>> MEET OUR 2017 CITIZEN-ARTISTS
HARRY GRAFF KIMBALL, NEW YORK >> JULY 2017
PLACE-BASED SONGWRITER
Harry Graff Kimball is a songwriter, producer, and builder-storyteller who strives to capture places and spaces in lyrical story-songs. Kimball works in American idioms—musical, mythical, and historiographical—while searching for authentic, individual truths. His compositions surprise with the depth of emotion he brings to the odd and the everyday. As a songwriter, he borrows Neil Young’s apocalyptic streak and Warren Zevon’s playful world-weariness, adding the lyrical density of Stephen Malkmus and the literary sensibilities of Bill Callahan. 

Kimball is a lifelong New Yorker who maintains spiritual homes in rural Connecticut and the Adirondack mountains. A classical guitarist by early training and a member of the late '90s, almost-almost-famous NYC indie group Ensimismada, Kimball is also the bassist and co-founder of Los Chinches, the only group ever described as a “Pavement-meets-Dead Kennedys" revelation. He is also a halfway-decent carpenter, an inveterate tinkerer, and a budding amp maker. He writes speeches to pay the bills. 
​​MELISSA WRAY, Minneapolis >> AUGUST 2017
COMMUNITY BUILDER & PODCASTER ​​
​Community and stories are at the heart of Melissa's creative work. She grew up on a sheep farm near Caledonia, MN, and often feels an internal tension between her rural roots and her present urban life. This tension informs much of her writing and community work. Melissa, along with her sister Amanda Wray Ninneman, founded Hazel & Wren in 2011, a community resource organization for writers. As a writer herself, she mostly writes poetry and creative nonfiction. She is the Marketing Coordinator at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where she produces The Loft Podcast. She will graduate with a Masters in Arts & Cultural Leadership from the University of Minnesota in spring 2018. She lives in south Minneapolis with her husband. ​
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TODD MELBY, Minneapolis >> AUGUST 2017
MEDIA ARTIST & JOURNALIST
Todd Melby is a reporter, interactive producer and filmmaker. He 's best known as  lead producer of Black Gold Boom, a public media project documenting North Dakota's oil boom—and bust. His radio stories have aired on MPR, Marketplace and The World. He's also a senior producer at 2 below zero, a public media nonprofit. In 2013, he was awarded a McKnight Media Artist Fellowship.
CIMARRON CORPÉ, VICTORIA, BC >> SEPTEMBER 2017
GEOGRAPHER & MULTIMEDIA ARTIST
Cimarron Corpé is a human geographer whose interests focus on landscapes and the role sound and images play in our spatial orientation and construction of place. His doctoral research at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia examined the interconnections between residents' sense of place, place-based strategies, and climate change adaptive capacity for a rapidly developing peri-urban coastal region. He employs a variety of artistic mediums and draws inspiration from the convergence of environmental psychology, topography, cultural practices, and the built environment. Cimarron's work spans sound and image installations, photographic exhibits, audio recordings, and sound and visual performances. His creative works have been presented in Berlin, Barcelona, Athens, Rome, Sydney, Montreal, Vancouver, Victoria, Portland, and Seattle. He has lectured on topics within the spheres of physical and human geography, environmental science, and sustainability and has presented at academic conferences in Canada, Australia, and the United States. Cimarron is currently Director of Policy Development with the Province of British Columbia where he leads projects including technical building requirements, energy efficiency, accessibility, and climate leadership in the built environment. 

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