PechaKucha Night Hamptons Returns to Parrish Art Museum on December 9

The Parrish Art Museum will present Vol. 18 of PechaKucha Night Hamptons, with speakers from varied fields giving rapid-fire presentations about living creatively on the East End. In this iteration of PechaKucha, on Friday, December 9 at 6 p.m., the Museum’s recently appointed Deputy Director, Chris Siefert, will present. The program, where speakers show 20 slides for 20 seconds each, also includes flight instructor Peter Boody, fashion designer Liliana Casabal, artists Peter Dayton and Melinda Hackett, photographer Bryan Downey, choreographer and educator Debra McCall, author Maureen Sherry, and architect Lee H. Skolnick.

Peter Boody, a regular contributor to the Sag Harbor Express, writes the “Spyglass” Sag Harbor community column for The Southampton Press, and is a flight instructor at East Hampton Airport for Sound Aircraft Services. He began flying in 1967 and soloed at age 16.

Liliana Casabal is the Argentine-born founder of the high-end women’s clothing line, Morgane Le Fay, which she began in SoHo in 1982 and expanded to Uptown NY, Santa Monica and Malibu. The brand’s intricate details in design, fit, and creativity are both unrivalled and uncompromising.

Peter Dayton emerged on the art scene in the early 1990s and is best known for his flower collages and witty surfboard paintings. He uses the language of Pop art to reference commodity culture, appropriating images and stripping them of their meaning, seeing them as “color, shape, and pattern.” 

Bryan Downey, a photographer originally from Liverpool, moved to the United States in 1986 to pursue both photography and cinematography. Having worked for major publications and award winning movies, he settled into the field where he is most comfortable—portraits. 

Melinda Hackett is a painter who incorporates drawing, sculpture, and printmaking into her practice. Using invented and borrowed forms derived from the natural world as well as her own internal sources, her work is rich with saturated, jewel tone colors and has been described as “organic, biomorphic pop.” 

Debra McCall is a choreographer, dance historian, teacher and Director of Teacher Certification at Ross School where she teaches World Dance. Recipient of NEA and NEH grants, for her sabbatical this year she worked with war refugees on the Greece-Macedonia border and researched dance at Nataraj Temple, India.

Maureen Sherry, a former Wall Street executive, is the author of the national bestseller Opening Belle, a whip-smart and funny novel that reveals what it’s like for a working woman to balance love, ambition, and family in a world of glamorous excess, outrageous risk-taking, and jaw-dropping sexism. 

Chris Siefert, who joined the Parrish Art Museum in July as Deputy Director, has a BS in landscape architecture from Cornell University, and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University where he was awarded a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in Visual Arts. Siefert worked as a landscape architect at Cesar Pelli and Associates and Balmori Associates; taught sculpture at Louisiana State University; and served as project manager, director of exhibits, and ultimately deputy director at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

Lee H. Skolnick is the founding Principal and Lead Designer of Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership, an internationally renowned firm that integrates architecture, exhibition design, and education and synthesizes art, science, and architecture to create meaningful experiences.

As the official global site for the Hamptons PechaKucha, the Parrish joins over 700 cities internationally in hosting the event, named for the sound of “chit-chat” in Japanese. Attendees at PechaKucha Night Hamptons have the opportunity to learn about local resources, and hear from the many creative professionals who live here, from artists and writers to musicians, chefs, designers and many others.

PechaKucha Night Hamptons Vol. 18 will likely sell out! For tickets and more information, visit parrishart.org.