Amada Miller (b. 1985, Austin, Texas) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Texas whose work exists at the intersection of art, science, and cultural inquiry, translating scientific data into tangible sensory experiences that invite audiences to engage with the world around them in intimate and unexpected ways.

Her projects has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at The Center for Science of Sinaloa (Sinaloa, Mexico), Blue Star Contemporary, Sala Diaz, FL!GHT Gallery (San Antonio, Tx), David Shelton Gallery (Houston, Tx), grayDUCK Gallery (Austin, Tx), and Galveston Arts Center, McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, Tx), Artpace San Antonio, MASS Gallery (Austin), and The University of Texas at San Antonio, among others.

Miller has worked with scientific institutions such as the European Space Agency, NASA, The Southwest Research Institute, and various natural history museums. She has been an artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, The Berlin Natural History Museum, Alice Yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, and The DoSeum in San Antonio.

Miller currently lives and works in Marathon, Texas, a registered Dark Skies Designated Area.

Joyce Chung is the Curator at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, where she leads the organization’s exhibition and performance programs. Her interdisciplinary approach examines identity, memory, and marginalization, with particular attention to how capitalism and power structures shape lived experiences. She is especially drawn to performance and time-based media for their ability to position the body as a site of resistance, reconciliation, and embodied memory. Chung focuses on underrepresented communities, particularly ethnic and gender minorities, and champions work that challenges normative frameworks. Her practice aims to create platforms where art fosters social inquiry and collective engagement. She has held curatorial roles at institutions in Korea and the U.S., including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Gwangju Biennale, Hyundai Card, Kukje Gallery, and Performa in New York. Chung holds an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University.

Erin Turner is a site-specific installation artist originally from Oklahoma and based in NYC, whose itinerant and research-based practice includes sculpture, photomontage, painting, tapestry, walking, writing, and participatory archive projects. Her works consist of layers of narrative surrounding the landscape: from public and private perceptions of the land, how we discuss nature and environment directly, symbolic representations, counter-narratives, and intentions for preservation and protection. Social, political, and environmental messages and interventions intersect in her collective work with the intention of promoting intimacy with the landscape. She believes that biodiversity is a human right.

Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen have been collaborating since 2015. With a focus on forms of visibility and knowledge production, their work and research spans a wide array of phenomena, from neutrinos to dust storms, and often incorporates researchers and practitioners from fields outside of art such as physics, anthropology, mathematics and architecture. With an emphasis on modes of sensing and sensory archives, they employ various filmmaking and installation strategies that create immersive and interactive experiences for participants. Their collaborative work has been exhibited widely with recent exhibitions and screenings in Johannesburg, Lima, Mexico City, Bilbao and Chicago.

Rami George is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Lenapehoking in what is now called Philadelphia. They have exhibited and screened broadly and remain motivated by political struggles and fractured narratives.

Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective creates art to empower relational community healing. Their works investigate systems of discipline, control, censorship, and capitalist extraction and reimagine memory/memorials, rituals, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship to (re)build sustainable community infrastructures. From punching sticky rice to chanel queer feminist rage to collectively write poems about grief and care, CAO’s work is collaborative and continues to evolve in community. Their work has been supported by Snapdragon Fund, SEEK Raleigh, Asian American Arts Alliance, The New Breath Foundation, ChineseFeminism, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and many community members. www.caocollective.com/ @caocollective

hú-tu (Laura 嘟嘟 & huiyin zhou) is an artist duo with backgrounds in social practice and anthropology, working across moving image, photography, performance, publishing, and collaborative writing. Dedicated to multidisciplinary art and transnational organizing, huiyin and Laura co-founded and co-direct the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草. They have been awarded residencies and fellowships at The Luminary, Culture Push, Pedantic Arts, BRIClab, The Seventh Wave, and more. @huiyin.zhou / @lauradudupersonal

Sangwoo Yoo (b. Seoul) is a Chicago-based artist whose sculptures and installations investigate ephemerality, material memory, and ecological cycles, often incorporating olfactory elements. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Environmental Sculpture from the University of Seoul.

Yoo has received fellowships and residencies from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, The Watermill Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Loghaven, MASS MoCA, and the Ucross Foundation. His honors include the Kumho Young Artist Award, the Creative Young Artists Award from the Kim Chong Yung Museum, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts Award, and the Grand Prize at the Hoguk Art Exhibition.

His work has been exhibited at the Kumho Museum of Art, Comfort Station, SITE Gallery, Dos Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, 6018 North, Bridgeport Art Center, and the United Nations Peace Memorial Hall.

SHED Projects is a non-profit organization and curatorial vessel founded by Gabrielle Banzhaf and Jon Gott in 2021, in the backyard of their family home in New Orleans. SHED nurtures investigative activity at the intersection of art, family life, and contemporary urban habitation—generating exhibitions, printed matter, residencies, and opportunities for experimentation and knowledge-building centered around visual culture and the dimensions of human feeling and lived experience. Now based in a historic 1856 landmark in Cleveland’s Brooklyn Centre neighborhood, SHED once again serves as a family home, project space, gallery, and living sculpture. The space is inhabited with the intention of fostering radical engagement with the heritage and emotional resonance of place through contemporary art and thought.

Maceo is a multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and cultural producer who explores themes in society and identity through movement, language, and imagery.

Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved. Working through archives and omissions, Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken.

Campbell’s films and artworks have been screened/exhibited internationally: International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Arts Festival, Berlinale Film Forum Expanded, MIT List Center, SFMOMA, Walker Art Center, The Drawing Center, ICA-Philadelphia, MOMA, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Bemis, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, St. Louis Art Museum, 67th Flaherty Film Seminar, and others. Awards include a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, MacDowell, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, and Whitney ISP.

Campbell’s writing is featured in artist books published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is Associate Professor in Art & Media Study at the University at Buffalo.

Laura Camila Medina (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá, Colombia. Her practice is deeply inspired by the kisses between mountains and sky of her birthplace intertwined with the thematic fantasy-scape and migrant microcosms of Central Florida. Her work has been exhibited at Yossi Milo, David Castillo Gallery, SPURS, Arts Fort Worth, Fuller Rosen Gallery, the Portland Art Museum, and Nationale. She was awarded the H. Lee Hirsche Memorial Prize, Dean’s Travel Grant, and CCAM Fellowship at Yale University, Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, New Media Fellowship at Open Signal, and various artist residencies including: the Living School of Art, ACRE, Signal Fire, and Centrum. She is represented by Nationale in Portland, OR. Medina earned her BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and an MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University. She is currently based in Cleveland, OH, where she is the AICAD Post-Graduate Fellow at the Cleveland Institute of Art. 

Cecilia Vargas Muñoz (b. 1951) is a master clay artist from Pitalito, Huila, known for her work that celebrates Colombian heritage and culture. Her contributions include a notable project for the Gold Museum of the Banco de la República, where she highlighted the life and culture of indigenous Colombian peoples. Her most iconic work, La Chiva, is a colorful sculpture of a traditional carriage filled with figures and objects, evoking the history of hardworking and joyful Colombian people. While Chivas are now mass-produced across Latin America and beyond, the original Chivas that inspired this widespread symbol were crafted by Vargas herself. Influenced by her early experiences with her mother, Doña Aura, Vargas’ work is imbued with the values of dedication, love, and the slow, steady transmission of knowledge that has shaped her legacy.

Cheyenne Wyzzard-Jones is the Curator of Spiritual is Political; producing, discussing, and exhibiting contemporary art of artists who explore histories, realities, and narratives that often go unnoticed and erased. Cheyenne is an interdisciplinary researcher, curator, writer / playwright, and educator whose work spans international development, curriculum development, race and gender studies, reproductive justice, prison abolition, and land sovereignty. Rooted in critical race theory, Black feminist discourse, and spatial justice methodologies, their research explores the impacts of globalization, colonialism, and environmental exploitation on Black, Indigenous, queer, and migrant communities. As a black indigenous queer femme, the positionality in her work stems from both a practice in creative oral and written storytelling, alongside a dedication to remembrance that has been passed down to her. Their curatorial practice centers narratives of the Black diaspora, global Indigenous communities, and queer realities: creating immersive, multi-sensory spaces for reflection and connection. Cheyenne’s love for curation is rooted in creating spaces where the audience can experience what is, what was, and what could be.

Their practice has included collaborations with Independent Curators International, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Indigenous Curatorial Collective, The New Museum, The Longwood Art Gallery, among others. Their love for theater led them to write their first production, The Messenger, which was commissioned in 2022 by 5th Avenue Theatre. Cheyenne became an Artist in Residence at The Theater Offensive from 2023 to 2025. They hold a Bachelor of Arts in International Development and Social Change from Clark University and a Master of Arts in Comparative and International Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Born in Atlanta to Thai and Indonesian immigrants, Amanda is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist. Her work in sculpture, textile, public art, and ritual has reclaimed space in museums and galleries, at protests and rallies, on buildings, in classrooms, and on the cover of TIME. Her work examines the unseen labor of women, amplifies AAPI narratives, and affirms the depth, resilience and beauty of communities of color. Amanda has been artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights and sits on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities where she advises the President on how art can foster community well-being.

During her residency with us at The Luminary, Amanda finalized her new installation “Of Soil and Sky,” named after a poem written about her time spent in the Summer of 2023 in 40 different textile communities across every region of Thailand. This monumental work celebrates the many threads of experience that shape us, the objects that remind us of who we are, and the roads we’ve traveled to find and cultivate belonging.

Allegra Hangen (USA, 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist, independent curator, and cultural organizer who mainly works in experimental video, installations, photography, sculpture, sound, and archives. Hangen's work often takes on social and cultural themes, focusing on sociopolitical effects of images and architecture. Her practice combines processual feedback loops, glitches, erasure, and research to question and subvert images and text, or rather to create new intuitive imaginations.

Hangen received her Master's in Visual Arts at UNAM (Mexico) and her BFA in Photography and Art History at Lesley University College of Art and Design (Cambridge, MA). Her work has been exhibited internationally in individual and group shows, film festivals, and live performances. She is a curator for the experimental film festival, ULTRAcinema, and co-founder and co-director of Fortuna, an independent art space and international residency program.

Zainab "Zai'' Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist and cultural worker living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Her work contextualizes the cybernetic and temporal entanglement embedded within societal dynamics to understand how all socio-technological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all materially implicated through time. She draws upon her body as a corporeal archive and site of ancestral memory to craft counter-narratives through sculpture, video, installation, built virtual environments, printed matter, archives, and community-participatory (un)learning. Zai is currently a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, design director for the African Film Festival at the Film at Lincoln Center in NYC and a 2023-24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow. Her work has been shown internationally at Gardiner Museum (Toronto), Film at Lincoln Center (NYC), Museum of Modern Art Library (NYC), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh), Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), Aktuelle Architektur der Kulturimages (Murcia, Spain), Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico) among others.

David W. Norman is a writer and art historian whose work focuses on highlighting the ways that art can make visible the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism in the Americas. He has collaborated with Indigenous artists and curators in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), Alaska, Canada, and Sápmi, and his current research project, "Settler Earthworks and Dispossession in the Midwest," traces parallels between the 1960s land art movement and histories of forced relocation and resource extraction in the broader Great Lakes region. His writing has appeared in journals such as October, Peripeti, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift—Journal of Art History, Kunst og Kultur, and First American Art Magazine as well as exhibition catalogues for Nuuk Art Museum and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. His research has been supported by the University of Copenhagen, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Alan Poma (Peru) is a multidisciplinary sound artist; he has focused his work on the creation of site-specific performances and multimedia installations. In the integration of performance, video art, sound art and scientific research he develops the creation of novel assemblies in which the viewer participates in sensory journeys.

An important part of his production studies the possibility of establishing a relationship between Russian Futurism and images taken from the Andean culture developing the concept of ¨Andean Futurism. As evidenced in his 2011 version of the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913). He has taken part in the following residency programs: Delfina Residency program in London; New Musical Theater, organized by the Munich Musical Theater Biennial in Buenos Aires; Residencia Casa Tres Patios, Medellin, Antioquia; Residencia Cero Inspiración, Quito; and Residencia Frontera Compartida, Ecuador-Peru.

As part of the CEC ArtsLink International Fellowship, we are delighted to host Yulia Krivich, a visual artist and cultural organizer from Poland and Ukraine. Yulia’s practice focuses on themes of migration, language, and decolonial processes in Eastern Europe. She co-founded the Solidarity Cultural Center "Sunflower" at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, using community-based practices to foster dialogue and activism. Her project, Vocabulary / Словник / Słownik / Словарь / Слоўнік, explores collaborative language and shared experiences of imperialism and nomadism.

During her residency, Yulia will continue her exploration of migration as a collective experience, seeking connections with US-based cultural institutions and communities.

Yulia Krivich (Poland/Ukraine) is a visual artist, PhD fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, and co-founder of the Solidarity Cultural Center "Sunflower" at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. 

Yulia has participated in numerous international projects and exhibitions in Ukraine, Poland and internationally; including  Pla(t)form at Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland, 2018),  WHW Akademija (Zagreb, Croatia, 2021), Documenta 15 public program (Kassel, 2022), Vilnius Performance Biennale (2023), the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (Poland 2023), Osaka Kansai Art Festival (Japan, 2023), among others. Scholarship holder of the City of Warsaw (2021). Nominated for the Future Photography Platform for Emerging Artists (2021). Her works are in the public collection of the ING Art Foundation in Poland and various private collections. Her practice is based on a postartistic approach, community-building and activism, exploring migrant experiences and themes of language, as well as decolonial processes in Eastern Europe. 

Christy Chan is a Virginia-born, San Francisco Bay Area-based artist who uses video, installation, performance, object design, and public art interventions to question the everyday power structures that uphold white supremacy in the United States. She was a 2022 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Fine Art and the founder of Dear America, a guerrilla public art project that projects the artworks of Asian-American artists onto high-rise buildings in urban areas, in response to an epidemic of anti-Asian violence. Chan’s work has been featured in solo presentations in Mills Art Museum and Southern Exposure in the Bay Area; Wassaic Project x NY Council of the Arts in New York; Film Independent in Los Angeles; and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, among others. She has been awarded residencies and support from the Bemis Center of Contemporary Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, SFFILM House, California Arts Institute, Creative Capital and other cultural institutions. Chan’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, San Francisco Chronicle, and on NPR and PBS. She lives and works in Richmond, CA.

dr. nick alder, ph.d., (they/themme/theirs) is a creative co-conspirator, healing + liberation spacemaker + community designer, making healing and liberation irresistible (word 2 toni cade bambara). their work nurtures the creative spirit, crafts ecosystems of care, worldbuilding + possibility. they are guided by the words of Audre Lorde, “without community, there is no liberation.”

dr. nick works as a pre-licensed psychologist and founder of radical healing lab, an incubator + digital community for Black queer creativity + healing arts.

as a community organizer and cultural worker, nick creates spaces that privilege the Black genderqueer spectrum. through these spaces, nick co-dreams experience design, digital storytelling creation, and community building with the award-winning collective and cultural hub Party Noire.

embracing a research-based art practice, nick is on an ancestral assignment to foster diasporic belonging + ecosystems of care. currently, their exploration centers on devotion, creative practice, technology, and Black feminist healingways.

their current creative side quests include learning to code at Seeda School, dj’ing + digital art making.

Imani Badillo (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. Their artistic practice revolves around fiber art and bookmaking; through these media, Imani explores community relationships and shared memory through working with natural, scrap, secondhand, and natural materials. Imani is the Project Coordinator for Cooking Sections' To Those Who Nourish project, exploring how cultural institutions can highlight the work of agricultural professionals as they address changes in food producfion due to climate change in Northeast Ohio. Imani works at SPACES Gallery as the Creative Engagement Coordinator; Rust Belt Riders, a worker-owned cooperative; and facilitates mutual aid events such as clothing and food swaps throughout Cleveland.

Kiki Salem (b. 1995, Al-Bireh, Palestine) is a St. Louis-based multi hyphenate Artist, Weaver, Designer, Sculptor, Writer, Educator, and Entrepreneur. Through various mediums, with textiles and material studies at the focus, her practice covers topics of escapism, experimental visual pattern development, linguistic hybridization, occidental assimilation, orientalism, and the Palestinian question. Kiki is a member of the Screwed Arts Collective in St. Louis. Her wearable collection, Punk Ass Arab (@punk_ass_arab) can be found on Instagram.

St. Louis polymath Stan Chisholm works under the alias 18andCounting and has built himself as a staple in his city’s creative community for nearly two decades.

As an experimental musician, vinyl DJ, visual artist and educator he commonly works in collaborative, communal and improvised settings. Visually, Chisholm’s works are socio-reflective pop art pieces that use an ever-evolving lexicon of characters, graphic abstractions, and text. Sonically, he brings modular hardware into immersive live experiences, mutating ideas of hip-hop and electronic music into visions both grim and wholly life-affirming.

In 2009, he earned his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2012, he co-founded Blank Space, a creative hub and community space on Cherokee St. In 2013, he became the Regional Arts Commission’s first “Artists Count” Fellow. In 2018, he served as the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’ first ever DJ-in-residence. From 2019-2023, he developed and full-time taught Kairos Academies Middle School’s Visual Arts program. And in 2021, he became the first awardee of an STL Art Place Initiative home.

Chisholm has exhibited at Laumeier Sculpture Park, City Museum, The Hyde Park Art Center, Paint Louis, Hoffman-LaChance Contemporary, and many other museums, galleries, venues, festivals, and DIY spaces.

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Prem Krishnamurthy (b. 1977) is a designer, author, and educator. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. His professional papers were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2019. In 2022, Domain Books published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters, which was named one of Fast Company’s “Best Design Books of 2022”. Prem graduated with a B.A. in Fine Art from Yale College in 1999 and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany the same year.

He currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design studio, and organizes Department of Transformation, an itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. In addition to leading design projects with artists, cultural institutions, and nonprofit organizations across the world, he has curated several large-scale exhibitions. These include Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, the 2022 edition of FRONT International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Our Silver City, 2094 at Nottingham Contemporary; and Ministry of Graphic Design in Sharjah, UAE. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York.

Elizabeth Burden is a multidisciplinary artist blending studio work with social practice. She uses drawing, painting, video, sound, and other media, mining archives and datasets to reflect on geographies, imaginaries, legacies, and vestiges of the past/present/future. Whether in her studio or working with others in community-engaged processes, she seeks to create spaces of/for critical thinking, critical feeling, and critical reflection that lead to a re-imagining of possibilities.

R Kauff (she/they) is a visual artist and educator currently living in Cleveland, OH. Their current work looks at the picture plane, mark making, time, and the embodied experience of living in chronic illness. Their multidisciplinary practice is centered on a sense of touch, which they explore through drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and poetry. They hold an MFA in printmaking and sculpture from University of Iowa where they were an Iowa Arts Fellow. Residencies include Jentel, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Platteforum, and the Tallgrass National Preserve. They are currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Drawing at Oberlin College.

Star Feliz (b. 1992, Lenapehoking, New York, NY) is an artist and healer living and working on Tongva land (Los Angeles, CA). Feliz illuminates the processes of world-building as they braid back together the strands of life within their Afro-Taino lineage of the Caribbean and its diaspora that were so violently fragmented since the onset of European colonization. Working across media, their conceptual installations take the form of maps, songs, and talismans. Through the exploration of the twinned histories of humanity and the earth, a unique visual lexicon emerges that embraces the mundane and the unknowable as sacred. While investigating universal phenomena like loss and desire, they engage with the theoretical touchstones of feminist thought, the queer radical tradition, contemporary Black liberation movements and land rematriation. Under the moniker of Priestusssy they create experimental devotional music with the earth through intimate narratives of transformation.

Matthew Flores is an artist and designer currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. His studio practice is rooted in strategies of misdirection and appropriation, and orbits around an interest in how the art viewing experience can be analogized with the format of jokes, performance, and the theatrical. He received his MFA from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in 2019 and his BA in Art History from the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri in 2015.

Eli Brown is an interdisciplinary artist and farmer whose research is rooted in queer ecologies, trans theory, and agriculture. Working in sculpture, participatory projects, and new media, Eli explores trans-ness as a lineage and evolutionary strategy encompassing many species in the natural world. His practice aims to address the problematic foundations of classification systems which continue to inform our bodily experiences.

Recent work has been featured at The deCordova Museum Biennial, Flux Factory, Franconia Sculpture Park, and Creative Time X. Eli’s work has received reviews in Sculpture Magazine, CULTURED, and Art New England. Last year, their artist essay was published in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.

Starr Davis is a poet and essayist whose work has been featured in multiple literary venues such as The Kenyon Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Rumpus, So to Speak, and Transition. She is a 2021–2022 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow and the creative nonfiction editor for TriQuarterly. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York and a BA in journalism and creative writing from the University of Akron. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry and creative nonfiction, Best of the Net, and Best American Essays.

Born and raised in “DC proper,” A.J. McClenon studied art and creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park, and The New School prior to receiving a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Alongside artistic experiences, A.J. is passionate about teaching and community collaborations with the goal that all the memories and histories that are said to have “too many Black people,” are told and retold again. As a means to uphold these stories A.J. creates writings, performances, installations, objects, sounds, and visuals. These creations often revolve around an interest in water and aquatic life, escapism, Blackness, science, grief, US history, and the global future. A.J. is deeply invested in leveling the hierarchies of truth and using personal narrative to speak on political and cultural amnesia and their absurdities. A.J. currently works and lives in Chicago.

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.

Alden Burke (she/her) is a Chicago-based educator, facilitator, and writer. Currently, she is thinking about modes of introduction, radicalizing HR practices, and free-writing in five-minute paragraphs. Generally, her work centers around supporting collaborative making, process-based work, care in administrative practices, creative sustainability, and the question “What are we going to learn from one another?”

Alden is the Co-Founder of Annas, the Program Manager at Design for America, and a Lead Organizer for the Chicago Arts Census.

Aldnbrk.com

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and St. Joseph’s College. His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2021. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He works as Program Manager at Recess.

Worksofanais.com

Andrea is a steward of in ℅: Black women (in care of Black women), a creative placekeeping initiative nurturing sites of care through a blend of urban agriculture, civic engagement, and art praxis. Her community-centered visual arts production works to reshape land-use policy by activating vacant space as sites that heal individuals and regenerate collective imaginations. Her process transforms quotidian materials, slated for waste streams, into designed and utilitarian objects that serve as community resources, and incorporates the impact of solidarity and circular economies at the material, individual, and communal scales. She is most interested in how we move from theory into practice as we imagine a harm free society where those most impacted by state sanctioned violence can thrive.

Incareofblackwomen.us

Emily Gastineau is a choreographer, performer, writer, and arts administrator based in Minneapolis and working internationally. Her work has been presented at Frascati (Amsterdam), On the Boards (Seattle), Garage29 (Brussels), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and Red Eye Theater (Minneapolis), among others. She collaborates with Billy Mullaney (US/NL) under the name Fire Drill, and their work has been shown in Amsterdam, Minneapolis, St. Paul, New York, San Francisco, Portland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago. Her collaboration with Vilma Pitrinaite (LT/BE) has been supported by Les Brigittines (Brussels), workspacebrussels, SE.S.TA (Prague), and the Lithuanian Council for Culture. Emily co-founded the performance writing platform Criticism Exchange, curates performances at Fresh Oysters Performance Research and elsewhere, and co-produced RELAY RELAY, an interview marathon and publication on contemporary performance. Emily is one of seven artistic directors of Red Eye Theater. As Program Manager of Mn Artists, she works with local artists to produce programs and publications at the Walker Art Center. From 2017-2019, she was based between Minneapolis and Amsterdam while completing a master's at DAS Choreography, Amsterdam University of the Arts.

Emilygastineau.com

Nia-Amina Minor is a movement artist + educator. Her creative work focuses on the body and what it carries. Through performance and teaching, Nia-Amina converses with black realities and investigates the intersections of movement, memory, and rhythm. As an educator and arts advocate, Nia-Amina centers community building as a mobilizing space for connection, support, and collaboration. Whether on stage, in the studio, or in the streets, Nia-Amina approaches movement based practice as a site for collective gathering. She holds a MFA from the UC, Irvine and a BA from Stanford University. She is a co-founder and former curator for Los Angeles based collective No)one Art House. Nia-Amina currently resides in Seattle, where she performed for five seasons as a Company Dancer and Community Engagement Artist Liaison at Spectrum Dance Theater under the direction of Donald Byrd. Nia-Amina performed in acclaimed works such as A Rap on Race, Shot, and Strange Fruit receiving a Seattle Dance Crush Award for her performance in Shot and was recently recognized as Dance Magazine's 25 Artists to Watch in 2021.

Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, Nathan Watson

Related Tactics is a collective of artists and cultural workers producing creative projects, opportunities, and interventions at the intersection of race and culture. Our projects explore the connections between art, broader social issues, and the public through trans-disciplinary exchanges, making, and dialog. Related Tactics is a conceptual space and platform where we confront systemic and institutional racism or inequities that influence our immediate socio-cultural lived experience that benefit from collective support and sharing knowledge or resources. We do this through collaboration and critical thought strategically implemented amongst and for communities of color and the diaspora.

Related Tactics is a collaboration between Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nathan Watson though there are many community members that make our work possible. We work between the San Francisco and Washington DC areas. Our projects have been exhibited and supported by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Center, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at Parsons School of Design (New York), Southern Exposure Gallery and Alternative Exposure Grants (San Francisco), Chinese Cultural Center (San Francisco).

Relatedtactics.com