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Debra Olin, 2004 Rappaport Prizewinner: Prints and Printed Constructions
 Debra Olin focuses on bodily coverings as containers for meaning. In both her two-dimensional prints and three-dimensional printed constructions, Olin creates garments, or images of garments, adorned with text, found objects, and images from the natural world and of her Jewish cultural heritage—notably Yiddish literature, poetry, and folklore. These elements gird the body and make reference to what the artist considers to be the constructive elements of identity, nature, religion, family, memory, ritual, history, self-perception, and morality. Olin’s work, taken as a whole, can also be considered as an autobiographical narrative, a revelation of self broken down into its constituent parts while bound together within the framework of apparel.
The artist suggests that identity is as fluid and multifaceted as the clothing we change each day. She explains in her artist statement: “I have come to think of clothing as an extension of the body. The coat becomes a thick hide, a shelter, a vantage point from which to safely view the world and one’s relationship to it. The slip holds the skin, delicate and vulnerable. Under this covering are revealed the mysteries that live inside us. This work explores that inner life with an emphasis on hope and healing.”
 Born in Trenton, NJ, Debra Olin received a BA from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. She currently lives and works in Somerville. Olin has shown in solo exhibitions at the Perkins Gallery, Striar Jewish Community Center, Stoughton, MA; Hampshire College, Amherst, MA; the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston; the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs; the Starr Gallery, Levanthal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, Newton, MA; and the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA. Her group show participation includes such institutions as the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Baltimore; Galería Espacio Abierto, Havana, Cuba; the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, New York, NY; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; the Tisch Gallery, Tufts University, Medford, MA; the Somerville Museum and Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville, MA; Higgins Art Gallery, Cape Cod Community College, Barnstable, MA; and the New Art Center, Newton, MA.
John Bisbee, 2003 Rappaport Prizewinner: Sculpture
 Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo writes the following about the artist in the current Annual Exhibition catalogue. “John Bisbee’s sculptures express his energy and restlessness, as well as his bravura in choosing to work with an unforgiving and potentially dangerous material. For some time now he has worked with nails and spikes, transforming their industrial toughness and sharp points into an amazing array of abstract forms that can be loosely organic or tightly geometric, or both at the same time. Using twelve-inch spikes as his building material, Bisbee welds the spikes into units and assembles them in shapes that are suggestive without being specific, and that embody a number of opposing characteristics. The forms can look hard or soft, organic or industrial, highly crafted or sloppily thrown together (although they’re not), delicate or strong, complex or simple.
 John Bisbee received his BFA from Alfred University (Alfred, NY) and attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He has done artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH) and Yaddo Art Colony (Saratoga Springs, NY). He has also had solo exhibitions at Plane Space Gallery (New York, NY), Albright-Knox Museum (Buffalo, NY), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Maine College of Art (Portland), Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Brunswick, ME), Kemper Museum (Kansas City, MO), and Suyama Space (Seattle, WA). Bisbee’s work resides in a variety of collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Hugo Neu Corporation (New York, NY), Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA), and Portland Museum of Art (Portland, ME). He teaches at Bowdoin College.
Lars-Erik Fisk, 2002 Rappaport Prizewinner: Sculpture
 Since 1995, Lars-Erik Fisk has been turning out artworks in the form of a sphere, a shape he calls a "basic form, one that we can all understand, but is at the same time the least likely form for these subjects to assume. In combining the dissimilar, I want to find how we might recognize something by seeing it for what it is not." Using whatever organic and manmade materials are required to produce the traditional construction upon which a particular form is based, Fisk compacts the salient functional and distinctive features of the original into a concise and humorous ball in order to render it universally accessible.
 Fisk studied studio art and art history at the University of Vermont, spending one semester in Rome. His works have been exhibited at the Firehouse Gallery in Burlington, VT; the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH; The Robert Hull Fleming Museum in Burlington, VT; the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, MA; Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, NY; and Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, MN. His works currently appear on display at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA; The Robert Hull Fleming Museum in Burlington, VT; and the Horst M. Rechelbacher Sculpture Garden in Osceola, WI. Fisk has held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine; Sculpture Space in Utica, NY; the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, MA; Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, NY; and Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, MN.
At DeCordova, Fisk created the DeCordova Ball specifically for the Museum's 1999 exhibition On the Ball: The Sphere in Contemporary Sculpture. As is characteristic of most of Fisk's work, the DeCordova Ball is intended for outdoor display. It abstracts and complements the idiosyncratic architecture of the Museum by referencing the red brick exterior, arched window form, and slate turret. The structure of the ball is comprised of a steel support skeleton, which was covered with a layer of concrete and then coated in wet clay. Once dry, the bricks were individually cut by the artist, fired in a kiln as factory brick, then mortared permanently into place. Situated on the slope adjacent to the Museum stairway, the DeCordova Ball may be viewed from various perspectives and interacts with both the interior and exterior of the Museum building.
Annee Spileos Scott, 2001 Rappaport Prizewinner: Multimedia Installations
 For two decades, Annee Spileos Scott has been creating multimedia installations with sociopolitical content. Initially, her work explored women’s identities in a patriarchal society. More recently, the artist has focused on family dysfunction, substance abuse, ethnic cleansing, organized religion, mental health, and healing. Her installations are notable for their use of found objects that mock suburban coordinated decor.
 Spileos Scott received both her MFA and BFA from Massachusetts College of Art. Her works have been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; the List Visual Arts Center at MIT; the University of Maryland, and the AIR Gallery in New York. Solo exhibitions of her work have also been held at Boston University, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and the Fuller Museum in Brockton, MA. She holds a Teacher’s Certificate from Suffolk University and has taught drawing, painting, and installation coursework at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and Lasell College in Newton over the last 10 years.
At DeCordova, Spileos Scott contributed Dieing for a Drink—a life-size dining room bursting with imagery of alcoholic decadence—for Good-bye to Apple Pie: Contemporary Artists View the Family in Crisis (1992) and The Road to Mental Health, an elaborately handpainted miniature village, for Strokes of Genius: Mini Golf by Artists (1995).
Jennifer Hall, 2000 Rappaport Prizewinner: Interactive media
 Jennifer Hall is among this country’s foremost leaders in the field of art-and-technology—as an artist, educator, curator, and researcher. Since the late 1970s, Hall has used newly emerging technologies to push the aesthetic envelopes of sculpture, video, performance art, sound art, and viewer-interactive/participatory installations. Her ongoing exploration of technology is not an end in itself, however, but a means to create beautiful and meaningful works of art that speak profoundly of the human experience. Hall’s work addresses a range of intertwined contemporary issues that include the human body and its relationship to machines, the emotional affect of "rational" science, language, communication and telecommunication, the roles of women in post-industrial society, art and healing, and shifting questions of identity, responsibility, and surveillance in a world increasingly dominated by the computer. Her work has been exhibited at the M.I.T. Museum, the Boston Computer Museum, at the National Conference of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, the Museum de Bella Artes in Caracas, Venezuela, and on numerous institutionally-supported web sites. In 1999, Hall participated in the DeCordova exhibition Make Your Move: Interactive Computer Art Installations, the flagship project for the first annual Boston CyberArts Festival.
 In 1988, Hall founded – and continues to direct – the Do While Studio in Boston, Massachusetts, one of the world’s first computer art ateliers. This small non-profit institution is dedicated to "the critical appraisal of digital technology—always in concert with traditional forms of artistic expression such as painting, sculpture, poetry, choreography, storytelling, music, and design." Do While achieves this mission through projects and programs that include technology classes for artists, K-12 curriculum development in new media for art educators, international artist residencies and fellowships, and research and development of new art/technology and arts/business linkages. More information on the Do While Studio can be found at www.dowhile.org.
In addition to her duties at Do While, Hall also teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art. Hall holds a Master of Science in Visual Studies from M.I.T.’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Kansas City Art Institute. She has been widely published in web and print periodicals, and has lectured internationally on art and technology. Hall’s activity as a curator of contemporary art includes the groundbreaking exhibition From the Storm: Artists with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (T.L.E.). The show opened in Boston in 1992 at Do While Studio and traveled to The American Neurology Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana; The Canadian Academy of Neurology Annual Congress, Newfoundland, Canada; and The Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, Washington, D.C. Hall, who suffers from TLE, received a special award from the National Epilepsy Society in 1994 for her research into connections between T.L.E. and creativity.
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