BIOS
FRIDAY EVENING KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Caitlin Strokosch is President & CEO of the National Performance Network Caitlin was appointed President & CEO of the National Performance Network in 2016 and led the organization’s strategic plan to make explicit NPN’s commitment to building artists’ power and advancing racial justice. Previously, she served the Artist Communities Alliance—an international association of artist residency centers—from 2002 to 2016, where, as Executive Director, she was instrumental in creating the Artist Communities division at the NEA in 2008. Caitlin is a past board member of Grantmakers in the Arts and Girls Rock! Rhode Island. She currently serves on the advisory committee of Transcultural Exchange, is Secretary of the Board of the Performing Arts Alliance, and is a board member of Louisiana Partnership for the Arts. Caitlin has a BA in music performance from Columbia College Chicago and a Master’s in musicology from Roosevelt University, where her research focused on music as a tool for building communities.
Michael J. Bobbitt is the Executive Director, Mass Cultural Council. He is also a theater director, choreographer, and playwright who has dedicated his professional career to arts leadership. He joined Mass Cultural Council as Executive Director in February 2021, and is the highest-ranking cultural official in Massachusetts state government. Michael has led Mass Cultural Council through the development of its first-ever Racial Equity Plan; worked with staff, Council Members, and cultural sector advocates to secure and distribute a historic $60.1M in state pandemic relief funding; and overseen the drafting and adoption of the Agency’s FY24-FY26 strategic plan. In 2023 Michael received the prestigious Kennedy Center Gold Medallion in recognition of his commitment to the arts and educational theater and was appointed by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey to serve on her Advisory Council on Black Empowerment. Michael has directed/choreographed at Arena Stage, Ford’s Theatre, The Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera, and others.
Lisa Funderburke is the President & CEO, Artist Communities Alliance. She is a systems thinker and coalition builder whose work and research examines equitable engagement. A dynamic facilitator, she works with residencies, foundations, and other nonprofits on developing effective strategy and improving the efficacy of teams and programs. A scientist by training, she has served as a herbarium collections manager and public school educator; and has held leadership posts at McColl Center for Art + Innovation and Charlotte Nature Museum, among others. She is currently on the Grantmakers in the Arts Individual Artist Committee, and serves on the boards of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Rustle Lab, and Orion Magazine.
Kristopher McDowell is the Founder of KMP Artists. He has produced over 1,300 performances and residencies in 17 countries with an emphasis on Asia and the Americas, including major tours with Mariah Carey, Molly Ringwald, Scottish Ballet, West Australian Ballet, PHILADANCO!, Beijing Dance Theater, and more. In the U.S., he is invested in various productions on Broadway including the current production of “Merrily We Roll Along”, starring Daniel Radcliffe. As Founding Partner for Rhizome Consulting, Kristopher supports clients in the Arts & Entertainment industry on venue and event management, marketing, fundraising, and income diversification. He is also a former faculty member at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy for performance, producing, and arts management.
Ronee Penoi is the Interim Executive Director for ArtsEmerson – Boston’s leading presenter of contemporary world theater – and the Office of the Arts, Emerson College. Previously, Ronee Penoi (Laguna Pueblo/Cherokee) was a Producer with Octopus Theatricals. Ronee is on the board of the Producer Hub and is a Founding Member of The Industry Standard Group, a multimedia commercial investment and producing organization with an intentional focus on increasing the presence of BIPOC investors and producers in the commercial producing field. She is also co-founder of the Groundwater Arts Collective dedicated to climate justice in the arts, a proud advisor to New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, and part of the working consortium of First Nations Performing Arts. She spent three years with the Consensus Building Institute, a nonprofit specializing in facilitation and mediation services. Her current anti-racism practice builds upon a decolonization framework and embraces systems change as a key component of that work.
SATURDAY EVENING KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Organized by PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection
Other Speakers TBA.
Achiro P. Olwoch is a Ugandan writer, playwright and screenwriter currently living in exile in New York. She tells stories that start conversations, often writing about subjects that her part of the world calls forbidden. A former air hostess who hates flying, Achiro knows full well how to turn uncomfortable situations into a story. The name Achiro is short for Achirochan which means ‘the resilient one’. This best describes Achiro who was born in exile and when they returned lived in exile within her country because of the ongoing civil war in her homeland and now finds herself in exile. Regardless she keeps going and turns every trial and triumph into a story. When she is not writing, Achiro is reading. Like her favorite authors, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo and her late father, she delights in writing history and present day politics in story.
Complete List of Conference Speakers in Alphabetical Order
Antoine Abi Aad (Ph.D. and MA University of Tsukuba in Japan, DES Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Lebanon) is an educator, visual communicator, researcher, and Associate Professor at Zayed University, Dubai. He has also conducted talks and workshops at numerous institutions, including the Universidade de Brasília, Institute of Business and Design (Moscow), Hong Kong Design Institute, IIT Bombay, Greenside Design Center College of Design (Johannesburg), International Design School (Jakarta), Nara University of Education (Japan), Boston University, and Yale University. Having participated in 62 exhibitions (35 cities, 20 countries), lectured in 48 universities (24 countries), and taught 2236 students since 2004, Antoine’s true dedication is to research and experimentation. His passion is for letters, typography, calligraphy, and handwriting. His scripts (Arabic, Latin, and Japanese) led him to have special interests in the directions of writing, leftward, rightward, and downward, and how they affect visual communication and advertising, or even more, motion graphics and animation.
Farrukh Addnan, a visual artist based in Lahore, Pakistan, utilizes drawing and photography to explore the traces of his ancient historic hometown, Tulamba, and its cultural memory. The history of Tulamba dates back to the 2nd century BC, and Addnan’s work focuses on the patterns and structures found in the area’s ruins. He conducts meticulous research and documentation directly on-site, collecting relics and utilizing his own movement and experiences as mapping tools. During his childhood, Addnan developed an interest in collecting shreds, coins, and terracotta toys from the ruins of Tulamba. He would draw lines, create various shapes, animals, and pots, and even write names on muddy surfaces. Through his art, Addnan explores the interconnectedness of space, history, and artifacts, creating a visual language that reflects the layers of memory and the richness of his cultural heritage.
Faustin Adeniran is a Nigerian-American artist based in New Haven who repurposes aluminum cans and other metals to create layered wall reliefs, woven mesh, and sculptures. His work is heavily influenced by African metalwork and methods. Even before the official start of our project, Faustin is developing the processes to work successfully with medical clinician-trainees through pilot weaving workshops for the current pool of 16 medical residents in Yale Pediatrics. Faustin is developing a community-based practice as a core part of his artistic practice (work for which he has been awarded a CT Office of the Arts Artists Respond grant.
Since 2003, Juan Aguilar Sandoval has played key roles in the fields of community ecotourism and sustainable forestry development, based in his Indigenous P’urhépecha community of Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutiro, Michoacán, Mexico. He completed studies in Graphic Design at Don Vasco University. During his career, he has been the General Manager of the Community Ecotourism Network of Michoacán and Coordinator of Community-to-Community Seminars, fostering the exchange of experiences among rural communities and promoting sustainable tourism. He has participated as a speaker in both national and international conferences, including the International Forum on Solidarity Tourism in Chiapas and the International Forum on Ecotourism in Natural Protected Areas in Puerto Vallarta, both in Mexico. He has also attended Ecotourism forums in Guatemala and Nicaragua. He currently serves as Manager of the Ecotourism Company of the Indigenous P’urhépecha Community of Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutiro, where he continues to promote conservation and responsible tourism initiatives.
Yemi Alalade is an Invention Educator, a Consultant at Lemelson-MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts), an accidental artist, and a founder of ANIKE. Her organization explores nature-inspired indigenous knowledge in Africa and promotes representation in invention education. ANIKE’s learning platform/NatureLab, enlightens and inspires innovative thinking among youth by charting the evolution of Africa’s indigenous artistic practices in Cambridge, sponsored by Lemelson-MIT. Yemi completed her undergraduate studies in Economics at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and her graduate studies were in Counseling & Therapy (Saint Louis University) and later Museum Studies (Harvard Extension School). A collection of her initial accidental artwork, “Orí-Ire: Rhymes, Rhythm & Reanimation,” was exhibited at the YWCA Cambridge and featured in Harvard’s Visual & Environmental Studies Documentary highlighting Women at the YWCA in 2018. She enjoys sketching, traveling, and documenting artistic practices/indigenous technology within the African diaspora. She is an affiliate of the MIT OpenCourseWare Mirror Site Program in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Bénédicte Alliot, PhD, was assistant professor at Université Paris-Diderot (Paris) until 2002 in Postcolonial and translation studies. She then moved to Johannesburg as the director of the French Institute (2002-2006), and then to New Delhi as the cultural attachée of the French Embassy (2006-2010). From 2010 until early 2016 she headed the Cultural Season festival programmes at the Institut français in Paris. Since 2016, she is the head of the Cité internationale des arts. The Cité is an art residency centre located in central Paris (in the Marais and in Montmartre) which welcomes simultaneously more than 300 artists of all generations, practices and nationalities. It runs cultural and artistic programs throughout the year. Photo Credit: Maurine Tric/ADAGP.
Yazmany Arboleda is a Colombian-American artist who served as the first People’s Artist for New York City at the Civic Engagement Commission and founded the People’s Creative Institute. An architect by training, Yazmany’s art practice fosters community connections through expansive public art initiatives. In 2022, as the lead creative producer for Little Amal Walks NYC, he designed 55 events experienced by more than 100,000 people across all five boroughs. He is the Senior Artistic Advisor for the Community Art Network. Carnegie Hall, the Yale School of Management, and the United Nations have previously commissioned him.
Amanda Barrow is a visual artist living/working in Massachusetts. Originally from the Midwest, she has lived on the East Coast and India since 1982. Her prints, paintings, and artist’s books reside in collections around the world: Massachusetts College of Art and Design, MoMA/NYC, Paul Matisse/Groton, MA, and the Museum of the Book, The Netherlands. Her artwork presents a broad range of abstractions utilizing nature, architecture, and the human body as Barrow’s primary sources of inspiration. In 1992, Barrow received a Fulbright research grant to work and study printmaking in India: in 2023, she was accepted as a Fulbright Specialist. Barrow has received numerous fellowships, several Mass Cultural Council grants, a Drawing Center/NYC honorarium, and a Lower East Side Printshop residency in NYC, among other awards. Speedball Art Products sponsor Amanda Barrow; she has taught Monotype printmaking techniques in Iceland, Germany, India, Colorado, New York City, and Massachusetts, etc.
Eben Bayer is the CEO of Ecovative, which he co-founded in 2007 shortly after graduating from New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Ecovative is now the leading mycelium technology company in the world. He is also a Co-founder of MyForest Foods and is listed as an inventor on 64+ patents. As an entrepreneur, inventor, and futurist, Eben speaks worldwide, communicating the immense potential of natural technologies and advocating sustainable stewardship of Spaceship Earth. He has presented at TED Global (London) and the World Economic Forum (Davos, Switzerland) and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list (US). Eben’s areas of interest and activity extend beyond mycelium technology into agriculture, energy, physics, biopharmaceuticals, and alternative monetary systems.
Courtney Bethel is the Admissions Director at MacDowell, a contemporary leader in artists’ residency programs whose mission has been advancing artistic freedom since 1907. For more than 20 years, she has guided the application experience for artists. Bethel’s responsibilities include overseeing over 4,000 applications and coordinating a selection process that fields rotating admissions panels in seven disciplines twice a year. Bethel currently serves as a member of MacDowell’s Leadership Team. Before joining MacDowell in 2000, Bethel served as an information coordinator with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps at Women Together/Mujeres Unidas in McAllen, Texas, and as an intern with the International Rescue Committee in London, UK. In her free time, Courtney loves reading, traipsing around the woods time with her husband, children, and dog, Gracie, and tending to her chickens.
Kathleen Bitetti is a Boston-based independent curator and arts administrator with over 30 years of experience. She is also a practicing visual artist, and her most recent solo show was at Boston’s Gallery Kayafas. Currently, she provides curatorial programming for Spoke (formerly Medicine Wheel Productions) in its Spoke Gallery. In the Fall of 2016, she was the curator for Tír na Óg, an international outdoor temporary public art project in Boston that collaborated with many organizations, including Medicine Wheel Productions, the Fenway Alliance, the City of Boston, and Culture Ireland. Tír na nÓg was supported by Culture Ireland as part of the Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme- a global initiative to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which set Ireland on its path to independence. Photo Credit: Craig Bailey.
Andrée-Anne Blacutt is a doctoral design and social innovation candidate at Université Laval. The processes of sensory perception are at the center of her research and creation process. She has completed a Master’s Degree in Visual Arts based on a narrative visual and sound system of narrative motifs. Since 2001, Andrée-Anne has presented projects that multiply how human beings can be contextualized differently according to space and time. Her creative domains include theater, painting, design, television, and music. She is currently working on a project to improve the quality of mobility of people as a value to foster a model of interaction between art and science.
Susanna Bolle is a Boston-based curator and concert organizer. Over the past 20 years, she has put together over 500 concerts in a wide variety of often unusual or nontraditional spaces in and around the city. Since 2007 she has been the main organizer of Non-Event, a concert series devoted to the presentation of experimental, abstract, improvised, and adventurous music from New England and around the world. She is also the longtime producer and host of the radio program, Rare Frequency, on WZBC.
Sara Bouzgarrou is a Tunisian member of the Mouhit Space, publisher/printmaker, cook, and cultural coordinator/consultant. Through her interdisciplinary approach, she is interested in the intersection between print, food studies, and feminist issues.
Mary Sherwood Brock is an artist and independent curator based in Los Angeles. She has created national and international calls for art with themes on the environment, migration, and immigration. Awarded an NEA, a Fellowship from the Mass Council and several travel grants, her personal artistic focus has been in printmaking which she has taught along with studio arts for the past two decades. She has worked with arts organizations in North America and abroad to create events that include her workshops and artist collaborations, such as her most recent projects, “ImMigration Project” and “Paper Boats”.
Janette Brossard Duharte is an prominent Cuban artist with many awards and artist residencies for her unique work in printmaking. She was included in the 20/20 Contemporary Cuban Printmaking at Highpoint Center for Printmaking and was the 2015 Artist in Residence at Mass College of Art and part of the 2018 International Printmaking Symposium at UMASS Amherst. She has led workshops in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Open Studio in Geneva, Switzerland, and in Mexico and Australia. She is currently the president of UNEAC and has had numerous solo exhibitions for the past 23 years, the most recent being “the world as a supermarket,” a powerful reflection of the effects of consumerism on the environment.
Eli Brown is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, comics, and community organizing. Eli’s work explores queer and trans intimacies through time and cross-generational dynamics. They are especially interested in asking what the future of human evolution could look like if we reimagined reproduction as a queer, ecological strategy. Recent work has been featured at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston Huntington Library, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Creative Time Summit X. Most recent work is flown at Tailgate Projects in Tampa, FL.
Vytautas Bucionis is a doctoral student at the University of Montreal and an avid ornithologist, intertwines his love for music composition with his passion for bird study. His compositions are inspired by the melodies and rhythms of bird songs, which he has been recording, cataloging and analyzing for 15 years. Bucionis’s work represents a unique fusion of natural soundscapes and musical creativity, offering listeners a journey through the harmonic complexity of the avian world. As a composer, his pieces often reflect a deep engagement with the environment, exploring the musicality inherent in nature. Bucionis’s research and compositions highlight the importance of ecological awareness and the potential for nature to influence and enrich the artistic process.
After working as an executive for several international cultural projects, Jelle Burggraaff joined DutchCulture as the head of the Mobility & Advice team, which includes TransArtists, the Mobility Info Point, and Creative Europe Desk NL. What inspires him the most is providing cultural and creative professionals and organizations with the best possible advice on the wide range of international provisions and opportunities to collaborate. Jelle is also a Panel Member of the European Commission for the Expert Panel for the European Capitals of Culture 2020-2033 and the Chair of the Board of Opera Spanga.
Pauline Burmann is the director of the africanartsandtheory.nl platform. She studied art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She specialized in the African contemporary art history of Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In addition to her activities as director, she is also active as an independent researcher and exhibition maker. She collaborates with artists, universities, artists in residencies, art collectives, museums, and other institutions worldwide. Burmann is a member of the advisory board of the Vereniging Rembrandt. She is also a board member of Deveron Projects Artist in Residency Scotland and chairperson of the board of Amsterdam-based Thami Mnyele Foundation Artist in Residency Award. She is writing a Ph.D. on invitation by the Robert Gordon University Scotland to write a Ph.D. by public output on the artist in residency Thami Mnyele Foundation.
Chiara Caiazzo is a PhD candidate in Contemporary Philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University and a Fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she is part of the “Cultural Agents” Initiative. Her work explores the intertwining of artistic and political practices, revealing how cultural interventions can disclose absent emergencies and provide tools to navigate contemporary crises. Through Hermeneutics, she proposes an alternative view of Aesthetics as a discipline that has at its core the civic engagement of the Humanities. She combines her research with her photographic practice. Her work primarily focuses on experimental filmmaking, portrait photography, and digital illustration.
Pablo Caligaris. Buenos Aires, 1970. Cultural mediator and curator. He is the director of La Ira de Dios where he has been developing artistic and residency programs since 2014. He is involved in the organization and coordination of Red Quincho, which brings together art residencies in Argentina. He is a professor of Cultural Management at USAL, Faculty of History and Art Management. He has curated projects at Fundación PROA (Contemporary Space), Das Weisse Haus (Vienna), and Edinburgh Art Festival, among others. He has participated in international collaborations with Matadero Madrid, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshops, and Casa Tomada (São Paulo), and his projects have received support from the Ministry of Culture, National Arts Fund, British Council, Goethe Institut, Cultural Patronage, and Pro Helvetia, among others.
Dr. Stephanie Couch is the Executive Director of the Lemelson-MIT Program administered by the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research explores ways prolific inventors find and develop technological solutions to problems, drawing on knowledge and practices from many different disciplines. She also examines factors that support or constrain the development of creative and inventive problem-solving capabilities among people at different age ranges and stages of development. Her research informs LMIT’s efforts to remedy historic inequities in the U.S. with respect to who develops and protects their intellectual property. Prior to joining the Lemelson-MIT Program, Stephanie worked in California in numerous roles focused on K-12 and higher education policy including school finance and technology in teaching and learning. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from UC Davis and a MA/PhD in education from UC Santa Barbara.
Hope Campbell Gustafson is the Senior Program Associate for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She manages the residency selection process, affiliations, and grants. She has been connected with Civitella since her first internship in Umbria in 2012 and has worked in the New York office since 2018.
Nerea Campo is the director of A cobert, a space for critical thinking and artistic creation in Moianès, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. She graduated with a degree in literary studies from the University of Barcelona. She is part of the board of directors of Xarxaprod, a network of creative spaces in Catalonia. She coordinates – and participates in – artistic projects related to literature, cinema, and critical thinking from an unorthodox feminist perspective. She has been production manager for the Panoràmic festival and production manager in films. She is part of the curatorial team of the Ex Abrupto Festival. As an emerging curator, she has curated, among others, Politics of Desire in 2021 for the Ex Abrupto Festival; panels on critical thinking, such as of violence in art or for a violent art for the Saó Festival 2023 of the Farrera CAN. For 2024, she prepared a collective curatorship around art as a record of conflicting belief systems.
Nora Dominga Carrasco Apaza studied visual arts – sculpture at the National Superior Autonomous School of Fine Arts of Peru (1998 – 2004), Advertising Graphic Design at the National Superior Technological Institute of Design (1993 – 1995) and Design of Commercial and Residential Spaces at the Toulouse Lautrec Higher Institute of Communication and Design (2009 – 2010). She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Visual Anthropology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. With the AMAZÓNIKAS initiative “Art and Sustainable Design,” she works on the design, development, and promotion of products with communities in the Peruvian Amazon (Shipibo Konibo, Awajun, Bora, Mashiguenga, Kichwa, Ashaninka, and Yanesha), promoting traditional/ancestral techniques and the responsible use of natural resources through co-design.
Pieranna Cavalchini is the Tom & Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she has organized over 34 exhibitions and produced many catalogues and artist books. For the museum’s centennial, she curated a three-part project with Joseph Kosuth. During her tenure at the museum, the Artists-in-Residence program has included over 70 well-known and emerging artists from around the world, representing a wide range of disciplines. Prior to the Gardner, she served as a Special Advisor to Rome’s Incontri Internazionali d’Arte and as coordinator for the Concerti di Mezzogiorno at the Festival of Two Worlds of Spoleto. She was the Italian Coordinator at P.S.1 for The Knot Arte Povera and Michelangelo Pistoletto at P.S1 and Isamu Noguchi at the Venice Biennale, and Special Advisor to Geneva-based Art for the World, which included the traveling exhibition Playgrounds & Toys, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees.
Raquel Chapin Stephenson is a professor in the Expressive Therapies Department at Lesley University. As a Fulbright Scholar, she taught at Tallinn University in Estonia and is also adjunct faculty at the School of Visual Art. Dr. Stephenson’s clinical work and research focus on the intersection of arts and aging. She was co-founder and teaching artist for the Creative Approaches to Healthy Aging program, funded by two National Endowment for the Arts ArtWorks Grants. She was New York University’s Creative Aging Therapeutic Services’ founder, clinical supervisor, and program director. She published Art Therapy and Creative Aging: Reclaiming Elderhood, Health and Wellbeing and serves on the National Advisory Council and Program Advisory Committee of Arts for the Aging. She also serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Creativity and Human Development. She is a member of the UNESCO-UNITWIN Chair on Life Design, Decent Work, and Sustainable Development.
Anna Chistoserdova was born in Minsk in 1982 and has been based in Berlin, Germany since 2021. She is the managing partner and co-founder of two independent galleries, Podzemka and Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus (2004-2020), and co-founder, manager, and curator of the NGO Ambasada Kultury, founded in 2014 in Vilnius, Lithuania. Anna co-initiated the creation of the International Coalition of Culture Workers in Solidarity with Ukraine, an online platform of anti-war coalition art, and is the manager of Perspective, a program of art residencies in Germany and Poland for Belarusian culture workers. Anna was awarded a European Diploma on Cultural Project Management and Cultural Policy (Marcel Hicter Association, Brussels) and is a member of ICOM, European Culture Parliament, Advisory Committee of Eastern Partnership Culture Programme, Natasa – Eastern Partnership Civil Society Platform for Culture, Oracle Cultural Network, Trans European Halle.
Brice Coniglio is a visual artist, video, and theater director (within the group Coniglioviola), project manager, and artistic director of the non-profit Kaninchen-Haus. His activities are characterized by an attempt to redefine the artist’s figure via strategies and programs that champion unconventional relationships with the system and via artistic practice as a vehicle for an imagined escape from the concepts of “identity” and “profession.”
Kate Copeland is an artist, educator, and administrator at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) at Willamette University in Portland, Oregon. Copeland is the recipient of two Fulbright Scholar grants and currently serves as a Fulbright Scholar Alumni Ambassador. During her Fulbright Scholar grant to India in 2013, Copeland created artwork and taught workshops within the Graphic Arts Department at Maharaja Sayajirao University Baroda. During her Fulbright Scholar grant to Belgium in 2022, she served as an artist-in-residence at Industriemuseum in Ghent, taught workshops in the Printmaking Department of Royal Academy of Art Antwerp and researched collegiate art mergers. Copeland exhibits nationally, most recently in a two-person show with Ayumi Ishii at Chazan Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island.
From interactive portraits to immersive apparatuses, Luc Courchesne has created engaging works that have been widely exhibited and collected. He has received numerous awards, including the Grand Prix at the ICC Biennale in Tokyo (1997), the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas (2019), and Canada’s Governor General’s Award in Media Arts (2021). A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Courchesne is an honorary professor at Université de Montréal. Founding member of the Society for Art and Technology and member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts since 2010, he is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain (PFOAC) in Montreal. Photo Credit: Eric Labonte.
Jay Critchley was honored by the Massachusetts State Legislature as an artist, founder, and director of the Provincetown Community Compact, producer of the Swim for Life, which has raised $6M for AIDS, women’s health, and the community, and offers fiscal sponsorship for numerous projects and future nonprofits. He is a conceptual, multidisciplinary artist, writer, and activist whose work challenges corporate dominance and influence and engages with the environment and the shifting dunes, landscape, and sea, locally sourcing sand, Christmas trees, fish skins, plastic tampon applicators washed up on beaches and pre-demolition buildings. His work has traversed the globe across the US and Argentina, Japan, England, Spain, France, Holland, Ireland, Germany, and Columbia. He has had a residency and lectured at Harvard University. He gave a TEDx Talk, Portrait of the Artist as a Corporation, his movie, Toilet Treatments, won an HBO Award, and had survey shows at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum and Florida Atlantic University.
Ada Pilar Cruz has an MFA in sculpture and printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work was exhibited in New York, the US, and internationally. Cruz is a Museum Educator at MoMA and The Drawing Center and a professor of Art History at Mercy College. Among the awards and residencies she has received are Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990; Jerome Foundation Grant and Residency, 1989; New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, 1993; Lower East Side Printshop, 1997; Ellenville, NY Storefront Residency, 2007; Museum of Art and Design, 2014; RIA/CE, India, 2016; Nes AIR in Iceland, 2017, 2019, 2021; Baer AIR, Iceland, 2021, Herhusid AIR, Iceland, 2023, The Arctic Circle Residency, October 2023. Recent AIRs include – Herhusid, Siglufjordur, Iceland, and The Arctic Circle Residency (Svalbard, Norway). She is a member of Buster Levi Gallery, Cold Spring, NY, and Taller Boricua, Rafael Tufino Print studio, Spanish Harlem, NY.
Deborah Davidson is an artist, curator and educator. Her curatorial practice is an equal portion in that equation. She has been the curator and director of the Suffolk University Gallery since 2013, with a continued focus on the exciting Boston area artists. Davidson also has worked as an independent curator, mostly recently at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She has a particular interest in the intersection of many disciplines, which often determines the theme and content of her exhibitions. In addition, she founded and directs Catalyst Conversations, an organization devoted to the dialogue between art and science.
Marie Deparis-Yafil graduated from the Sorbonne with a philosophy and art history degree. She has been an art critic – a member of AICA- and an independent curator for nearly twenty years. Her published texts have appeared in almost eighty books in France and abroad, and she has organized more than forty exhibitions in art centers, museums, and heritage sites in France and several other countries. Among her projects, she has curated exhibitions for the French National Monuments Center and International Biennales (Dakar Biennial, BiennalSur). She also curated the first contemporary art exhibition in Europe’s largest medieval monument and the most significant contemporary art exhibition ever held in Algeria. She is initiating a program of contemporary art exhibitions with international artists at the Shoah Memorial in Paris. In 2024, among several other exhibitions, she is curating an exhibition dedicated to an unrecognized American hero, Varian Fry, who saved the lives of many major 20th-century artists.
Shana Dumont Garr is a writer, educator, and curator in Massachusetts. She is a professor and gallery staff at Emerson College and a doctoral student in art theory and philosophy at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Her research explores spirituality and technology as it impacts human and other-than-human relationships. Her previous positions include the Curator of Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA; the Director of Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA; the Director of Programs and Exhibitions at Artspace, Raleigh; and Assistant Curator of Montserrat College of Art Galleries in Beverly, MA. She earned an MA from Boston University in Boston, MA, and a BA from Colby College in Waterville, ME. She recently presented her research at SECAC, CAA, and the Black Mountain College Conference conferences, among others, and she will present at the Beyond Humanism Conference in Warsaw, Poland in July 2024.
David S. East is the Executive Director of the Watershed Center for the Ceramics Arts. With over 20 years’ experience as an artist and educator, East is engaged in curatorial work, writing and service to a number of arts organizations. Currently, serving as the Faculty Advisor/ Chair of Ceramics at the Maryland Institute College of Art, David S. East has taught and been a visiting artist at numerous locations including University of Missouri-Columbia (Assistant Professor 2001-2007), Alfred University, Kansas City Art Institute, and the Tainan National College of Art, Tainan, Taiwan. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including in the GICBiennale 2011, 2015 and 2017 Icheon, Korea, solo exhibitions at the Jane Hartsook Gallery, Greenwich House Pottery, NY and Schulman Project, Baltimore, among others others. He has received numerous awards including, Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, the Lighton Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation.
Alicia Ehni is an artist and Program Officer at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), working closely with Fiscally Sponsored projects on strategic planning and fundraising. At NYFA, she has also facilitated numerous professional development programs for artists and cultural workers. Ehni studied fine arts at Universidad Católica, Pratt Institute (BFA), Hunter College (MFA) and Arts Administration at NYU. She was the Director of Frederico Seve Gallery/Latin collector in her previous role.
Franklin Einspruch is a visual artist who paints, draws, prints, and uses digital media. He is also active in art criticism, comics, and alternative publishing. His art has appeared in 20 solo exhibitions and 42 group exhibitions. He has been a resident artist at programs in Italy, Greece, Taiwan, and the United States. He was the Fulbright-Q21/MuseumsQuartier Artist-In-Residence for 2019 in Vienna. Einspruch has authored 245 essays and art reviews for many publications, including The New Criterion and Art in America. He is the proprietor of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project for artists who love beauty and freedom. He lives in rural New Hampshire.
Janeil Engelstad designs and produces interdisciplinary art projects that address social and environment concerns throughout the world. Her process for this work, which can be as valuable as the outcome, involves embedding herself in communities, extensive research, collaboration and coalition building. The Founding Director of Make Art with Purpose (MAP), an organization that produces collaborative social practice projects, her work has been produced and exhibited in partnership with: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Central European Foundation; City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; Dallas Museum of Art; International Center of Photography, New York; Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, PL; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Oboro, Montréal; Stanica Žilina-Záriečie, Slovakia; U.S. Embassy, Sudan and many others. A Fulbright Scholar, Engelstad is faculty at University of Washington’s Institute for Innovation and Global Engagement and a member of the Social Practice Art Research Center at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Alfonso Ferdández: SomosNosotros, visual artists and curators at Ey! Studio (Madrid) holds degrees in Fine Arts, Education, and Culture and a master’s in research and creation. They have individually exhibited at Parallel Vienna, the Cultural Center of Spain in Panama, and the Reina Sofía National Museum. Their work has been featured in group exhibitions at Fotonoviembre, Estampa, and La Térmica, among others. They have received awards such as the Creation Grants from the Madrid City Council, the ArteLateral-OpenStudio Prize, and the Les Clíniques Es Baluard Fellowship. They have been residents at La Térmica, Espacio Oculto, and Arte y Desarrollo and have conducted workshops at the MNCARS and Art Madrid. Their accolades include the Hamaca-Museo Reina Sofía Prize and selections for the Obra Abierta Prize and Arte Joven UCM. Their contributions to art are widely recognized, leaving a significant mark on national and international cultural scenes.
Claudia Fiks is an art administrator with over two decades of dedication to the arts and culture sector. She is the founder and director of the New England Art Center, a newly established membership organization featuring The Art Gallery (TAG) and serves as the Director of Galatea Fine Art in Boston. Claudia is the director at Newton Open Studios, contributes as a writer and correspondent for Artscope Magazine, and leads guided tours at prestigious art fairs such as Art Basel and Art Miami Basel. As an independent consultant, she provides expertise to various art organizations and artists, helping to shape their programs and initiatives. Her extensive career includes notable positions such as Program Director and Development Director at esteemed institutions like the Eliot School for Fine and Applied Arts, Fuller Craft Museum, and the Society of Arts and Crafts. Beyond her administrative duties, Claudia serves as a grant panelist for the Mass Cultural Council.
Yulia Fisch (Basel, Switzerland) is an interdependent curator and cultural worker, holding an MA in Art Education and Curatorial Studies from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZhDK). She is also a co-founder and member of the collective Beyond the post-soviet. Following her leadership of the project Earthbound – In Dialogue with Nature (for the Cultural City of Europe, Esch-sur-Alzette 2022, at the House of Electronic Arts, HEK in Basel), Yulia worked as an Assistant Curator at the Fotomuseum Winterthur. Additionally, she was the curator for the exchange program within the Pro Helvetia Global Network & International Affairs Department. She has over ten years of work experience and expertise in new media art, performance, and photography. Yulia’s curated projects are based on performative and discursive formats aimed at questioning history, exploring mythologies and alternative forms of knowledge, and seeking strategies for forming new communities and interaction scenarios.
Dorothea Fleiss is a visual artist and a life-long believer in artistic collaboration across the arts. Her paintings, installations, works on paper, and book art were exhibited in more than 70 solo and 200 group shows. She obtained her Doctorate at UNArte (National University of Arts) Bucharest. As an artist, she has participated in the Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale in South Korea, DakÁrt Biennale Senegal, Biennale Cuenca Ecuador, and Biennale of Cairo. She is the co-founder and director of the DFEWA Artists Association, based in Dresden, Germany, and the curator of the DFEWA’s two-week residencies Carei, Romania; Mallnitz, Austria; Marrakesh, Morocco; Valparaiso, Chile; New York City, USA; Budapest and Nograd- Hungary; Stuttgart and Dresden- Germany; Paraza and Lyon -France, Totovo Selo, Serbia; Qinhuangdao, Heze and Harbin, China; Zhutian, Taiwan; Chiang Mai, Thailand. Additionally, she is the founder and curator of the EIBAB – European International Book Art Biennale.
Rita A. Fucillo is grateful for an extensive and happy career spent working in the arts. A graduate of Boston’s Commonwealth School and Brandeis University, her experience includes theatrical general management, arts marketing and communications, public relations, theatrical producing and, most prominently, arts publishing. A lifelong writer and editor, Rita is publisher of Art New England magazine—the region’s premier resource for contemporary art and culture—as well as numerous custom publishing titles, most serving the arts and hospitality sectors. Guest speaker appearances include Sotheby’s Institute of Art, TransCultural Exchange Conferences, American Women Artists, Canvas Fine Arts events, numerous art association programs, guest juror appearances, among others. A certified life coach specializing in coaching artists and creatives on their personal and professional goals, Rita has dedicated her career to providing a platform and a sounding board for the artist’s journey.
Laura Garbštienė graduated from Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2000 with a master’s in visual arts. Her recent practice encompasses temporal art forms and reflections on natural phenomena, ecological awareness, domesticity, and the decline of rural life. Since 2013 Garbštienė has lived in a small village near Dzūkija National Park with a herd of Skudde sheep, where she promotes spinning wool as an anti-capitalist movement to unite people from diverse cultural backgrounds. In 2017, she started Verpėjos (The Spinners) – an artist-run initiative to research and discuss rural traditional lifestyle and nature preservation locally and globally. Her works were shown at the Contemporary Art Centre, National Gallery of Art and VARTAI Gallery in Vilnius; Rauma Biennale Balticum in Finland (2004); Prague Biennale (2007); Liverpool Biennial (2010); Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (2010); Museum of Photography, Seoul (2021).
Erin Genia (she/her), an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer specializing in Native American and Indigenous arts and culture. Genia’s work in these areas is focused on amplifying the powerful presence of Indigenous peoples in the arts, sciences, and public realm to invoke an evolution of thought and practice aligned with the natural world’s cycles and humanity’s potential. Genia’s artistic practice merges Dakota cultural imperatives, pure expression, and exploration of materiality with the conceptual. She is fluent in multiple modes of expression: sculpture, fibers, sound, performance, digital media, writing, painting, printmaking, jewelry, and ceramics.
Tasha Golden, PhD is Director of Research at the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University and a national leader and consultant in arts + public health. Dr. Golden has published extensively on the impacts of the arts, music, aesthetics, and creativity on health and well-being. She serves as an advisor on several national and international health initiatives. EGolden is also a career artist and entrepreneur. As singer-songwriter for the critically acclaimed band Ellery, she toured full-time in the US and abroad, and her songs appear in feature films and TV dramas (ABC, SHOWTIME, FOX, NETFLIX, etc). She is a published poet (Humanist Press) and founder of Project Uncaged: a trauma-informed creative writing program for incarcerated teen women that amplifies their voices in justice reform.
Janet Goldner is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her steel sculpture, photography, video, text, installation, and social projects bridge diverse cultures, exploring and celebrating similarities and differences. Goldner’s work has been exhibited in over thirty solo exhibitions and over one hundred fifty group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. Highlights from Goldner’s museum exhibitions include Global Africa Project, Museum of Art and Design, New York; Women Facing AIDS, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York; Visions of Life, Islip Museum, Islip, NY; and Bronx Museum of the Arts. Permanent collections include the American Embassy in Mali, Segou, Mali, and the Islip Museum on Long Island, NY. She received a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to Mali and four Fulbright Specialist grants (Mali, Zimbabwe, Japan, Uganda) as well as grants from the Ford Foundation, the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the US Dept of State, Public Diplomacy.
Joshua Goode: Born: Fort Worth, Texas,1981; MFA: Boston University. He is researching mythic historical misinterpretations and manipulations that expose our past, present, and future malleability, and the brazen escalation of strategic historicity in proto-dystopian empires. Exploiting his extensive historical research and experience as an archaeologist, he conducts staged excavations worldwide, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. His ‘artifacts’ have been exhibited in solo exhibitions in venues such as the Capellades Museum, Barcelona (Spain); Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai, (China); the Monichkirchen Museum, Salzwedel (Germany); Darb 1718 in Cairo, (Egypt); James Freeman Gallery, London, (England); Maxim Boxer Gallery, Moscow, (Russia); Galerie Van Caelenberg, Aalst (Belgium); and Ivy Brown Gallery, New York, (USA). He is featured in public collections including Colección SOLO, Madrid, (Spain); Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai, (China); St. Regis, Doha, (Qatar); Muzej Grada Koprivnice, Koprivnica, (Croatia); Iraq National Library, Baghdad, (Iraq); and the Al-Nour-Wal-Amal Association, Cairo, (Egypt).
Rosie Gordon-Wallace is the founder and senior curator of Diaspora Vibe Gallery and Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, one of Miami’s most talked about art incubator spaces. Always a passionate lover of art, in 1996, Gordon-Wallace made up her mind to devote herself full-time to the gallery she created and developed. Diaspora Vibe Gallery, which specializes in Caribbean and Latin American Art and emphasizes exhibiting emerging artists, supports the development of new work by resident artists by offering workshops and other skill-building opportunities for young artists. The gallery also provides educational and outreach programs for the community. Gordon-Wallace has been awarded The African Heritage Cultural Arts Center 3rd Annual Calabash Amadlozi Visual Arts Award, International Businesswoman of the Year, One of South Florida’s 50 Most Powerful Black Professionals of 2007, The Images and Voices of Hope: What Works: From Inspiration to Action award, The Champion of the Arts Award, The Red Cross Spectrum Award for Culture, The Women in International Trade Businesswoman of the Year award, and the Miami Beach Black Advisory Board Award for Arts and Culture.
Florian Grond, PhD, is an Assistant Professor for Design, Interaction Design, and Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. His research interests are participatory design in the context of disability, the arts, immersive media, and assistive technology. He has published in the fields of sound studies, auditory display, assistive technology design, immersive sound recording, and sonic ethnographies. He was the first to record with a 6-degrees-of-freedom sound recording system in several projects at McGill University and later in independent productions. Grond has several years of experience and has been published on 3D sound recording (microphone arrays) and immersive sound reproduction. In 2022, he and Melissa Park received an SSHRC Insight Development Grant for an ongoing research-creation project in which they apply immersive sound recording and narrative phenomenology to study neurodiverse multisensory experiences.
Grace Grothaus is a computational media artist whose research focuses on ecosystemic human and plant relationships amidst the global climate crisis. Her collaborative work with scientists, engineers, and artists produces physical computing installations that visualize environmental phenomena. Her artworks have been exhibited widely throughout North America and abroad on five continents, including at Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, FR), the World Creativity Biennale (Rio de Janeiro, BR), Environmental Crisis: Art & Science (London, UK), and the International Symposium of Electronic Art (Barcelona, ES & Durban, SA). Presently concluding a Ph.D. in Digital Media at York University, Grace is a Vanier and VISTA scholar and a 2021 Graduate Fellow of Academic Distinction. She has received recognition from organizations such as the US National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts.
Evelyn Grzinich boasts 20 years of experience as a freelance artist, organizer, and creative skills trainer. In 2001, she co-founded and co-led the NGO Mooste Külalisstudio (MoKS), revitalizing the rural community of Mooste in Southeast Estonia. MoKS served as a model for artist residency programs in Estonia and internationally. In 2021, as part of the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) Tartu 2024 initiative, she studied Estonian artists’ residency programs, forming the Estonian Creative Residencies Network, LOORE. Currently serving as chairwoman of LOORE, she curated the conference “How Borderless is Culture?” in cooperation with ECOC Tartu 2024, focusing on mobility issues within the cultural sector. From 2021 to 2023, she worked as a culture specialist in Põlva County. Additionally, she is a member of the curatorial-advisory board for the project CycleUp! by the Goethe Institute.
Katherine Guinness (she/her) is a theorist and historian of contemporary art. She is currently a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland and is the author of Schizogenesis: The Art of Rosemarie Trockel (Minnesota, 2019), and the co-author of the forthcoming book The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube (Stanford, 2024), as well as co-editor of the forthcoming collection Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises and Visual Art (Intellect, 2024).
Eric Gunther is an artist / designer working at the intersection of experience, technology, and well-being. Co-founder and Creative Director of SOSO, he envisions a world in which design and technology work hand in hand to unlock our collective creative potential and bring us closer to ourselves, each other, and the planet. With SOSO he has created commissions for clients including Google, IBM, and Porsche, and exhibited work internationally. In his art practice, Eric brings together meditation and emotional work with sound and vibration to invent new experiences for the body, heart, and mind. His multisensory installation, Seated Catalog of Feelings, brought joy to visitors at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum. He also co-directed End Love, a time-bending music video for OK Go, and produces electronic music.
Johan Gustavsson (born in Stockholm in 1978) is an artist, curator, and educator based in The Hague, The Netherlands. He is the co-director and curator at 1646, a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague from 2006, and frequently guest lectures at other Art institutions and Academies. Gustavsson is also a co-founder of Alternativeartguide.com and The Hague Contemporary. Previously, Gustavsson served as the head of the board at Page-not-found. Gustavsson is the curator of the large-scale exhibition ‘Prospects’ for the Mondriaan Fonds from 2020-2024 at the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam in conjunction with Art Rotterdam. Additionally, Gustavsson has worked as a Cultural Ambassador for The Hague and collaborated with various museums, galleries, and institutions worldwide.
Lux Heljardóttir is New York’s premier rune reader and a practicing revivalist Heathen. A runemaster and professional vǫlva (Old Norse term for “seeress”), Lux has 25 years experience reading runes in the throwing style. Lux began teaching independently in 2014 and then with Catland Books in Brooklyn. She is the creator of the Heiðsær sveit of touring prophetic witches, invited to bring her services all across the United States for spiritual retreats, public shows, and into peoples’ homes. She is interested in the intersection of Old Norse society and magic—and how it reverberates into the present moment. As an artist, she is a published poet and has a piece of art on rotation in the MoMA.
Kendal Henry is an artist and curator who lives in New York City and has specialized in public art for over 30 years. He illustrates that public art can be used for social engagement, civic pride, and economic development through the projects and programs he’s initiated in the US and internationally. He is the Assistant Commissioner of Public Art at the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. He oversees the city’s temporary and permanent art commissions. Kendal is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and a guest lecturer at various universities and educational institutions. Kendal served as the Director of Culture and Economic Development for the City of Newburgh, NY, and was Manager of Arts Programs at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Art and Design for eleven years.
Robinson Holloway, Founder & Executive Director, Art Fair 14C, Art Fair 14C is a nonprofit arts organization based in Jersey City, NJ. Under Holloway’s leadership, Art Fair 14C operates an annual art fair, an art gallery, a yearly Studio Tour, six neighborhood Art Crawls, and Residency 14C. Holloway currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the London-based Association of Women Art Dealers. She is also a Director of the Hudson County Chamber of Commerce and co-chair of the Nonprofit Network. Past Board service includes Chairmanship of the Jersey City Arts Council Boards and Art House Productions. Her career in arts advocacy and administration came after a long career in sports journalism, covering the PGA Tour for Sports Illustrated, ABC Sports, ESPN, and Golf Channel. She continues to work in television one day a year, writing the script for ABC’s telecast of the Rose Parade.
Hasan Hujairi (b. 1982) is a Bahraini artist, composer, and writer. His work explores the notion of the outsider, confronting (historiographic) superstructures, and the nature of constructing narratives within time. He holds a DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) in music composition from Seoul National University (Seoul, South Korea), where he researched reorienting the narrative associated with the maverick composer tradition to be more inclusive of composers working outside the Western classical music tradition. He also holds a Master of Economics from Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo, Japan) in economic history and regional economics. He wrote his thesis on the significance of conceiving the Gulf region in its littorals within a Braudelian historiographic framework. As of January 2022, he joined the Sharjah Art Foundation as a music department manager.
Katsumasa Iitaka | Art director / board chairman from NPO ANEWAL Gallery After studying urban planning and architectural design, he worked for an architectural design firm and an advertising agency before establishing ANEWAL Gallery with artists and creators in 2004. In 2013, ANEWAL Gallery became a nonprofit corporation. Currently, as a starting point for these activities, NPO ANEWAL Gallery operates KKARC as a facility for AIR, KRAFTERIA for production as a shared workshop, and ANEWAL Gallery and ANEWAL Gallery Contemporary art factory as spaces for galleries and exchanges. With the concept of “The gallery that goes to public,” the corporation connects culture and art with the community and the public in various urban spaces, from streets, alleys, temples, underground passageways, and abandoned buildings to critical cultural properties.
Jon Isherwood is an artist and educator who holds an M.F.A. from Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, and a B.A. with Honors, Canterbury College of Art, Canterbury, England. He is the recipient of a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New York at Plattsburgh. His nature-inflected sculptures, prints, and commissions can be found in numerous public and private collections and have been widely exhibited in museums and galleries in the US, Canada, Europe, and China, recently including venues in NYC and Lincoln, Massachusetts, US; Florence and Milan, Italy; Shanxi, China; and London, UK. He is also the founding director of the Digital Stone Project residency. Photo Credit: Bobby Miller.
Actor and Director Kassem Istanbouli is the Founder of the Arabic Culture and Arts Network, dealing with the design and implementation of online culture activities for Arab countries; manager and founder of the Lebanese National Theatre – Tyre; project manager at Tiro Association for Arts, Lebanon (dealing with various international projects related to capacity building, youth empowerment, equality, and working for UNESCO, DROSOS FOUNDATION, UNIFILprojects, among others); and, since 2014, leading the rehabilitation of historic cinemas, abandoned/destroyed after the war. Additionally, he is the founder and director of several cultural festivals, operating at the international level: the Tyre Short Films Festival (10 editions); the Lebanese International Theatre Festival; Women International Monodrama (4 editions); International Storytelling Festival (5 editions), Tyre International Music Festival (4 editions), as well as other international events on contemporary dance, painting and photography. Previously, from 2014 – 2020 he was a teacher of Theatre at South of Lebanon public schools.
Wendy Jehlen is the Artistic Director of ANIKAYA. She is a choreographer and community builder whose work questions the boundaries that we imagine between ourselves, and seeks to break down these imagined walls through an embodied practice of radical empathy. She has created and performed in the US, Benin, Botswana, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Canada, China, Italy, India, Japan, Mali, Mexico, Mozambique, Rwanda, Palestine and Turkey. Works include The Women Gather (2022); Conference of the Birds (2018); Entangling (2015); The Deep (2015), Lilith (2013), The Knocking Within (2012); Forest (2010); and He Who Burns (2006). Jehlen has received support from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Theater Communications Group, Japan Foundation, The Boston Foundation, NEFA, Network of Ensemble Theaters, Boston Center for the Arts, Mass Cultural Council, the NEA, and the Department of State, among others.
Farrah Karapetian is an artist and public thinker from Southern California. Her artwork is in public collections, including those of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. She is a recipient of an Art Prospect Network 2021 Fellowship to Uzbekistan; a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (2020); a Fulbright Fellowship to Russia (2018); a Pollock-Krasner Award (2017); a California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Fellowship (2014); and a Warhol Arts Writers Grant (2013); among other honors. She holds an MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles and a BA from Yale University.
Emiko Kato is based in Tokyo, where she directs the KAB Library and Residency, a renovated artists’ house in the Sumida district. She is a lecturer in the Department of Art Policy and Management at Musashino Art University, the Management Department at Atomi University, and the Liberal Arts Department at Hosei University. She facilitates the establishment of networks between international and domestic autonomous organizations and individuals in the creative fields. Emiko has curated exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and symposiums, focusing on community-based projects that promote fine arts within social contexts. She studied and worked in Britain, earning an MA degree in Museums and Galleries Management from the Department of Art Management at City University. While in Britain, she was the assistant to the Director of the Fruit Market Gallery in Edinburgh. Additionally, she studied at the MA Course, Courtauld Institution of Art History, London University.
Susan Katz has more than thirty years of experience in transnational cultural exchange. She has initiated and managed diverse projects in post-Soviet countries and the U.S. As Director of CEC ArtsLink’s Art Prospect Program (1998 – 2024) in public art, social practice art, and professional development in post-Soviet countries, Susan worked closely with a diverse network of US and international organizations, funders, and artists to develop, finance, and coordinate projects. She co-edited A Miracle or Misunderstanding, essays on socially engaged practices in ten countries, and the 2006 publication Culture and Transition, which evaluated the effectiveness of international assistance programs to help Russian cultural organizations adjust to the post-Soviet economy and new political and administrative structures. Susan has a Ph.D. in public administration (cultural policy) from New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. She wrote her dissertation on developing nonprofit cultural organizations in Russia.
Eva Khachatryan is an independent curator, Vice-President of AICA Armenia (International Association of Art Critics), and a member of CIMAM (International Committee of ICOM for Museums and Collections of Modern and Contemporary Art). From 2003 to 2008, she worked as a curator at the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA). Between 2006 and 2008, she held the position of co-director in the Department of Fine Arts at the ACCEA. Currently, she runs the suburb.am platform with a focus on project-based art residencies. Among her recent projects is “Listening to Imagine” an international group exhibition at Dalan Art Gallery, Yerevan (2020) and the collective curatorial project :”Things We Sense About Each Other” at Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe. Eva oversees Residency Programs in collaboration with Weltkunstzimmer in Düsseldorf and CEC ArtsLink. Since 2018, she has been actively involved in organizing the Armenia International Art Fair as a curator and content manager.
Elham Khattab is an arts manager, curator, and researcher. With a fine arts background, Elham Khattab founded Out Of The Circle, an art entity based in Egypt since 2013 that provides arts management and curation support for digital artists in Egypt. OOTC has been the cradle for numerous digital art projects in Egypt and abroad with the support of foreign institutes and embassies in Cairo. As the Director of OOTC, Khattab participated in several arts management, curation, and exchange programs in Egypt, the Middle East, and abroad. Recently, she graduated from The Devos Institute, a Global Arts management fellowship in Washington D.C. She is now a cohort at the MBA Arts Innovation with the Global Leaders Institute in the United States. With these experiences, Khattab aims to cement a platform for digital artists she works with within the region and internationally by linking, building community, presenting work through exhibitions and events, promoting through other partners, and giving a space for research via residency in Cairo.
Annette Klein is program curator for the performative and visual arts as well as director of the artist residency Studio 170 at the Goethe-Institut Boston. She has been curating programs that promote cultural exchange and dialogue for almost 20 years profiting from her former life as a professional musician and teacher in Germany and the US. Photo Credit: Carla Zahrte
Andrea Kleine is a writer, performance artist, arts administrator, and advocate. She is currently a Program Officer at New York Foundation for the Arts where she works closely with artists in the Fiscal Sponsorship Program, provides coaching, and develops public programming and professional development services for artists. She has been a grant writer, grant panelist, and has received numerous grants for her own work. She is interested in helping artists write and discuss their work in their own voice and connecting them to the resources they need.
Keiko Kobayashi became interested in woodblock printmaking and started practicing it around 1990 of her own accord. In 1993, she moved to Moscow to study the Russian language and lived there for a while. While living there, she studied etching at Senezh Print Center under the instruction of a Russian etching artist, Natalia Zarovnaya. Kobayashi met some Russian artists interested in Japanese water-based woodblock printmaking and taught the techniques at a Moscow art school, Prostaya Shkola. She was one of the organizers of the cultural exchange project “Mokuhanga beyond the Borders – Tokyo and Moscow” in 2018, which included a contemporary mokuhanga exhibition and a workshop. Kobayashi has been working for MI-LAB as an international coordinator since 2019 after she returned to Japan. She has participated in Mini Print International of Cadaques (Spain) since 2008 and Lessedra World Art Print Annual (Bulgaria) since 2009.
Tatiana Kochubinska is a curator, writer, researcher, and lecturer from Ukraine. She was a curator at the PinchukArtCentre for seven years, where she developed its Research Platform, creating a digital archive of Ukrainian contemporary art. In her curatorial practice, Tatiana is interested in questions of responsibility, Soviet history, its relation to today’s society, and the psychological state of the individual repeatedly, flashbacking the personal memories of the cross-border 1990s. She co-curated the International Future Generation Art Prize in Kyiv and Future Generation Art Prize@Venice as a collateral event at the 58th Venice Biennial. Tatiana edited and compiled the books “The ParCommune. Place. Community. Phenomenon” (2019) devoted to the squatting group in Kyiv in the early 1990s and co-edited “Fedir Tetianych. Frypulia” (2022). In 2023, she worked at the Dresden State Art Collections and co-curated the exhibition “Kaleidoscope of (Hi)stories. Ukrainian Art 1912-2023” at the Albertinum Museum.
Ian Koebner is a Strategic Advisor for Health and Wellness at Carnegie Hall. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor and the inaugural Director of Integrative Pain Management at the University of California, Davis (UCD). At UCD, he was the recipient of a National Institutes of Health, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NIH-NCATS) Career Development Award for his project entitled, The Analgesic Museum: The Development and Effectiveness of Museum-Based Experiences to Reduce Social Isolation and Pain Among Individuals with Chronic Pain. He has over 20 years of experience developing and evaluating innovative strategic partnerships and high-impact programs to improve individual, organizational, and community well-being.
Ni Kun is a contemporary artist, independent curator, art writer and expert in museum operations, currently based in Chongqing. He is also the co-founder and host of the non-profit organization Organhaus Art Space since 2006, the chief curator of the Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art (2015-2019) and guest curator of Vienna’s Medo Art and Mondial Research E.U. since 2017. An independent curator, he has worked in Germany, the UK, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Hongkong, Thailand, Australia and India as a visiting researcher. Since 2015, he has begun to emphasize the role of education in art institutions as a means of social intervention to explore the relationships between art organizations and the public and has curated a series of art education exhibitions and workshops. At present, he is chief curator of the O ‘Kids International Children’s Art Festival.
Dr. Braden Kuo is the Director for the Center for Neurointestinal Health at the GI Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is active clinically seeing patients and training the next generation of GI Brain Gut clinicians and researchers in the Advanced GI Motility Fellowship. He has led numerous multicenter clinical trials in gastroparesis and diagnostic device evaluation for measuring GI transit. He has received funding from the American Gastroenterology Association as well as from the NIH and philanthropy. He has also authored over 130 publications including numerous book chapters, primary investigation and the recent ACG guidelines for Gastroparesis from the American College of Gastroenterology and served editor for the most recent textbook in Gastroparesis. He has also worked collaboratively with artists on projects intersecting Medicine and Art to more thoughtfully engage audiences.
I-Chen Kuo, Founder of STUPIN Artist Studio Residency Platform. Kuo creates his unique poetic artistic language through multiple media, including new media, installation, and video. He is concerned with the floating state of the human spirit. He keeps searching for the disappearance of belonging in the modern environment. In the status of non-existence, he attempts to explore the essence of life. In 2005, Kuo became the youngest artist to represent Taiwan in the Venice Biennial. He won the Taipei Art Award in 2005 and the 6th Taishin Arts Award Top 5 Selection in 2008. In 2016, he published the picture book “A Babytooth Fallen out of the Universe.” In 2017, he founded STUPIN, an artist studio-swapping platform. Significant exhibition experience includes Taipei Biennial, Singapore Biennial, Sydney Biennial, Seoul International Media Art City Biennial, ZKM, and other major museums worldwide. His works have been invited to various international exhibitions in recent years.
Crystalle Lacouture is an artist, freelance curator and Co-founder of Arrival, a new biannual art fair and cultural happening located at TOURISTS hotel in North Adams. She received her BFA in Painting/Printmaking from Skidmore College, where she received the Pamela Weidenman Award for Excellence in Printmaking. As an artist she has been a Resident Key Holder at the Lower East Side Printshop and has attended residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center (Michael Mazur Printmaking Fellowship), Surf Point Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and was Artist in Residence at the Aspen Art Fair. Her monumental “Wall at WAM” mural titled Correspondence (For Elizabeth Bishop) opened at the Worcester Art Museum in September 2024. She exhibits her work throughout New England and New York and is represented by Praise Shadows Gallery in Brookline, MA. Photo Credit: Edward Boches
Kai Latvalehto runs the 2nd Generation Cultural Residency program in Oulu, Finland. He has a Sweden-Finnish background, and he has worked extensively with Sweden-Finnishness, residencies, culture, film, and music. He holds a PhD on the cultural identity of 2nd generation Sweden-Finns.
Yipei Lee is a founder and curator of SUAVEART and an independent researcher. She navigates through perspectives of islands, ecology, and art, focusing on sociability, nonplaces, and speculation. Her recent cultural research includes “Urban and Natural Symbiosis: Analyzing Cultural Landscapes and Civic Aesthetics through Street Trees,” “Decentralizing Art Making: Commentaries on Curating Online Artist Residency,” and “Terracotta as a Social Cohesive Force and the Interpretation of Art Application: Taking the Case of Taiwan and West Java, Indonesia.” She participated in the IMPACT Symposium in Essen, Germany, on “Ecologies of Attention,” the Taiwan Association of Southeast Asian Studies’ regional research on “Ethnicity and Region: Locality and Diversity in Southeast Asian Society,” and the G20 Indonesia: ICONIC Symposium on “Culture as a Driver and Enabler of Sustainable Living.” Project Wagiwagi – Greeting to Nature was invited to Documenta 15. The curated project footprints are among Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Germany, Switzerland, and others.
Scott RC Levy has been the Executive Director of Green Box Arts since 2021. Additionally, he is an award-winning and acclaimed producer, director, and actor. Before Green Box, Levy spent 15 years serving as the Producing Artistic Director for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center Theatre Company & the Penobscot Theatre in Maine. His work has been seen in over 60 US cities, the Globe in London, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. An in-demand arts educator and thought leader, Levy teaches regularly for institutions nationwide. Additionally, he is the Vice President of the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region and a board of directors for the Colorado Theatre Guild.
Kuei-Pi Li (b.1991) born in Tainan, Taiwan. She got her M.F.A. degree from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2017 and currently lives and works in Taipei. Her work focuses on neglected landscapes and exchange networks under globalization for a long time. Through fieldwork methods from different disciplines, archival reading, and reenactment of history, she uses images, objects, and writing as the main form of art projects. She thinks art projects create a platform of exchange of ideas and inspiring discussion.
Jenny Carolin and Varvara Liakounakou started running Mudhouse Residency in 2015 with just two artists. Through the years, the residency has grown and is now accepting artists from all over the planet and with a vast variety of artistic disciplines.
Sharo Liang is an artist and researcher based in London, whose creative process begins with exploring human emotion. She works to gradually uncover their connections to societal structures such as personal memory, kinship, family history, and material life, forming the systems that identify individuals. Educated in traditional anthropology in London, her research and creative direction often reflect on the boundaries and historical connections between the Western and non-Western worlds, interpreting methods of everyday rituals and cultural customs. She experiments with various media and participatory designs to convey ideas to participants.
Zachary Lieberman is an artist, researcher, and educator with a simple goal: he wants you surprised. In his work, he creates performances and installations that take human gesture as input and amplify them in different ways — making drawings come to life, imagining what the voice might look like if we could see it, transforming people’s silhouettes into music. He’s been listed as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People and his projects have won the Golden Nica from Ars Electronica, Interactive Design of the Year from Design Museum London as well as listed in Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of the Year. He creates artwork through writing software and is a co-creator of openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding and helped co-found the School for Poetic Computation, a school examining the lyrical possibilities of code.
As a multimedia conceptual artist, Jingjing Lin frequently employs experimental narrative techniques to present a future filled with absurd imaginings and humorous possibilities, juxtaposing contradictions to reflect and challenge unresolved historical issues. Delving into the essence of personal politics, philosophy, power dynamics, and trauma, her work invites meditative introspection. Through multidisciplinary practice, she delves into the complexity of artificial intelligence and technological neocolonialism and explores possibilities for future construction. Her artistic works encompass installations, videos, lighting, performances, coding, and mixed media. She was profiled by TATE Research Center: Asia. Her works have been exhibited in major public museums, including the National Art Museum of Chile, the Ivam in Spain, the Kunstraum in Austria, the Long Museum in China, etc. Lin’s work has been reviewed in major publications such as Asia Art Pacific, Artforum, Artnet News, AsiaArt, Hong Kong Economic Journal, etc.
Qinqin Liu is an artist and scientist with a Ph. D in botany and ecology study with many interdisciplinary art accomplishments. Connecting humanity’s heart and soul to art, science, nature and culture is her life’s journey. She loves to explore living art projects “Seeds Crossing Ocean” and “Echo Climate” for public engagement and social practice in her art residency and visiting artist’s experience. Her cross-disciplinary experimental art-science investigations involve exploring contemporary languages, symbols, and unconventional materials and media from Eastern and Western cultures. Dr Liu has more than 10 peer-reviewed international publications tackling ecology and climate change. Her artworks have been selected for presentations and exhibitions including the National Science Museum in Taipei, California Art Center Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Duluth Art Museum, California State University gallery, Blue Line and Artistic Edge Galleries, Galway International Art Festival Open Studio, California science conference, and American Ecology Conference.
Tina Lorenz studied Theatre History and American Literature and Culture in Vienna and Munich. They have worked as lecturers and dramaturges in several theaters and founded two hackspaces. In 2020, they founded and headed the digital department at the State Theatre of Augsburg, creating dramatic works in mixed reality and writing and speaking about the opportunities of digital theatrical practices. In 2024, they were appointed head of ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe’s Artistic Research department, the Hertzlab.
Krishna Luchoomun holds an MA in Fine Arts from the Academy of Arts of the former USSR. He founded pARTage, an artist-led organization promoting contemporary art in Mauritius. He is the group leader currently teaching at the School of Fine Arts, MGI. He has participated in a series of exhibitions and residencies in different countries.
William Maier is Vice President of Social Impact and Transatlantic Relations at Cultural Vistas. This non-profit organization promotes global understanding and collaboration among individuals and institutions through international exchange experiences. In 2024, Cultural Vistas received a grant from the German Federal Foreign Office to implement the first-ever artist residency program that connects artists from V20 countries and their German counterparts with environmental research organizations, with the outcome of creating new means of artistic expression intended to motivate their audiences to global climate action.
Freo Majer is the Artistic Director of Forecast, an international facilitating program dedicated to mentoring and promoting audacious minds and their creative practices. Since 2015, Forecast has conducted one-on-one mentorships and workshop series and initiated research programs that bring together art and science institutions. The various strands of development and production each lead to what Forecast calls prototypes, which are showcased at transdisciplinary festivals. Majer looks back at a career as an opera director and producer in European theaters and festivals. Recognizing a gap in the support available to cultural workers, he founded Forecast in 2015. He initiated the international research programs Housing the Human (2017–2019), Driving the Human (2020–2023), and the ongoing Grounding the Human (2024–). Freo Majer serves on various boards and juries, including the European architecture platform LINA, the Cultural Forum of Social Democracy, and the jury of the KAIROS Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation.
Arthur Makaryan is the Artistic Director of Arte Makar Productions, a member of SDC, and a signatory of SAG AFTRA. Arthur, a stage director, producer, and educator, received Juilliard’s Directing Fellowship in 2017-18 and holds a master’s degree in directing from Columbia University (MFA) and Sorbonne (MA). He is affiliated with La Sorbonne Panthéon Paris 1 ACTE Institute, where he is leading research on the representation of brain-computer interfaces in the performing arts. Trained at the Grotowski Institute in Poland, Suzuki Company in Japan, Odin Teatret in Denmark, and Theatre of the Oppressed in France, Arthur brings a versatile approach to his artistic practice, which bridges tradition with innovation. He was recently invited to speak at the 28th International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Paris.
Jocelyn E. Marshall (she/they) is faculty in the Departments of Visual & Media Arts and Writing, Literature, & Publishing at Emerson College. Their interdisciplinary scholarly and curatorial projects focus on contemporary U.S.-based diasporic women and LGBTQ+ artists and writers, researching relationships between historical trauma and queer and feminist activism. Her work is featured in the Journal of American Culture, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Public Art Dialogue, Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, and elsewhere.
Amy Merrill is a Boston-area playwright and producer whose plays reflect her interest in class and community. In addition to being a playwright, she has been a community organizer and a nurse. Her work has been produced at Central Square Theater, New Hampshire Theatre Project. and Fort Point Theatre Channel. In addition to writing plays, Amy is a featured artist and planner with the Her Story Is collective, a program of dialogue and co-creation between women in Iraq and the Boston area. She is also a member of the Dramatists Guild, Chicago Dramatists (Network Playwright) Artistic Co- Director, Fort Point Theatre Channel. In 2020, she was a member of Company One Play Lab.
Purnima Mitra, born in Bangladesh, currently works as a Technical Art Director in Techvity Lab (Pvt) Ltd (an IT company focused on Cutting Edge Technology, AR/VR, and Digital Fabrication). Her works reflect the complex issues that shape diverse, global, and rapidly changing society. She endeavors to experiment with different art techniques using cutting-edge technology. She earned her BFA degree from the University of Dhaka in 2010. She qualified for the Asian Art Major Scholarship (AMA) 2012 by the Korean Government for the MFA program. She uses her creativity to bridge art and technology, where the audience can interact directly. She has held several exhibitions in Bangladesh, Japan, Indonesia, and South Korea. In 2012, she won the runners-up award in the Young Painters’ Exhibition, organized by Berger Paints Bangladesh Limited.
Conor Moynihan (he/him) is the Acting Department Head and Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the RISD Museum. He focuses on the modern and contemporary collection, with a particular research interest in identity-based practices. Moynihan also serves as the chair of the Accessibility SEI Task Force and a co-founding member of the LGBTQIA2S+ Working Group. Moynihan’s recent exhibitions at the RISD Museum include Perception and Presence in Contemporary Drawing (2022), Variance: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Disability (2022), and The Performative Self-Portrait (2023. He is working with Christina Alderman to help the young artists and art enthusiasts of RISD Art Circle curate a permanent collection exhibition from a teen perspective in Spring 2025.
Susanne Mueller-Baji graduated in Graphic Design from Johannes-Gutenberg-Schule in Stuttgart/Germany. She was a Creative Director with an American advertising agency in Hungary. Today, she is an artist, art critic, curator, and illustrator based in Stuttgart and Budapest/Hungary. She has been a mentor and speaker with the TCE Conference on Opportunities in the Arts in Boston/USA at various times. She was an artist-in-residence in Haslla/South Korea, Bethlehem/Palestine, Hovinkartano, and Luopionien in Finland. Her book collaboration with Anja Mattila-Tolvanen, “Medelplanin madrassa”, was published in 2019 in Pälkäne/Finland. In 2021, she started her print/online magazine FeuerbachGO, which stresses local life and culture in one of Stuttgart’s districts. It is published as a community project and has been awarded twice as a promising reply to the loss in press variety. In 2023, FeuerbachGo started its open-stage project with the help of local musician/composer Detlef Dörner.
Dr. Koustav Nag obtained his Honors degree from Indira Kala Sangeet Visawvidaylaya in 2005 and holds an MFA from Visva Bharati University, which he earned in 2007. Despite his training as a printmaker, he has consistently engaged in transdisciplinary endeavors. Dr Koustav Nag received several prestigious awards and scholarships, including the Lalit Kala State Regional Award in 2005, the Visva Bharati University Award in 2006, the Ministry of Culture Scholarship in 2007, the Lalit Kala Fellowship in 2010, and the Imagining Our Future Award by the World Bank in 2012. He was also recognized for his work in the Five Million Incident 2019. He has participated in numerous residencies and exhibitions, such as the Tokyo Wonder Site in Japan, the World Bank in the USA, Religare Arts in Delhi, Niv Art Centre in Delhi, Sarai Reader-II, and Crack Bangladesh. He currently holds the position of assistant professor at K R Mangalam University in Gurugram, India.
Line Nord has been the manager and curator of art projects since 2001 at the cultural house USF Verftet in Bergen. USF Verftet, on the west coast of Norway, was originally a sardine factory. However, it was transferred to a diverse house of culture in 1983. The art projects include Artist in Residence Bergen (which has existed since 1999, with more than 300 artists from 46 countries visiting) and formerly residency projects for Bergen artists in Brooklyn, Berlin, and Cape Town. She is also the manager and curator of the gallery space Visningsrommet USF, which runs a rich and varied exhibition program with fast turnover.
Molly Nuanes is a museum educator and nonprofit administrator from Denver, CO. She is the Director of Operations, US, at La Napoule Art Foundation, where she has been since September 2019. With LNAF, Molly manages operations in the US office, including the residency selection process and visiting artist programs in local schools. Her workplace joy comes from working with artists and supporting them through residencies and exhibitions. Molly graduated from Tulane University with a bachelor’s degree in art history and from the University of Denver with a master’s in art history and museum studies. Outside of work, Molly mentors Tulane students through the Newcomb College Institute’s Women-to-Women Mentoring Program, and serves on the Advisory Committee for the Customer Experience Certificate Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, Leeds School of Business. She also loves to garden, cook, and bake delicious food, and hang with her silly dog, Rooney.
Lucy Nychai is the curator of the Nazar Voitovich Art Residence (NVAIR) in Ukraine, the project coordinator of the NGO Congress of Cultural Activists (leading the direction of Art Mobility), and an artist, independent researcher, art critic, and curator-at-large of Lite-Haus Gallery in Berlin, Germany. She is also the founder and curator of Artist is Absent, a global virtual art residence for Digital arts (2020-2022), a board member of the CryptoArt Ukraine (CAU), and an Associate Artist of D6:Culture in Transit in Newcastle, the UK (2023-2025). Her multimedia art and curatorial practice spans film, painting, and installation. She works on memory and commemoration, sustainable ecosystems, and human migration, works on site-specific projects, and studies ethical issues of digital art. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has been at the forefront of her practice for the last ten years. In 2022, she moved to the UK as a curator in residence. She works between Ukraine, the European Union, and the UK.
Yuko Oda is an artist working in sculpture, animation, and drawing. She currently teaches in the Art and Design Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Oda’s artwork has been exhibited at SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 (Macao), Dumbo Arts Festival (NY), Calvin-Morris Gallery (NY), Beijing Today Art Museum, Maki Fine Arts (Tokyo), Annemarie Sculpture Garden and Art Center (MD), the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, among others. Oda’s animation, “Take Off,” was a finalist in the international animation competition “Artport: Cool Stories for When the Planet Gets Hot” and screened internationally, including at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, DIA Center (NY), Art Supermarket (Stockholm), Art Miami Basel (FL), Bridge Art Fair (NY), Diva Art Fair (Paris) and Scope Art Fair (Basel/NY). Oda was an artist resident at the Vermont Studio Center, Chashama North Residency, Goetemann Residency, and Byrdcliffe Artist Residency.
Heather O’Donnell is a psychologist (M.Sc.), an Artistic-Systemic Therapist (licensed: DGSF), a former professional musician, and the founding Director of The Green Room (TGR), a nonprofit center in Cologne, Germany, offering essential support systems for performing artists. TGR provides psychological and professional counseling, creative space, health-supporting classes, cultural and professional integration assistance, and networking opportunities. Heather has initiated pioneering programs supporting artists’ health and well-being and advocated for policies supporting artists’ health at local, national, and international levels. In addition to her work as a psychological counselor and therapist for performing artists, she advises arts organizations on systemic change and transformational leadership models. She presented at the International Symposium of the Performing Arts Medical Association (PAMA 2017, 2021, 2024), the European Network of Cultural Center’s (ENCC) International Conference (2022), and On The Move’s Conference focusing on Mental Health, Well Being, & International Cultural Mobility (2023).
Makiko Onda is a coordinator at ARCUS Project, the longest-running and the leading artist-in-residency program in the field of contemporary art in Japan, whose past participants included Turner Prize nominees and who participated in the documenta and Venice Biennale. Before joining ARCUS in 2021, Onda served as a director of art management at Colab Project and an independent art consultant in New York for ten years, managing internationally acclaimed artists from commercial projects to public art projects, which include working with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Alliance for Downtown New York, The New York Times, and Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She received her MFA in Photography at Ohio University. She received awards, fellowships, and grants, including the Immigrant Artist Program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, CENER, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation.
Clara Pallí Monguilod (Spain, 1978) lives and works in The Hague, The Netherlands. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Since 2004, alongside a career as a visual artist, she has been devoted to co-curating and co-directing Experimental Art Space 1646 in The Hague. She is also a member of the Master Artistic Research Work Field Commission at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts The Hague (NL), the advisory board of ReCNTR, Center of Multimodal and Audio-Visual Methods, Leiden University (NL), and the advisory board of the art space Das Leben am Haverkamp in The Hague (NL).
Bojana Panevska is a researcher and writer, with over 20 years’ experience working in the international cultural sector. Currently, she is an advisor at DutchCulture | TransArtists, Amsterdam – a platform that combines and shares knowledge and experience on artist-in-residence programs and works internationally.
Bojana is also the President of On the Move, Brussels, – an international network that includes more than 70 organizations in over 20 countries across Europe and internationally – from national funders, other networks, and info points to centers for creation. All the members of the network share a commitment to promoting cultural mobility in all its forms while striving for a fairer sector. She is also part of the Advisory Board of TransCultural Exchange – a non-profit organization based in Boston, with a mission to foster a greater understanding of world cultures through high-quality art projects, cultural exchanges, and educational programming.
Melissa Park is an Associate Professor in the School of Physical & Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University with a background in history of art and occupational science. Her research interests focus on using narrative and critical philosophical resources in the participatory co-creation of shared activities and events for health system and community transformation. Since 2022, she and Florian Grond, an artist and Assistant Professor for Design, Interaction Design, and Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University, have received three research creation Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council grants to engage and develop insights on pressing social concerns, such as social isolation, loneliness and aging in relation to atmospheres, co-led by artists and community members from their 1st person perspectives.
Giuliano Picchi is a cultural manager and creative economy specialist. He is an artistic entrepreneur at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a fellow at Harvard University with Cultural Agents. He founded UNITA – United Talents for the Future, an NGO dedicated to supporting the cultural and creative sectors by promoting research collaborations between the arts, the social, and the life sciences and supporting creatives in achieving sustainable careers. He is also the founder of Scenography Today, the international magazine and online platform for creatives in design and the performing arts that promotes artists’ mobility and cross-border collaboration.
Alix Pierre, PhD, teaches African Diaspora Studies at Spelman College and is the Director of Cultural Orientation. His research focuses on the diasporan retention and transformation of culture, including the feminist perspective. He favors a transnational approach to Diasporic cultural production(s) beyond the boundaries of nation-states. He explores the representation and visualization of black bodies, voices, thoughts, and aesthetics across media. Since 2015, he has collaborated with the Miami-based Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI) as co-project manager and scholar-in-residence. He has led the incubator’s International Cultural Exchanges to Guadeloupe (2015, 2017, 2020), Jamaica (2018) and Belize (2019). His publications have appeared in several journals. He is also author of L’image de la femme résistante chez quatre romancières noires: vision diasporique de la femme en résistance chez Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Toni Morrison et Alice Walker (Presses Académiques Francophones, 2014) and recipient of the GLAM (2016-present) and CAORC-WARC (2019) fellowships.
Johan Pousette is an independent curator, writer, and senior advisor within contemporary art. He is also on the board of Dupont Underground in Washington DC, and editor of a new publication on international residency practice. Pousette has been the director of IASPIS, the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden 2014-2020. Before that, his position was manager for Contemporary Art Development in Sweden at Riksutställningar, the Swedish Exhibition Agency 2011-2014. His curatorial practice includes the Gothenburg Biennial in 2009 and the October Salon in Belgrade in 2010. He is also the founding director of BAC, the Baltic Art Center, and served as director at BAC between 2001 -2007. Additionally, he has been a member of TransCultural Exchange’s international advisory board, and for five years he was the expert advisor to the Nordic Council of Ministers regarding artist-in-residence programs in the Nordic and Baltic countries, and a board member of Res Artis for four years.
Shabani Ramadhani is a musician, bass player, songwriter, festival organizer, and founder of the Marahaba Music Expo and Marahaba Arts Center in Bujumbura, which allowed him to serve as an ambassador of Visa for Music in Morocco and in a range of musical events throughout Africa as well as Europe. He has extensive music industry training in the UK, Tanzania, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Morocco, Mayotte Island, Egypt, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Burundi, and Kenya. He has served as an intern in the music industry at the British Council in Tanzania and the British Council in London, financially funded by the European Union. He has also performed as a musician in Tanzania and abroad. He has been a music teacher at Marahaba Arts Center in Burundi.
Mark Randall is an Assistant Professor in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design in New York. He is principal of Worldstudio, a strategy and communications firm that works with non-profit and civic organizations to improve the lives of individuals and communities. Mark is president of Worldstudio Foundation, the first nonprofit in the U.S. devoted to encouraging social responsibility in the design and arts professions. A signature initiative, the Worldstudio AIGA Scholarship program has awarded over $1 million to art and design students at colleges and universities across the United States. In 2017, he launched B-Line Ice Cream, sweetened with honey from his own hives. In addition to tasting good, B-Line educates the public around the critical role bees play in our lives. In 2017 Mark was the recipient of the prestigious AIGA Medal.
Rebecca Reynolds co-founded the Manship Artists Residency eight years ago to save an historic and environmentally significant property as an artist residency and to continue the legacy of this place as one for the creative process. An art historian specializing in American sculpture, Reynolds has worked in museums and unconventional settings, introducing signature programming that connects contemporary artists with the history of a place and which creates meaningful cultural experiences. In 1998 Reynolds began the outdoor sculpture path at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain and initiated the Lantern Festival there in 1999. In Spring 2022, she received an achievement award from the National Sculpture Society for years of service to the field and for advancing the work of sculptors. At Manship Artists Residency, Reynolds nurtures and supports artists working in many media, scientists, and creatives who challenge us and who transform the way we see the world. Photo Credit: Sash Ludwig.
Diana Riesco Lind is a versatile artist and curator, active within and beyond the Peruvian Amazon. She holds a master’s degree in art, specializing in digital media, from Valand School of Art at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research focused on identity, influence, migration, and belonging. She also earned a bachelor’s degree in art, specializing in painting, from The Catolica University in Lima, Peru. Her thesis examined a historical review of Shipibo Konibo art and its influence on contemporary art. Since 2012, she has founded and directed the Centro Selva Arte y Ciencia residency program, facilitating rural artistic experiences and seminars for national and international artists and researchers, primarily in Ucayali, Peru, focusing on the Shipibo Konibo communities and the broader Amazon region. Diana Riesco Lind has been a member of MAV – the Peruvian Association of Women Visual Artists, since 2021 and the Peruvian Curators Association since 2019.
Born in Messina, Italy, Giuditta Rustica is the director of the artists’ residency Villa R. Giuditta Rustica, an immersive Sicilian artist residency nestled in nature, offering transformative experiences for artists to explore their practice in a stunning natural setting. As an artist she has shown her works in several galleries, museums, and other contemporary art centers in Denmark, Germany, France, Lithuania, Spain, Mexico, America, Italy, Austria, Hungary, England, Greece, Turkey etc. Her works are in various collections, both private and public, worldwide. Giuditta is represented by Heike Arndt Gallery in Berlin and Kettinge (Denmark), Oscar Roman in Mexico City, and Art Decentrale, founded by Allan Paulose in Arkansas, USA. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany.
Nisha Sajnani, PhD is a co-founder & co-director of the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, a collaboration between New York University’s (NYU) Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, the World Health Organisation (WHO), Culturunners, and Community Jameel, where she leads the Lancet global series on the health benefits of the arts. Dr. Sajnani is an Associate Professor and Director of the NYU program in drama therapy and founder of the Arts & Health @ NYU. Other faculty appointments include NYU Abu Dhabi, where she developed Can Art Save Lives?, a transdisciplinary course uniting current evidence for the health benefits of the arts with practice and policy, and the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma. Dr. Sajnani co-authored the first WHO policy brief on the role of the arts in supporting the well-being of people who are forcibly displaced and curated the first WHO panel on the role of the arts in re-imaging the relationship between human and planetary health. An award-winning author, educator, and advocate, her work explores unique ways aesthetic experience can inspire equity, care, and collective human flourishing across the lifespan.
Malvina Sammarone is a visual artist and independent researcher; she lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She graduated in Industrial Design (1978) and Architecture (1983) from Mackenzie University in São Paulo. She obtained her MA in Arts from New York University (1998) and her master’s in communication and Semiotics (2001) from PUC/SP and an MFA in Creative Art Research, University of Plymouth (UK), in 2018. Among the group exhibitions that she participated in the following stand-out: Diálogos Contemporâneos: Máteria-linha, MuBE (São Paulo, 2021); In the spirit of Fluxus – international exhibition of Flux Films, Hotel Dada Gallery and VideoPlay (Argentina, 2020); The (NotSo) Short Fest, Ely Center of Contemporary Art (New Haven, CT, USA, 2020); coletivo@7 in MARP (Ribeirão Preto,2019); Co-a-lism, Flutgraben, (Berlin, Germany, 2018); Estou cá: Sempre Algo Entre Nós, SESC Belenzinho (São Paulo, 2016); Ressonâncias:Brasil-Berlin, KunstBethanien (Berlin, Germany, 2013).
Homa Sarabi (she/her) is an artist, educator, and programmer. Her work focuses on exploring intimate relationships through the experience of diaspora and beyond the borders. She examines the failure and promises of virtual connections through performance videos and photography documentary films. Her curatorial focus is on lifting the voices of other diasporic artists with a concentration on experimental moving images and documentary film.
Ellie Schimelman is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been an art teacher, gallery owner, and potter in the United States. Drawn to Ghana by a love of African art, she did volunteer teaching, studied with traditional artisans, started Aba Tours, built a cultural center/guest house, and incorporated Cross Cultural Collaborative. Ellie divides her time between Boston, MA (USA) and Nungua, Ghana, where she facilitates CCC programs. Ellie has presented at many meetings and conferences, such as The International Conference on Intercultural Dialogue Through The Arts in Saga, Japan, The International Arts Therapy Association Conference in Winnipeg, Canada, and three TransCultural Exchange Conferences. Ellie also consults on cultural exchange programs and is helping to start one in Oaxaca, Mexico, with indigenous artisans.
Raquel Schwartz is an artist, curator, and cultural manager. She participated in International Biennials, among the most notable being the Sao Paulo Biennial, Mercosur Biennial, Cuenca Biennial, End of the World Biennial, and Gwuanju Biennial. Held individual and group exhibitions in Bolivia, Perú, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, Venezuela, USA, Italy, Switzerland, Korea, Russia, and UK, among others. She won several awards in competitions and biennials in Bolivia and has been art director in several productions. She gave workshops and training courses to children, adults, and artisans at different institutions. She organized and coordinated the Km0 international contemporary art workshops in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 2001, 2005, and 2014. From 2006 to the present, she has served as director of KIOSKO Galería. KIOSKO is a contemporary, alternative, and independent art space committed to social transformation through artistic practices articulated in residencies and exhibitions, educational programs, and editorials.
Susan Sgorbati is the Director of The Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College where she has been on the faculty for the last thirty-five years. In 2018, with Dr. Asim Zia, Sgorbati co-founded the Transboundary Water In-Cooperation Network. which works with communities on six continents in the world’s major river basins. She is also a partner with the African Centre for Climate Action and Rural Development to move forward a new United Nations Convention on Conserving River Deltas (UNCCRD). In collaboration with scientists, Sgorbati created emergent-improvisation and wrote the book Emergent Improvisation: On Spontaneous Composition Where Dance Meets Science. She co-founded Quantum Leap, a program that connected over 2,000 at-risk, public-school students to their education. She has also partnered with Jon Isherwood and the US Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies to create a collective group process and public art installations in Norway and Thailand.
Amanda Shea is a two-time Boston Music Award-winning Spoken Word Artist. Shea is an artist, performer, educator, artivist, publicist, host, and curator. She co-founded and curated six iterations of Activating ARTivism, a community festival to amplify POC through art, activism, and resistance. Her work can be found in the Museum of Fine Arts, The Boston Globe, TEDX, TEDXRoxbury, Netflix, Prime Video, BBC News, GBH, and much more. Shea will be releasing her first book, “Pieces of Shea” in the Spring of 2024. Amanda’s work examines her personal life experiences, social justice issues, and healing through trauma utilizing art as the tool.
Michael Sheridan is a filmmaker and educator who has produced documentary and experimental films for local, national, and international humanitarian and cultural organizations through SheridanWorks productions. PBS, ABC, National Geographic, TLC, and Discovery have aired Michael’s work as a producer, cameraman and editor. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Cyberarts Festival, and many other galleries have exhibited his experimental work. The National Education Media Network, the Columbia International Film and Video Festival, the United Nations Association Film Festival, and EarthVision have screened and awarded his films. For 25 years, Michael has taught filmmaking and has been on the faculty at Northeastern University, MassArt. He offers filmmaking courses through SheridanWorks-Learning. From 2007-08, he served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia. In 2010, Michael founded Community Supported Film to amplify local voices by training and mentoring storytellers and change-makers in under and misrepresented communities.
cari ann shim sham* is here to move things. Her art acts as a window to the soul, a mirror for reflection, a warm refuge for meditation, a generator for embodiment, and a sacred space for healing. She is part of the Techspressionist movement, having exhibited with Kingsborough Art Museum, Loop Art Critique, Li Ting Gallery, Superlative Gallery, Las Lagunas Art, and has generative artwork in the Mud Foundation’s permanent collection. She works with AI as an oracle and is currently creating an AI Choreographer. In 2022, she developed an AI curator for the Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art’s exhibition This Show is Curated by a Machine. She is a free diver, wild mushroom hunter and nature worshiper with a certification in Family Systemic Constellation Therapy and in service as a Full Arts Professor of Dance and Technology at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and mentor to many.
Yang Shu is one of the early explorers of China’s experimental paintings. In the mid-1980s, Yang Shu began his experiment on non-realistic paintings. In recent years, Yang Shu has immersed more graffiti elements into his works, expecting to find a new possibility in an anti-painting way. In 1989, he attended the “Chinese Avant-Garde Art Exhibition” hosted by The National Art Museum of China. Meanwhile, as an arts patron and curator, in 2006, with Ni Kun, Yang Shu founded the famous non-profit organization Organhaus, which has become the most dynamic and international contemporary art field in Southwest China.
Ika Sienkiewicz-Nowacka is a curator, manager of culture and head of the Artistic Residencies Department at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. She founded the U-jazdowski residencies (at that time A-I-R Laboratory) in 2003 as the first ongoing residency program in Poland and one of leading residency programs in Central Europe. She graduated from Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities (University of Warsaw) and holds the European Diploma for Culture Management (Brussels). She has been working with the Open Method of Coordination, introduced by the European Commission – a program designed to help member states jointly progress in the implementation of reforms needed in order to achieve the goals of the Lisbon treaty, in this case to improve the mobility in the arts and culture sector. Between 2010 and 2020 acted as a board member of the Res Artis Foundation in Amsterdam and member of the Programme Council of Akademie Schloss Solitude.
Doris Sommer is Ira and Jewell Williams’s Professor of Romance Languages and Literature and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the founder of “Cultural Agents,” an Initiative at Harvard and an NGO dedicated to reviving the civic mission of the Humanities. Her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities worldwide, specifically through the “Arts and Policy Certificate,” for city governments to discover how participatory arts address urgent challenges, and “Pre-Texts,” a train-the-trainers program to support democracy through literacy, critical thinking, and creativity.
Alex Soulsby is an award-winning Creative Education Specialist and artist mentor with over two decades of international experience integrating arts & cultural learning into education systems. Passionate about fostering critical thinking, creative thinking, and cross-cultural understanding, he is honored to have had his work recognized within the sector, including a prestigious Fellowship of the British Royal Society of the Arts. His work emphasizes how the arts can cultivate empathy, emotional intelligence, and teamwork, preparing young people to be innovative global citizens and engendering meaningful change within the contemporary education system.
Stephen Stapleton s a British-Norwegian artist and social entrepreneur working at the intersection of culture, education, and international diplomacy. Following an artist road trip across the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11, Stephen founded Edge of Arabia as a platform for creative collaboration between the Middle East, Europe and the United States; and in 2015, launched Culturunners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop artists-led initiatives that accelerate implementation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. In 2023, Stephen co-founded the Jameel Arts & Health Lab in collaboration with the World Health Organization, New York University, and Community Jameel.
With over 20 years of experience as a nonprofit event producer and engagement strategist, A.J. Steinberg has worked on over one hundred successful events and raised millions of dollars for organizations with her Los Angeles-based production company. AJ’s team has produced almost every fundraising event, including intimate high-net-worth donor gatherings, galas, festivals, and fashion shows. In 2015, AJ launched Queen Bee Fundraising to share the art and science of nonprofit event planning, sponsorship acquisition, and engagement strategies with organizations worldwide. She is a recognized topic expert and trainer. She presents on nonprofit event planning, event sponsorships, committee and volunteer leadership, generational giving, fundraising, and guest engagement.
Since taking the helm at Vermont Studio Center in May 2023, Hope Sullivan has steered the organization through immense challenges. From a historic flood to the ongoing recovery from COVID-19, Hope has led VSC through a critical revision of its Campus Master Plan, all while ensuring continuous support for resident artists and writers and securing crucial funding for operational sustainability and improvement.
Zsuzsanna Szegedi-Varga, born in Hungary, had studied visual communication in 1996 when the Eastern bloc was opening up. She continued her art studie) and later critical theory in the United States, then began traveling and exhibiting internationally. Her notable US Exhibition was In the Words, In The Bones, where Traveling Ghost of Lukács first appeared. At the height of her career, Szegedi-Varga co-authored a bilingual book Productive Misreadings, was teaching at Wellesley College, receiving generous grants for her Lukács research connecting often separately considered theories leading to a fellowship nomination (Revolutionary Spaces 2021) when she unexpectedly became a displaced artist in 2021. Disillusioned, she exited the US, and retreated to a nomadic research in “transcendental homelessness.” She successfully self-exiled to Slovenia in 2022, where she is currently undertaking doctoral studies in Environmental Protection, received an official artist status, and initiated the Island (un)residency summer praxis in 2023.
Sarah Tanguy is an independent curator and arts writer based in Washington, DC. The daughter of a US diplomat, she holds a BA in Fine Arts from Georgetown University, and a MA in Art History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After interning at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tanguy worked at the National Gallery, the International Exhibitions Foundation, The Tremaine Collection, the International Sculpture Center, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, The Hechinger Collection, and the Office of Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State, where she curated temporary exhibitions and permanent collections for U.S. diplomatic facilities. A strong believer in hands-on collaboration, she explores the intersection of art culture and science in her practice. Recent and upcoming projects include Reveal: The Art of Reimagining Scientific Discovery Elements, Mother Earth, and Samadhana: When Many Become One. She has contributed to Sculpture and Metalsmith, among other publications.
Meliha Teparic is a Bosnian and Herzegovinian multimedia artist, art historian and curator. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo in 2002, acquired her master’s degree in 2007 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, and PhD from the Department. of Art History of the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Philosophy in 2016. Since 2010, she has been teaching at the International University in Sarajevo, Department. of Visual Arts and Communications Design and, since 2014, she is also the curator of the Art Gallery at the International University in Sarajevo. Additionally, she has been a member of the Artists Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2007. She has participated in 70 group exhibitions and seven solo exhibitions nationally and abroad, winning several national and international awards. She published numerous scientific articles as well.
Cultivating the complementary practices of curating and writing, Judith Tolnick Champa is a hybrid independent contemporary art curator/ writer. She is the founding director and president of the Providence Biennial for Contemporary Art, conceived to expose individuals and communities to transformative experiences, provoking new ways of seeing, thinking and engaging with the world. Increasingly emphasizing critical issues of social and environmental justice, the nonprofit operates nomadically across alternative
venues to reach diverse communities. Judith served as editor-in-chief of the regional magazine Art New England, and has contributed to national art magazines including Artforum and Ceramics: Art & Perception. This followed longtime curating and directing at the kunsthalle-style academic galleries at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island, Kingston. Following Brandeis University, she was trained in Brown’s History of Art and Architecture graduate department, where teaching with objects became her passion and the originalimpetus for embarking on a curatorial career.
Lori-Ann Touchette, co-founder of CRETA Rome, is responsible for administrating and promoting the residency program. An American art historian with degrees from Brown, Princeton, and Oxford Universities, she taught and worked in the administration of several British and American study abroad programs since moving to Rome in 1997. She is the author/editor of several articles and books on Greek & Roman art and the 18th-century Grand Tour. She has contributed numerous articles on historical and contemporary ceramics to Ceramics: Art & Perception and other international ceramics magazines.
Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas are artists, educators, and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Vilnius, Lithuania. Urbonas Studio is an interdisciplinary research platform that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. The Studio collaborates with experts from different fields to develop practice-based models that merge new media, urbanism, social sciences, and pedagogy to address the transformation of society and ecology critically. Urbonas Studio has exhibited internationally at the São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, Gwangju, Busan, Taipei biennales, Folkestone, and Baltic triennials, Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions, including solo shows and curatorial projects at the Venice Biennale, MACBA Barcelona and National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, among others. Urbonas is researching and teaching in MIT, USA’s Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program. Photo Credit: Berta Tilmantaitė.
Cristina Vázquez. Mexican curator and producer with two decades of experience. She recently created the performing arts programming for the US at the 51st edition of the International Cervantino Festival, as the country was the guest of honor. In 2012, she founded Contenidos Artísticos in Mexico, a venture she directs dedicated to curating, producing, and promoting performing arts and cultural projects. Since 2015, Contenidos Artísticos INC, based in Chicago, has complemented it. Her primary interest is revitalizing the exchange, cooperation, and mobility of performing arts between Mexico and the US through projects with a strong social focus. Her initiatives consider academic activities that enrich artists or the local audience on both sides of the border. Since January 20, 2020, Cristina was the first Mexican woman to be part of the Board of Directors of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP).
Toña Vegas holds a BFA in Psychology from Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, Caracas, a Foundation Course at Hornsey College of Art, London, UK, and a Graphic Arts Degree at Center for Graphic Arts, Caracas. Selected solo shows include Reflexions on Visibility. Feel/Think/Create. MACZUL, Maracaibo, Venezuela (2020), Energy Matters, Imago Art in Action, Miami, Florida (2019), Inventory/takes, The Clemente Center, New York, NY (2016) in collaboration with Tony Vazquez. Selected group exhibitions: Active Artists Collective, Bermac Studios, Houston, Texas (2021), Beyond Paper Boundaries, Pan American Art Projects Miami, Florida (2020), For Now… Coral Gables Museum, Miami, Florida (2019/20). Winner of a commission for Zelda Glazer’s Soundscape Park with Art in Public Places, Miami-Dade County (2022), currently under construction. Her architectural interventions include private and public buildings and residencies in Caracas and Miami. Vegas has lived in Miami, Florida, since 2017 and is an artist-in-residence at Bakehouse Art Complex.
Professor José Alberto Velázquez Campoverde graduated from the High Institute of Artistic Education (CALMECAC) in the city of Jérez de García Salinas, Zacatecas, Mexico, where he completed his degree in Mexican folkloric dance. He is a promoter and cultural advocate inside and outside Mexico, with more than 20 years promoting a passionate appreciation for Mexican culture. He is the founder and director of the folkloric dance group “Grupo Folklórico P’urhépecha” and of the Dance of the Kúrpites with the group Raíces de mi Pueblo (Roots of my People), with which he has visited many states in Mexico, as well as several important U.S. cities, powwows, immigrant and indigenous communities. He is a 2023 recipient of a grant from the Lindley Murray Fund of the New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) to preserve P’urhépecha dance, music, costuming, linguistic, and other community traditions.
Helmi Vent is Professor emerita of “Experimental SpaceSoundBodyTheatre” at the Mozarteum University Salzburg, Austria. Her main foci are Art-Culture-Society-Education, Performative Arts in the Context of Applied Humanities, Transcultural Joint Projects, and Arts-Based Research. Helmi is also the Director of LIA – Lab Inter Arts, an international platform for crossover projects in various artistic and cultural fields. She also produces video films about her interdisciplinary art performance projects. Helmi Vent was born in Hamburg, Germany. Guest activities (lectures, seminars, artistic and transcultural projects, performances) led her through many countries worldwide. Several study trips to traditional cultures brought her life-enhancing perspectives on the diversity of cultural forms of living and communicating. 2013 she received the “Ars docendi-Staatspreis” (state award) for excellence in teaching at Austria’s public universities (category “Innovative Teaching Concepts”) for the concept LIA – Lab Inter Arts.
Qudrat Wasefi is an Afghan composer and trumpeter. He studied music at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and founded a choir for children from AFCECO orphanages, composing patriotic songs that embodied Afghan Resilience. He released the moving music video “The Children of War,” capturing the resilience and innocence prevailing amidst adversity. His composition “A Candle of Hope in the Darkness” united Italian musicians, and performances with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra and a string quartet in Melbourne showcased the fusion of music’s universal language with Afghanistan’s cultural tapestry. Notably, he orchestrated the Afghan song “Ay Shakh-e Gul” for the “American Festival Chorus,” at Utah State University. In early 2023, he founded the “Afghanistan Freeharmonic Orchestra” who had a series of concerts in Boston in October 2023, aiming to reunite Afghan musicians who have lost connection or hope amidst their homeland’s challenges. His music serves as a catalyst for peace and freedom.
Suzanne Watzman, owner Tamaryn Design, is an entrepreneur, textile designer, dyer and wearables artist. She is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design- with entrepreneurial background in user experience and graphic design. Her practice evolved from those early days, inspired by her global travels and a seven-year residency in Vietnam. This began her deep dive into hand-made and traditional practices of artisans that she continues to meet and learn from. Suzanne focusses on sustainability in textiles, as she creates one-of-a-kind wearable art pieces and usable items. She works with traditional shibori/resist methods, natural dyes and eco-printing with plants in not-traditional ways. Suzanne continues her research and practice as well as teaching workshops, growing her own dye plants and giving talks about natural dyeing, sustainability and environmental challenges.
Larisa Waya is an award-winning artist (National Association of Women Artists), designer, and photographer who works as a staff chaplain at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Longwood. She is also a Field Education supervisor at Harvard Divinity School and a finalist in the annual flash fiction contest “Boston in 100 Words” in 2023.
Crispin B. Weinberg is president of Biomedical Modeling Inc. (BMI), an anatomical engineering and 3D modeling service bureau in Boston, MA. BMI makes 3D printed and digital human anatomy models, primarily from CT scans. He mainly works with surgeons, hospitals, and medical device companies. However, he enjoys collaborating with artists such as Kiki Smith and institutions such as the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. Previously, he was Chief Scientific Officer of Angio-Oncology Sciences Inc. and a co-founder of Organogenesis Inc., one the earliest tissue engineering companies. Organogenesis grew partly from his fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Crispin holds degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard University. He is also president of the Coolidge Corner Community Chorus, is active in local schools, and is an avid folk dancer.
Glenn Williams is a dedicated advocate of the arts in Boston and beyond. He is committed to ensuring community participation in sharing information and discovering our common goals and happiness. He has long been a community activist, volunteer, and Board President for The Roslindale Village Main Street. As General Manager of Boston Neighborhood Network, Boston’s PEG Access stations, Glenn continues his mission by assuring every community voice has a place to be heard. He holds seats on the Greater Roslindale Medical and Dental Center Board of Directors, Alliance For Community Media’s New England Board of Directors, The Alliance For Community Media’s national Inclusion, Equity and Engagement Caucus and The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Virology and Vaccine Research Community Advisory Board of Directors.
Leilei Xia was born in Guangzhou, China. She is a multimedia artist who works in tactile art, experimental animation, video art, and participatory collective art. She is interested in combining the process and result of creating art – treating art not merely as a noun but as a verb. Her workshops have been hosted at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, and The Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Her films and animation have been awarded and selected in the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Stop Trik Animation Festival, Berlin Female Film Festival, Paris International Animation Festival, among others. Her works have been exhibited internationally in New York, Greensboro, Richmond, Guangzhou, and other cities. She was also one of the speakers at TEDxVCU 2023. She holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and is currently pursuing an MFA at the Virginia Commonwealth University.
Haizhu (Pearl) Yang is the director of NY20+ Art Promotion Institution. Pearl set her feet in arts in 2019 when she worked with curators to localize Hans Ulrich Obrist’s do-it exhibition at A4 Art Museum, China. With a multidiscipline background and first-hand experience in arts, she made her way to promote art to the public from a cross-cultural perspective. During her tenure at NY20+, she curated four exhibitions, launched dozens of events, and built partnerships with more than seventy art organizations and platforms around the globe.