Futures, Narratives, and Networks

Bryanna Bradley, Stephanie Dinkins, Bel Falleiros, Chantal Feitosa-Desouza, Andrew Freiband, Cody Ann Herrmann, Hyperlink Press, Mafe Izaguirre, Amy Khoshbin, Esther Marveta Neff, Althea Rao, Amy Ritter, Hanae Utamura, Amy Wetsch, Adam Zucker

Bryanna Bradley is a body-based broad, notorious ballet class crybaby, and Queens local circa 1995. In July 2016, Bradley trained at The School at Jacob’s Pillow under the tutelage of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Urban Bush Women) and shadowed choreographer Camille A. Brown through her Black Girl Spectrum (BGS) program. Bradley premiered her dance work buck: an exploration of black masculinity in Nick Cave’s exhibit ‘Until’ at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA ) while scrambling to finish college. She just wrapped up her work on the devised theater production House Of American Activities which premiered at Theater for the New City. Bryanna looks forward to expanding her capacity for rest, joy, and adventure.

Stephanie Dinkins (b.1964) is a transmedia artist who creates platforms for dialogue about race, gender, aging and our future histories. Dinkins’ art practice employs emerging technologies, documentary practices and social collaboration toward equity and community sovereignty. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded in social and technological ecosystems. Dinkins is a professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Professor in Art. Dinkins earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Studies Program. She exhibits and publicly advocates for inclusive AI internationally at a broad spectrum of community, private and institutional venues. Dinkins is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow and Knight Arts & Tech Fellow. Previous fellowships, residencies and support include the Artist Fellow of the Berggruen Institute and Lucas Artists Fellow in Visual Arts at Montalvo Art Center, CA Onassis Foundation, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Creative Capital, Soros Equality Fellowship, Data and Society Research Institute Fellowship, Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works Tech Lab, NEW INC, Blue Mountain Center; The Laundromat Project, Santa Fe Art Institute and Art/ Omi. The New York Times featured Dinkins in its pages as an AI Influencer. Wired, Art in America, Artsy, Art21, Hyperallergic, the BBC, Wilson Quarterly, and a host of popular podcasts have recently highlighted Dinkins’ art and ideas.

Bel Falleiros is a Brazilian artist whose work focuses on place, our relationship with the land, and its impact on our identities. Beyond her studio practice, she participates in collaborative projects across the Americas connecting art, education and autonomous thinking. She is currently a teaching artist at Escuelita en Casa and Dia:Beacon, and recently had her first public sculpture on view as part of the Monument Now show at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York.

Chantal Feitosa-Desouza is a Brazilian United Statesian artist + educator from Queens, New York. The different processes of collage, image-making, and archiving are at the heart of her practice when exploring themes of language, knowledge production, and care. She has exhibited in spaces such as Real Art Ways (CT) and Equity Gallery (NY). Her work has been screened at the Harlem International Film Festival (NY), Vidlings & Tapeheads (MI), and the Anti-Racist Classroom’s Represent Film Festival (CA). She has participated in More Art’s 2020 Engaging Artists Fellowship and residencies at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Residency Unlimited, and Smack Mellon. Her educational practice has focused on accessible, out-of-school arts instruction and curriculum consulting for remote and in-person youth programs.

Andrew Freiband is an artist, filmmaker, producer, educator, and research-artist. He is the founder and director of the Artists’ Literacies Institute (ALI), an experiment in arts education and engagement that helps artists reframe their artistic practice as research, and then connects them to new possibilities for intervening meaningfully in social, ecological, political, civic, and economic systems.

As a critique of the instrumentalization of artists as only communicators or servants of the marketplace, the ALI seeks to discover new, more meaningful roles for artists in their society and communities.

He holds more than two decades of extensive field experience at the many intersections of art, education, media, film, journalism, literature, social impact, international development, research, and strategic design. www.artistsliteracies.org

Cody Ann Herrmann is an artist and community organizer based in Flushing, Queens, NYC. She combines socially engaged art, political advocacy, and community science to create participatory art works and public programs. Guided by her interest in public space, participatory design methods, and urban resilience Cody’s work explores urban planning processes while applying an iterative, human centered approach to ecological problem solving. Since 2014 her work has focused on her hometown of Flushing, creating projects critiquing policy related to land use and environmental planning in areas surrounding Flushing Bay and Flushing Creek.

Hyperlink Press a zine/curatorial collective that seeks to distribute work by artists that navigate in-between spaces of the internet, queer communities, and diaspora experiences. Their mission is to uplift marginalized and underrepresented experiences, identities, and histories in the art gallery and technology field. Hyperlink Press reminisces about the early 2000s that showed us exciting alternatives to traditional forms of community building for a more equitable world.

Mafe Izaguirre is a Caracas, Venezuela-born, NYC-based artist, graphic designer, and educator dedicated to the exploration of hybrid spirituality, intent on the belief that technology can help us to understand and amplify human nature. Izaguirre works in cybernetics, the science that explores communication between humans and machines, and is guided by the ideas of the philosophy of posthumanism, a movement that poses the human as a plural, fluid, and de-centered being interacting in multiple spaces with other species, machines, software, and hybrid systems. Her installations are (in)organic landscapes, a forest of cybernetic artifacts, where the interaction between humans and machines creates an audiovisual symphony of color, light, and movement. Her sensitive machines mimic human consciousness. While many people find absurd the idea of machines developing the ability to “feel” emotions, Izaguirre continues to mine the controversial subject of hybrid spiritual systems as part of her larger The Mind Project.

Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist. She pushes the formal and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to foster radical social change through performance, social practice, video, collage, rap music, writing, and installation. She has shown at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, Times Square Arts, Artpace, The High Line, Socrates Sculpture Park, and festivals such as South by Southwest and River to River. She has received residencies at The Watermill Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Anderson Ranch, and Banff Centre for the Arts among others. She has received a NYFA Grant, Franklin Furnace Fund, and Rema Hort Mann Grant. She is the current Fellow in Civic Engagement at Pratt Institute. Khoshbin received an MA in New Media Art from New York University and a BA in Film at University of Texas at Austin. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and poet Anne Carson among others.

Esther Marveta Neff is the founder of PPL, a thinktank, organizational entity, and performance-making collective. A book called Institution is a Verb, culminating PPL’s operations as a physical site, was published in 2021 with The Operating System. Neff is also a founding member of MARSH (Materializing & Activating Radical Social Habitus), a worker-owned cooperative biocultural laboratory in St. Louis, MO. Neff’s writing has appeared in Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan companions, journals including PAJ and Performance Philosophy, and in various online and print art magazines. Their “operas of operations” and other artistic projects have been produced through a wide array of material and social relations. Neff is currently a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Althea Rao creates social engagement models to facilitate playful conversations that unpack normalized systemic power imbalance. She draws influence from media studies, design justice and community organizing. Her project Vagina Chorus, a bio-responsive, socially-engaged multimedia performance provoking conversations around gender justice and healthcare accessibilities, is a recipient of the 2020 MAP Fund and premiered at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, US.

Rao has lived and worked in China, Japan and the US, and received training in journalism, media arts and filmmaking. She participated in fellowships and residencies at MIT Feminist Future(s) Hackathon, Theater MITU, More Art, Artspace New Haven, Flaherty Film Seminar, NYFA, Signal Culture, and Halcyon Arts Lab. In her spare time, Rao writes for Chinese readers about gender justice, as well as translating manifestos, film scripts and poetry between English and Chinese.

Rao is currently pursuing a doctorate degree at DXARTS in University of Washington.

Amy Ritter grew up in Eastern, PA in the rural town of Orefield. Her work is an exploration of her relationship to her identity vis-à-vis mobile homes and their interior landscapes. It stages her memories of growing up in a mobile home community—a place she left but still feels connected to. Her ongoing work of archiving these homes and neighborhoods gives shape to immersive installations and site-specific public sculptures. Ritter has shown her work nationally and has had numerous art residencies and fellowships. Ritter received her MFA from The Ohio State University, a BFA from Tyler School of Art and attended Skowhegan in 2016.

Hanae Utamura is a Japanese interdisciplinary artist and an educator. Utamura’s media include video, performance, painting, and sculpture. She connects human beings and earth, using the physical human body as a conduit. Negotiations and conflicts between the human and the non-human, and how all the varieties of the wills of life manifest, have been the central focus of her practice.

She received her Master of Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and her Bachelor Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has exhibited extensively in Asia, Europe and U.S. including the participation of 8th Asian Art Biennial (2021) at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan.

Utamura has received support through numerous international residencies and fellowships including Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), Art Omi (Hudson, U.S.), Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (Buffalo, NY), Aomori Contemporary Art Center (Japan), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Changdong Art Studio (Seoul, S.Korea), Seoul Art Space_GEUMCHEON (Seoul, S.Korea), Florence Trust (London, U.K.) and more.

She has been awarded Shiseido Art Egg Award, and awardee of Grant programs by the Japanese Ministry of Culture, Nomura Art Foundation, i-style Art and Sports Foundation, the Pola Art Foundation, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursary Award, and Axis/Florence Trust Award.

Amy Wetsch is a multidisciplinary artist originating from Louisville, Kentucky. Her artistic practice spans from creating installations, paintings, drawings, mixed media sculptures, to publicly engaged works. Amy’s work often examines and intertwines various sciences such as biology, ecology, hydrology, and planetary science, while often collaborating with professionals in these diverse scientific fields. Amy received her BFA from Western Kentucky University (WKU) and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in the Mount Royal School of Multidisciplinary Art. She has exhibited her work in various galleries and museums nationally, including The Kentucky Museum, The National Academy of Sciences, The Museum of Contemporary Art Nashville, and in galleries throughout New York City. Amy has attended artist residencies and fellowships including More Art Engaging Artists (NYC), SÍM (Iceland), Works on Water (NYC), Supercollider/Space for Humanity (CA), and Trestle Art Space (NYC). She was selected as a JHU/MICA Extreme Arts Fellow, a National Academy of Sciences fellow, and selected for a European Space Agency conference in Madrid, Spain. Amy is also a lead artist on the newly selected NASA mission, Dragonfly. Instagram: @amywetsch_art

Adam Zucker (He/Him) is an art historian, curator, artist, and educator. He holds an M.A from the City College of New York in Museum Studies and an Advanced Certificate in K-12 Art Education from Brooklyn College. His work focuses on the integration of visual art, education reform, and mental health awareness. In addition to his experience curating exhibitions, working in classrooms, and within the community, Zucker writes a blog and hosts an audio series called Artfully Learning about the benefits of employing contemporary art practices within the K-12 and higher education curricula.