Michal Alpern
Michal Alpern is a New York based artist with an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. Alpern’s practice shifts between making serieses of objects to room sized sculptures, reconciling spatial thoughts like gesture and materiality with abstractions like gender and domesticity. Her works were featured in museums and institutions in NY and Israel, including solo shows at M23 Gallery, NY, The Museum of Israeli Art, Israel and group shows at False Flag, NY and the LeRoy Neiman Center, NY.
Marcelo Arroyave
Marcelo Arroyave is a sociologist and urban anthropologist who has conducted quantitative and qualitative research in Colombia and the US. Since moving to NYC in 2014, he has worked in various urban settings as an after-school teacher, consecutive translator, marketing researcher, and community outreach specialist. Marcelo is also a creator, editor, and producer of fanzines and magazines. He was the founder and publisher of the MusaEnferma fanzine in Cali, Colombia (five editions). He also created Sursystem Magazine, which has eight editions so far. He published the magazine in Cali (3 editions), Bogotá (2 editions), Barcelona (2 editions in Catalan and Spanish), and NYC (1 edition in English and Spanish). The latest edition is The Sound Map of Salsa Music in NYC. Marcelo enjoys dancing to Salsa music and giving lectures whenever possible.
Alain Barriere Kamga Noubissi
Alain Kamga Noubissi is a mechanical engineer with more than 10 years of experience maintaining industrial machines and overseeing manufacturing facilities. He has hands-on experience in metal fabrication and designs projects for industrial use. He is a seasoned design instructor and teaches fluency in the language of technical drawing.
Nadia Bongo
Nadia Bongo is a teaching artist and translator with a PhD in French Language and Literature. She has earned a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship. Her writing or photographs have appeared in Solstice, Litro online, Taos journal of Poetry, African Voices, The Citron Review, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. In 2023, Nadia co-directed an experimental short film, Wandering In Beauty, supported by the University Open Air program presented by BPL. Find her at https://www.nadiabongo.com/
Dylan Castagnette
Dylan Castagnette is a Mauritian filmmaker living in Brooklyn, New York. He has previously served as an intimacy director in a staged reading and a theater production. He also practices photography and experiments with cyanotype printing. Dylan holds a bachelor in Mathematics from Columbia University and is currently a project manager at a consulting firm.
Chia-Lun Chang
Chia-Lun Chang is the author of Prescribee (2022), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, named among the “Best Poetry of the Last Year” by Ms. Magazine, and honored as a Poets & Writers debut poet and two chapbooks; An Alien Well-Tamed and One Day We Become Whites. Recent work appears in Academy of American Poets, Granta, Bomb, Columbia Journal and Brooklyn Rail. She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which awarded her the 2022 Sarah Verdone Writing Award. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in Brooklyn. Learn more at Chialunchang.com.
Tashi Chödrön
Tashi Chödrön is a lay Buddhist practitioner. She is one of the first women of her generation in exile to receive the entire teachings of the Vajrayana path directly from HH Penor Rinpoche (one of the greatest masters of the 20th century) including Ngondro—preliminary teachings, Tsalung and Dzogchen, the pinnacle teachings of the Great Perfection. As the Himalayan Programs and Communities Ambassador at the Rubin Museum of Art, Tashi has taught Awakening Practice and Awakening Wisdom Experience mindful meditation classes, and educates university students and adults through gallery tours and classes on Himalayan Art and Culture.
She taught the Awakening Practice at Kripalu in partnership with NY Yoga and Life Magazine for many years and curated a monthly program on Himalayan Art and Culture called “Himalayan Heritage” at the Rubin Museum of Art. She also lead virtual sessions with Tibet House New York, the Center for Adults Living Well @ the YMCA, and hosted meditation sessions for children since the pandemic, and led a meditation session on the 21 Feminine Attributes for UN Women’s USA.
Tashi is the founder and current director of Voices of Tibet, an organization dedicated to conducting interviews with Tibetan elders to save their stories for many future generations and to educate the world about Tibet. She is also a board member of the UN Women’s USA NY Chapter.
Enrique Enriquez
For twenty years, Enrique Enriquez has sat in the same café, sending a steady signal into the world until one day, the world began to answer back. Not through prophecy or revelation, but through the voice of a sparrow.
What started as an intuitive leap became a profound discovery: the birds responded not necessarily to specific sounds, but to rhythm, to presence itself. In this dialogue with otherness, Enrique found not answers, but a way to live. The birds taught him that meaning isn't found in interpretation, but in the moment when we forget ourselves enough to let the world speak through us.
Roberto Granados
Roberto Granados is a guitarist and composer originally from Hayward, California. He holds a Bachelor of the Arts degree in Music from California State University East Bay, where he studied with Marc Teicholz, and the degrees Master of Music, Master of Musical Arts, and Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, where he studied with Benjamin Verdery. Roberto has performed widely in numerous venues in collaboration with various ensembles and artists, including the San Francisco Guitar Quartet, the California Symphony, the Santa Cruz Symphony, Jon Anderson of British progressive rock band Yes, and ukulele soloist Jake Shimabukuro.
Roberto composes music varying from solo and ensemble instrumental works to electronic and electroacoustic pieces, and often experimenting with elements of noise, improvisation, indeterminacy and altered tuning systems. He has premiered and composed new works for guitar and other instruments in collaboration with the Bay Area Composers Group collective, including several concerts at the Center for New Music in San Francisco and an online livestream premiere series.
Roberto has also performed extensively as a flamenco guitarist, and has released an album of flamenco music, Soñador (2018). He writes music for an internet-based solo multi-instrumental progressive metal project under the alias of The Halcyon Effect, and does work in audio production, performance art and visual art in his free time.
Naama Levit
Naama Levit is a chef and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores food as a medium for cultural inquiry, critical thinking, and performance. With a background in both fine art and culinary practice, she has worked in restaurants, test kitchens, and food startups, blending research, experimentation, and storytelling. She collaborates with cultural institutions and teaches, developing projects that examine the intersections of food, materiality, and social dynamics.
Matteo Liberatore
Matteo Liberatore is an artist and composer working in experimental music and video art. Now based in Brooklyn, Liberatore spent much of his life in the medieval region of Abruzzo, Italy, amidst dramatic landscapes that are reflected through a performance and composition style of “unsettling beauty” and “striking physicality” (The New York City Jazz Record).
Matteo is currently focused on a solo audio/visual project called Molto Ohm, which is a sonic exploration of the interplay between digital life and social decay on an emotional level; ongoing collaborations include a duo with Amirtha Kidambi (vocals) creating “interdimensional” (The Quietus) improvised aural landscapes that are at once spacious and unrestrained, as heard on their debut album Neutral Love (Astral Spirits); a duo with Brian Chase, playing in the art-rock band Gold Dime, and a trio with Donald McKenzkie and Mark Kelley. He is also an active member of New York’s improv scene, having released albums with Ava Mendoza, Joanna Mattrey, gabby fluke-mogul, Elliott Sharp, Weasel Walter and Catherine Sikora.
During his formative years, Liberatore studied classical guitar under Maestro Marco Salcito at Conservatorio di Foggia, philosophy at the University of L’Aquila, and obtained his M.M. in Jazz Performance at NYU.
Tom McGrath
Tom McGrath is an artist who lives and works in New York. He holds a BFA from Cooper Union and an MFA from Columbia University, and has exhibited his work nationally and internationally since 2002. His work deals with landscape painting as alternately a verb, a perceptually unstable clarifying obstacle, and location device of triangulating between narrative, historical and contemporary cultural significance.
His public work consists of a permanent ceiling installation at the Jim and Alexis Pugh Theater at DPAC, Orlando. He has had solo shows at Sue Scott Gallery in New York; Maruani-Noirhomme, Knokke, Belgium; Lia Rumma, Naples, Italy; and Zach Feuer/LFL ,NY, and two-person exhibitions at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles and David Castillo, Miami.
Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale Gallery of Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Orlando Museum of Art, among others.
His work has been discussed or reviewed in Artforum, Bomb/blog, The Paris Review, Tema Celeste, Time Out New York, and The Los Angeles Times, among others. McGrath has written essays or reviews for numerous publications and artist's catalogs, and has taught at schools such as RISD, Brooklyn College, Columbia, Brandeis, University of Tennessee and SMfa. He has been a guest critic, workshopped or talked at many programs including Bard/ICP, MICA, Rutgers, Boston University, Yale Norfolk, MassArt, and Hunter.
Alisa Minyukova
Alisa Minyukova is a Russian born artist, researcher and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is co-creator of the Dream Mapping Project which works to bridge dream science with the creative process resulting in an ongoing series of collaborative art, film and performance works. Her drawings, film and mixed media installations explore world mythology and symbols of the collective unconscious.
Her research covers the topics of dreams, memories, liminality, emigration, heritage and the loss thereof and the exploration of the human condition by way of ancestral memory. Her current creative focus is on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - a collective memory of war, and faith healing in South African cultures.
Elizabeth Moylan
Elizabeth Moylan is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. She recently relocated from Chicago, where she was an instructor of painting, print media, and fiber and material studies. She is currently working on a body of writing inspired by the vivid nightlife of her new home. She has years of experience studying and translating classical Latin and Greek poetry. She considers that early immersion in poetic study as foundational to her artistic practice today. She holds a BA in Gender Studies from the University of Chicago, where she also studied Russian Language and Literature, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Haoyan of America
Haoyan of America seeks to honor the mind of self through invisible landscapes of meaning. With over 175,000 hours of film, digital media & visual arts experience, Haoyan's multidisciplinary art practice has been encoded in print, documentaries, music videos and on web servers across the world. More info at: https://haoyanofamerica.com
Achiro Olwoch
Achiro P. Olwoch is an author, playwright and founder of Acirocan Books, a self-publishing brand dedicated to storytelling that sparks essential conversations. Through her work, Achiro delves into the realities of LGBTQ injustices, political oppression and social issues in Uganda, creating narratives that reflect the struggles of marginalized communities. Drawing on real situations while protecting identities, her stories resonate deeply, fostering dialogue and inspiring change. With a clear, courageous voice, Achiro’s mission is to bring untold stories to the forefront, challenging perceptions and advocating for a more inclusive just society.
Eugene Opoku-Mensah
Eugene is an Assistant Professor at Middlesex’s College Department of Computer Science. To his credit, he has taught diverse of students in Ghana Information Technology. He then continued in China, where he worked for 6 years before moving to the United States. Dr. Opoku-Mensah uses an interactive approach with practical illustrations that attracts students’ interest to grasp the concepts being taught. His interest is Data Science and Information Security.
Sarah Overton
Sarah Overton is a dynamic multi-genre cellist living and working in NYC. Sarah has been featured at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Atlanta Symphony Hall, the Pantages Theater, and international stages in London, Paris, and Cardiff. She most recently performed with the Broadway Sinfonietta at L.A.’s Hollywood Bowl for the world premiere of Mattel’s “Barbie: The Movie in Concert” and completed a national tour as the Principal Cellist for Sony/Marvel’s “Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse Live in Concert '' series.
As an advocate for new music and genre-fusion she recently performed a premiere of Wondersmith Entertainment’s “Passing the Crown”: A celebration of women in hip-hop as a part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City, and is a frequent collaborator with Sound Off! Music for Bail, Choral Chameleon, NYU’s New Theater on Broadway, the NYChillharmonic, internationally renowned Cypriot fusion ensemble Sounds of Cyprus and many more. Sarah is also a versatile electric cellist who has performed on stages at Walt Disney World, Universal Studios Orlando, and recently made her compositional debut both at Re:Sound Festival in Cleveland, OH and as an Artist in Residence for The Movement Theatre Company.
Adrian is Hungry
Adrian Patino aka. Adrian is Hungry has been collecting and sharing vintage afro-rooted music for the past 6 years in New York City. He specializes in ropical sounds from Colombia, New York, the Antilles, Venezuela, Peru, Africa, and more with an emphasis on danceable tunes that hit a nostalgia chord that bring you back to dancing at a family party.
A traveler and cultural anthropologist at heart, he’s been exploring and rediscovering his cultural identity through music research and curation, creating spaces in his community to bring these sounds into the NYC nightlife.
Hilla Shapira
Hilla Shapira is a Fiber artist, costume designer and educator. Originally from Tel-Aviv, Israel,
and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work deals with the relationships between common
design and body regimen. By making functional mundane objects she questions design norms
and the political aspects of things. She has presented her work in Israel, Europe, and the USA
including: Art Basel (Miami, FL), Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art (Philadelphia, PA), NY
Textile Month (NYC, NY), Jerusalem Design Week (Jerusalem, Israel), NY Jewelry week (NYC,
NY), Little Berlin Gallery, (Philadelphia, PA), Depo2015 (Pilsen, Czech Republic), Neve
Schechter Gallery (Tel-Aviv, Israel), Hansen House (Jerusalem, Israel), Textile Arts Center
(Brooklyn, NY) and Wasserman Projects (Detroit, MI). She was AIR in Carrizozo residency
(Carrizozo, NM), Popps Packing (Hamtramck, MI), Makerspace (Brooklyn, NY) and Neve
Schechter center (Tel-Aviv, Israel). She received her BFA in Fashion from Bezalel Academy,
Jerusalem, Israel and her MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield-Hills MI, USA.
Shapira's work had been featured in different publications including: Hyperallergic Magazine,
NY Jewish Week, Metalsmith Magazine, Portfolio Magazine, Haaretz, and the Jerusalem Post.
Stephen Tekpetey
Stephen Tekpetey holds a Bachelor of Science (BSC honors) and Doctoral Degree from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Kumasi, Ghana. He is a member of the ISO Technical Committee of the Bamboo and Rattan Standardization with extensive research work and publications on bamboo as a building material and its utilization. He is currently working with New-York Presbyterian Hospital. He loves to share time with family and friends.
Tsai-Ling Tseng
Tsai-Ling Tseng, born in 1991 in Taipei, is a Brooklyn based artist that earned her BFA from SVA in 2016 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. Tseng currently teaches at RISD and her studio practice focuses on transforming her daily life experiences into visual form. She works to capture the process of transformation itself — not only to make images, but also to use a canvas as a space to think through the possible relationships between art and experience. Colors are the initial marks on her canvas. Tseng tries to find light within these colors, which becomes the main character for her to visualize an unknown yet familiar event of the painting. Images of landscapes, plants, animals, and humans are products of discovery within her painting process. Tseng relinquishes control over specific narrative and allows it to happen spontaneously, whenever images collide. The objective is not only to surprise viewers, but to surprise herself with these unexpected collisions.
CD Wu
CD Wu received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wu has exhibited in several group shows both nationally and internationally. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Julia Adams
Julia Adams is a certified Life Coach at the NGO, Academy of Public Health and an educator at a private museum. She is also an expert in tea cultures, skilled in the subject of Chinese Tea Ceremony and Traditional Chinese Culture, especially Tang Dynasty's culture etc. Prior to relocating to New York from Shanghai, Julia was a news anchor and hosted citywide events; she then became an HR director and often hosted nationwide conferences on HR-related topics. Julia is also a zither player, certified by Shanghai Conservatory of Music.