George Ferrandi is the creator and director of JUMP!STAR. She designs the Constellates, leads the creative team, and makes the pole star sculptures.

Ferrandi is an American artist whose performance and participatory projects address issues of vulnerability, impermanence, and spectacle, often through experimental approaches to narrative. She has been awarded grants from Franklin Furnace and the Mid Atlantic Arts Council, and she was an NEA funded Fellow with the Japan-US Friendship Commission. Her work has been performed or exhibited at the International House of Japan in Tokyo, Abrons Arts Center in New York, the Kitchen in New York, Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn, Sluice Art Fair in London, the McKinney Contemporary in Dallas, the Wexner Center in Columbus, the Harn Museum in Gainesville, and Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. She is the founding director of Wayfarers Studio Program and Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and was the founding member of the touring performance project Cloud Seeding: Circus of the Performative Object.

Jee Young Sim created and performed the signature sounds for the pole star characters.

Jee is a visual, sound, and performance artist currently based in Berlin. She has exhibited and performed at institutions including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, panke.gallery, and HAU 2 in Berlin, Museum of Fine Arts Galerija Umjetnina in Split, Arti et Amicitae in Amsterdam, the 4th Anyang Public Art Project in Anyang, Overgaden Institut in Copenhagen, the Center of Contemporary Art in Lagos, Real Fine Arts and Brooklyn Museum in New York. Sim has released her music in collaboration with Jee Day on DFA Records and Beats in Space Records.

Alan Calpe is working with community performers to develop Jump!Star dance and movement, and oversees the design of all performance regalia.

Calpe is a visual artist working primarily in video and performance. His work has been exhibited at the Getty Museum, the Wexner Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and LAXART. His intersections with dance have included presentations at Danspace Projects, Dance and Process at the Kitchen, Abrons Art Center, and New Museum. He has attended artist residencies at Skowhegan, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Alan received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and currently lives in NYC.

Mirah is writing and performing the lyric-driven anthems of Jump!Star.

Brooklyn-based songwriter Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn has been creating incorruptible independent pop music since the late 1990s. She has released over a dozen solo and collaborative recordings on K Records, Kill Rock Stars, and various domestic and foreign independent labels. She has performed with the Oregon Symphony, Contemporaneous Orchestra, and the Portland Cello Project, and has toured solo and with countless iterations of her own band in concert halls, music clubs, and punk basements all across North America, Japan, and Europe.

Sonali McDermid is our consulting climatologist and expert on agricultural models.

Sonali McDermid is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at NYU. She obtained her Ph.D. at Columbia University in Earth and Environmental Sciences, and subsequently held a NASA Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Her research strives to understand how agricultural land-use can feedback on regional climate and environmental systems to have major ecological consequences. She also served as the Climate Co-Lead for the Agricultural Model Intercomparison Project, which conducted integrated assessments of climate change and food security across Africa and Asia.

Jana Grcevich is our collaborating astrophysicist.

Grcevich received her doctorate in Astronomy from Columbia University, where she studied dwarf galaxies and interstellar gas, discovering two previously unknown local galaxies. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, where she continued research, taught astronomy to future high school science teachers, and hosted public shows in the Hayden Planetarium. She co-authored The Vacation Guide to the Solar System, a whimsical travel guide to the planets.