ABOUT OUR PANELISTS
Bill Buchman
Artist, musician, educator, and author Bill Buchman, a painter and jazz pianist for over 50 years, studied early on with distinguished artists, Fletcher Martin, Robert Richenburg, and Victor D’Amico and with eminent musicians including Ran Blake, Jaki Byard and George Russell.
Buchman’s paintings, as the manifestation of the mind of a skilled musician as well as painter, combine the principles of music, color and drawing in vibrant abstracts which have been described as “symphonies of space, form and color” and in fluid figure drawings which have been characterized as " lightning bursts of energy condensed into a fine line." His works are in private and public collections in the US, Denmark, Sweden, and England.
As a musician, he has performed widely with his own group and with jazz greats in the USA, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. When not painting or performing, he gives workshops and seminars on creativity, abstraction and figure drawing and entertains audiences with his unique lecture using his inter-disciplinary skills to demonstrate the parallels that exist between art and music.
His five popular DVDs and his innovative book, Expressive Figure Drawing(Random House 2010), present Buchman’s unique teaching approach infused with the Zen and Modernist ideas with which he has been inspiring and empowering artists for several decades. He studied Fine Arts at Cornell University and has Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Third Stream Studies from the New England Conservatory of Music and is represented in Sarasota by the Allyn Gallup Gallery. www.billbuchman.com
Kate Alexander
Kate Alexander is Associate Director at Large for Florida Studio Theatre. An actress, director and educator, Kate has been creating for over 30 years with hundreds of productions to her credit, many regional or world premieres. Broadway Worldsaid, "Watching Kate Alexander perform is like having a masterclass in acting."
Alexander founded the FST theatre school whose mission and training are cultivated from her passion for "truth on stage." No matter what the age, students are taught that "we must venture to the emotional landscapes others fear to tread." She has also developed theatre programs in Russia, Scotland and Israel. Her book, The Animated Short, co-authored with Karen Sullivan, brings this art to the animator and is now In its second printing. Committed to social change, she created a city-wide dialogue on race about which Rex Ellis of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture noted, "You are on the pulse of our collective anxiety."