form piece Before the Comet Comes is staggeringly beautiful.” — New York Times “…this fascinatingly eclectic pianist, composer, and singer has few qualms about mingling folk, jazz, chamber music, and points between and beyond in arresting original music.” — The New Yorker “Achingly painful and suddenly tender, Robin Holcomb’s songs mirror a beguiling, bewildering world.” — Rolling Stone

Stan Shields has been a programmer for the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) since 2004, programming features, shorts, forums, and special events. He assumed the position of SIFF’s Festival Programming Manager in 2017. Prior to his work for SIFF, he served as the operations manager for Intiman Theatre, curated for the Bumbershoot Arts Festival and On the Boards, and taught at Cornish College of the Arts. He is also chairman emeritus of the Board of Directors for The 14/48 Projects and a recipient of the 2008 Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award.