Upcoming

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Dr. Yamuna Sangarasivam is professor of anthropology and director of the Women & Gender Studies Program at Nazareth University. She engages her interdisciplinary training in musicology, dance ethnology, cultural-political anthropology, transnational feminist and queer epistemologies and ontologies to inform her studies of terrorism, nationalism, resistance, and the politics of race. Her book, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism: A Speculative Ethnography of War (2021) was published by Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by her parents and grandparents to honor an ever-evolving transnational sense of self rooted in Tamil Eelam along with an awareness of ourselves as ecologically interdependent living beings, her recent scholarly and artistic endeavors in the study of food cosmogonies invites her to journey into the fabulatory arts of culinary worlding to build solidarities across space and time. 

Melissa Joseph is a New York based artist and independent curator. Her work considers themes of memory, family history, and the politics of how we occupy spaces. She intentionally alludes to the labors of women as well as experiences as a second generation American and the unique juxtapositions of diasporic life. Her work has been shown at the Delaware Contemporary, Woodmere Art Museum, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Jeffrey Deitch Projects, MOCA Arlington and List Gallery at Swarthmore College. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, Artnet, New American Paintings, Le Monde, CNN, and Architectural Digest and participated in residencies including Dieu Donné, Fountainhead, the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, the Museum of Arts and Design and upcoming at Greenwich House Pottery in 2023. She is a regular contributor to BOMB magazine.

Pacyinz Lyfoung, an Asian American poet, attorney, and activist, presents an intersectional narrative marked by her Hmong roots and dual French and American cultural heritage. Her trajectory from her birthplace in France to her growth and evolution in Minnesota offers a panoramic view of her life's journey. 

Bilingual in French and English, Pacyinz carries the relics of her family's diasporic experiences imprinted in her linguistic finesse. This distinct heritage frames her artistic endeavors, colored by her steadfast journey to master her ancestral Hmong language. Her poetry has been her bridge to her family and community legacies, especially that of her paternal grandfather, Phagna Touby Lyfoung. The story of Touby and his family reflects the story of the Hmong People finding pathways to full integration into their homelands, whether the Kingdom of Laos or the United States: breaking new grounds, making the Hmong name sound far and wide, and being of service to their homelands is the legacy of Phagna Touby Lyfoung, who was bestowed the title of "Lord Whose Name is Heard from Far Away" by the King of Laos.

Pacyinz's involvement in artistic projects is characterized by a deep-seated delight and a belief in the transformative power of collective creativity to shape a more compassionate world. She is at an exciting juncture in her career, poised to publish her first poetry collection—fulfilling one of her late father's wishes. She is currently based in Washington-DC.

Milagros “Mica”  Verendia Coming from an international and multi-cultural background, Mica’s work ethos and approach reflects her values – inclusive, accessible and human-centered, with a creative flair for the narrative arts. With a degree in International Affairs, she set out to work in international civil service, and held several positions in communications at the United Nations. She then shifted to lending her skill set to the arts and cultural institutions. Today, Mica consult with both spheres, as well as social media figures with impactful objectives. Her work has reached millions of people globally, providing safe containers for healing, empowerment and mutual aid in vast landscapes, and have been translated into many different languages. Past clients include several agencies within the United Nations, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Community Organized Relief Efforts (CORE), Brooklyn Museum and Big Little Feelings, Inc. Mica is most interested in community care as praxis towards abolition. She has a strong interest in how humans connect, and the many-fold layers and modalities this involves. Her curatorial practice is founded on non-violent and accessible communication, which are all baked into the DNA of everything she does, mainly in service of mostly BIPOC and immigrant communities.

Gloria Lau 劉君蕙 (she/her) is a designer and visual artist based in Brooklyn with roots in Hong Kong and California. Her creative practice centers on co-designing places and visualizing stories to amplify marginalized narratives, illustrate collective imaginaries, and actualize community-led visions. Her professional experience in landscape architecture and urban planning focuses on public space, resilient infrastructure, and community-centered design. As a visual artist, she is also the co-founder of Laudi CoLab art collaboratives that document and illustrate undervalued stories in the built environment. Gloria merges art and archival research to explore the interplay of urban and natural landscape and the interlinks between spatial systems, culture, and identity. She is a Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow, a NEW INC member, a Bandung Resident, and an Urban Design Forum Forefront Fellow.

Louise Yeung 楊浩怡 (she/they) strives to envision and build a better world as an urban planner and visual artist of the Hong Kong diaspora. Through printmaking and painting, Louise explores migratory relationships and collective memories among people, plants, and animals who transform new environments to call home. Louise’s creative practice is shaped by her vocational work in climate policy and organizing. Louise is a 2023 Bandung Resident, a program through MoCADA and Asian American Alliance for the Arts through which she is documenting Black and Asian traditions of herbal healing to foster new forms of community care.  Louisse is also an Advisory Board member of the Octavia Project, which uses the creative power of speculative fiction, art, and science to engage femme and nonbinary teens in imagining greater possibilities for our future.

April Z is a neurodivergent person born in China. She has been an aspiring competitive gameplayer, a groupie-turned-bar-singer, a failed-new-media-artist, and started a DIY project space called Tutu Gallery in Brooklyn. During her free time, she likes to take walks, swing, and google anything that comes up in her mind. Her special interests include contemporary art, psychology, and affective labor. She is good at bantering, writing, touching, and making things happen.

Sidian Liu is a photo-based artist, translator, and home builder. She makes images, performance, installations to build a sanctuary for personal and collective emotions triggered by the ever-shifting contemporary world. Leading a liquid, fragmented urban life, she seizes photography as a means to construct or subvert, to create a safe space in response to the issue of displacement. A lot of her works are participatory and interactive, establishing a space to feel belonged through exchanging energy with the audience.

Sidian is the recipient of Top 10 of 9th Annual Photography Rankings in China, 2022, “Kunpeng Award" of China Young Photographer Promotion Plan, the 21st Pingyao International Photography Festival, 2021, the top prize of First Female Photographer Competition by Miroir Project, 2021, and the top prize of Banshan Photography Award, 2020, etc. Her translation works have been published on LEAP. She has also translated for Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, and various art institutions, Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Shanghai Minshenng Art Museum, Wu Space, Aranya Art Center etc. 

Rabiga Marx is a Berlin-based artist and researcher with roots in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. She identifies as a "Nomadic Art(ist) Historian," embodying a conduit role that connects diverse cultural spectra.

Marx's primary focus revolves around the identities of contemporary artists from Central Asia, illuminating their nuanced roles within the global art milieu. Her work is a junction for differing cultural paradigms and temporalities, creating a dialogue between tradition and modernity, familiar and foreign.

Driven by her personal experiences of straddling varied cultural landscapes and timeframes, Marx's investigations and creations explore identity construction among "glocal" artists in the global art scene. Her perspective is keenly interested in the interplay of cultural memory within these contexts.

Marx's commitment to decolonization further challenges conventional narratives, dismantling embedded hierarchies and actively facilitating a more inclusive understanding and representation of artists in the global art community. 

Sammy Lee (b.1975 Seoul, Korea) studied fine art and media art at UCLA and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally and is in collections at the Getty Research Institute, Denver Art Museum, and the Spanish National Library in Madrid. Among her many accomplishments, highlights include a performative collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma during the Bach project tour in 2018. Lee is a Fulbright US scholar to S. Korea for 2023-2024 and the founder of a contemporary art and residency space called Collective SML | k in Santa Fe Art District, Denver. Sammy Lee’s art merges traditions of craft and installation while employing her Eastern and Western identities. Her work blends spatial, human, and temporal boundaries by deploying various materials and processes—paper, sumi ink, books, rubbings, sculpting, and architecture.

Peach Tao is a Brooklyn-based muralist, teaching artist and illustrator. Born and raised in Beijing, China, she received a BFA in illustration and printmaking from Savannah College of Art and Design. In the summer of 2020, she paired up with local activist Karlin Chan to breathe life into the Chinatown Mural Project. Their vision was to usher vibrancy and renewed energy into Manhattan's Chinatown through the creation of evocative murals that embody Chinese American life. Their endeavor, designed to reinvigorate local businesses and draw people back into the neighborhood, was met with acclaim and earned widespread recognition, including features on CBS News and NY1.

Peach's broad artistic impact is further demonstrated through her collaborations with numerous organizations like NYC Health+Hospitals, ThriveCollective, Groundswell, The LISA Project, East Village Walls, and The Bushwick Collective. Their shared mission—to beautify New York City's public schools and spaces—harmonizes seamlessly with Peach's passion for utilizing art to transform communal spaces.

Peach is her nickname because her family name (陶Tao) shares the same pronunciation of Peach（桃Tao）in Chinese.  

Victoria Romulo is a Filipina-American photographer based in Brooklyn, New York.

Born in Manila, Philippines, and then moved to Chesapeake, Virginia at the age of 8, Victoria's immigration experience left her yearning for the person she would have been if she had never moved, and curious about the people she could have become had her parents picked any number of different cities. Today she expresses those feelings through her photography: seeing the possibilities of people she could have become in everyday moments, objects, and strangers — giving her work a cinematic and romantic lens.

Bonita Jackson is an actress, writer, teaching artist, and activist based in NYC. She hails from the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”– Minnesota. At thirteen years old, while walking down the hallway of her junior high school she saw a bright fuchsia audition flyer for The Wiz. From the moment she stepped on stage as Addaperle (“the feel-good girl!) her calling to be a storyteller was solidified. And she has answered the call by training at Howard University and Pace University where she obtained her BFA in Acting. She also holds a Master’s in Acting from FSU/Asolo Conservatory of Actor Training.

Bonita has written, performed, and produced four one-woman shows, and has performed in theatres and festivals in NYC for over ten years. Her theatre credits include As You Like It (FSU Conservatory), Sweat (Asolo Rep.), Corey & Vanessa (The Tank),  The Niceties (Urbanite), Black Footnotes (Nuyorican Poets Café), and Adventures of Kieron & Jade (Bridge Street Theatre). Film credits include Beneath the Sound, Drowning Above Water, How Does That Make You Feel?, and The Old Man and The Fish.

Karesia Batan is a Queens-based dancer, artist advocate, and founding director of the Queensboro Dance Festival. As a dancer, she was a company member of several modern dance companies for choreographers including Craig Zarah, Beth Soll & Co., Nancy Meehan, and Anne Zuerner. Karesia also loves collaborating with interdisciplinary artists for installation and film. Under her company The Physical Plant, her dance choreography has been presented in venues including HERE Arts Center, Dixon Place, Triskelion Arts, TheaterLab, CultureLab, and Gibney Dance. As part of the NYFA Artist Corps Grant, she has also recently completed a series of Tinikling dance workshops, teaching the traditional Filipino folkdance in several Queens communities. 

Kristin Vining is a composer, pianist, teacher, and poet with Pacific Northwest roots who recently moved to New York City. She has a heart for artistic collaboration and a gift for reflecting the energy of those around her back to them through her music, which is centered in hope and healing. She has been collaborating with choreographer John Passafiume on a new dance theater work based on Oscar Wilde’s “The Fisherman and His Soul.” She is also interested in blurring the lines between music and poetry. In poet Constantine Jones' words, Kristin's poetry is steeped in "impossible hope" and "some sort of genuine unshakeable tenderness.”

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.

Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a Dominican and Puerto Rican Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Literature, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and an Atticus Review Poetry Contest winner. She is also a BRIO award winner with fellowships from CantoMundo, Desert Nights Rising Stars, The Frost Place, The Home School, VONA, Nalac Leadership Institute, and Communitas America. With advanced degrees in education and an MFA in Performance Studies, this three-time International Latino Book Award winner authored Conversations With My Skin (2011), and Homage To The Warrior Women (2012). Through Robleswrites Productions Inc., she created Lalibreta.online (2021), and The Abuela Stories Project (2016). Her work has been featured on HBO Habla Women, The Dodge Poetry Festival, Lincoln Center, and The Smithsonian Institute. Her poetry appears in Poets.org, Tribes.org, The Quarry, 92Y.org, and NACLA.org. Peggy’s also been published in several anthologies including The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. For more please visit Robleswrites.com.

Sagirah Shahid is a Black American Muslim poet, arts educator, and performing artist from Minneapolis, MN. She is a recipient of awards, fellowship, and residencies from the Loft Literary Center, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Twin Cities Media Alliance,  Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art and Muslim Advocates, Strive Publishing, Wisdom Ways, Nicollet Lanterns, Write Like Us, and 826 MSP. Sagirah’s prose and poetry have been published by Mizna, Terrain.org, Winter Tangerine, Puerto Del Sol, Paper Darts, Juked, the Walker Art Center, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. In 2021 Sagirah was co-curator of the City of Saint Paul’s Sidewalk Poetry project. She celebrates her life exploring poetry with the student-writers of Unrestricted Interest, a writing program and consultancy dedicated to supporting neurodivergent learners through creative writing. Sagirah’s children’s activity book Get Involved in a Book Club!  is available at Capstone press. Sagirah is a poetry editor with Overtly Lit.

Lauren Hlubny is the NYC Artistic Director of Franco-American company Danse Theatre Surreality (DanseTheatreSurreality.org). Hlubny's work centers image-as-metaphor, physicality, social justice, and interdisciplinary communication, and her research focuses on the intersection of movement and storytelling. Hlubny has been invited to share works in France, Italy, Seattle, San Francisco, Birmingham, Knoxville, New Orleans, Portland, and in museums nationwide, including the Dali Museum. Hlubny studies Martial Arts and Anthropology in New York City, where she works as a director who originates works at venues such as Joe’s Pub, Triskelion, The Kraine, Shetler Studios, TADA, Mark Morris, and La MaMa. Fascinated by multifaceted productions, combat, and consent, Hlubny also enjoys working as a dramaturg and acting coach for choreographers, and as a choreographer for theatre and opera. Hlubny was recently an artist-in-residence for her piece “īs, a dance-concerto” this August at the Shed Seattle, and serves as co-director/dramaturg for Dance Action’s latest work “Welcome to Imagi•nation Part 2” premiering October 21st at the Center at West Park. 

Taylor Ennen earned a BFA summa cum laude and an Honors Medallion from Florida State University's School of Dance. She also trained in California with the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and in Paris, France with the Academié American de Danse de Paris. Ennen has worked closely with the organization Movement Exchange as a dance diplomat to Panama, with the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and with the Gibney Dance Center Programs Department. She has had the privilege of performing works by Robert Moses, Ohad Naharin, Alex Ketley, Christian Burns, Larry Keigwin, Doug Varone, Gerri Houlihan, and Gwen Welliver, among others. Ennen is also currently working with Vencl Dance and SagaDanceCompany in New York City.

Simona embraces the listeners and transports them into an intriguing atmosphere with a clean, warm, unique sound. Her multicultural upbringings and musical training from the conservatory in Europe to contemporary studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston developed her expressive musicianship that allows her projects to span from classical to jazz, pop and r&b where she showcases her sensitivity and sophistication as a proliferous songwriter, composer, vocalist, pianist and cellist. Her solo work includes the studio album Always Be and the latest collaboration with the multi artistic platform Accented Projects. She currently lives and works in New York City.