illustration by kat zhao
Culture Push Associated Artists receive support for mid-process and established projects that are aligned with the mission and experimental vision of Culture Push. Associated Artists are individuals and projects that have established themselves within New York City, but can still benefit from collaboration with and assistance from our organization. Unlike the seedling-stage ideas of our Fellowship for Utopian Practice, our Associated Artists and their projects have already run through their first logistical stages and idea-testing, and are ready to be bolstered through fiscal, institutional, and creative support.
Current associated artists
SINNAMON LOVE
Sinnamon Love is a visual artist, writer, community organizer, and Black feminist pornographer living with a Traumatic Brain Injury in New York City. She is the Executive Director of the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Collective. For over 30 years, Sinnamon has created media that shift narratives around sex work, BDSM, disability, and motherhood. She was inducted into the AVN and Urban X Awards Hall of Fame.
Love is currently using her career as a sex worker and adult filmmaker as a research subject as an archivist and memory worker through Archiving the Black Web, a project of Northeastern University and The College of Wooster. She uses the multimedia project to create a digital archive of images, videos, interviews, panels, academic journals, art, writing, tweets, blogs, and other media she has appeared in and produced. The project builds on Black feminist theory, art history, porn and sex work studies, sex education, and ethical non-monogamy to create theory about being a Black, disabled, and parenting sex worker. Her writing can be found in “Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex” (2009,) Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey” (2012,) “The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure” (2018). More recently, she wrote the afterword for “Body Autonomy: Decolonizing Sex Work & Drug Use” (May 2024,) “Coming Out As A Porn Star 2 (October 2024,) and “Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities” (May 2025). Her thoughts, words, and insight can be found in the NY Times, Business Insider, NPR, Five Thiry Eight, GQ Magazine, Cosmopolitan, British Glamour, Fast Company, Vanity Fair, Complex, Whoreible Decisions, Missy Magazine, and numerous podcasts, books, and academic journals.
Sinnamon’s philanthropic work stems from lived experience as an unhoused youth in the sex trades and systemic inequities that influenced her work in both legal and criminalized forms of sexual labor. She serves on the Steering Committee of The National Survivor Network, one of the largest networks of pro-sex work and pro-decriminalization anti-trafficking organizations. She is a former fellow of the Sex Worker Giving Circle. As a committee member of ‘me too’ International’s Survivor’s Agenda, Love strives to ensure sex workers are included in conversations on ending sexual violence. She lends her voice to Freedom Network, Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST) Los Angeles, Decrim NY, and Free Speech Coalition to advocate on the city, state, and federal levels for sex workers’ rights and to end sex trafficking, financial and banking discrimination.
Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Collective is an organization providing financial assistance and increased access to mental health and wellness resources, domestic violence intervention, and labor advocacy to Black and Brown sex workers in the formal and informal sexual economy. Sinnamon identifies as a kinky, pansexual, solo-polyamorous grownup, lifestyle switch, retired full-service sex worker, and professional Dominatrix. She is a vibe curator, yogi, Hip Hop & House head, cannabis enthusiast, recovering serial monogamist, #naturallygrey, and happily #singleinbrooklyn.
You can find out more about Sinnamon at SingleinBrooklyn.com
Social Media: Twitter / Instagram / IG Backup / TikTok / Website
ANNA RG
Anna RG (she/they) makes work in composition, traditional music, sculpture, and community organizing. Based in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, her experimentation is rooted in a decade of apprenticeships in communities of traditional song, fiddle and banjo in Appalachia; and more recently in her experiences with long covid and disability justice community.
Her longtime folk music/theater duo Anna&Elizabeth was heralded a “a radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do”(The New Yorker). Smithsonian Folkways artists, they performed at Carnegie Hall, the Newport Folk Festival, the Hirshhorn Museum, Big Ears Festival (where she was guest curator of traditional music), and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, Newport Folk Festival, The Stone, Cafe Oto, Big Ears Festival (where she was guest curator of traditional music), NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, and many other venues which are not currently accessible to high risk/immunocompromised artists, and played with musicians across genres, including Lonnie Holley, Cochemea Gastelum, Susan Alcorn, Ellen Fullman, Sarah Hennies, and wrote a piece for the award winning Aizuri Quartet.
She recently completed her MFA in sculpture at Bard College, was part of the recent Tulca Artist Festival in Galway, Ireland, and took part in an annual High Risk Club in Dublin, hosted by the Chronic Art Collective. She is a proud member of RAMPD (Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities), and an active member of the NYC Mask Bloc, and is one of the many founders of a new initiative CLEAR THE AIR NYC, a collective of disabled organizers committed to supporting covid-safer events in the city, through an air filter library, masks, education, and resources.
SICK CENTER is an organization dedicated to supporting sick music-making and sick forms of listening, beginning with a budding archive of sick music history, and a song service for the sick by the sick. To take an audio tour of the Ridgewood Sick Center, or to request a song, visit our website at www.sickcenter.net
a black and white photo, by francie seidl chodosh, of anna roberts-gevalt. Anna, a white person with light hair with bangs and shoulder length hair, sits leaning against the wall. She stares directly at the camera, in a button up shirt, holding a cane in their hand. In the mirror, the photographer is partially glimpsed, blurry, behind a large camera.
LAUREN COVEY
Lauren Covey (b. 1982 Lynchburg. Virginia) is an artist working with sound, video, installation, photography, and performance. After completing a B.S. in Fashion Design from Drexel University and working in the fashion industry, Covey studied at the Art Students League before receiving an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University in 2021. Simultaneously she worked as a peer counselor in the mental health field, and sound has always been an essential part of her mental health. Covey hopes that her artwork can inspire social change through advocacy and her involvement in the community. Her work has been exhibited at the Governors Island Art Fair, Fridman Gallery, and Fountain House Gallery.
"Sonic Portraits of NY" is a community-based art and archival project supporting marginalized communities dealing with mental illnesses and incarceration through the use of sound as a therapeutic tool. Covey will collaborate directly with staff and participants in non-profit organizations in the mental health field, such as CASES. Together they will create a composition of the urban landscape which will document their lived experiences through their ears. The skills that participants learn will provide a platform for a new way to collaborate, building increased independence and self-confidence as they learn creative ways to cope. The sonic portrait will also provide important documentation of the New York urbanscape created by individuals who get ignored on the street, are often feared and misunderstood, and have fewer legal rights. This project aims to diversify the sound art field, allowing the medium to amplify voices, making room for inclusivity and empowerment, explicitly addressing stigma, and raising awareness about the intersection of untreated mental illness and incarceration.
MAHO OGAWA
Maho Ogawa is a Japanese born multidisciplinary movement artist working in NYC since 2011. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated movements of the body that she has built a database, “Minimum Movement Catalog”. She uses body, video, text, computer programming, and audience-participatory methods to discover how relationships and the environment affect individual bodies consciously and subconsciously.
Her works have been presented in N.Y. at Domestic Performance Agency, Invisible Dog Art Center, Emily Harvey Foundation, White Box Gallery, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, NYU Grey Gallery, CPR as well as in Korea and Japan at Za Koenji, Tokyo Culture Creation Project, and Whenever Wherever Festival to name a few.
Her recent works are in part decontextualizing and researching minimum movement found in Japanese tea ceremony rituals as well as cinema. She's currently working on public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new methods of thinking about “silence,” providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community. The aim is to empower the erased cultures by dismantling oppressed body gestures and their context as an archive and audience-participating event, fighting for cultural equality in nonviolent ways.
VERONICA AGARD (IFÁṢADÙN FÁSANMÍ)
Veronica Agard (Ifáṣadùn Fásanmí) (she/her) is a poet, writer, abọ̀rìṣà, community educator, and connector at the intersections of Black identity, wellness, representation, and culture. She curated the Who Heals the Healer series and the conference of the same name and facilitates the Ancestors in Training educational project. Her initiatives are housed in her freelance platform, Vera Icon, LLC. Through archival research at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica (CIRMA), she completed her undergraduate thesis on the complex histories of sexual assault and violence against women in post-conflict Guatemala. In 2014, she graduated from CUNY City College of New York with a BA in international studies and history and continued her community work as a co-founder of Sister Circle Collective, a role she held for five years.
She is invested in cultures of healing, and experiments with creative healing modalities and puts theories learned into practice. This came to life during the first generation of the Reparations: Black Wellness Clinic, a free healing clinic for and by Black people that was housed at Earth Arts Center and continues with metaDEN. Building on her community work, she served as a college advisor for three generations of Black and Brown youth in Brooklyn and taught at the Summer Institute of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project. In addition, she was a contributing editor at Your Magic, a podcast and digital community, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts. No matter the role, Veronica offers her expressions and time to amplify the voices of those that walk with her.
As a creative, Veronica’s words have been featured at The Grio, Let Your Voice Be Heard, Mic, For Harriet, Black Girl Magik, Life as Ceremony, Black + Well, Redefining Our, and Heritage Journal.Her work has been profiled at Loca Vibes Radio, Black Abundance BK, eres.you, The Glam Femme, the Bag Ladiez Podcast, NFLUX Magazine, the Bushwick Podcast, Take Nothing When I Die Podcast, Self Ceremony, and the This Restorative Justice Life Podcast. She is a recipient of the Spring 2022 Reclamation Ventures Grant award for Healing Practices for Grief. With every opportunity, she names the power of storytelling and being believed in.
Described as living in the future - Veronica is guided by the past and carries out her dreams in the present.
veronicaagard.com | @verosgotthejuice (FB and IG) | @vverosgotthejoy (TW)
ancestorsintraining.org | @ancestorsintraining (IG)
whohealsthethehealer.com | @whoheals.thehealer (FB and IG)
GIOVANNAH MARVEIGE
Giovannah Marveige is a Divine Being who manifests in ways that have been assigned, chosen, and revealed. The child of many, Giovannah is a 1st generation settler born on occupied and colonized Indigenous lands. Their heritage is Haitian and genealogy evidence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Giovannah’s pronouns are: Divine Bing, Ife, We, They, all pronouns are accepted.
Giovannah and their work are rooted in and informed by Global Majority feminism, socially engaged Buddhism, compassion, care, play, equity, joy, and rest. They are employed in the fields of communications, development, and grant writing. As an interdisciplinary conceptual artist, Giovannah explores themes of identity, race, body/The Body, and living history while integrating notions of stewardship, social practice, and research on the climate crisis into this framework. Learn more at Marveige.org
The Stewarding Resilience Initiative (SRI) is a social practice project created and directed by Giovannah Marveige. SRI works with Global Majority (BIPOC) and other systematically and strategically under-resourced communities in the areas of emergency preparedness and climate change resilience. Through micro-grants, information sharing, community building, resiliency training, and art/creative activations, SRI supports effective and sustainable community-led change that is rooted in equity and care. SRI is Global Majority centered and led. We are rooted in Global Majority critical thought and wisdom. We prioritize Global Majority community and grassroots led initiatives and responses to climate change resilience and emergency preparedness. Learn more at StewardingResilience.org
EMILY BASS
Emily Bass is an author, activist and artist who witnesses, documents and interrogates the intimate and global forces that turn pathogens into pandemics, and place some bodies at greater risk. Her first book, To End a Plague (PublicAffairs, 2021) was shortlisted for the 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize for best English language book on foreign affairs. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Washington Post, n+1 and many other publications, including zines published by the What Would an HIV Doula Do collective, of which she is a member.
She is the recipient of a Fulbright journalism scholarship and the Martin Duberman Visiting Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library.
Bass was trained and works within AIDS activist communities that gather and share scientific and technical information, map power, and activate evidence-informed strategies for redistributing power and securing change through collective action. She is interested in defining a new pandemic activism encompassing HIV/AIDS, SARS CoV-2, pandemic preparedness and sexual and reproductive health. As part of this inquiry, and as a Culture Push Associated Artist, she is creating and sharing conceptualizations of the immune system and its constituent cells and substances through mixed media collage, participatory workshops, historical research and oral history. The “immune responses” generated through this creative, collaborative work are an alternative to state-sponsored narratives of immunity in pandemic time. This work is part of her ongoing initiative, The Dendron Project. Instagram: @dendronproject
QUINLAN MAGGIO
Quinlan Maggio is an artist and tech worker based in Brooklyn, New York. Quinlan makes site-specific installations, videos and objects informed by a constant ongoing practice of performance. Through these mediums Quinlan processes experiences of workplace alienation and solidarity and synthesizes those experiences into artistic works that explore questions of labor and the artist’s studio as a site of production. Through this process of reforming and reimagining our relationship to work, Quinlan creates spaces for collective conversations about work, labor and technology through solo performance, immersive installations, and socially engaged projects.
Quinlan's most recent project was a free community vending machine on the Hunter MFA campus, inspired by community fridges, free food in tech workplaces, and family history. Past performances include a design lesson performed as a chair dance, a karaoke performance for former coworkers, interviewing at corporations like Facebook and Amazon in order to refuse job offers, and walking around Times Square with a layoff box.
Wages for Art(work) is an art project by Quinlan Maggio that leverages the artist’s labor power to give creative time back to working people, one hour at a time. During the hours that the artist is working a job, participants in the project are invited to book an hour-long session to ‘work’ alongside the artist. They can use that hour to make art, write, sleep, take a walk—anything that is creatively generative for them. Participants are then compensated for this time at the rate of 50% of the artist’s hourly wage. Participants are also encouraged to leave a short written review after the coworking session, and any reviews, as well as optional photo documentation, are collected on the Wages for Art(work) website.
ZOE C. BERGER
Zoe C. Berger is a digital artist using live interactions to highlight our experience of time, dimension, and materiality. Live video mixing, lighting design, and interactive programming provide a diverse arsenal for creating phenomenal art pieces and environments. Zoe is an alumni of CCNY's DIAP MFA program, with a previous educational background in Physics (B.S. Stoney Brook University) and Studio Art (B.A. CCNY).
Her Teaching work, titled "Glitch" uses Scratch to teach computer programming to children aged 6 - 12, by addressing technology as a shared birthright, and error messages as a necessary part of code writing. In order to introduce basic concepts such as timelines, coordinate systems, storyboards, sprites, loops, and remixes, Zoe is developing a screen free alternative to teaching computer science at the elementary school level. She will be distributing the packets of materials through the New York Public Library system as take-home projects.
ANDREW INGALL
Andrew Ingall has been working in arts, culture, and community engagement for over twenty years as a curator, scholar, writer, performer, and producer. He received a B.A. from Columbia College and an M.A. in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. His collaborators have included cultural workers, artists, scholars, faith leaders, activists, health care professionals, and funeral directors.
With a background in theater, performance, and museum studies, Andy has organized exhibitions and public programs for The Brooklyn Museum, Electronic Arts Intermix, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, Wave Hill, and other cultural institutions. His writing and research has appeared in Videofreex: The Art of Guerrilla Television (SUNY Press), Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, and other publications. This year Andy is taking part in LABA NY, a fellowship based at Manhattan's 14th Street Y and part of a global cluster of hubs that includes Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Northern California.
Andrew Ingall. Photo: Matt Deen
ANDREW’S PROJECT:
Warlé is a multi-platform project that re-envisions my cousins’ mid-century boutique as a pop-up site for discussion, storytelling, and art that inspires action on behalf of LGBTQ+ elders and refugees. Using archival documents, photography, original artifacts, and recreations of objects, my goal is to re-assemble the personal and professional lives of Leon Ingall and Warren Kronemeyer. They co-founded Warlé, a small business specializing in antiques, contemporary objects, art framing, restoration, and interior decoration. Leon was a Jewish refugee and fashion designer who fled Bolshevik Russia, relocated to Weimar Berlin, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1940; Warren was a ghostwriter, journalist, antiques dealer, and an operative of the WWII-era U.S. Office of Strategic Services. After several decades together in New York, Leon and Warren left the city in 1980 and relocated to Townshend, Vermont and became beloved citizens of this rural community. The goal of the newly re-branded Warlé is to facilitate conversations about how we care for some of the most vulnerable populations. Programming will include exhibitions of archival materials, decorative objects originally sold at the boutique, as well as new works by refugee and queer artists inspired by those artifacts. Follow my research on Instagram @warleinc. More information at www.warleinc.com
Leon Ingall and Warren Kronemeyer. Photo: Karl Decker
(This is an Ongoing Fundraiser)
IKI NAKAGAWA
Iki Nakagawa is a videographer who lives and works in NY, United States. She has recorded live events including music, dance, theater and lectures for arts as well as edited footage for archive and online distributions. She has also produced shot documentaries on topic including permaculture, cooperative practice and macro-business.
For more information please visit www.ikinakagawa.com
Photograph by Ronald Jean-Gilles
RAY JORDAN ACHAN
Ray Jordan Achan (he/him/his) is an Indo-Caribbean, Brooklyn based actor, director, writer and producer. Ray is the Founding Artistic Director of EXILED TONGUES, a performance collective that provides financial, artistic and collaborative support to QTBIPOC artists who center diasporic consciousness. He is currently developing his documentary theater piece, “CON DOUGH: Stories of 1 in 5 Gentrified'' which premiered at the Center at West Park in February 2021 and will premiere at the Tank in May 2021. Ray is also developing his original play, “Diasporic Dreams From a Boy Who Wished He Could,” at the Rogue Theater Festival in Summer 2021. He is an Artist-in-Resident at the Asian American Arts Alliance, a Playwright-in-Resident at the Player’s Theater and an Associate Member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation. He is the recipient of the Pet Project Grant sponsored by Jeremy O’Harris and the Bushwick Starr for his play, Free Fallin’. Ray directed the World Premiere Off-Broadway production of SHARUM written by Mohammad Murtaza and Dena Igusti at the Player’s Theater. Recently, Ray directed CUT WOMAN, written by Dena Igusti and premiered at the Prelude NYC 2020 Festival. Future projects: Ray is directing his original play Free Fallin’ which is set to premiere at the Hudson Guild Theater in Fall 2021. Additionally, Ray is directing La Violecion of My PapiYon, an original play written by Arline Pierre-Louis. rayjordanachan.com | exiledtongues.com.
GABRIEL TORRES
Gabriel Torres is a multidisciplinary artist from Colombia and New York. Gabriel’s work deals in the conversations between community engagement, creative placemaking, civic practice, theater making and film. Gabriel has worked in Hong Kong, NYC and Colombia as an educator, documentarian, theater director and community engagement consultant.
Gabriel is currently working in Haus of Dust, a campaign to bring awareness about substance use in latinx queer communities from his personal experience. Haus of Dust is successfully created as a collaboration between Gabriel, Aaron Salazar (Producer) and Kristen Kelso (Marketing and Development director), additionally a collective of 10+ artists and institutions working to bring forth the project. To learn more, visit iamdust.org
Current Project: “Haus of Dust” - Loisaida Inc, The Laundromat Project | Recent Projects: ”Mañanaland” The Tank NYC - Ass. Dir and Community Coordinator, “Distant Bodies” - 2020 - The LGBT Center & Cyber Tank - NYC .“Still - Performance for Inner Peace” 2019 - Chashama - NYC | Recent Theater Directing Credits: “LoverSpy by Anna O’connell”, PEA Fest, NYC, 2021,“Village Stories, KrisP Productions”, Hong Kong (Virtual), “Leo and his friends by Amalia Oliva Rojas”, Theater Accident, NYC (Virtual), “Caught in The Act by Anna Parisi”, Biennal Immigrant Artist Festival, NYC (Virtual).
ANAKA
AnAkA is a storyteller on the sacred path of wisdom reclamation. Born with the divine faith to create bridges between worlds, AnAkA’s storytelling approach is to honor the rooted intricate of culture, highlighting sacred elements of human connection and conscious elevation. Through visual, audio, herbal and tattoo practices, AnAkA creates portals of healing for their global community.
AnAkA has shown her work at Chale Wote Fest in Ghana, Lagos Photo Fest in Nigeria, The Portland Arts Museum in OR, and has curated solo shows in Cape Town, New York and LA. She has recently been announced as one of the 27 chosen artists to showcase their AKTIV8 Archive project at The Shed in Manhattan in June 2021.
AKTIV8 Archive is a continuous creation & love-child birthed by AnAkA in the year 2014. The AKTIV8 Archive creates a sacred safe space of wisdom, bridging the gap between cultural preservation and global accessibility to knowledge. AKTIV8 Archive reconstructs what it means to preserve cultural wisdom with the safety of Black & other Indigenous folks at the forefront of its consciousness. Seeking sovereignty of storytelling, wisdom sharing and cultural growth, AKTIV8 Archive creates a literal map of global key movements persevering through times of great change. It provides an equator the sacral experience of urgent expressions and revolutions. Ase o
KHADIJAH McCASKILL
“I was born and raised throughout Los Angeles, but I consider Mid-City, Ladera and Windsor Hills my stomping grounds. I graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a B.A. in Sociology in May of 2013. I hold a certification in Advanced Youth Development, and serve as an Ambassador for Ethical Global Engagement with Omprakash. With over 7 years of experience as a teacher, tutor, and youth advocate, my work has spanned the field of education. I am currently based in the Brownsville community of Brooklyn, NY. I find inspiration in many places and have lived in Costa Rica and China. My work is also heavily connected to exploring my ancestral roots. Namely, I create through the West African and Native American principles of "no art for art's sake." Both beauty and functionality are equally important in creating new futures for Black and Brown communities. “ - Khadijah McCaskill
KHALIF TAHIR THOMPSON
Khalif Tahir Thompson is best recognized for his powerful work concentrated in portraiture and figuration. Incorporating painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, and paper-making into his practice, he explores notions of self through varied subjectivity concerning identity, race, iconography, as well as family and relationships. Recently he graduated from Purchase College with his Bachelors in Fine arts degree and completed a fellowship at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in NYC, the Vermont Studio Center and Trestle Art Space. He is currently represented by Black Art In America LLC.
TASHA DOUGE
Tasha Dougé is a Bronx-based, Haitian-infused artist, artivist and cultural vigilante. Her body of work activates conversations around women empowerment, health advocacy, sexual education, societal "norms," identity and Black community pride. Through conceptual art, teaching, and performance, Dougé devotedly strives to empower and to forge broad understanding of the contributions of Black people, declaring that her "voice is the first tool within my art arsenal."
She has been featured in The New York Times, Essence Magazine and Sugarcane Magazine. She has shown nationally at RISD Museum, The Apollo Theater and Rush Arts Gallery (Philadelphia). Internationally, Dougé has shown at the Hygiene Museum in Germany. She is alum of the Laundromat Project's Create Change Fellowship, Urban Bush Women's Summer Leadership Institute, The Studio Museum of Harlem's Museum Education Program and the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute's Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship.
PAst
The Illuminator is an art-activist collective comprised of visual artists, educators, and technologists living and working in New York City. The collective has staged hundreds of projection-interventions in public spaces, and primarily uses large-scale, guerrilla projections to shine a light on the urgent issues of our time.
Janine Renee Cunningham is a performer and theater-maker residing in Brooklyn. Her work plays with themes of futurity including utopia,dystopia and social ecology. Her work has been presented at Dixon Place, The Prelude Festival, On the Boards, ESPA and the New York City Fringe Festival. In 2018 she was an EmergeNYC fellow with the Hemispheric Institute. She is currently an Associate Artist with Culture Push and member of The Commitment Experiment. Graduate of the Atlantic Acting School Conservatory, BA in International Studies from Portland State and currently pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College.
She is currently working on a public art project that explores citizen science as a tool against hopelessness, depression and anxiety caused by climate change.
Sonya Aragon is a writer, artist, and theorist focused on intimacy under capitalism. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Inquiry, BOMB, Mask Magazine, and Commune, among other outlets and under other names. Through "AGAINST THE LAW: An Erotic Labor Reading Group & Harm Redux Project", Aragon studies the criminalization of sex work, the limits of identity-centered organizing, and the possibilities of opposing the state through community care-taking.
Christina Freeman is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her work takes on various forms including photography, video, artists’ books, multimedia installation, participatory performance, and curatorial projects.
Whether initiating spontaneous conversation with viewers in public space, or working with an anthropologist or another artist, her practice has a porousness that relies on the participation of others. Creating unconventional rituals, she invites the audience to join in disrupting dominant cultural norms. Intervening in systems often taken for granted, she approaches culture as something we actively shape together.
She received her MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, City University of New York in 2012 and her BA in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Haverford College in 2005. Freeman’s projects have been featured in Hyperallergic, Art F City, and Greenpointers, as well as Bulgarian National Television and Radio.
Christina was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Haverford College from 2016-2018 and has taught in the Department of Art & Art History at Hunter College since 2014. Community-building through transformative conversation motivates all of her work, regardless of whether she is performing, curating, or teaching.
BFAMFAPhD is a collective that employs visual and performing art, policy reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. BFAMFAPhD received critical acclaim for Artists Report Back (2014), which was presented as the 50th anniversary keynote at the National Endowment for the Arts and was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, Gallery 400 in Chicago, Cornell University, and the Cleveland Institute of Art. Their work has been reviewed in The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, WNYC, and Hyperallergic, and they have been supported by residencies and fellowships at the Queens Museum, Triangle Arts Association, NEWINC, and PROJECT THIRD at Pratt Institute. BFAMFAPhD members Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard are now working on Making and Being, a multi-platform pedagogical project which offers practices of collaboration, contemplation, and social-ecological analysis for visual artists.
Candace Thompson is a [human] performer and interdisciplinary media maker fascinated with the feedback loops generated by place, culture, identity, climate, economics, and daily interpersonal interaction. She makes video, audio, web projects, and ritualistic installations– both IRL and online—that examine and challenge the truths we purportedly hold to be self-evident. Perhaps they aren’t so self-evident after all.
Her project "The Collaborative Urban Resilience Banquet" (aka The C.U.R.B.) uses the act of urban foraging and the projected "what if" disaster scenarios of climate change to examine critical issues around food and food sovereignty, land access, environmental remediation, multi-species interdependence, and right relationship(s) with the (un)natural world. She is currently documenting her learning experience via the project's instagram handle, @the_c_u_r_b and throughout 2019 will be hosting a series of 'banquets' foraged entirely from the city streets. She is a Fellow with More Art's Engaging Artist's Program and will be taking part in Residency Unlimited's 2019 Dirt and Debt residency program.
Sherese Francis is a southeast Queens-based poet, speculative fiction writer, blogger, workshop facilitator, and literary curator. She has published work in journals and anthologies including No Dear, Apex Magazine, La Pluma Y La Tinta's New Voices Anthology, The Pierian Literary Review, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, Blackberry Magazine, Kalyani Magazine, and Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Arts Inspired by Octavia Butler. Additionally, she has published two chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls and Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling. Sherese is currently the poetry editor of SpokenBlackGirl.com and co-editor of Harlequin Creature’s Social Justice Subscription Series. Her other projects include her Afrofuturism-inspired brand, Futuristically Ancient; being a core member of the Southeast Queens Artist Alliance; and her southeast Queens based pop up bookshop/mobile library project, J. Expressions.
Katherine "Kat" Cheairs is a filmmaker, educator and activist who utilizes moving image arts as a healing modality. Katherine has designed and taught numerous courses and workshops in media arts for school and community based organizations focused on adult and K-12 populations, which include, neurodiverse and on the spectrum individuals; incarcerated youth and adults; new immigrant and English language learners. Kat's focus is on individuals who would not have access to formal filmmaking education and using it as a practice to explore the self and archive the personal narrative. Katherine has worked with such organizations as, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, BRIC Arts Media, The Tribeca Film Institute, and Four Freedoms Park Conservancy. Katherine is currently Director of Education and Public Programs at Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project and will begin a Doctor of Education Program in Art and Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in Spring 2019. Kat is also the producer and director of Ending Silence, Shame and Stigma: HIV/AIDS in the African American Family and is a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective. Ms. Cheairs is from Atlanta, GA and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Haitian American Artist | Educator | Visual Anthropologist
Régine is a dynamic storyteller who uses photographs/film/performance to create acts of social resistance to stoke the collective imagination and keep alive new ways of seeing. For the past two years, she lived in Benin, West Africa, conducting research, teaching, completing her "Brooklyn to Benin: A Vodou Pilgrimage" mixed-media project and directing/producing three short films. While in West Africa, she created the WaWaWa Diaspora Centre - to actively heal historic wounds and trauma related to the TransAtlantic Slave Trade through inter-generational arts, education, and exchange programs.
Régine is a 2018 EMERGENYC Fellow (NYU’s Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program) and is a BRIC 2018 Brooklyn Free Speech Podcast Fellow. In September 2018, Régine launched a new podcast entitled "Vodou Roots: A Love Story Musical via BRIC's Podcast Fellowship available via iTunes and SoundCloud. She is a NYSCA 2015 Folk Arts Apprentice and is an A.I.R. Gallery 2011 - 2012 Fellow. Régine is the editor of Diaspora Diaries: An Educators Guide to MoCADA Artists (2009) and her photo essay on Haiti, including photos from her exhibition “Portraits for Self-Determining Haiti,” is featured in Meridians, Vol 11, No. 1 (2011), a journal published by Indiana University Press. Her photographic work on Vodou appears in MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora (2017) and her work was included in the MFON’s exhibition of Altar: Prayer, Ritual, Offerings at Photoville (2018).
She has over 20 years of experience teaching, training, and supporting diverse populations utilizing memory, arts/creativity, critical analysis, social justice activism, mediation, humor, and mindfulness as key pillars in her work. As a visual and performing artist, she makes use of mixed-media tools to promote love, understanding and respect by addressing issues of discrimination and misrepresentation through participatory and reflective learning practices. She has served as a consultant with clients that include – New York University, NYC Department of Education, Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project, the Smithsonian Institution, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Through A Lens Darkly documentary, and Mind-Builders Community Folk Culture Program.
Régine received her BS in International Studies from Bowie State University (HBCU) and MA in Photography and Urban Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London.