Speakers

Jean Marie Casbarian

© Jean Marie Casbarian, tracking five from the series A Philosophy Lost

Jean Marie Casbarian was born to an Armenian father and a German mother on a military weapons testing ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. Her nomadic lifestyle has led her through various lives in the U.S. including Chicago, California, Colorado, Massachusetts and New York. She received her MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in New York where she focused on interdisciplinary installation practices and incorporates photography, film and video, sound, sculpture and performance into her artworks.

Along with exhibiting her works throughout the United States, Europe, Central America and Asia, she has received a number of awards and artist residencies including a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space Grant, a Research / Studio Art Associate with Five-Colleges, Inc., Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation nomination, The LaNapoule Foundation Grant in LaNapoule, France, the Chicago Artist’s Assistance Project Grant, and an Associateship with The Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute. As an educator, Jean Marie is core faculty with the ICP-Bard MFA program and the General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography. She also teaches and advises graduate students at Transart Institute, a low-residency MFA program based in Berlin and New York City. She has taught in the film and photography departments at Hampshire College, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Colorado. Jean Marie currently lives and works in New York City.

Nona Faustine

© Nona Faustine

Photographer Nona Faustine was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of The School of Visual Arts and International Center of Photography at Bard College MFA program in 2013. Her series “White Shoes” are nude self-portraits taken in and around the places associated with the 250 year history of slavery in New York City. Recently her work has received worldwide press coverage online and print in publications such as the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Elle.com, NBCNews, The Village Voice, Beautiful Decay, ArtNet, Brooklyn Magazine, Mic.com, Greybook Magazine, Dodge & Burn Blog, Lenscratch Fine Art Photography Daily, PDN, and a host of national and international publications. Writer/Curator Charlotte Cotton selected Nona’s work as a 2014 Honorable Mention for Baxter St. Camera Club of New York Competition. Since graduating her work has been steadily exhibited, most notably this fall in The Studio Museum of Harlem’s “Constellation” exhibition. “For Colored Girls”, at the Schomburg Center for Black Research in Harlem in 2014, “Respond” at Smack Mellon, “Take 10” at ICP, “Feminism” at Chicago’s Woman Made Gallery, “The Future is Forever”, at ICP MANA Contemporary Art Center all in 2015. She will have her first of two solo shows at Smack Mellon in January 2016 and Invisible Dog Art Center in October 2016.

Alex Fialho 

Shan Kelley, With Curators Like These, Who Needs A Cure, 2015

Alex Fialho, Programs Manager at Visual AIDS, has facilitated projects and conversations around both the history and immediacy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, utilizing art to maintain HIV/AIDS visibility, consider its legacy, and galvanize contemporary response. He has presented his research on the art of Glenn Ligon and Keith Haring at the College Art Association and NYU Fales Library. He also curates exhibitions for Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as Research and Curatorial Associate, and is a frequent contributor to Artforum.com and Artforum International Magazine.

Gordon Hall

Gordon Hall, Stand And, Image by Amy Mills

Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York. Hall has exhibited and performed at SculptureCenter, The Kitchen, Movement Research, EMPAC, The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Night Club in Chicago, Kent Fine Art, Foxy Production, The Hessel Museum at Bard College, White Columns, and at Chapter NY, among others. Hall has also organized programs at MoMA PS1, Recess, The Shandaken Project, Alderman Exhibitions, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, producing a series of lectures and seminars in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Hall’s writing and interviews have been featured in a variety of publications including V Magazine, Randy, Bomb, Title Magazine, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (published by SculptureCenter) and in Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge, 2012). Hall was awarded a Triangle Arts Foundation Residency in 2015, the LMCC Workspace Residency for 2013-14, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013, and the Fire Island Artist Residency in 2012. Hall holds an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Katherine Hubbard

Cyclops and Slashes at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Performance Documentation no.2 of 8, 2015

Katherine Hubbard is an interdisciplinary artist living in New York who works at the intersection of photography, performance, and writing. A new series of landscape photographs, bygone from here (2015), is currently included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1. Her most recent solo exhibition, four shoulders and thirty five percent everything else, was presented at Capricious 88, (now Company Gallery), NY in 2014.  Forthcoming in 2016 Hubbard will be an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX.  Hubbard’s work has also been exhibited at Recess, NY; The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Judd Foundation, NY; Vox Populi, PA; Higher Pictures, NY; Renseriet, Stockholm, Sweden; Murray Guy, NY; Marlborough Gallery, NY; and Museum of Arts and Design, NY. Hubbard holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and holds part time teaching positions at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Parsons School of Design, and the International Center of Photography at Bard.

Steffani Jemison

© Untitled, Steffani Jemison, 2013

Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003). Jemison’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally; solo exhibitions include LAXART, the RISD Museum, the Bindery Projects, and Real Art Ways; collaborative exhibitions include the New Museum and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art; and group exhibitions include the Brooklyn Museum; the Drawing Center; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Laurel Gitlen; Team Gallery; and other venues. Her publishing project, Future Plan and Program, commissions literary work by artists of color and has published books by Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and Harold Mendez, among others. Jemison has participated in artist residencies at Smack Mellon; the International Studio and Curatorial Program; Project Row Houses; the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Jemison was a 2013 Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awardee and a 2014 Art Matters Grantee. In 2015, she presented her new multipart commission Promise Machine at the Museum of Modern Art. Jemison is currently an artist-in-residence in the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program. She teaches at Parsons The New School for Design, the Cooper Union, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Martha Joseph 

Martha Joseph is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art, where she has worked on such exhibitions, commissions, and performances as Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980; Steffani Jemison: Promise Machine; and Projects 101: Rabih Mroué. Before joining MoMA she worked at The Whitney Museum where she assisted on the 2014 Biennial and helped produce such performances as Mortal Kombat featuring Ariana Reines and Jim Fletcher. Previously, she worked in the curatorial department of The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and curated the group exhibition Love to Love You. She received her Masters degree in the History of Art from Williams College and Bachelors degrees in Art History and Vocal Performance from Oberlin College and Conservatory.

T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko

Nikki Cesare Schotzko is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. She coedited TDR’s special issue “Caught Off-Garde: New Theatre Ensembles in NYC (mostly)” with Mariellen R. Sandford in 2010, and, with Isabel Stowell-Kaplan and Didier Morelli in 2015, a special issue of CTR entitled “Performing Products: When Acting Up Is Selling Out.”  She has presented talks and papers internationally, and, as an occasional dramaturge, collaborated on productions in New York, Toronto, Chicago, and Morelia, Mexico. In fall 2012, Professor Cesare Schotzko organized the The Future of Cage: Credo in celebration of the centenary of composer John Cage, which brought together an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars and artists including Allen S. Weiss and Pauline Oliveros, and culminated in a new performance of Cage’s 1976 Lecture on the Weather. Her first book, Learning How to Fall: Art and Culture after September 11, engages the skewed relationship between 21st-century media technologies, perception, and pop culture, and her current research explores what she considers to be a trending nihilism, or #nihilism, within literal and metaphoric climate change.

Milagros de la Torre

Flag Confiscated from ‘Shining Path’ Terrorist, The Lost Steps, © Milagros de la Torre, 1996

Milagros de la Torre has been working with the photographic medium since 1991. She studied Communication Sciences at the University of Lima and received a B.A. (Hons) in Photographic Arts from the London College of Printing. Her first solo exhibition, curated by Robert Delpire, was presented at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. After an artist residence grant from the Cité des Arts, Paris (1995), she received the Rockefeller Foundation Artist Grant and was awarded the Romeo Martinez Photography Prize and the Young Ibero american Creators Prize for her series The Lost Steps.

Born in Peru, De la Torre lives and works in New York.

Martha Wilson

© Christopher Milne

Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past four decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity. She has been described by New York Times critic Holland Cotter as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s.”  In 1976 she founded Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artist books, temporary installation, performance art, as well as online works.  She is represented by P.P.O.W Gallery in New York.

Martha Wilson received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in 2013.  She has received fellowships for performance art from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; Bessie and Obie awards for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression; a Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts; a Richard Massey Foundation-White Box Arts and Humanities Award; a Lifetime Achievement Award from Women’s Caucus for Art; and the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.