Artists Archive
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Abigail DeVille received an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of the 2014-15 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the 2015 Creative Capital grant, the 2015 OBIE Award for Design, the 2017 Louis Tiffany Comfort Prize and the 2017-18 Chuck Close Henry W. and Marion T. Mitchell Rome Prize fellow.
DeVille’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Cooper Gallery at Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Cambridge; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York. She has designed sets for theatrical productions at venues such as the Stratford Festival (2014), Harlem Stage (2016), La Mama (2015), JACK (2014-16), and Joe’s Pub (2014).
Learn moreAdee Roberson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is a meditation on symbolism and texture. Synthesizing performance and installation, her work melds vibration and technicolor visions through paintings, video, and melodic compositions. These works offer a refracted timeline of black diasporic movement, weaving sonic and familial archives, with landscape, rhythm, and spirit.
They have exhibited and performed at numerous venues including, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Antenna Gallery, Project Row Houses, Palm Springs Art Museum, Human Resources , UTA Artist Space, NADA Miami, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, MOCA Los Angeles, and Art Gallery of Ontario. Adee has been an Artist-In-Residence at Echo Park Film Center, Treehouse Lagos, and ACRE. She is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Cutting Edge Grant and the 2021 Los Angeles Artadia Award. She is based in Los Angeles, California.
Learn moreAki Onda is an artist and composer. His musical and visual works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as his widely-known project "Cassette Memories", drawn from three decades of field recordings (or, as Onda refers to them, ‘sound diaries’). Crossing genres, he has been active internationally in the fields of art, film, music, and performance. His artistic collaborators include Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Raha Raissnia, Loren Connors, Alan Licht, David Toop, and Akio Suzuki. Onda has presented his works at documenta 14, the Louvre Museum, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Argos, Bozar, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA, The Kitchen, and Walker Art Center, Nam June Paik Art Center among other institutions. After residing in New York for many years, he currently lives and works in Mito, Japan.
Learn moreAki Sasamoto is a New York-based artist who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and whatever medium it takes to communicate her ideas. In her installation and performance works, Sasamoto moves and talks inside the careful arrangements of sculpturally altered objects, activating the complex emotions at work in her daily life. Sasamoto’s works appear in theater spaces, gallery spaces, and landscapes. Sasamoto has shown in exhibitions at Mori Museum, Take Ninagawa, Yokohama Triennale 2008, Japan; Gwangju Biennial 2012, South Korea; Chocolate Factory Theater, the Kitchen, Soloway, Whitney Biennial 2010 at Whitney Museum, Greater New York 2010 at MOMA-PS1, New York; and numerous other international and domestic venues. Sasamoto has collaborated with visual artists, musicians, choreographers, mathematicians, and scholars.
Selected Press:
"String Theory," Jennifer Krasinski, Artforum, March 19, 2014.
"After Magritte," Martha Sherman, Dance View Times, March 11, 2014.
"Stilts Aren’t the Only Way to Rise Above It All," Brian Seibert, The New York Times, March 7, 2014
Learn moreAlexandria Rema Saleem is a first generation Palestinian American* artist and cultural worker. She works with individuals, communities, and the land to reclaim our right to sacred spaces through land tending, worldbuilding, dance, ritual, risk, and tenderness. Flowers are her deepest ally and main medium, working between the land as a regenerative flower farmer and her community as florist, event designer, and installation artist. She is currently co-stewarding the Black Oregon Land Trust and is the Director of Arts and Culture with the Center for Study and Preservation of Palestine.
*Saleem grapples with an appropriate way to name her locations amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects.
Learn moreAlex Cecchetti is an artist based in Paris, France, who works primarily in writing and performance. Cecchetti has published several books of his writing, and performed internationally at places including: La Vatrine, Paris, France (2010); Art Pavillion, Zagreb, Croatia (2010); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France (2009); and Artists Space, New York, NY (2009). Cecchetti was an artist in residence at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2006) and SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2003).
Learn moreAlfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021), as well as, Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).
Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017), Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2020) and SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo (2021).
The artist has realized more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020.
His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide. Learn moreAlima Lee is a transdisciplinary afrolatinx artist from New York City and is currently based in LA. Their work explores themes of identity and intersectionality. A recent Frieze LA x Ghetto Film School Fellow and Co-Host of a monthly radio show, "Rave Reparations" on NTS. Working in an uninhibited range of mediums from video installation and performance to printmaking and sculpture, Alima is on an ever-constant freefall from structure. Their video work is currently on view at HVW8 Gallery in Berlin and has been presented at the Tate Modern, MOCA, Smithsonian African American Museum, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and ICA Boston among other global entities.
Learn moreAlison O’Daniel is a visual artist and filmmaker who works with moving image, performance, sculpture, and large-scale installation. Informed by her experiences of being d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing and collaborations with others across the d/Deaf spectrum, including composers, athletes, musicians and actors, O’Daniel builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the auditory. She has screened and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. O’Daniel is a United States Artist 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and has received grants from Ford Foundation; Sundance; Creative Capital; Field of Vision; ITVS; Chicken & Egg; SFFILM. She was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s 2019 25 New Faces of Independent Film issue. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. Her film “The Tuba Thieves' premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Learn moreAllie Hankins is a dancer, choreographer, and sound artist who has been producing and performing experimental works in Portland since 2013. Her interdisciplinary practice has led to her professional engagements with choreographers Heather Kravas (Seattle), Milka Djordjevich (LA), Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis); and Portland artists Linda Austin, Takahiro Yamamoto, keyon gaskin, Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, claire barrera, and Emma Lutz-Higgins. Allie co-initiated the ongoing Queer performance cooperative Physical Education (PE) with keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim in 2013. PE produces festivals, hosts reading groups, and teaches workshops nationally. She’s been awarded residencies at Centrum, Ucross, Headlands Center for the Arts, Caldera, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency.
Learn moreA.L. Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of the project Ridykeulous, founding member of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her works have been featured internationally at such venues as P.S.1/MoMA, Tate Modern, The New Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Centre Pompidou, The Kitchen, REDCAT, and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, among others. Her work is included in such public collections as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Steiner is currently based in Los Angeles and is faculty at the University of Southern California.
Selected Press
The Lowdown: A.L. Steiner, Io Tillet Wright, New York Times T Magazine, May 11, 2011.
Eve Fowler & A.L. Steiner, North Drive Press #4, 2007.
Would it be okay if I kept my sweater on?, Naomi Fry, Paper Monument.
Learn moreAmanda Lee is a queer artist located in Los Angeles, CA.Their primary mediums are media and ceramics (porcelain). In addition, they love to create hand-made flora inspired earrings.
@amandalee_faa
Learn moreAMERICAN ARTIST makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video. Artist is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Visual Art and a Creative Capital grantee. They are a former resident of Smack Mellon, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Abrons Art Center, Recess, EYEBEAM, Pioneer Works, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Cultured, Artforum, and Art in America. Artist is a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a core faculty at Yale.
ig: @ivorytower_headass
Learn moreAndrew Gilbert is a Los Angeles-based performer, musician, and teacher. In 2007 he co-founded Poor Dog Group, an experimental performance collective with whom he has developed six works as a sound designer and performer, performing in venues including REDCAT, the Experimental Media and Performance Art Center (EMPAC), The Getty Villa, Grotowski Institute in Poland, Bitef Theater in Serbia, and the Pula International Theater Festival in Croatia. House Music, an ongoing co-creation with choreographer Jennie Liu, is a performance for 16 guests rooted in an ongoing study of Japanese tea ceremony, and has been performed since 2014 at venues including Prelude Festival, Live Arts Exchange, HomeLA, The Mistake Room and the Printed Matter Art Book Fair. He most recently designed sound for choreographer Faye Driscoll's Thank You for Coming: Space. Andrew is one half of the band Royal Auditorium. @royalauditorium @andrewgilbertindependentartist
Learn moreAndrew Tay is a hybrid performer, choreographer, curator and DJ. He is the cofounder of Wants&Needs Danse with Sasha Kleinplatz. Together, they produce the popular dance events Short&Sweet and Piss in the Pool which take place in non-traditional venues in Montreal. Tay received the Buddies in Bad Times Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation at the SummerWorks Performance Festival for his work Fame Prayer / EATING (2016). He was named the first artistic curator at Le Centre de Création O Vertigo (CCOV) in Montreal and recently became the Artistic Director of Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) one of Canada’s oldest contemporary dance companies. Tay actively thinks about community, irreverence and resistance in both his performance and curatorial practices.
Learn moreAngelo Scott is an interdisciplinary artist from the South currently living in Portland, OR and completing their BFA in Intermedia at PNCA. Their sonic compositions build shifting layers of melodic sentiments from splintering phrases, emphasizing irregularities in live sampling, synthesis, and insisting upon fleeting swells of emotive expression as a passage through intricate patterns in overwhelming soundscapes. Scott received their Associate of the Arts from Linn-Benton Community College in 2019, where they worked as the photo editor for The Commuter. While living in Corvallis, Oregon, they began operating in DIY sonic arts communities, co-organizing and curating installation and video works for Corvallis Experiments In Noise's What is Noise? festivals. In 2016, they co-initiated and co-created Sponsored Trash, an ongoing performance arts collective. They currently perform solo sound compositions as Tyronza and participate in improvisational ensembles, create video projections, and make collaborative CRT installations for interactive music events.
Learn moreAnissa Mack received her BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art. She also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and participated in the PS1 National Studio Program. Her work has been featured solo exhibitions in New York, Atlanta, and Portland, Oregon. She has also created commissioned public projects and performances for the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (California), WaveHill Gardens (Bronx, New York), The Public Art Fund (New York), and the Queens Museum (New York). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Mack is represented by Laurel Gitlen in New York.
Selected Press
Anissa Mack at Small A Projects, Micah J. Malone, Big, RED & Shiny, March 17, 2008.
Anissa Mack: The Last Full Weekend Each September, John Motley, Portland Mercury, March 27, 2008.
Pies for a Passerby (with audio), Melissa Block, NPR, June 14, 2002.
Learn moreGray and Paulsen are artists who live and work collaboratively. Their idea-based practice fuses history, fiction, autobiography, and artistic commentary into a wide variety of material works. Their work has been shown and published internationally. They live and work in Portland, where they are represented by PDX Contemporary Art.
Selected Press
Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Nat Andreini, Shift.jp, June, 2011.
Review: Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen at PDX Gallery, DK Row, The Oregonian, July 15, 2010.
Learn moreAnthony Hudson is a Grand Ronde/Siletz artist and writer also known as Carla Rossi, Portland's premier drag clown. Hudson’s performance work—from his award-winning solo show Looking for Tiger Lily to Queer Horror at the Hollywood Theatre—have earned him national fellowships, international engagements including the US Pavilion’s drag clown in residence at the 2024 Venice Biennale, features in Hyperallergic and Art in America, and sainthood from the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. A 2023 FSG Writer’s Fellowship finalist and 2024 Tin House resident, Hudson’s writing has appeared in American Theatre, BOMB Magazine, and Arts and International Affairs. Hudson is currently adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.
Learn moreariella tai is a video artist, film scholar, and independent programmer from Queens, New York. They are interested in Black performance and cultural vernaculars in film, television and media studies. They are one half of “the first and the last,” a fellowship, workshop and screening series supporting and celebrating the work of Black women and femmes in film, video and new media art. They have shown work at Anthology Film Archives, the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival, Portland Institute For Contemporary Art, Northwest Film Center, Boathouse Microcinema, Wa Na Wari, the Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival, MOCA and Smack Mellon. Their most recent video work "safehouse" premiered at Trinity Square Video in Toronto as part of group show "Architectures after the Asylum" curated by Sajdeep Soomal.
Learn moreAutumn Knight is a New York-based, Texas-born interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, sound, and text. Drawing from her training in theater, group dynamics, and psychology, Knight makes performances that reshape power structures and upend audience expectations of live experiences. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions, including Human Resources, Los Angeles; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Shedhalle, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, New York; Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Performance Space New York, NY; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired to the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors, and fellowships, including an Art Matters Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Learn moreThe Design Collaborative know as the Black Aesthetic Studio (BAS) is led by artist duo Cleo and Kayin Davis, in conjunction with Professor of Architecture Robert Alexander Clarke, and historian Kimberly Moreland. They will investigate policing through the lens of Oregonian historically anti-black urban politics and policies. And how these systems of policing affected Black Folks' ways of living, being, and seeing throughout time.
BAS aims to uncover how past, present, and future policing histories have imprinted African Americans' psychology and aesthetic throughout time. They will construct temporal gateways that will encapsulate specific periods which will draw the audience into black space, thus illuminating the user on how we see our histories and futures which has been policed by white authorship from the founding of our nation. These constructed visions will be critique on Oregon racist history and policies, allow one to understand how migration and oppression has transforms black identity and its expressions.
Cleo Davis started his education in architecture at the University of Oregon further changing to industrial design at San Jose State. He is an artist whose work takes a critical view of the social, political and cultural issues and through his work, he continues to reconstruct the cultural view modernizing while also highlighting traditions. Although he engages with multiple subjects and mediums his methodology remains consistent. He also has started the screw loose Studio the Mayo House project and most recently, the archives project in collaboration with Kayin.
Kayin Talton Davis started off in an artistic direction from a very young age, but later learned her love for math and science and pursued a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering at Portland State University. Her design projects were always influenced by a drive to be accessible to all. She started the soapbox theory in 2001, as a way to express herself creatively. And through these mediums, her interest is always in creating something that is positive, helpful and accessible to all but especially children from culturally underrepresented communities.
Robert Alexander Clarke is a designer, educator, and theorist practicing at the intersection of culture, identity, and architecture. His work aims to develop and canonize black aesthetics, thus authenticating it as a lens through which to practice architecture. His design office, BAS (Black Aesthetic Studio) was founded by Clarke, Cleo Davis and Kimberly Morland; their studio explores how to unearth new aesthetics that are immensely specific to African American culture, experience, and identity. Before joining as Activist in Residence at UCLA’s City Lab, Clarke held posts as a Wilson Smith III Design in Spatial Justice Fellow at the University of Oregon’s College of Design. As well as Research Fellow at Newlab under the supervision of architect and New York University Associate Professor of Practice Mitchell Joachim. Before opening his practice, Clarke worked for many years at architectural firms across the globe, including HOK, Terreform ONE, Gensler, and Archi-Union.
Kimberly Stowers Moreland, MBA, MURP, is wife of Michael L. Moreland and the mother of four amazing young adults: Katherine, Mike Jr., Kristen, and Karina. She owns Moreland Resource Consulting and has over 25+ years of experience in the public sector, urban and historic preservation, community development, and urban planning in Portland, Tacoma, and Salem.
Moreland serves as the President of the Oregon Black Pioneers, and their mission is to preserve the history of Black Oregonians. On behalf of the Oregon Black Pioneers, she authored Images of America: African Americans of Portland (Arcadia Publisher). She is the Vice-Chair of the Portland Historic Landmark Commission and a member of the Portland Landmark Commission.
As a community historian, Kimberly began documenting Portland's Black history for over 30+ years. As a city planner with the City of Portland, she worked with the community advisory committee and local historians to produce the History of Portland's African-American History (1805 to the Present). She was on the project team that produced Cornerstones of Community: The Buildings of Portland's African American History, published in 1995. She was subsequently involved in the Multiple Property Documentation (MPD) history project, which builds on the Cornerstones research to produce African American Resources in Portland, Oregon, from 1851 to 1973. This research brings attention to sites related to Portland's Black history so they can be listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
As owner of Moreland Resource Consulting, Moreland worked with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and Home Forward, former the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP), to better understand how their past policies unjustly impacted African Americans. Since, 2021, she has teamed with the City of Portland and Architectural Resource Group (ARG) on successfully approval of four National Historic Landmark Register nominations significant to Portland's Black history, including Dean's Beauty and Barbershop, Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, Golden West Hotel, and Dr. John D. Marshall Building. In 2023, with Constructing Hope, Moreland co-authored Building Legacy: BIPOC Construction Trailblazers in Oregon, which highlighted twenty-three construction trade pioneers.
In 2023, she partnered with Robert Clark and Cleo Davis to establish Black Aesthetics Studio LLC (BAS). The firm explored how to unearth new aesthetics specific to African-American culture, experience, and identity.
Learn moreAtlas has created work for film, theatre, television, and museums including the Whitney (New York) and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville (Paris). A pioneer of integrating live video with stage performance, Atlas is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with choreographers, dancers, and performers such as Leigh Bowery, Diamanda Galas, Merce Cunningham, and with Antony and the Johnsons on the audiovisual performance, Turning. Atlas is the recipient of three Bessie Awards and was recently presented with the prestigious John Cage award, by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2006).
Atlas has been active as an interdisciplinary filmmaker and video artist since the 1970s. Over the years he has made pioneering media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television, and live electronic performances. In November 2006, London's Tate Modern presented a retrospective of his work, titled Hail the New Puritan.
Learn moreDB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an interdisciplinary media artist who explores audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience. He frequently emphasizes the generative role of error as an opportunity for creation, resulting in media-centered projects driven by DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations, and persistent, inquisitive experimentation with available materials.
His work has garnered awards from esteemed organizations including the Jersey City Arts Council, Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Precipice Fund grant funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation and administered by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). His visual art, performances, curatorial & collaborative programming have been presented internationally at A4 Arts Foundation; the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival; Onassis Foundation; ICA at MECA&D; Luggage Store Gallery; Soundwave ((7)) Biennial; PICA; Portland Art Museum; the Honolulu Museum of Art; Honolulu Biennial 2019.
Learn moreEmily Jones and Hannah Krafcik make performances and facilitate movement practices together. They are white settlers residing on the unceded lands of the Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clackamas, and many other Tribes, also known today as Portland, OR. Hannah (they/them) is a neurodivergent dancer and writer. Emily (she/they) is a dancer, movement educator, and bodyworker. The artists’ long-standing collaboration is driven by considering how power dynamics impact their body/minds and behaviors.
Learn moreForensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations. FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists, to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organisations, to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence.
Our investigations employ cutting-edge techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, open source investigation, digital modelling, and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews, and academic collaboration. Findings from our investigations have been presented in national and international courtrooms, parliamentary inquiries, and exhibitions at some of the world’s leading cultural institutions and in international media, as well as in citizen’s tribunals and community assemblies.
Learn moreDr. Gregory D. S. Anderson is founder and Director of Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Dr. Anderson has degrees in Linguistics from Harvard (AB) and University of Chicago (PhD). He is an expert in endangered languages and the structure and history of languages from across the globe. He has worked with speakers of endangered minority languages in their communities from every continent. He is the author of eleven books and more than eighty academic articles. Dr. Anderson is a National Geographic Society Fellow and was the subject of the critically acclaimed film The Linguists.
Learn moreHolland Andrews (they/them) is a vocalist, composer, clarinetist, and performance artist whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build soundscapes encompassing both catharsis and dissonance. Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, they create a realm of live performance that is boundlessly present. They have been commissioned by REDCAT, ISSUE Project Room, and the 2024 Whitney Biennial, where they created two sound installations and the performance work Speaker. Notable musical collaborations include Son Lux, Nils Frahm, JJJJJerome Ellis, Christina Vantzou, William Brittelle, Peter Broderick, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. Their work is presented nationally and internationally, collaborating with artists such as Bill T. Jones, Sonya Tayeh, Dorothée Munyaneza, Otobong Nkanga, Jenn Freeman, NARCISSISTER, Demian DinéYazhi, Oliver Beer, and Will Rawls. Andrews is a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Awardee, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awardee, and United States Artists Fellow.
Learn moreJose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and Tony-nominated producer. A leading voice for the human rights of immigrants, he founded the non-profit media advocacy organization Define American, named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. His best-selling memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, was published by HarperCollins in 2018. Most recently, he co-produced Heidi Schreck’s acclaimed Broadway play What the Constitution Means to Me, which was nominated for a Tony Award for “Best Play” and is streamable on Amazon Prime Video. In 2020, Fortune named him one of its “40 under 40” most influential people in government and politics.
In 2011, the New York Times Magazine published a groundbreaking essay he wrote in which he revealed and chronicled his life in America as an undocumented immigrant. A year later, he appeared on the cover of TIME worldwide with fellow undocumented immigrants as part of a follow-up cover story he wrote. He then produced and directed Documented, an autobiographical documentary feature film that aired on CNN and received a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary. Also in 2015, MTV aired White People, an Emmy-nominated television special he produced and directed on what it means to be young and white in a demographically-changing America.
Among accolades he has received are the Freedom to Write Award from PEN Center USA and honorary degrees from Emerson College, Colby College, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Passionate about the role of arts in society and promoting equity in education, he serves on the advisory board of TheDream.US, a scholarship fund for undocumented immigrant students.
A product of the San Francisco Bay Area, he is a proud graduate of San Francisco State University (’04), where he was named Alumnus of the Year in 2012, and Mountain View High School (’00). An elementary school named after Vargas opened in his hometown of Mountain View, California in August 2019.
Learn moreJulia Arredondo is an Artist Entrepreneur currently living in Chicago. Originally from Corpus Christi, Texas; Julia is pursuing her MFA at Columbia College Chicago. Julia's latest art business venture currently explores the crossroads of Avon and botánica culture, titled Botánica Avon. Julia founded independent publishing entities, Vice Versa Press and Curandera Press; and continues to explore the intersections between art and business.
Learn moreFounded in 2012 by Libby Werbel, Portland Museum of Modern Art (PMOMA) is an investigative project focused on the lack of major contemporary and modern art institutions within a growing metropolis. PMOMA has produced more than 50 exhibitions and events within the context of a self-actualized and community-grown modern art museum.
Learn moreMaster Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. is Black, Italian, Queer, Non-Binary, Neurodyvergent, and practices primarily in america. Their collaborative approach results in artwork by and for the people.
Stevenson’s practice has been dedicated to supporting young people ages 4 to 18 in developing the necessary skills to encourage advanced imaginative thinking and self-confident expression. In 2019 they developed the Afro Contemporary Art Class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School which has had many forms since, including Afro Futurist February, and three years of Fred Hampton Summer Camp. Supporting community efforts as well, taking the shape of support for the effort to Save Dr. Martin Luther King School from being displaced by the expansion of Interstate 5 which has triggered the need to move Harriet Tubman Middle School. Stevenson is currently working in the Albina community to develop a Living Archive at Jefferson High School with students, community, and the architectural design team. Stevenson also has a robust portfolio of artist projects centering food and gathering around it, projects involving sculpture, drawing, and photography, and new work in collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated folks. These include Tin Can Phone, a podcast all about life in and outside of prison, and Gallery Blue, a curation and exhibition project both of which are owned and operated by formerly incarcerated individuals. Stevenson pursues these professional and creative goals passionately because they believe that empowered and open-minded young people and communities are the best and most direct way toward ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future for all.
Learn moreRay Anthony Barrett's interdisciplinary practice is situated at the intersection of art and gastronomy. Since 2018, his pop-up, CINQVÉ, has been devoted to tracing the evolution of Soul Food from California to its West African origins. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, a project commissioned by Active Cultures, traces a seven month journey across the varied landscapes of the Western states. This multifaceted endeavor—spanning writing, research, film, and cooking—unfolded over the course of two years, interrogating the evolution of agricultural and land practices and the impact of dispossession and colonialism on foodways, tracing its roots from settler colonialism to present day modes of capitalism, and overconsumption. Barrett's drawings, photography, and installations elaborate on these themes. His projects have been featured at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal, among others. His work has been profiled in Hyperallergic, Compound Butter, and Los Angeles Times.
Learn moreRobert Alexander Clarke is a designer, educator, and theorist practicing at the intersection of culture, identity, and architecture. His work aims to develop and canonize black aesthetics, thus authenticating it as a lens through which to practice architecture. His design office, BAS ( Black Aesthetic Studio ) was founded by Clarke, Cleo Davis and Kimberly Morland; their studio explores how to unearth new aesthetics that are immensely specific to African American culture, experience, and identity.
Before joining as Activist in Residence at UCLA’s City Lab, Clarke held posts as a Wilson Smith III Design in Spatial Justice Fellow at the University of Oregon’s College of Design. As well as Research Fellow at Newlab under the supervision of architect and New York University Associate Professor of Practice Mitchell Joachim. Before opening his practice, Clarke worked for many years at architectural firms across the globe, including HOK, Terreform ONE, Gensler, and Archi-Union.
Learn moreSaint Abdullah is the moniker of Mohammad and Mehdi, New York based Iranian-Canadian brothers working across sound, and music. Inspired by Iran’s religious, political and cultural history, the project was formed out of a deep frustration with the way the West perceives – and treats – Muslims and the Islamic faith. We aim to challenge stereotypes and act as a conduit between unnecessary enemies.
Learn moreSholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose immersive works, performances, and audience participatory scores implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary’s practice is a conglomeration of visual, sound, and collective processes, all of which she is deeply dedicated to.
Featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue,” Asgary has been supported by numerous residencies, most recently including Headlands Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, UCLA Art Sci, ARoS Kunstmuseum, and Berkeley Art Center. Her work has been presented through performances, exhibitions and screenings by such institutions as Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Minnesota Street Project, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, 500 Capp St., and Ann Arbor Film Festival. Asgary holds an MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University. Learn more