The Fund for Performance Art allows artists to produce works anywhere in the state of New York; artists from all areas of the world are encouraged to apply. With support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Jerome Foundation, Franklin Furnace awarded increased grants in June 2001. The following emerging artists each received $5,000 to allow them to present major work in New York in 2002.

Tish Benson (Brooklyn, NY) Tish Benson earned a BA from the University of Oklahoma and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Playwriting in 1996 and the Lorraine Hansbury Playwriting Award in 1998. She has performed at such venues as The Knitting Factory, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the University of North Carolina. Like a Natural Woman A staged performance piece about one woman's exploration into memory. It examines the ways in which the suppression of memory can become a distorted reality and how that distortion reveals itself; how repressed memory imagines itself through sound, color, and facial expressions.

Christine Carson (Toronto, Ontario) Christine Carson was born in Ontario and graduated with a BA in Fine Art, Art History, and Studio Art in 1991. She received a project grant from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2000 and is on the Board of Directors and Programming Committee for Charles Street Video. Numb/Hum: A Subterranean Metropolitan Opera (A Cultural Intervention) Numb/Hum: A Subterranean Metropolitan Opera involves 35 to 40 singers on a subway platform who hum harmonically with a highly recognizable electronic sound that the subway makes as it arrives at the station. The singers create, in concert with an electronic noise that is essentially irritating and nerve jarring, something that is highly melodic and other worldly. This intervention takes place in the subway during the early morning rush hour for 20 to 30 minutes every day for one week. The singers arrive from all directions to the subway platform in street clothes so that they are initially indistinguishable from the other passengers. The subway riders sleepily awaiting the arrival of the train suddenly enveloped by a beautiful sound that seems to be spontaneously produced by fellow travelers. Over a period of a week the people departing for work everyday at the same time start to anticipate this experience, that a sense of community is created, and that in some pavlovian way, the sound previously inscribed as something to be endured is forever associated with something beautiful. An opera for the people, as it were.

George Ferrandi (Gainesville, FL) George Ferrandi was a member of Cloud Seeding Circus, a winner of a Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art grant in 2000. She has participated in numerous shows across the United States, and most recently lectured at Virginia Commonwealth University in a series called, "Things I Read/Things I Know: A Select History of Performance Art." Untitled The artist uses her aunt's funereal photograph as evidence of a pivotal moment in her family history, attempting to unravel the event with myth, bad memory, and cartoon drawings of rabbits. The presentation is video-based with some animated images but remains deliberately low quality with cheap sound effects.

Stanya Kahn (Brooklyn, NY) Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary performer, writer, dancer, and actor originally from San Francisco and now living in New York City. She has been making performance since 1987 and her solo and collaborative works have toured nationally and internationally. She was a founding member of the performance group CORE (1994-1999) and has collaborated with Ishmael Houston-Jones, Keith Hennessy, CONTRABAND, Lauren Elder, the writing trio S.A.M., and Headlong Dancetheater. She currently teaches dance and performance and has just begun work on an MFA in Writing at Bard College. Naked on the Path Naked on the Path is a multidisciplinary performance spectacle which combines constant language streams with intense physicality and interactive sculptural sets and video projection to create a visceral, high energy, live performance. Pushing the body physically, while deconstructing it conceptually, two performers integrate and disintegrate the relationship between their physical states and tricky spoken texts. Thematically, naked on the Path deals with gender representation along with other forms of cultural dysphoria and social distress (e.g. money/employment, identity, exclusion, depression-as-normalized-function) and uses humor and humility to explore grief and dignity.

Cary Peppermint (Brooklyn, NY) Cary Peppermint, who graduated from Syracuse University School of Art and Design with a Master of Fine Arts in Computer Graphics for the Visual Arts and Art Video, has participated in more than 20 festivals and exhibitions at such venues as Walden Gallery, The Kitchen, Postmasters Gallery, and Walker Art Center. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews, most recently in the March 2001 Artforum magazine. Conductor Number Zero Conductor Number Zero involves the "removal" of the "live" performance from the actual physical space: the performer is isolated in a pine box or behind a boarded doorway allowing the audience to observe the presence and proximity of a live performer while being regulated to interactions through an over-mediated environment of real-time video monitors, cameras, telephones, and computers.

Tadej Pogacar (Ljubljana, Slovenia) Tadej Pogacar, born and educated in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe, including Slovenia, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Hungary. He received a New York Atelier Grant in 2000 and has been awarded the Grant of Ministry of Culture from Ljubljana, Slovenia five time in the past nine years. Code:Red Code:Red is an ongoing project which explores and discusses selected aspects of prostitution and sex work as a specific form of parallel economy. The project takes the form of an open dialogue between artists, sex workers, and the public in a selected micro-environment and local context. This cooperation consists of public discussions, lectures, presentations, interventions in the urban context, media viruses, and performances.