Dado Gyure
Dado Gyure was the 2017 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
Dado is a visual artist and theater practitioner in the Chicagoland 
area. She was born in East Chicago, Indiana. She has two children. She is interested in value perceptions and how they inform empathic systems. Dado is an ensemble member of A Red Orchid Theatre, which is Chicago’s premiere theater for the best acting in the city. A lot of her work, both formal and experimental, happens at A Red Orchid. She has recently directed The Room by Harold Pinter, The Mutilated by Tennessee Williams, Simpatico by Sam Shepard, and Megacosm by Brett Neveu.
Dado is a trained actor (University of Southern California, Los Angeles Theater Academy), a director and visual artist, (UChicago DOVA), as well as an educator. She has appeared in many theaters and on tv/film.
Dado’s Edes year project, The Little Match Girl Passion, was workshopped during her time at DOVA and is being moved into a larger social platform in the Chicago area. The Little Match Girl Passion is taken from a chamber opera written by David Lang (Pulitzer 2008) and is derived from the short story by Hans Christian Anderson of the same name. The project used movement, sculpture, percussion and voice.
Dado has also been a Maggio Fellow for directing, She has received a Jeff Citation as well as an After Dark Award. In 2017 her production of Sam Shepard’s Simpatico will move to the McCarter Theater in Princeton New Jersey. She teaches often at DePaul University and UIC. Her performance collective is known as c a K e. Cake stands for Collections, Analysis, Kinesthesia, and Ensemble.
Eric Watts
Eric Watts was the 2016 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
Watts is a Chicago based artist working in moving image and installation. He received his MFA from the University of Chicago, his BFA from The School of Visual Arts, with interstitial time at The Royal College of Art.
His Edes project, Edifice, is focused on the interrelated themes of Home, Biography, and Memorial. It looks specifically at connections between the house Ludwig Wittgenstein built for his sister in Vienna and the Cone House from Thomas Bernhard’s novel, Korrectur. He traveled to Austria to film these real and imagined spaces, creating his own architecture to install these films into.In 2014, Watts took part in Winterjourney, a group thematic residency at The Banff Centre, Banff, AB and was an Artist in Residence at The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, YT. Watts and his partner, artist Lauren Edwards, were awarded a DCASE Individual Artist Grant from the City of Chicago to fund their exhibition Fanfare for the Times at Heaven Gallery in 2016. Watts has exhibited and screened works at The Logan Center Gallery, Regina Rex, ACRE TV, Walter Phillips Gallery, and Trunk Show.
Francisco Castillo Trigueros
Francisco Castillo Trigueros was the 2015 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
Francisco is a composer and performer of contemporary and electronic music from Mexico City residing in Chicago. As a composer he has received numerous distinctions such as the BMI Student Composer Award, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne Young Composer’s Forum Jury prize, two honorable mentions in the Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, and four nominations for the Gaudeamus Music Prize. As a performer of electronic music, Francisco is part of Collect/Project, a trio with flutist Shanna Gutierrez, and vocalist Frauke Aulbert. He has also performed with ensembles and soloists such as Ensemble Dal Niente, the Spektral Quartet, Fonema Consort, Claire Chase, and Ryan Muncy, and with the prestigious Mexican dance company Delfos Danza Contemporanea.
Francisco recently received a Ph.D at the University of Chicago, where he served as Computer Music Studio Manager for three years, and is currently teaching Digital Music Composition at Columbia College Chicago, and Theory and Composition at the New Music School. His mentors include Augusta Read Thomas, Shulamit Ran, and Howard Sandroff, among others. Current projects include Xilitla, a large-scale multimedia song cycle funded by the Edes Prize, a new piece for harpist Ben Melsky, and the music for a videodance by Delfos Danza Contemporanea.
Lila Newman
Lila Newman was the 2014 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
She is an actor, writer, musician and comedian, and received her MFA in Acting from Drama Centre London with study at the Vakhtangov Institute in Moscow. As part of her Edes year, She worked on a play about Ora Nichols, the pioneer of Golden Age Radio Sound Effects. For more on that project including interviews and images, please see: Edes Grant Project: Ora Nichols.
Her recent screen work can be seen on Amazon’s Alpha House, opposite John Goodman and Julie White and written by Garry Trudeau. Stage work includes New York: White on White (Steps Theatre), About Face (The Brick), A Map to Somewhere Else, Something Wicked (Everyday Inferno). Chicago: A Prairie Home Companion (NPR), The Ballad of Lula Del Ray (Manual Cinema), Sketch Comedy & Improv (Donny’s Skybox at The Second City, iO (Improv Olympic), The Playground), Spectacle Performer (Redmoon),Compass Players (Pocket Guide to Hell), Liberal Arts: The Musical,The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Underscore Theater Company)Williamstown Theater Festival: 356/365 Plays, Uncle Sam I Am (Nikos Theater). London: Hedda Gabler, The Broken Heart (The Platform Theatre), Twelfth Night (Studio Theatre at Kings Cross) Moscow: The Seagull (SADA Theatre).
A graduate of Chicago’s Second City & iO Conservatories and a member of the Playground Theater, Lila’s performed sketch and long-form in venues all around Chicago including: Donny’s Skybox and the DeMaat at The Second City, iO, The Playground, a handfull of dive bars and countless dilapidated storefronts. She performed under many group names, all of them sound like parodies of comedy group names, among them: The Business and Lumberjack Tsunami (Check out reviews in Time Out and NPR Station WBEZ).
She is a classically trained soprano with a passion for belt, folk and jazz. Lila plays an ok piano, a better ukulele and the clawhammer banjo (please, forgive her the last).
Lila writes and contributes sketches weekly to A Prairie Home Companion. With Sarah Rosenshine, Lila also co-writes, produces and acts in Barnum Effect, a radio sketch show. For more on her writing, please see: Writing (Bits & Pieces).
Shane Ward
Shane Ward was the 2013 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
Shane is an American artist who lives and works in Chicago. His work is dedicated to themes of
war and romance, capital and masculinity, violence and emancipation, surface luster and value. Shane is after the relationship between the grave and the monument, the mine and jewelry box, the wound and the mend. Of late, he has thought of this as a sustained inquiry into the nature of victory, its relationship to liberty, and its ultimate fragility.
Shane earned his MFA from the University of Chicago in 2012. He currently teaches in the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jack Lawrence Mayer
Jack Lawrence Mayer was the 2012 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize, with David Milton Brent.
Jack is the co-writer and director of Single Long, a seven-episode HBO GO digital comedy. He is the co-creator of numerous web series, including L.A. Famous (2014), and Distance (2015). He is the co-founder of Screen Door, a live movie company based in Chicago. He is the writer and director of numerous short films including, How To Say I Love You with Video (Portable.tv), Exit Ghost @ High Concept Labs, and Five-Fingered Lucy.
Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman
Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman was the 2011 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
Jacob writes and direct movies. Short films, a couple features, music videos, animation, and documentaries. He recently directed a few music videos in my hometown of Detroit that he’s pretty proud of. One of them (Waves) was put in the “Top 10 Music Videos of 2014” list in Detroit Music Mag. He won an Emmy in 2014 for directing a series of short documentaries.
Jacob used the Edes Award to direct and edit a feature documentary called Detroit Threat Management
about a for-profit urban paramilitary squadron. He’s the director/editor/co-creator of a music webseries called Far Off Sounds that chronicles unique musical subcultures and artists around the world. As of 2015, he was living for the month in Accra, Ghana, shooting a documentary about underwater logging in the world’s largest underwater forest.
Leigh-Ann Pahapill
Leigh-Ann Pahapill was the 2010 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
She designs site-responsive projects where architecture is systematically examined as a means to dis-locate subject, object, and place. Her work is an attempt to invert and sustain the processes of representation as a means to provoke reflection on the logics, grammars, and other complexes of interpretation that comprise culture.
Pahapill’s 2010 Edes Award project, The Screen as the Juncture of the Infra-Ordinary, initiated a period of research into the material, epistemological, and ideological particularities of the screen, the white cube of the gallery, and the black box of the theatre. These spaces of representation were explored as hybrid scenes of exchange with the potential to materialize the realm of translation and mediation that is experience. Her award year started off with a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada and finished with an exhibition of the works produced in residence at Galerie Catherine Bastide in Brussels in 2011.
Pahapill’s recent solo exhibitions include Screen Space, Melbourne, AU (2015); Box13 Artspace, Houston, TX (2014); Window (re/production re/presentation) Asheville, NC (2013); Penelec Gallery, Allegheny College, PA (2013); and the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, FL (2011 & 2012). Recent group exhibitions include Hyperbole at the History Museum at the China Academy of Art (IMPACT9 2015); It Was Better in Real Life Than Real Life at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi (ISEA2014); and PROOFOFPROOFOFCONCEPT at the Ontario College of Art and Design University Graduate Gallery (2013). Pahapill joined the faculty of the School of Art at Bowling Green State University in Ohio as an Assistant Professor in 2012.
