EMINESCU FESTIVAL
Jess Cook
Jess Cook has been an active creative in Sydney, passionately engaging with the community and different artforms for the last 6 years. In this time she has worked in a variety of roles including: event manager, art director, poet, performer, painter, fundraiser, art activist, vocalist and curator. From venues, online, publications to festivals and street installations, her collaborations create fun and accessible situations that blur the boundaries between artforms, audience and performer. As the Director of Token Imagination, Jess Cook has produced featured work for The Australian Poetry Festival, The Anode Festival, Underbelly Public Arts Festival, 2042 Street Art Festival, Art and About Festival, Sydney Children’s Festival, Peats Ridge Festival. Jess Cook ran a monthly performance night, Token Word from ’03-‘07. As an individual artist, her recent achievements include being published by Affirm Press in Lines of Wisdom, lead role in the innovative spoken word show Project:Alice and most recently the Sydney Poet in residence for the The Australian Poetry Centre's Cafe Poet program.
Benito di Fonzo
Born into an Irish-Italian family in Homebush, Sydney, Australia, Benito Di Fonzo has made a name for himself as a popular journalist, playwright, poet and performer to the extent that he has been profiled by both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Weekend Australian. Presently a regular Arts and Entertainment writer for several Fairfax publications including Metro, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun Herald, Benito is currently working on a novel and has a play in production. In 2005 he wrote and performed in a weekly radio serial for FBI 94.5FM. In 2004 “The Strange Case of The Parrot & The Stolen Sydney Opera House” played to a capacity crowd at The Studio at Sydney Opera House, and was broadcast live on Fbi-FM, as was “Attack of The Robotic Russell Crowes” in June 2006. “Pokie Face” was also re-staged at The Sydney Opera House as well as Melbourne’s VCA as part of “SHORTer & SWEETer.” Between 2001 and 2008 his short plays “The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman,” “9/11 Conspiracy: The Musical,” “Unpeople”, “Pokie Face,” “Naked, With A Blue Light,” “Gotta Dollar “ and “I’m Frightened, & I Want My Money” were performed to glowing reviews. For many years he co-hosted Sydney’s longest running Spoken Word night Bardflys and has performed extensively, including shows in London, Edinburgh, and Australian festivals ‘Night Words’ (at Sydney Opera House) ‘The Big Day Out,’ ‘Carnivale,’ ‘Australian Poetry Festival,’ as well as Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide Fringe Festivals where he received four star reviews from The Adelaide Advertiser. Benito has won several awards, including the 2SER Short Story Competition, and the NSW Writers’ Centre’s Inner City Life prize. His favourite colour is irrelevant...
Robert Balas
Robert Balas is a page and performance poet and the poet in residence at the Tap Gallery. Robert is the author of two books of poetry, "Once Upon a Place, Twice Upon the Moon" and "Opened 24 Hours".
The colourful, somewhat eclectic nature and the colloquialism of the locales of Darlinghurst and Kings Cross are explored in Robert's most recent poems. Robert Balas verses encompas both the sublimely poetic and the acutely real aspects of Sydney life.
Loredana Tudor-Tomescu
Loredana Tudor-Tomescu made her debut with an article in the Libertatea magazine, in 2004, and went on to write a regular feature, "Studio report", for the arts and culture section of 'Curierului National-Pop,Rock&Show'. In 2005 she starts writing for the Romanian Chronicle, and then for the Independent.
At the same time as her career in journalism, Loredana publishes both in Romania and abroad a number of poems, short stories and interviews in literary journals and magazine such as Universul, Timpul, Spirit Romanesc-Australia, Agero-Stuttgart.
Tudor Bucea
Tudor Bucea has obtained a Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology, Sydney in 1998, by completing a thesis on the application of multimedia databases to education. Since 2000, he has turned towards his love of poetry, art and performance by joining Bardflys as a Poetry Slam performer. He proceeded to win the coveted 'Slam Title and the Lobster' twice as well as being a finalist when Bardflys hosted a poetry slam at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta. In 2004, Tudor Bucea combined his love of art and his digital media skills by first developing the Bardflys website and managing the associated mailing list and then by creating an award winning video clip for the Ngara National Poetry Festival.
Between 2004 and 2006, Tudor Bucea worked on a number of videos of performance poetry, theatre and studies of visual art as well as filming live music, experimenting with real-time video and developing as a multimedia artist. He first performed as a VJ for Jackie Orszaczky and Friends @Newtown in February 2006, and continued to be part of the show until the end of the production.
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