Findings Night 2024 with Maia Brown

Maia Brown (she/her) is a visual artist, Yiddish musician, writer, translator, and educator. Brown has a background in oral history and fine art, including a Watson Fellowship to study storytelling and advocacy in South Africa and the North of Ireland. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. She is a dedicated student and teacher of her own tradition as well as the many ways people have reached out to each other across communities. You can read more about Maia’s residency in her blog posts: Scratching the Surface and Seeking a Song.

Stefanie Brendler is a Seattle-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, visual artist, translator, storyteller, and union stagehand. The founder of Seattle’s premier klezmer brass band Shpilkis, Stefanie is also a member of the Yiddish folk-punk band Brivele. Despite the constant toil under capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and nationalism, Stefanie’s artistry reflects the joys of life as a queer Jew.

Brivele, a Seattle-based ensemble, blends Yiddish song, anti-fascist and labor balladry, folk-punk, and contemporary protest themes into powerful vocal harmony. Meaning “little letter” in Yiddish, Brivele symbolizes the journey songs undertake, crossing borders and time, carrying tales of love, resistance, and resilience. Rooted in the Yiddish anti-fascist tradition, their repertoire merges satire, remembrance, and political commentary, echoing the voices of ancestors in today’s struggles. With an irreverent spirit, Brivele proudly embraces Diaspora heritage, singing in Yiddish as a testament to the enduring relevance of our mixed-up, impure Yidishkayt.

Faith Jones is a librarian, translator, and researcher of Yiddish culture in Vancouver. She is a member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, which brings primary source material and accessible inquiry to the public sphere. Her book of translations of Shira Gorshman’s stories, Meant to Be and Other Stories, was recently released by White Goat Press. She is a co-translator of The Acrobat (Tebot Bach, 2014), a selection of the poetry of Celia Dropkin, and she created supertitles for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s production of Kadya Molodowsky’s genre-defying, futuristic play “Ale fentster tsu der zun” (All Windows Face the Sun). Her research on Yiddish language activism in Winnipeg and Vancouver has been published in scholarly journals. Her essay “How to Suppress Yiddish Women’s Writing” responds to the current state of scholarly denial of the rich, complex history of women’s literary culture.

Noam Lerman (they.he.zi) is a story-collector, musician, restorative justice circle keeper, nature and shabbes lover, writer, grief worker, amulet maker, and Hebrew Scribe. They facilitate Der Tkhines Proyekt, which provides experimental and songful workshops that give life to Yiddish spontaneous supplications that were/are composed and prayed by women, trans, and gender-expansive people. They have been a chaplain for students, elders, incarcerated youth, and recently incarcerated fathers. They seek to follow in a long lineage of practitioners committed to reparations, land back, and a world liberated from prisons and borders.

About Town Hall Residencies
Every year, Town Hall selects exceptional local artists and scholars for paid residencies where they engage with Town Hall programs and collaborate with our programming team to develop original events for the community. Read more about our residency program here.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle.