Arts & Culture

More than 230,000 U.S women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. Sharon Harris is one of them.

In addition to medical treatments, Harris has developed her own form of therapy to cope with her illness: flash mobs. Harris has participated in nearly 40 of these public dance performances since 2011. She calls flash mobs her anti-chemo.

Harris, 43, was not surprised when she was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer in 2010. Several women in her family have battled the disease.

While undergoing treatment for cancer, Harris re-evaluated her life. A caretaker by nature, Harris spent much of her time doing for others. However, when she needed support after her diagnosis, some of her friends did not return the favor.

Rather than focus on the negative, Harris decided to make some changes. She stopped doing so much for others and started pursuing the passions she never had time for in the past, including a life-long love for dance. Through flash mobbing – public dance performances that seem to occur spontaneously – Harris has found a new group of friends. They call her the Flash Mob Queen.

As a child in Greece, Fotis Flevotomos could not read letters on a class blackboard. Flevotomos, 35, was born with ocular albinism, a genetic condition in which the eyes lack melanin pigments, causing blurry vision, sensitivity to bright light and a difficulty in perceiving depth.

Despite his condition, Flevotomos grew up to become a piano player and an artist. He made watercolor and ink drawings of still lives and landscape,  but not many portraits. Although he was interested in human figures, he found it difficult to draw people. “I am quiet slow when I draw… and then I have to be really close so it’s a relationship that has certain requirements and for me it’s been difficult to find models with whom I feel comfortable,” he said.

Last year, Flevotomos was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to be a visiting artist at the New York Public Library. Since September, he has been engaged in discussions and workshops on the accessibility of art for people with low or no vision. He writes blog posts about the importance of subjective vision in making art, and the relationship between music and paintings. He recently wrote about the affinities between Monet’s weeping willows series and Mozart’s Requiem.

In New York, Flevotomos started using an iPad application as a drawing tool, which helped him overcome some of his vision problems. Inspired by the diversity of people in the city, he decided to draw his first portrait in many years.

With the flick of his wrist, DJ Esquire — a club and competitive DJ — can always get the party started.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, DJ Esquire, a.k.a., John Chavies, 35, uses an eclectic mix of hip-hop, 1980s rock and video game theme songs to create unique tracks. He’s won several major DJ awards, and even traveled to London in September to represent the United States in a global DJ competition.

But Esquire’s winning streak hit a snag last year when he failed to notch a repeat championship at a regional DJ competition in Hartford, Conn. Esquire drove to Connecticut with visions of filling his empty trunk with prizes and awards. Instead, he filled his trunk with beer to take home.

Now DJ Esquire returns to Hartford, carrying with him the desire to win, but also the fear of failing again. Will he pull off a flawless set? Will his nerves get the best of him? Can he reclaim the No. 1 spot?

Nikki Romanello,  whose work blurs the line between art and science, invites viewers to contemplate their place in the web of life.

The evolution of Romanello’s art reflects evolution in nature: Found bones become bones cast in glycerin, which become skeletal animals from alternate pre-histories, which in turn become prints. In her latest project, she uses “living paper” created by feeding kombucha tea to bacteria to create sculptures of tubeworms that live near hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean.

She wants her art to reflect the transience of existence, the haphazard nature of evolution and the connections between all living creatures.