Kresge Artist Fellowship & Gilda Award Panelists

Piper Carter is an arts and culture organizer and Hip Hop activist focused on entertainment, environmental, climate, education, and food justices as well as makerspace communities. She hosts the Piper Carter Podcast on Detroit is Different where she discusses social justice and Hip Hop with a worldwide audience. Carter is also an image maker; she was among the first Black women to shoot for high-end publications Vogue France, Elle UK, and The New York Times, as well as notable music companies Def Jam, Sony Music, Warner Music, and Universal Music. Her photography has been featured on Tyra Banks’ VH1 show, The Shot. Carter co-founded We Found Hip Hop, an organization that uplifts, celebrates, and supports women, helping them build careers in a safer environment, and is the creator of Dilla Youth Day, a highlight during Black History Month where youth explore S.T.E.A.M disciplines through leading and participating in hands-on, engaging, educational activities while honoring modern homegrown figure, J Dilla.

Mike Khoury is a violinist, composer, improvisor, and researcher. He is the director of the Entropy Studios space and the proprietor of the Entropy Stereo record label, both featuring the work of international as well as Detroit artists. In addition to performing extensively as a soloist, Khoury also plays in the Redford Civic Symphony, in duet with percussionist Ben Hall, in duet with dancer/choreographer Leyya Tawil, and as a member of the group Porcelain Hammer. He has performed across North America as well as in Berlin and Beirut. Khoury holds a BA in economics from University of Michigan and an MA in economics from Michigan State University. He is author of a chapter on the composer Halim El-Dabh in The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). Khoury’s projects have received funding from the Knight Foundation and, in 2020, he was awarded a Kresge Artist Fellowship.

Brian Kirkbride is a composer, sound artist, DJ, and programmer based in Chicago whose work investigates the re-contextualization of complex scientific and social systems through musical and other auditory representations. Musically, he explores the emotional and psychological effects of the uncanny by playing with near-musicality, arrested narrative, and the subconscious recognition of appropriated pop. Kirkbride’s work has shown at Whitechapel Gallery, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, Alchemy Film Festival, Biennial of Moving Images, Montréal Underground Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival, Videoex Festival, Kinodot Experimental Film Festival, Video Art Miden, Nonplussed Ultra Film Festival, Simultan Festival, and Fovea. He has collaborated on installations that have been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, EXPO Chicago, the Lincoln Park Conservatory, and at Millennium Park.

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School. She is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Kite has also been published in several journals and magazines, including in The Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), where the award winning article, Making Kin with Machines—co-authored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis—was featured. She is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Shawntai Brown is a Detroit writer, media commentator, literacy coordinator, and teaching artist whose work centers on empowering communities through experiences that educate, challenge, and entertain. She has a BA in creative writing from Western Michigan University and a MA in literacy learning from Marygrove College. Brown’s plays have been performed in New York, Chicago, and across Michigan, including her episodic series eLLe, centering queer women experiences. She co-hosts a web show, Woman Crush Everyday, reviewing Black woman-centered queer media and interviewing content producers, and co-founded Black LGBT+ Plays, a creative development network for film and theatre creatives.  Brown serves as the school coordinator with InsideOut Literary Arts where she previously taught poetry as a teaching artist. She is a board member and playwright with Extra Mile Playwrights Theatre and a 2020 Kresge Artist Fellow in Live Arts.

Aimee McCoy is a film and theater artist and co-founder of The Artizen Company, a film and theater company based in Georgia that focuses on the intersection of arts, faith, and community. Her work utilizes audio/visual elements, live performance, narrative, interactivity, and immersion. In addition to being a director, devisor, and performer, McCoy is also an arts administrator at Alternate ROOTS Inc, a 45-year-old southern-based arts service organization that supports artists, organizers, and activists. She has had the privilege to occupy several different roles within the organization including general member, management fellow, administrator, operations manager, and now the director of membership, affording her an increasingly rounded view of the ecosystem. McCoy considers herself fortunate to be an artist with a penchant for numbers and organizational structures.

Arien Wilkerson (They/She) is a queer Black choreographer, dancer, filmmaker, director, producer, and installation artist. Wilkerson’s practice as an artist encompasses dance, choreography, installation, and theater, weaving elements from each into provocative performances and videos that resist categorization. Climate change, self-love, racism, and sexuality are a few of the issues they have explored through their work. They have received funding support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts (2021) and the Sachs Program for Arts and Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania (2020). Additionally, they are a Connecticut Office of the Arts’ Artist Fellow (2019). Other awards include: Connecticut Dance Alliance Jump Start Award (2019); Greater New Haven Arts Council and Connecticut Office of the Arts’ Artist Workforce Initiative Sponsorship (2019); Connecticut Office of the Arts’ Project Grant (2018); National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read Grant (2018); Director’s Discretionary Fund Award from the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund (2018); New England Foundation for the Arts’ Rebecca Blunk Fund Award (2018); New England Dance Fund Grant (2017 & 2018); and the Spirit of Juneteenth Award from the Amistad Center for Art and Culture (2017).

Sarika Chandra is associate professor of English at Wayne State University. She researches and teaches in the areas of globalization studies, American studies, and race and ethnic studies. Theorizing the US in a transnational frame, her work focuses on questions of race, ethnicity, im/migration, economy, and the environment. Chandra is the author of Dislocalism: The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobilizing of Americanism. Her publications have appeared in various volumes and journals, including American Quarterly, Cultural Critique, and Modern Language Notes.

Photographer: Bao Phi

Douglas Kearney has published six collections, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and California Book Award silver medalist (Poetry). M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up.” Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” His newest collection, Sho (Wave, 2021) is forthcoming. His operas include Sucktion, Mordake, Crescent City, Sweet Land, and next year’s Comet / Poppea commissioned by American Modern Opera Company (AMOC). He has received a Whiting Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, as well as residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family.

Jina B. Kim is an assistant professor of English Language & Literature and the study of women & gender at Smith College. Kim received her PhD in English and women’s studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She researches and teaches the fields of feminist disability studies, women-of-color feminisms/queer-of-color critique, and contemporary multi-ethnic U.S. literary studies. She is currently at work on a manuscript, tentatively titled Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Imaginaries after the U.S. Welfare State, which examines political and aesthetic engagements with public dependency discourse in the literary-cultural afterlife of 1996 U.S. welfare reform. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Signs, American Quarterly, MELUS, Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Asian American Literary Review.

Native Detroiter Leslie Reese is a poet, writer, and interdisciplinary arts educator. Currently she is a Chicago Poetry Center Poet-in-Residence in three Chicago public elementary schools—a role she first practiced with InsideOut Literary Arts Project and Broadside Press’s Poet-in-Residence Program. Since earning her MA in interdisciplinary arts from Columbia College Chicago, Reese created Folkloreandliteracy on Instagram, which uses books, visual art, music, movement, and performance as gateways to literacy, discovery, and self-expression. In addition to authoring the poetry collections, Upside Down Tapestry Mosaic History, and Urban Junkstar, Reese has composed and performed original poetry for projects by bassist Marion Hayden (2016 Kresge Artist Fellow) and violinist Regina Carter. She is honored to have performed with musicians Pamela Wise, Djallo Djakte, and Jaribu Shahid on Medicine—a celebration of the poetry of 2019 Kresge Eminent Artist Gloria House—as well as having contributed to House’s monograph, A Life Speaks.

Sima Familant is the owner of Sima Familant: Private Curator & Art Advisor, an art advisory founded in 2006. There, she has been integrally involved in building important collections of contemporary art for her international clients. Her philosophy surrounding art has been largely shaped by receiving her MA in postwar & contemporary art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. Her experiences there, being exposed to the burgeoning London art scene and viewing art internationally, made her recognize that you need to see art—a lot of art—to understand art. This engendered her strong commitment to, and love of, contemporary art, which has always served as the backbone in all of her ventures. She still relies on what she learned from her London days, and travels extensively to see art—from the Taj Mahal in India to the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead in Detroit.

Detroit-bred and based fine artist, muralist, and 2017 Kresge Artist Fellow in Visual Arts, Sydney G. James earned her BFA at the College for Creative Studies in 2001 and began her career as an art director in advertising. James headed to Los Angeles in 2004 to expand her career as a visual artist in the film and television industry, and earned her master’s degree in secondary education. Returning to Detroit in 2011, James has become one of the leading creative voices in southeast Michigan. Recently, the racial and gender positioning of the Black woman in America—as “last” or “least among others” in society—has been the central theme in James’ work. Her portraits and murals seek to reposition this narrative of the Black woman’s visibility and importance, bringing them to the forefront of the conversation.

Osman Khan is an artist and educator interested in constructing artifacts and experiences for social criticism and aesthetic expression. His work engages and subverts the materiality behind themes of immigrant and Muslim identity, home/land, postcolonialism, and social and public space through participatory and performative installations; as well as site-specific interventions. Khan is associate professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. His work has been shown at MassMOCA, MOCAD, Shanghai Biennale, Ars Electronica Center,  O.K Center for Contemporary Art, and Socrates Sculpture Park. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Art Matters grant, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation grant, Knight Foundation Knight Arts Challenge grant, Ars Electronica’s Prix Ars Award of Distinction, and The Arctic Circle 2009 Residency, among others. Khan was born in Pakistan, grew up in New York City, and proudly calls Detroit home.

Courtesy of Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Kameelah Janan Rasheed grapples with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished. With interests in the generative qualities of incompleteness, leakage, dispersal, and syncretism, Rasheed works across an ecosystem of iterative and provisional projects. Projects include sprawling, architecturally-scaled, Xerox-based collages; large-scale text banner installations, publications, digital archives, lecture-performances, library interventions, poems/poetic gestures, and forms yet to be determined. Rasheed has had national and international solo exhibitions and projects at the New Museum, NY; Transmissions Gallery, Glasgow, UK; Rice University, TX; Brooklyn Public Library, NY; Brooklyn Historical Society; and Brooklyn Museum, in addition to public installations with Public Art Fund and For Freedoms/Times Square Arts. Her work has also been exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale and will be included in the Glasgow International (2021) and Prospect.5 (2021). She is author of two artist books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019).

Sherrine Azab is the Co-Director of Detroit-based devised theater ensemble A Host of People, which premieres shows in Detroit and tours nationally. Azab holds a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle), where she founded the critically acclaimed company Strike Anywhere Productions (2002-2007). During her stint in New York, she worked extensively with Target Margin Theater—of which she is still a proud Associated Artist—and also served as the associate producer for The Foundry Theatre (NYC) during 2011 and 2012. Azab holds a postgraduate certificate from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in performance at Wesleyan University and was a member of the 2008 Lincoln Center Director’s Lab. Other professional highlights include being a staff member of Network of Ensemble Theaters (2012-2019), working with the Arab American National Museum (Dearborn), working with NYC-based theater Ping Chong + Co., and being a 2018 University Musical Society (UMS) Artist in Residence. 

Miryam Johnson is a Detroit-based dance artist with degrees from Eastern Michigan University in dance and African American Studies. She’s had the honor of training with the Ailey Extension and Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institute, and has performed works by critically acclaimed choreographers Mae O’Donnell and Diane McIntyre.

Johnson’s work explores the intersection between improvised Black movement, vernacular, and communal connection. Her works have been presented at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, The Masonic Temple, Sidewalk Festival, Eastern Michigan University, and Play House. Johnson’s first evening-length work, Rebellion: An Artistic Exploration, was performed at the Charles H. Wright Museum in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of the Detroit Rebellion.

Johnson is a co-founder of Collective Sweat Detroit, an organizer with Daring Dances, a committed educator and community member, and a Model D under 30 feature. Johnson believes in using her body and art as protest.

Toby MacNutt is a queer, nonbinary trans, and disabled dancer/choreographer, author, and teacher living in Burlington, VT. Their dance work includes Enter the Void (2018), a performance installation in the darkness of space, accompanied by a sci-fi poetry guidebook; and One, Two (2014), an exploration of embodiment and relationships in dancers with and without disabilities. Toby has also danced with Murmurations Dance’s immersive site works, When Women Were Birds and Bone Hooks, in projects by Tiffany Rhynard’s Big APE and Lida Winfield, and with Heidi Latsky’s GIMP, among others. They were a participating choreographer for AXIS Dance’s Choreo-Lab in 2018 and 2019 and a recipient of NEFA’s Rebecca Blunk Fund Award in 2019. Find out more at www.tobymacnutt.com or say hi on twitter @tobywm and instagram @tobymacnutt.

A native of Honolulu, Jeff Michael Rebudal is the artistic director & arts administrator with Rebudal Dance. He is also a founding member of the critically acclaimed Seán Curran Company. Rebudal choreographed the American Premier of Philip Himberg’s Paper Dolls in Washington, DC. His opera and theatre choreography credits include L’Etoile (performed in New York City Opera, Opéra de Montréal, Glimmerglass Opera, Bergen National Opera, Cincinnati Opera, Austin Lyric Opera), Romeo et Juliette, La Traviata, La Rondine, and A Little Night Music (Michigan Opera Theatre), and Carmen (Cincinnati Opera). Rebudal also choreographed Two Gentlemen of Verona for The Old Globe and his concert dance choreography has been presented at Joyce SoHo, Danspace Project, Lincoln Center, NYC Downtown Dance Festival, Cunningham Studio, and DUMBO Dance Festival as well as among other venues such as the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila, and Anargyrios & Korgialenios Theatre of Helioupolis in Greece. 

Rebudal is a member of the Association of Arts Administration Educators, a longtime board member for the American College Dance Association—currently serving as vice president for membership—and a performing arts panelist for New York Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Council, and The Kresge Foundation, among others. He has an MFA in performing arts management & dance from the American University and a BA in dance & journalism from the University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa. Rebudal was previously associate professor and director of dance at Wayne State University. He currently resides in Manhattan, where he is the incoming director and clinical professor of arts & entertainment management graduate program for the Lubin School of Business at Pace University.

Leith Campbell is a musician and artist working in technologically mediated works exploring parallels between sound, architecture, and the human/technology interface. They have shown and performed extensively in Southeast Michigan and across the country, both solo and in collaboration with the electromechanical arts group Apetechnology. Notable installations include the “Vision In A Cornfield” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2012), New Music Detroit’s “Strange Beautiful Music” (2014), The Power Center Renegade Series (2017), and all of the Dlectricity Festivals. Campbell works in audio engineering, mastering, and technical direction, with releases on the Third Man and Two Rooms record labels. They have a Bachelors in Music Technology from Wayne State University (2012) and a Masters of Media Arts from the University of Michigan (2017). Campbell teaches music technology at Wayne State University and is a metal shop technician at the College for Creative Studies.

Self-taught multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer, and improviser, Amy Denio performs and produces soundtracks for film, TV, dance, and multimedia performances. 

Her work has been commissioned by the Berkeley Symphony, Relache Ensemble, Seattle Theater Group, On the Boards, New York Festival of Song, Bumbershoot Festival, Jack Straw Foundation, and Il Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte, among others. Denio’s projects have received funding from Meet the Composer, Doris Duke Foundation, the National Education Association, Good Will Arts Festival, Washington State Arts Commission, and 4Culture. She has enjoyed Fellowships from Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission, and Civitella Ranieri. Denio has received the Seattle Mayor’s Award and the NYC Bessie Award.

An inductee of the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame, Denio enjoys expanding all genres of music. She is a founding member and president of the all-women Tiptons Sax Quartet and has collaborated with a plethora of musicians and artists since 1980, having produced over 60 recordings and played 1,000 concerts internationally.

Marshalle Montgomery Favors is a filmmaker and producer/director raised in Inkster, Michigan. Since 2006, Montgomery Favors has produced six independent feature films and has written and directed three short films. In 2016, she was a top three finalist for The American Black Film Festival’s “Deeply Rooted In My Community” video contest. Her passion for indie movies inspired her to co-found the Trinity International Film Festival and the Fearless Tribe of Fanatic Filmmakers in Detroit. Montgomery Favors works in collaboration with other filmmakers to host film screenings, workshops, and networking events with industry professionals. Recently, she received a 25 Most Influential Women in Detroit Award. Montgomery Favors works purposefully to contribute to the growth of the film community in metro Detroit.

Oona Mosna is an artist, author, curator, and director of Media City Film Festival. She has organized 1,000+ screenings, retrospectives, and performances with artists including Mati Diop, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, and Kevin Jerome Everson at the Presidential Palace (Chile), Toronto International Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art Buenos Aires, Detroit Institute of Arts, 25FPS Festival (Croatia), and countless other festivals, museums, and grass-roots venues worldwide. An accomplished producer, her commissioned films have screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Venice Film Festival, Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Jeonju IFF (Korea), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Pompidou Centre (Paris), National Gallery of Art (Washington), New York Film Festival, and Tate Modern, etc. She lives and works in Windsor-Detroit as well as internationally.

Terry Blackhawk’s five full-length poetry collections include Escape Artist (John Ciardi Prize, 2003), The Light Between (WSU Press) and One Less River (Mayapple Press, forthcoming 2019)—with awards from Nimrod (2010 Pablo Neruda Prize), America (1990 Foley Prize) and others. A former high school creative writing teacher, Blackhawk is founding director emerita (1995-2015) of InsideOut Literary Arts Project and a 2013 Kresge Artist Fellow. She received a Detroit Metro Times Progressive Hero Award (1999), the MI Governor’s Award for Arts Education (2001), grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts (1998-2000), and National Endowment for the Humanities (1992-1993), and was twice named MI Creative Writing Teacher of the Year (1990, 2008). She served (2008-2012) on the board of AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) and has presented for the White House and the Library of Congress. Blackhawk holds an Honorary Doctorate from Oakland University and divides her time between Connecticut and Detroit.

Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. Her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother (Wayne State University Press, 2016), is a 2017 Michigan Notable Book that has won numerous awards, including a 2016 Foreword INDIES Finalist and a 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Cooper’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2018, Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hypertext Review, and Best African American Fiction 2010, among other online and print publications. Cooper is genre agnostic. In 2018, she translated one of her short fictions to video in “The Choice,” a short film about reproductive rights and recipient of a 2019 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Berlin Flash Film Festival. Cooper collaborated with the director of dance at The College William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, to create a dance inspired by the feminist themes of her short fiction. The performance called “Aloft” debuted in October, 2018. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, the pre-eminent national residency for emerging black poets, and has received residencies at Kimbilio and Ragdale.

Rob Halpern lives between San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Huron Valley Women’s Prison. His most recent book of poetry, prose, essays, letters, and manifestos is Weak Link (Atelos 2019). Other books include Common Place (Ugly Duckling Presse 2015) and Music for Porn (Nightboat Books 2012). Together with Robin Tremblay-McGaw, he co-edited From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (Contemporary Practice), which was listed among Entropy‘s “Best Non-Fiction” books of 2017. Halpern’s critical and lyrical essays appear in Mediations, Brooklyn Rail, Journal of Narrative Theory, Modernist Cultures, Chicago Review. He is currently completing his translations of Georges Perec’s early essays on aesthetics and politics, while editing Bruce Boone Dismembered: Selected Poems, Stories, and Essays, which will be published later this year.

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of several chapbooks and five books of poetry: c.c., On Spec, The Hero Project of the Century, Adventures of Pi, Howell and As Iz. A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited the anthology, Inciting Poetics (2019). 

Cesar Cornejo’s work reflects critically on socio-political issues while exploring the relationship between art, architecture, and society. He has participated in exhibitions such as the California Pacific Triennial 2017, XII Havana Biennial, Busan Biennial 2008, Art Positions at Art Basel Miami 2011, the Biennial S-Files Museo del Barrio, NY; and V Biennial Barro de America, Venezuela. Cornejo received awards and residencies from the Creative Capital Foundation, Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation, The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at Dora Maar House, The George A and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, Sharpe Walentas Studio Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Art Omi, among others. He received M.A. and PhD degrees in fine arts from the Tokyo University of the Arts and a bachelor’s degree and professional license in architecture from the Ricardo Palma University in Lima Peru. He is associate professor at the School of Art and Art History at the University of South Florida.

Erik Paul Howard is a photographer as well as co-founder of Inside Southwest Detroit, Young Nation, and The Alley Project, in southwest Detroit. He combines his passion for youth and community development with his love of photography. Through cultural and place-based activities such as lowriding and street art, Howard has been building with neighbors and youth in southwest Detroit for over 20 years. Erik’s photography documents his and others’ personal relationships and interactions in community. It captures the excitement of people in processes of development, discovery, and general life experiences.

Born in Iran, Amitis Motevalli explores the cultural resistance and survival of people living in poverty, conflict, and/or war. Through various media, including sculpture, video, performance, and collaborative public art, her work juxtaposes iconography with iconoclasm. Her work intends to ask questions about violence, occupation, and the path to decolonization, while invoking the significance of a secular grassroots struggle. For her current project, Motevalli is working internationally with a broad spectrum of transnational cultural Muslims in order to research what defines home, life, and labor in the urgency of survival. She is particularly concerned with conducting workshops with SWANA people who come from places of political and religious conflict and collaborating on public art projects. Currently living and working in Los Angeles, Motevalli exhibits art internationally while also working to create an active and resistant cultural discourse through information exchange in art, pedagogy, or organizing artist and educators.

Yao-Fen You is senior curator and head of product design and decorative arts at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Prior to joining Cooper Hewitt in 2019, she was associate curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). At the DIA, she organized “Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate” (2016), the DIA’s first exhibition to engage all five senses; “Fabergé: The Rise and Fall, The Collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts” (2012); and “Designed for Convenience: Tableware from the DIA” (2011). A frequent author and invited speaker, You has lectured and participated in symposia and panels nationally and internationally. Her publications and talks reflect her diverse expertise in European polychrome sculpture, the history of collecting and art markets, the art of dining, and Northern European decorative arts. You holds a PhD and M.A. in history of art from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Juanita Anderson, area head of Media Arts and Studies in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University, is a veteran producer, executive producer and documentary filmmaker. A native of Detroit, she has previously held the positions of producer/director and production manager at WSIU-TV (Carbondale, IL), executive producer of Cultural Affairs and Special Projects for WTVS-Detroit Public Television, and series producer for WGBH-Boston. Her work has garnered numerous awards including seven regional Emmys, a DuPont Columbia Silver Baton and a George Foster Peabody Award. A long-standing advocate for diversity in public media and for independent media, Anderson has served on the board of directors of the Independent Television Service (1998-2005), and was a co-founder of the National Black Programming Consortium (now Black Public Media). Anderson is also a past president (1989-1991) of the National Conference of Artists (NCA), the nation’s oldest African American arts organization. She is currently a member of the NCA – Michigan Chapter’s board of directors and a member of Final Girls, an organization of women filmmakers in Detroit. Anderson is also an accomplished still photographer whose work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the permanent collections of Southern Methodist University and the Mott-Warsh Collection.

Jazz violinist Regina Carter began taking music lessons at the age of two, first for the piano and later for the violin. Though classically trained, she started to become interested in jazz and funk when she was a teenager. She graduated from Cass Technical High School in Detroit, Michigan and enrolled in the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts. She went on to receive her B.A. degree in music from Oakland University. In 1987, Carter joined the all-female pop-jazz quintet Straight Ahead, and appeared on their first three albums before leaving the band in 1991 and moving to New York City, where she performed and recorded with a variety of high-profile jazz and pop artists, including Aretha Franklin, Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Billy Joel, Dolly Parton, Max Roach and Oliver Lake. Carter released her first solo album, Regina Carter, in 1995. It was followed by Something for Grace in 1997, Rhythms of the Heart in 1999, Motor City Moments in 2000, Paganini: After a Dream in 2003, I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey in 2006, Reverse Thread in 2010, Southern Comfort in March of 2014 and Ella: Accentuate the Positive in 2017. In 2006, Carter was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and in 2007, she was named artist-in-residence at her alma mater, Oakland University, for which she teaches master classes and works with students, faculty and ensembles. She also served as one of the Resident Artistic Directors for the discerning SFJAZZ during its inaugural season. Most recently, was appointed as the Director of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s All-Female Jazz Residency, a unique summer immersion program for aspiring women jazz professionals.

Recipient of the 2016 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, composer Wayne Horvitz’s own ensembles include the Snowghost Trio, Sweeter Than the Day, and The Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble. Horvitz’s commissioners include The Kitchen, The Seattle Symphony, Kronos, BAM, New World Records, The Flynn Theater, and Vienna Jazz. He has received 3 MAP Fund Awards, the NEA American Masterpiece Award, 3 Artist Trusts Fellowships and more. As a collaborator and producer, he has worked with Bill Frisell, Robin Holcomb, Butch Morris, Bobby Previte, George Lewis, Reggie Watts, John Zorn (Naked City Etc.), World Saxophone Quartet, Fontella Bass, John Adams, and Eddie Palmieri. Collaborators in theater, dance, and film include Carey Perloff, Bill Irwin, Gus Van Sant, Paul Taylor, and Paul Magid. “There’s nobody else out there I hear even attempting to cover some kind of similar range, and do it so convincingly” — All About Jazz

Ara Topouzian is an Armenian-American musician whose proficiency at the kanun (Middle Eastern harp) has made him a nationally recognized artist. He has performed in concert, at music festivals and many celebrated venues across the united states, with the top musicians in Middle Eastern music. Topouzian’s traditional musical style keeps to his Armenian heritage but has expanded to include music from around the Middle East, as well as jazz, fusion, new age, and blues. The recipient of numerous awards, Topouzian’s music has been heard and sold around the globe. In 2012, Topouzian became an Kresge Artist Fellow and in 2015, he was honored as artist in residence for Farmington Hills, MI.

Billy Mark is an experimental artist whose work is rooted in the art of poetic freestyle. Based in poetry, his work extends to areas of music, theater, sculpture, movement and installation. His current work explores the production of improvisational books and other multidisciplinary long forms of improvisation. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, his writing has been published in The Guidebook of Alternative Nows and SEEN magazine. His work has been performed at REDCAT (Los Angeles), Spiel Festival (Austria), Detroit Contemporary, and Bushwick Open Studios (New York).

Lisa Rose LaMarre Wilmot is a choreographer testing the boundaries of performance-based artwork and working to bring the art of dance away from the lofty stage and into the realm of everyday life. She is the Director of LaMarre and Dancers, a teaching artist for VSA Michigan, and has been instructing at Wayne State University since 2012. She is a member of both the Michigan Dance Council and National Dance Education Organization. Her choreography has been produced for Wayne State University, Grand Valley State University, Oakland University, ArtPrize7, DDC Dances, People Dancing, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit Contemporary, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Music Hall, Sidewalk Performing Arts Festival, ArtPeers, and numerous spaces nationally. Lisa, pursuing a Master of Arts in Teaching Artistry, is a Presidential Scholar of Western Michigan University holding a Bachelor of Arts.

Marjani Fortè-Saunders is a choreographer, performer, organizer, and curator and is currently the co-director of Alkebulan Cultural Center of Pasadena, CA. She is a recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Performance Bessie Award as one of 21 Black Womyn Artists of Skeleton Architecture. Marjani is an inaugural recipient of the Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Fellowship and a two-time Princess Grace Foundation awardee. Memoirs of a…Unicorn is a recipient of the 2017 MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation Grant, and was named Dance Magazine’s Best of 2017. In 2016, as recipient of the Surdna Foundation, Marjani curated an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art in Brooklyn titled Being Here…in Memory. Marjani facilitates within UBW’s BOLD Teaching Network, offering their unique approach to community engagement and organizing.

Rulan Tangen’s work explores movement as an evolving language, rooted in global indigenous cosmologies from her own lineage and cultivated through collaborative creation processes with diverse indigenous and intertribal peoples. She acknowledges dance as a functional ritual for transformation and healing, integral to the process of decolonizing the body, and in kinetic energetic connection with all relations – human and beyond. As Founding Artistic Director/Choreographer of Dancing Earth, she has passionately cultivated successive generations of indigenous contemporary performing artists, and embodies her belief in dance as a purposeful center of continuance of life. She is a recipient of the 2018 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Award and is grateful for all that roots her, supporting pathways for the dreaming and doing of Dancing Earth: moving, shaking, and stomping the world into renewal.

A native Detroiter and Howard University graduate, Njia Kai directs and curates major public events and cultural arts projects with a focus on community enrichment, and in support of placemaking initiatives. Her 30 years of production experience include the annual City of Detroit Tree Lighting, Art X Detroit and Noel Night in Midtown, the Wright Museum African World Festival, and the downtown entertainment series at Campus Martius Park. Njia has led arts-based summer and after-school programs for city youth and lends her expertise to a wide variety of community projects.

Frank Pahl received a bachelor of arts degree in English from Wayne State University, Detroit and a master of fine arts degree in art and design with an emphasis in sound art from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has received over 80 commissions to write music for theater, film and dance and has performed throughout North America, Europe and Japan. His music has appeared on over 70 releases. Since 2000, he’s actively created kinetic sound installations, which are frequently designed to accompany his music. Pahl has taught sound design at College for Creative Studies, Detroit and sound-related courses at University of Michigan. His current music projects are Scavenger Quartet and Little Bang Theory.

Todd Chandler is a filmmaker, musician, and interdisciplinary artist. His work has been featured at the Hammer Museum, the Torino Film Festival, Brooklyn Museum, Mass MoCA, 01SJ Biennial, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. His first feature film, Flood Tide (2013), documents and reimagines a journey down the Hudson River on a fleet of sculptural rafts dreamed up by the artist Swoon. He is the co-creator of Empire Drive-In and was a founding member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and the band Dark Dark Dark. He has received fellowships and support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, Experimental Television Center, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. He teaches in the Department of Film at Brooklyn College.

Terence Nance is an artist born and raised in Dallas, Texas. Each of his siblings are artists: Norvis Jr. Djore, and Classi. Terence makes music under the name Terence Etc. His first feature film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, premiered in the New Frontier section of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The film has garnered Terence recognition from Filmmaker magazine, where he was selected as one of the 25 new faces of independent film. Oversimplification… also won the 2012 Gotham Award for “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You.” The film has since been released theatrically in the US, UK, France, and South Africa. It is currently available on DVD and Digitally through Cinema Guild. Terence currently resides in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn – along with the rest of The Swarm and is currently developing his next feature film.

Penny Godboldo completed her Ph.B. degree in Education at Wayne State University and holds an M.A. Degree in Humanities from University of Detroit in English, with a cognate in Dance/Theater. She trained at the Alvin Ailey American Dance School, Broadway Dance Center, Steps Dance Studio and the Martha Graham School in New York City. She mentored under dance Icon Katherine Dunham for over 20 years and is the only certified instructor of the Dunham technique in Michigan. She has taught and performed in the U.S. (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) as well as Toronto, Canada and various countries including England, Scotland, France and Japan. Godboldo has conducted research: “Traditional Dance” and “Dance in Religion” in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Benin, and West Africa. Since 2006 she has frequently presented papers on her work at the KOSANBA Academic Colloquium, at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Massachusetts University, Wayne State University, among other places. Professor Godboldo is currently in her 32nd year on faculty at Marygrove College, Artistic Director of the Hartford Baptist Church Liturgical Dance Ministry, and directs a community mentoring program through the arts, “Discovery: GAP” for adolescent girls and directs the Detroit Legacy Project each summer.

Carrie Morris is a director, puppeteer and performance artist with an interest in creating experiences that extend beyond the stage and out into the world.

Carrie’s work as a director and performing artist combines puppetry, multimedia and the gestural language of experimental theater. She has a BFA in directing theater from NYU and an MFA in studio art from U of M Ann Arbor. Her work has been seen in the New York International Fringe Festival, The Athens Museum of Art, Seattle’s Annex Theater, the Canadian Fringe Festival, the CATCH! New Artist Series in Brooklyn, NY, the Orlando International Fringe Festival, the Matrix Theater, as an invited artist working with the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra, at The Flicker Film Festival in Richmond, VA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. She is a J. William Fulbright grantee in the field of performance art for creative work in multimedia shadow puppetry in Solo, Indonesia, a Princess Grace grantee in the field of theater for puppetry design and direction and for several years was the program manager of Puppetry and Performing Arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has been the director of CMAP (Carrie Morris Arts Production) since it was established in 2012 as a place where Detroiters can experience and explore contemporary puppetry, performance and multimedia works.

Aku Kadogo is an international theatre director, choreographer, performer, educator and cultural arts curator. Kadogo has directed and created theatre works in Australia, Korea, Europe and the United States. This multi-faceted artist directs highly energetic, imaginative, original theatre works.She has served as the Director of the Black Theatre Program at Wayne State University, been a guest Faculty member at Yongin University in South Korea and is currently a Visiting Scholar at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Kadogo has worked in film, television and stage making her career debut in the original Broadway production of for colored girls who considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.

She divides her time between Atlanta and Sydney, Australia..

Leyya Mona Tawil is an artist working with dance and music practices. Tawil is the artistic director of DANCE ELIXIR and TAC: Temescal Art Center. Her work has been presented in Russia, Canada and 13 countries throughout Europe and the Arab world. Her approach to experimental performance is based on conceptual scoring and location based variables. She has discussed this process with author Linda Weintraub for Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence; as well as interviews with NEA Art Talks, Art21 (NYC), Art Territories (Ramallah), Wall Street Journal and American Theater Magazine. Presentation highlights include New York Live Arts/Live Ideas (NYC), Dock11 (Berlin), MOCAD (Detroit), BIPOD9 (Beirut), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), TransDance15 (Cairo) and the Museum of Nonconformist Art (Saint Petersburg). www.danceElixirLIVE.org

Samiya Bashir is the author of Gospel, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2009 Lambda Literary Award, and Where the Apple Falls, a Poetry Foundation bestseller and finalist for the 2005 Lambda Literary Award. Bashir is editor of Black Women’s Erotica 2 and co-editor, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana, of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. Bashir’s poetry, stories, articles and editorial work have been featured in numerous publications including, most recently and forthcoming, in Poetry, World Literature Today, Ecotone, HOAX, The Normal School, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cura, The Normal School, Eleven Eleven, Cascadia Review, Hubbub, Callaloo and The Encyclopedia Project. Her long poem, Coronagraphy, was a 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee. A long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Bashir is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches creative writing at Reed College. www.samiyabashir.com

renée c. hoogland is Professor of English at Wayne State University where she teaches literature and culture after 1870, critical theory, cultural studies, and visual culture. She has published widely in American and British literature, film, visual culture, and critical theory. Her most recent book is A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation (2014, Dartmouth College Press). hoogland is the editor of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts.

Kim Hunter is life-long Detroiter employed in media relations for social justice groups. He has served as Poet-in-Residence in several Detroit public schools through the InsideOut Literary Arts Project. He co-directs the Woodward Line Poetry Series which received a Knights Arts Challenge Detroit award in 2013. His work has appeared in Rainbow Darkness, Abandon Automobile, Triage, Hipology, Metro Times, Dispatch Detroit and Graffiti Rag. He has published two collections of poetry: borne on slow knives and edge of the time zone. In 2012, he received a Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts. www.kimhunterdetroit.com

Albert Mobilio is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Open City, Jacket, and Tin House. Books of poetry include Bendable Siege, The Geographics, Me with Animal Towering, and Touch Wood. A volume of short fiction, Games and Stunts was published in 2012 by Belladonna Books. He is an assistant professor of literary studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College, an editor at Bookforum, and an editor for Hyperallergic Weekend.

Born in 1953, sculptor Chakaia Booker fuses ecological concerns with explorations of racial and economic difference, globalization, and gender by recycling discarded tires into complex assemblages. Booker began to integrate discarded construction materials into large, outdoor sculptures in the early 1990s. Tires resonate with her for their versatility and rich range of historical and cultural associations. Booker slices, twists, weaves, and rivets this medium into radically new forms and textures, which easily withstand outdoor environments. For her, the varied tones of the rubber parallels human diversity, while the tire treads suggest images as varied as African scarification and textile designs. Though she has adopted utilitarian jeans and work boots in her studio, she always wears a large, intricately wrapped headdress, which has links to her earliest wearable art and has become her fashion signature. Booker received a BA in sociology from Rutgers University in 1976, and an MFA from the City College of New York in 1993. She gained international acclaim at the 2000 Whitney Biennial with It’s So Hard to Be Green, her 12.5 x 21 foot wall-hung tire sculpture. Booker received a Pollock-Krasner grant in 2002 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. She has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. www.chakaiabooker.com

Sonya Clark’s work has been exhibited in over 300 museums and galleries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas. Since 2006, she has been Chair of Craft /Material Studies in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Formerly, she was Baldwin-Bascom Professor of Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the recipient of several awards including an Art Prize Grand Jurors Prize in 2014, a Pollock-Krasner grant, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art, a United States Artist Fellowship and an Art Matters grant. www.sonyaclark.com

Elizabeth Dee is an American gallery owner and co-founder of Independent New York and Independent Brussels. Elizabeth Dee Gallery is located on West 20th Street in Chelsea, and has produced numerous groundbreaking and internationally-recognized exhibitions by such artists as Adrian Piper, Miriam Cahn (debut), Philippe Decrauzat, Derek Jarman, Leo Gabin (debut), Josephine Meckseper (debut), Ryan Trecartin (debut) and Mark Barrow, among others. Previously Dee established X Initiative, a nonprofit consortium of the global art community presenting exhibitions and programming in response to the major philosophical and economic shifts in Contemporary art. She was also recently included in Art + Auction Magazine’s list for the 100 most powerful figures in the art world.www.elizabethdee.com

Valerie Parks is a Detroit painter whose studio practice spans over the past 30 years, since her graduation from Wayne State University. She has participated in many solo and group exhibitions and her work can be found in area and national art collections. Parks worked for thirteen years at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the museum’s Learning and Interpretation Department, where she taught drawing and painting and curated many of the Detroit Public School Exhibitions at the DIA. Valerie Parks is also co-owner of TravelArt Services.