Introducing our 2022 Engaging Artist Fellows

Posted on Friday, March 11th, 2022

We are excited to announce our 2022 Engaging Artist Fellowship Cohort! We will be spending a year with these socially engaged artists as they develop and work around issues of networks of care; accessibility and technology; motherhood; among other deeply community-centered practices.

Our 2022 Cohort members include ayo Ohs, Buena Onda Collective, María Bonomi y Lucía Cozzi, Maya Simone Z., Tanika Williams, and Yeseul Song.

ENGAGING ARTISTS is More Art’s 2-tiered, Fellowship and Residency program for artists seeking to both develop and sustain their public art and socially-engaged practice. The program curriculum encompasses a professional development series, public art commission opportunities, mentorship, and peer networking. For more info on the program, visit the Engaging Artists page.

Meet our 2022 EA Cohort

ayo Ohs

ayo (Alicia) Ohs (she/they/A.O.) is a performer, educator, and community builder interested in what makes people laugh, cry, and continue. ayo is currently working on The Silent Unseen, a series of workshops and performances tracing the Asian femme diaspora through untold stories and unheard voices. 

As an organizer and anti-racist facilitator, ayo has worked in community-based non-profits including the Audre Lorde Project, MINKA Brooklyn, and is a founding member of Movement Research’s Artist of Color Council. As a performer, they developed the lead role in Andrew Schneider’s AFTER (The Public Theatre), continued as Artistic Director and Community Accountability Coordinator for NERVOUS/SYSTEM (BAM Next Wave), and have toured internationally and throughout the United States in Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming: Attendance (Dancespace) and Play (BAM). 

ayo has been teaching yoga for 16 years and is the founder of Anti-Oppression Yoga. They are a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and currently studying Somatic Abolitionism with Resmaa Menakam, and music production at Berklee College of Music Online. They live in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY with their senior pit bull mix.  www.antioppressionyoga.com

Buena Onda Collective

Buena Onda Collective—Dominika Ksel (she/her/they/them) and Camila A. Morales (she/her)—is an eco-centered, paradigm shifting, transmedia collective that uses sculpture, installation and interactivity to playfully explore ideas around restoration, remediation and interspecies communication during the Anthropocene.

We work with a range of media and design techniques including: 3D Modeling, Architecture, Digital and Physical Fabrication, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Sound Composition, Video, Animation and more. Our influences range from science, art, architecture and consciousness. We enjoy subverting and transforming ideas around ‘sustainability’ into more intimate, transhuman experiences where the consciousness of non-human species is more deeply considered. We do this by mapping out the invisible landscapes of our interdependent, rhizomatic relationships via various community-based artworks and workshops.

The founders are educators and artists with over 10 + years in the art and architecture realm. The Rockaway based art collective’s focus is on the creation of a eco-centered community oriented practice. We value process and collaboration that facilitate more equitable and dynamic ways of integrating and communing with sentient and non-sentient life. instagram.com/buenaondacollective

María Bonomi y Lucía Cozzi

María Bonomi (they/them) y Lucía Cozzi (she/they) are a Brooklyn-based artist duo from Argentina.  Their practice focuses on art as a channel for action, reflection and healing, enhanced when shared in community. In their paintings, encuentros, they co-create spaces of research and dialogue using canvas as the conversation space. They have been collective members of Mil Mundos Books since 2019, where they first met. Alongside their studio practice, they organize actions and events in coalition with other colectiva members and community groups in Brooklyn. instagram.com/mariquitx

instagram.com/m4p4s

Maya Simone Z.

Maya Simone Z. (they/them) is a NYC-based interdisciplinary artist, choreographer and educator from the South. Their work centers queer, Black diasporic emotional and spiritual connections as told by their ancestral lineages, Afro-futurist imaginings, and dreams of this and other worlds.

Maya Simone has worked with Sydnie L. Mosley, Jasmine Hearn, Lisa Fagan and others. They have developed works presented at Green Space, Corkscrew Theater Festival, Theater Mitu and more. Maya is also an Art & Survival Fellow with Double Edge Theatre and Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative and a member of the Dance/NYC Junior Committee. They support multiple artists as an arts administrator and emerging producer. www.mayasimonez.com

Tanika Williams

Tanika I. Williams (she/her/hers) (b. 1981, St. Andrew, Jamaica; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an award-winning filmmaker and performance artist.

She investigates women’s use of movement, mothering and medicine to produce and pass on ancestral wisdoms of ecology, spirituality and liberation. Williams holds a BA from Eugene Lang College, New School and MDiv from Union Theological Seminary. Her films have been screened at festivals and broadcast on American television. Williams has been awarded residencies at New York Foundation for the Arts, Hi-ARTS, and BRIC. Additionally, she has been featured on 99.5 WBAI; and in Art in Odd Places; Creative Time; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Civic Art Lab, GreenspaceNYC; Let Us Eat Local, Just Food; and Performa. www.tanikawilliams.net

Yeseul Song

Yeseul Song (she/her/hers) is a South Korean born and New York based artist and educator working with technology and interaction. She creates non-visual experiences that challenge human perception and its relationship with our society, culture, and the environment. Her ongoing project, Invisible Sculptures, suggests more inclusive and creative views of the world through sculptures that involve olfactory, auditory, and tactile senses.

She is currently a resident artist at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD Museum), community member of New Museum’s NEW INC, and recipient of the Wave Farm MAAF (Media Arts Assistance Fund). She teaches at ITP/IMA at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. www.yeseul.com