Jean Claire A. Dy

Jean Claire A. Dy would like nothing more than to retire in a bamboo house complete with the traditional Filipino “banggera,” standing on a cliff in some coastal community, with the sea breeze on her face and the sun on her back. But, since she’s not getting any younger and needing to save for that bamboo house, she is contented with dwelling in what she calls a “feminine elsewhere.”

Most of her waking hours are spent traversing different realities as a teacher, journalist, visual artist, travel writer, performance artist, creative writer, New Media evangelist, sometimes a fortune teller when her friends need sound advice, and even to some extent a fashion ethnographer. Just recently, she realized that all these roles lead to her being an interdisciplinary artist who is constantly trying to integrate/use New Media tools in her works.

She dabbles in anything New Media and is currently interested in integrating different art forms using New Media. (As “Interactivity” is her favorite word these days.)

She is currently working on her first collection of travel essays, her first solo exhibition of installation art pieces with birdcages as central material and her first set of solo performance art pieces.

Claire practices Yoga and Tai Ji and has studied a bit of Orissi and Bharatanatyam. Presently, she is interested in Contemporary Dance and Noise Art.

She dreams (honestly) of a better world (although she thinks Utopia is an illusion), where Patriarchy does not exist, where women and children do not have to bear the brunt of violence and war, where everybody can have same access to education and the basic human rights, where religion and all other Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) aren’t as powerful as they are. And so on and so forth.

But when her other lifetimes crowd in, Claire will willingly dust the sand off her toes, grab her back-pack and leave for another life less ordinary. Her life (in this lifetime at least) as she knows it, is surrounded with music, films, books, art, dance and loves.

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Jean Claire A. Dy teaches Creative Writing and Media Arts courses at the University of the Philippines Mindanao in Davao City, where she also sits as Chair of the University Gender Committee and the University Committee for Culture and the Arts. Her University involvements also include a membership in the Interactive Learning Center Advisory Council.

Currently, Claire heads MindaNews TV, the convergence media component of MindaNews. She also serves as the Board Secretary of the Mindanao News and Information Cooperative Center. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of m. Life and Living in Mindanao, a new lifestyle magazine about Mindanao with a nationwide distribution.

[Source: http://jeanclairedy.net/all-about-claire/ ]