Current Residents
 

 2022

 

  • Elena Levi is an arts administrator and educator from Brooklyn, NY. She is interested in creative practices, pedagogy, oral history, and ritual as opportunities for access and exchange. Elena is the Director of Programs at Artis, where she’s worked since 2016. She oversees Artis’ international Grant Program, Public Programs, Curatorial Workshops and Residencies, and works on organizational strategies and partnerships. Since 2016, Elena has been part of Interference Archive, a volunteer-run community archive and exhibition space in New York, where she co-produces a podcast about social movement culture and co-organized the exhibitions “Resistance Radio: The People’s Airwaves” (2019) and “Silencio, Fuego, Palabra, Vida: Zapatista Graphics” (2022). Additionally, Elena is a Museum Guide at the Brooklyn Museum. Previous positions include Program Assistant at Triangle Arts Association, New York (2014-2016) and Weitz Family Intern at Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha (2012-2013). Elena received her B.A. in Art History from Carleton College, Northfield, MN (2012).

 
 

  • Meghana Karnik works across modalities as a curator, arts administrator, and artist exploring relationships between art and social change, belief and technology, and between institutions, artists, and arts workers. Karnik is Co-Curator of The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023 and Manager, Grants & Artist Initiatives with Art Matters Foundation. She organized exhibitions and programs as Associate Curator of FRONT International 2022: Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows (Cleveland, 2019-2020), as Associate Director of EFA Project Space (New York, 2015-2019), and independently with The Cleveland Institute of Art’s Reinberger Gallery (Cleveland), Critical Practices, Inc. (New York), Harlan Levey Projects (Brussels, BE), Penthouse Art Residency (Brussels, BE), Foundation and Center for Contemporary Arts (Prague, CR), and Zygote Press (Cleveland). Karnik has an M.A. in Arts Administration from Teachers College, Columbia University, a B.A. in Political Science and Art History from Case Western Reserve University, and completed a non-degree BFA Exhibition & Thesis in Drawing at The Cleveland Institute of Art.

 
 
 
 

  • SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like Performance Space New York, The New Museum, The Kitchen, The Time-Based Art Festival at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. SHAWNÉ is currently teaching in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 
 

  • Tomi Seyi Laja [she/her/elle/la] is a Yoruba-American designer and writer/editor based in Chicago and Cambridge, MA. Born in Ibadan, Nigeria, she was raised in the suburbs of Chicago by way of Bronx, NYC and Uptown, Chicago. Currently a Master of Architecture II Candidate at Harvard Graduate School of Design, she is a researcher at Harvard Design Magazine, co-host of the African American Design Nexus Podcast, and independent architecture and arts writer.

    Through artifact-making, narration, and experimental media, her current musings include eco-womanist and afro-futurist perspectives as they relate to agency, consciousness, and the built environment.

    Interested in discourse and dialogue that brings to the surface process and intellectual labor (nuanced context), Tomi understands the function of art writing as one that speculates on the erotic (political and spiritual) dimensions of art/architecture. Artworks are a site of resistance since they alchemize the opportunity to practice deep listening—art writing is the archiving and holding of this timespan.

    Her experience with writing/editing and exhibitions includes the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; The Funambulist Magazine: Politics of Space and Bodies; Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy; Disc Journal; Harvard Design Magazine; and Yale Paprika!, amongst others.

 
 

  • Maggie Wong makes art, writes about art, writes art, reads art, shares art, mentors artists, and is mentored by artists. She studies by playing with objects' affective edges in the studio and by using pedagogical models rooted in creative vitality and community building. Maggie holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she now works as a lecturer. She is the Associate Director of Iceberg Projects in Rogers Park, Chicago, and is affiliated with Chicago API Artist United. Her work has been shown at Mana Contemporary, Comfort Station, Annas Projects, take care, Temple Contemporary, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and 99cent Plus Gallery and has been written about in ArtForum and Sixty Inches from Center. Her pedagogical workshops have been staged at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Art Institue of Chicago. Maggie’s writings are in publications such as Material Meanings, published by Yale University Press, Viral Ecologies, and the Journal of Art Practice.

 
 

  • Anisa Olufemi is a Black American, Washington, D.C. based curator, writer, and cultural worker of Afro-Trinidadian descent. Their practice is seeded by cultural productions of the circum-Atlantic, largely within The South and the Caribbean. Pulling at the common threads between mother lands and chocolate cities, Anisa amends and reimagines Black life pre and post emancipation. As a child of the Black Atlantic living in the wake of plantation economies, Anisa Olufemi maintains that Black Futurity is bound to the collective re-envisioning of Black being — finding abundance through speculative and surrealist frameworks.

    Such critical fabulation is engendered by their soft spot for lush lands, familial lore, and Black ecstatics. “Acknowledging and deepening our relationships with the lands that have mothered us…” — this is the vision of a Black Pastoral that Olufemi calls forth through their curatorial work and community activations.

    To date, Olufemi has mounted exhibitions in Washington D.C. and Chicago, and presented research at the Pratt Institute, the University of Oregon, Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Stony Island Arts Bank.

    Anisa is the day dream of caretakers, sharecroppers, and matriarchs from Couva-Tabaquite-Talparo, Trinidad, and the Northern Neck of Virginia.