Jed Speare

Director

 
 
Jed Speare is an artist and arts manager working in a variety of media and settings. Initially trained in music composition, he has presented performance, sound, video, installation, conceptual, and community-based works locally, nationally, and internationally in festivals and locales such as San Francisco, Amsterdam, Canada, Taiwan, Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Belarus, Bulgaria, France, and Italy. He has received numerous awards, commissions, and residencies for his work from diverse entities such as the Secretary of the Smithsonian (for his work on Smithsonian Folkways Records), Wyspa Institute of Art (Gdansk, Poland), and the Experimental Television Center, to name a few.  
 
In Boston, Jed has been known primarily as a member of the Mobius Artists Group since 1995 and as the Co- Director and Director of Mobius from 1996 through 2004. There, in addition to programming and managing a gallery and performance space in conjunction with the Mobius Artists Group, he also developed and implemented  with the Artists Group and its  collaborative partners three international cultural exchanges with artists from Croatia and Poland. In Fort Point, he was the primary coordinator of the two-year Fort Point Cultural Coalition Public Art Series, from 2000-2002, heightening the visibility of the community and increasing live/work studio housing alternatives for artists. He was also on the Fort Point Working Group for the City of Boston's Fort Point Channel Watersheet Activation Plan and has served on the Artist Review Board for the City of Boston's Artist Space Initiative since its inception.

Jed has written about performance art in P-Form magazine and Art New England (2001-2003),  and has also worked in collaboration with and as the international coordinator for choreographer/performer Rob List/Company OZU, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In January of 2008, Family Vineyard Records released a special, archival double-CD of his music, Sound Works, 1982 - 1987. He is featured in the March issue, #289 of Wire magazine's Cross Platform section (print edition). And as a compliment to the article, some examples of his work appear on the Wire web page.

 
Jed plans to continue and develop Studio Soto's international, local, and community programming focus with an emphasis on artist talks, presentations, forums, screenings, and live events. He can be reached at jed@studiosoto.com .