Through video, installation and the performative strategy of formational interventions, Hillerbrand + Magsamen’s navigate between art and cultural geography by exploring perceptions of language, identity, media, and family within uniquely American subjectivities.   

Hillerbrand + Magsamen have been included in international screenings and exhibitions including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival, LA Freewaves New Media Art Festival, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Aurora Picture Show, the Hudson River Museum, Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery, Light Factory Contemporary Museum of Photography and Film, SF Cameraworks and the Dallas Contemporary.   

They have been awarded residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Experimental Television Center, as well grants from Ohio Arts Council and Houston Arts Alliance, and a Carol Crow Fellowship from the Houston Center for Photography. They won the FuseBox Collaboration Award with playwright, Kirk Lynn at the FuseBox Festival in Austin, Texas.  

Stephan Hillerbrand’s exhibitions include Nexus Contemporary Art in Atlanta, Artspace in New Haven and the Mississippi Museum of Art. Hillerbrand is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Photography, an Art Matters Grant recipient and a MacDowell Colony Fellow. He was a Fulbright Fellow for the German Technology and Performance seminar and in addition to being awarded a second Fulbright Fellowship to work in Karlsruhe, Germany.  

Mary Magsamen’s past exhibitions include exhibitions at Momenta Art, Anna Kustera Gallery and White Columns in New York. In addition, she has been awarded a residency from the Longwood Cyber Residency Program and Experimental Television Center.  Mary is the Curator of Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas, a micro-cinema dedicated to non-commercial film, video, and media. Aurora has distinguished itself as a home for vanguard work that falls outside of conventional moviemaking and expands ideas of cinema.

Kirk Lynn is a Founder and Co-Producing Artistic Director of the theatre collective Rude Mechanicals in Austin, TX. As their playwright-in-residence, Kirk has collaborated with the Rude Mechanicals on 17 world-premieres. In May of 2001, Kirk's adaptation of Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century enjoyed a critically-acclaimed Off Broadway premiere. In 2002 and 2003, Lipstick Traces toured across the U.S. and internationally, to Salzburg, Austria.  

Since then Kirk has led a number of the Rude Mechanicals' experiments with form. El Paraiso, written in 2003, was a karaoke musical.  In 2005 Kirk translated Deborah Hay's Bessie award-winning dance, The Match, into a play entitled, Match Play. In 2006 Kirk led the Rude Mechanicals' collective adaptation of David Rees' Internet comic strip Get Your War On, presented in Austin, Philadelphia, New York, Washington D.C., Houston, Marfa, Seattle, Galway, Helsinki, and Edinburgh, where it won the Total Theatre Award for Best New Work by a Collective. Currently Kirk is writing the book and lyrics for new musical, I’ve Never Been So Happy, one of only five works nationally to be awarded a NEA New Play Development Program award.  I’ve Never Been So Happy tells the story of a boy whose mother ties him to the last mountain lion in Texas.    

Outside the Rude Mechanicals, Kirk has written a play for young audiences, ZEN JUNIOR HIGH, which was premiered in New York as part of the Drama League

Director's Project, and was published by DPS. His play Major Bang, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre, received its premiere in August 2005 under the direction of Paul Lazar (Big Dance Theatre) and has since toured the U.S. and Australia. In 2009 Kirk's current work The Wrestling Patient will open in Boston at the SpeakEasy Theater Company.