Virtual Artist Salon: Natasha Beste and Leith Campbell

We invite you to join us in this virtual gathering space for discovery, dialogue and the exchange of ideas.

This unique series focuses on the 2022 Kresge Artist Fellows and Gilda Awardees, featuring artists Natasha Beste and Leith Campbell. A presentation about their practices will be followed by a Q&A based conversation moderated by WDET’s Chris Campbell.

This program is a collaboration between Kresge Arts in Detroit and WDET and is part of Kresge Arts in Detroit’s mission to advance and showcase the work of Kresge Artist Fellows and Gilda Awardees, provide space for growth and discovery, and further the connection between Kresge artists and the wider arts community.

[accessibility note: ASL interpretation will be provided during this event]

Natasha Beste is a video director, installation artist, animator, performer, and educator whose work has been showcased at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, MOCAD, and the University of Michigan Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. Since 2006, Beste has taught media arts at Wayne State University, Marygrove College, Y-Arts at the Boll Family YMCA, and Ladybug Studios. Since 2010, she’s been co-director of Gold House Media and has been commissioned by Kresge Arts in Detroit and Cranbrook Art Museum. She currently teaches at the College for Creative Studies and Living Arts (Detroit).

Leith Campbell works at the intersection of technology and creativity, attempting to find new, more organic methods of expressing meaning and emotion through the use of technological means as well as using machines to interrogate humanity’s relationship to technology. From tech-mediated avant-garde composition to electro-mechanical sculpture, there are few mediums under the rubric of technology she has not intersected with in her practice. Originally an instrumentalist with an improvisational focus, she has reinvented and renewed her practice many times. Since 2017, Campbell has been exploring notions of space, perception, phenomenology, and identity, as well as developing new pedagogies synergizing technology and art. She grew up in Port Huron, and now lives in Midtown Detroit, and is the non-birth parent to two beautiful children.