New York City-based theater artist Aaron Landsman makes performances with people, language, space and time. His current work includes: Perfect City, a 20-year art and activism project about city planning, urban policy, and displacement, created with planners, activists, students and artists; Empathy School/Love Story, a diptych of monologues about landscape, nostalgia, memory and class (NY Times and Time Out New York Critics’ Pick); and SQUARES, a performance created with photographer Paul Shambroom, director Mallory Catlett and designer/director Jim Findlay, drawn from anonymous cast-off instamatic snapshots. From 2012-2014, Landsman, Catlett and Findlay presented the participatory performance City Council Meeting in five US cities. His earlier works were commissioned and presented by EMPAC, The Foundry Theatre, DiverseWorks, The Chocolate Factory, and PS122. Landsman is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow; previously he was a Princeton Arts Fellow, and the ASU Gammage Residency Artist. His work has been funded by LMCC, MAP, The Graham Foundation, Jerome, Rubin, NEFA and other funders. He has performed with Elevator Repair Service, Richard Maxwell, Tory Vazquez, and many other artists. He is a playwright in residence at Abrons Arts Center, and a Visiting Associate Professor at Princeton.

www.thinaar.com

Adelheid Mers engages in conversations with lay and professional cultural producers about their aesthetic practices. She uses diagrams as tools for figuring, to make cultural ecologies accessible to reflection, with an emphasis on practitioner perspectives. As a tenured professor of arts administration and policy at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mers appraises cultural processes across scales and manifold participant's interests. As a visual artist, she draws on the performative tools of studio critique to facilitate conversations. Formally, diagrams are defined by their operativity, engendering action and reflection. Mers' diagrams are deployed across media, ranging from quick sketches to freely distributed flyers to manipulable whiteboards; occasions are created for use and response.

Mers works independently, with artists, and with non-profits and their constituencies. She has explored artist's thinking about grant application processes for the 3Arts Foundation, and conducted research on cultural ecologies on Chicago's south and west sides, with the Foundation for Homan Square and the University of Chicago. As part of an ongoing project, Art Work (Visual Art/Music/Management) Mers is currently exploring the practices of sound artists, composers and experimental musicians, in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute of Cultural Management at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. Her work is presented nationally and internationally, through conference contributions and exhibitions. She has curated thematic exhibitions, published essays on pedagogy, arts administration and art-based research and has edited and published a book, Useful Pictures.

Honors include grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the British Council, the NEA, Illinois Arts Council and DCASE. Mers serves on editorial boards, and has recently served as juror for the NEA and the Rauschenberg Foundation.

Mers works with artists and with non-profit clients: with the City of Chicago Mayor's office and department of Innovation and Technology she observed stimulus funding application and uses. She has worked with the Evanston Art Center seeking out local arts ecologies, explored grant making impacts on artists for the 3Arts Foundation and conducted projects on Chicago's south and west sides, with the Foundation for Homan Square and the University of Chicago. Her work is presented nationally and internationally, at conferences and exhibitions. She has curated several exhibitions, published essays on pedagogy, arts administration and art-based research and has edited and published a book, Useful Pictures. Honors include grants from the German Academic Exchange Service, the British Council, NEA, the Illinois Arts Council and DCASE.

Anna Riley is a visual artist whose work emerges from a strong desire for material research. By recreating or altering the circumstances of their manufacture— whether reversing the coloration in glass, or making lime using antiquated burning methods— she considers common preconceptions surrounding materials, only to attempt to do away with them and discover the materials anew. Her research, tacit and often dependent on experimentation, has been enabled by residencies at the Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass (2017), the Creative Glass Center of America Fellowship at WheatonArts (2016), the Thicket (2016), and Wave Pool Gallery (2016). She is currently a Workspace Resident at Dieu Donne creating work focused on the origin and production of lime. She will further this research as an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Art and Design (September 2017 - January 2018). Further information can be found at www.annaelizabethriley.com.

Asha Veal Brisebois maintains a writing, editing, and curatorial practice, and has collaborated as an administrator on projects with visual, film, theater, and literary organizations and artists. She is currently developing The Tokyo Show: Black is Beautiful (2018), an experimental curatorial project to explore the following contexts: art as an instigator for cross-cultural dialogues across global space; and art as an instigator for potentially disruptive private and public conversations on the constructions of “race.”

Asha’s published work as a writer and editor has been acquired in libraries and collections including the George Gustav Heye Center at the National Museum of the American Indian Smithsonian Libraries, National Museum of African American History & Culture Smithsonian Libraries, Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, and others. Her work in creative nonfiction has been published by Brooklyn-based Slice Literary, among others. She is the founder of The Places We’ve Been books, an independent publisher, working since 2011 with more than 48 writers from cities and countries globally.

Asha teaches "Flexible Art Worlds" and "Curating in the Expanded Field" as faculty in the Department of Arts Administration and Policy at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a BA from The Gallatin School at New York University, an MFA from the writing program at The New School, and an MA Arts Administration & Policy program at SAIC.

http://sites.saic.edu/emerge/fall2016/     http://www.ashavealb.com/ 

taisha paggett (b. 1976, Fresno, California; lives in Los Angeles, California) and Ashley Hunt (lives in Van Nuys, California)

Pagett and Hunt’s collaborative practice attempts to span and challenge their respective disciplines-- spanning dance, visual art, activism, and teaching--and the demands and possibilities of political life. The set of directives presented as a “tool” at WOUND originated in Par Course A, a larger work by the artists developed in Los Angeles in 2009. Par Course A is organized as a “parcourse” fitness circuit with simple, time-based instructions, engaging the viewer/participant in a minor performance. Eleven stations provide equipment and instructions for viewers/participants to, for example dance to ambient sound, repeat habitual gestures, and track the origin of their garments through audio recordings. This work has primarily been presented as part of their ongoing research project, “On Movement, Thought, and Politics.”  The form of the parcourse allows the artists to offer the workshop without being present.

Be the Change Consulting provides high quality learning experiences and consulting for organizations to reach their creative potential. We do this through an intentional process that connects core values to organizational outcomes while providing research-based strategies, experiential learning techniques, and live coaching on real issues. Our solutions engage clients in creative problem-solving, provide alignment to research and best practices, and offer strategies to institutionalize organizational change.

Caroline Woolard (b. 1984) is a New York-based artist who makes objects and systems at the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. She is the co-founder of barter networks​ ​OurGoods.org​ and TradeSchool.coop and cultural equity platforms​ ​BFAMFAPhD.com​ and​ ​StudyCollaboration.com​. 

Her work has been commissioned by MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Creative Time, the Brooklyn Museum, Cornell University, and Cooper Union. She is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships including at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2016), the Queens Museum (2014), Eyebeam (2013), Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund (2010), Watermill (2011), and the MacDowell Colony (2009).

Recent scholarly writing on her work has been published in Artforum (2016); Art in America (2016); The New York Times (2016); and South Atlantic Quarterly (2015). Woolard has been named one of 11 Artists to Transform the Art World in 2017 (2017), has been listed in ArtNet's Top 20 Female Artists (2015) and the WIRED Smart List (2013).

Woolard is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hartford; her projects are the subject of three documentaries by PBS / Art21 for ​New York Close Up; her forthcoming book about the future of arts pedagogy, Ways of Being, co-authored by Susan Jahoda and designed by Emilio Martinez Poppe as a contribution to BFAMFAPhD, will be published by Punctum Books in 2018. http://carolinewoolard.com

Chloë Bass is a multi-form conceptual artist working in performance, situation, publication, and installation. Her work addresses scales of intimacy, where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand, and daily life as a site of deep research. She began at the scale of the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 - 2013). Her current project, The Book of Everyday Instruction, is an eight-chapter investigation into one-on-one social interaction. Beginning in 2018, she will be making a study at the scale of immediate family units, tentatively titled Obligation to Others Holds Me In My Place. Chloë is a 2017 - 2018 Workspace resident at the Center for Book Arts, and a 2017 studio resident at Triangle Arts Association. Her projects have appeared in recent exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming book will be published by the Operating System in December 2017; her writing is most often found on Hyperallergic. A native New Yorker, she lives and works in Brooklyn, and is an Assistant Professor in Art at Queens College, CUNY. You can learn more about her at chloebass.com. 

Dee Hibbert-Jones is an Academy Award nominated, Emmy® award winning filmmaker and artist. Her work incorporates animation, installation, public art and documentary film examining power and politics: how people manage and who gets heard. She explores diverse subjects from land use and wasted resources, to criminal justice and indigent rights: examining what is considered valuable and who is dismissed as valueless. Hibbert-Jones is a Guggenheim Fellow. She was most recently awarded a United States Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award in
recognition for her outstanding national commitment to civil rights, and social justice. The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke awarded Hibbert-Jones the 2015 Filmmaker Award, the California Public Defenders Association awarded them the Gideon Award for support to indigent minorities. She teaches sculpture, public art and digital art new media, film and social documentary. Her short film, installation and new media projects have been exhibited worldwide in exhibitions, museums and festivals; broadcast internationally and shown on Netflix. Her most recent animated documentary film Last Day of Freedom (with Nomi Talisman) won Best Short Documentary at the International Documentary (IDA) Awards 2015, a Northern California Emmy and was nominated for an 88th
Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. The film screened at over thirty international festivals and won eleven festival awards including: Best Short, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Best Short Documentary Hamptons International Film Festival, Golden Strands Award, Outstanding Documentary Short, Tall Grass KS, the 2015 Platinum Award Winner Spotlight Documentary Series, as well as the Award of Recognition at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards. Her work is in the collections of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences, the DeRosa Preserve, Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz, Riverside and Berkeley, Duke University Library, Recology and the Savidge Collection MacDowell Colony.

Douglas Paulson is an artist and educator who maintains collaborative practices with many of his favorite people.  He loves drawing, making books, and creating sprawling cultural and educational projects that bring together people with disparate backgrounds.  In 2012, he partnered kids withs artists and urban planners to design and build Kitty City, a city for kittens (Flux Factory, 2012). He and Heidi Neilson recently inflated the Menu For Mars Kitchen (The Boiler, 2015) to prototype food for the Red Planet.  In 2016, Doug collaborated with refugees from the Middle East and Africa who have relocated to Germany and Norway; producing parallel projects designed to bring people face to face with their new neighbors. http://www.douglaspaulson.com/

Emilio Martinez Poppe is an artist, designer, and educator born in Baltimore and working between Brooklyn and Lima, Peru. Their work includes video, interactive websites, text, performance, garment design, installation and research based collaborative projects. Emilio’s practices and collaborations have been supported by the New Museum, Cooper Union, SOMA, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their work has been presented at Cornell University, MICA, Cooper Union, Creative Time, Framer Framed, Side Room, and Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond. Emilio is currently a member of the collective BFAMFAPhD and a member of NEW INC at the New Museum. http://www.emilio.click/

The São Paulo Biennial Foundation is a pulsating institution that idealizes and puts into practice artistic, educational and social initiatives. In addition to holding the event that moves the world of art every two years, its activities extend from January to January in an emblematic pavilion of modern Brazilian architecture and in actions inside and outside the country. Without political-partisan or religious ties, it is a private non-profit institution that wants to bring the new, provoke debate, educate the eye with anxieties, proposals and questions always renewed.

Ghana ThinkTank is an international collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, allowing the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world. We collect problems from communities throughout the USA and Europe, and send them to think tanks we created in “developing” communities. The think tanks – which include a group of bike mechanics in Ghana, a rural radio station in El Salvador, Sudanese refugees seeking asylum in Israel, an artist collective in Iran, and a group of incarcerated girls in the Boston penal system, among others – propose solutions, which are then implemented in the “first world”.

Ghana ThinkTank’s innovative approach to public art reveals blind spots between otherwise disconnected cultures, challenges assumptions about who is “needy,” and turns the idea of expertise on its head by asking people in the “third world” to solve problems of people in the “first world.” This process helps people overcome their own stereotypes while being exposed to the stereotypes that other cultures have about them. Ghana ThinkTank was founded in 2006 by Christopher Robbins, John Ewing and Matey Odonkor. Maria Del Carmen Montoya joined in 2009. The project began with think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, and El Salvador, and has since expanded to include Mexico, Iran, Serbia, Indonesia, Sudan and Morocco. http://www.ghanathinktank.org/

Judith Leemann is an artist, educator, and writer. Translating operations through and across distinct arenas of practice, she looks for ways to move studio teaching methodologies into other contexts and to interrupt classroom habits by bringing in carefully curated noise. A long-standing collaboration with the Design Studio for Social Intervention grounds much of this experimentation. Of particular interest is bringing non-verbal choreographies of hands moving objects into relation with verbal explanation. The resulting double descriptions foreground the relational and systemic aspects of the phenomenon under consideration, and can be used by individuals in personal study as well as by groups looking to surface system dynamics. Recent work takes up the retooling of studio critique, with an eye towards its liberatory potential in both classroom and public sphere.

Leemann is Associate Professor of Fine Arts 3D/Fibers at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and holds an M.F.A. in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writings have been included in the anthologies Beyond Critique (Bloomsbury, 2017), Collaboration Through Craft (Bloomsbury, 2013), and The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MIT Press 2007). Leemann’s distributed audio project reading aloud is produced every spring at the intersection of her studio, teaching, and research practices. Recent exhibitions include arvensis (of the field) (Proof Gallery, Boston, 2017), WOUND (Cooper Union Gallery, New York City, 2016), Virtually Physically Speaking (A+D Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago 2014), Resonating Bodies (The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, 2013), and Imperfect Symmetry: A Compendium (A+D Gallery, 2013). Leemann is a frequent contributor to national and international gatherings, whether formal conferences or informal working groups, and offers workshops on studio critique through a social justice lens.

Leemann lives in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Kerry Downey (b.1979,  Ft. Lauderdale) is a multi-disciplinary artist who makes videos, works on paper, and performances. Downey’s work illuminates the connections between private emotion and political consciousness. Their work presents queer bodies, landscapes, and objects as intimate, sensorial experiences..  Their work is heavily influenced by gender queerness, their commitment to feminist collaborations, and their work as a caregiver and teacher of people with Alzheimer’s and other disabilities.

Downey has recently had a solo show at CAVE in Detroit and a two-person show at Knockdown Center. They have also exhibited at the Queens Museum, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the Drawing Center, and the Paris International with Taylor Macklin.  In 2015, Downey was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.  Artist-in-residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, SHIFT at the EFA Project Space, the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, Real Time and Space in Oakland, CA, the Vermont Studio Center. Downey participated in the Queer/Art/Mentorship program in 2013. They are currently in residence at Triangle Arts Association in Brooklyn. Downey holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College. http://www.kerrydowney.com/

Kristen Barker is a social entrepreneur and the President and Co-Founder of the Cincinnati Union Co-op Initiative (CUCI). She leads participatory education with co-op workers, helps determine feasibility of potential co-ops, helps co-ops access capital, and helps existing business owners interested in succession determine if selling their business to their employees is feasible. She hosts delegations from around the country and helps adopt the Mondragon model to the U.S. cultural context. She is currently a BALLE fellow (Business Alliance for Local and Living Economies.) Prior to working full-time for the union co-op movement with Mondragon North America/MAPA, she spent 12 years at the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center fostering faith, labor & community partnerships. She is the mother of a resilient daughter with special needs. She is a lifelong Cincinnati resident (except 2 years in El Salvador) and a Xavier graduate.

Melanie Crean is an artist, educator and filmmaker whose work explores how systems of power are represented in media, culture and technology. She uses site specific performance to research and mitigate the impact that social systems of control, such as capitalism and criminal justice, have on people and their surrounding environment. Her recent work focuses on how cultural archetypes such as the hero and the criminal are conceived, and how new forms of narrative can be used to equitably shift relationships of power.

Crean is an Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design, where she teaches courses on emerging media, social engagement and visual culture. She has worked with moving image in a variety of capacities and genre, including directing the production studio at the arts non-profit Eyebeam; managing animation, motion capture and speech recognition teams at MTV Digital Television Lab; and producing documentaries in Nepal and India on the effects of women trafficking.

She has received commissions from Art in General, Bronx Arts Council & Rhizome; fellowships from Creative Capital, Franklin Furnace, Jerome Foundation, Harvestworks, NYFA & NYSCA; and participated in exhibitions with Creative Time, Performa 11, Southern Exposure and No Longer Empty.

Mirror/Echo/Tilt is a project created by artists (Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable E. Smith) in collaboration with people who are court-involved, formerly incarcerated, or otherwise affected by the criminal justice system. Through a curriculum based on visual storytelling, participants translate personal narratives into performance in order to replace a culturally embedded conception of black criminality with new language so that the mind and body may think, feel, and move in a way not defined by their previous experience with incarceration. Our goal is to facilitate participants’ agency to tell their own stories and ultimately, reframe existing narratives defining the “criminal.”

 Since 2015 we have piloted our methodology working with individuals caught in cycles of incarceration and now collaborate with the Brooklyn downtown criminal court as an arts-based diversion program for youth. When individuals successfully complete the course, their cases are closed, sealed, and do not appear on their adult record.

The immediate goal of our project is actionable impact on youth recidivism.While doing so, we refine and compile a tool kit that includes input from different populations affected by the system, archived online with visual documentation.

Patricia Silva is a Lisbon-born, New York-based visual artist working with socially recuperative methods using photography, video, sometimes words. Earned a MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College (2013), and a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts (1999). In 2011, Patricia curated the first Luso-Brazilian Pop-Up Arts Festival in New York City. Currently faculty at The School at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Patricia's interviews and critical writings on photography and visual culture have been published in ICP Perspective, Cult Bytes, Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography, Daylight, "Memories Can't Wait," and in The Portuguese American Journal.

Photographs have been exhibited in group shows at Flux Factory, USA, (2017); The International Center of Photography, New York, USA (2013); Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2012); Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, USA (2005). Recently published in Der Grief Number 10, Jubilee Anniversary Issue.

Videos have screened in film festivals and in group exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center, USA (2017);  Anthology Film Archives, USA (2017); Contemporary Centre of Arts Glasgow, UK (2017); British Film Institute, UK (2016); MoMA PS1 Theater, USA (2016); IFC Theater, USA (2016); Colorado Photographic Arts Center, USA (2016); Tengis Cinema, Mongolia (2016); Cervantes Institute, Brazil (2016); Cine 13, France (2015); and the International Center of Photography, USA (2014).

Photo books have been exhibited in group shows at The Benaki Museum, Greece (2017); Phoenix Museum of Art, USA (2016-17); The Knockdown Center, USA (2016); Ateliê da Imagem, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2015-16); The International Center of Photography (2013-14). In 2016, one of Patricia’s self-published projects earned her an invitation to the White House by the Obama Administration.

www.patriciasilva.com

Paul Ryan was a video artist, writer, teacher and theoretician. Ryan was a member of the Raindance Media Collective as well as a contributor to the historic video journal Radical Software. His codification of the concept of “Threeing”--situations in which three or more people create sustainable, collaborative relationships--found sculptural expression and experimental use in multiple communities. The process developed in videos in which three people took turns playing three different roles; initiator, respondent, and mediator.

It is high tide in the digital age. Smartphones, laptops, tablets, televisions, and now watches and other “wearable technology” constantly proffer text and images, often simultaneously. We can scroll or swipe our way through the waves of rich data, but there is always another hyperlink to transport us elsewhere.

If we are to accept the presence of digital technology in our lives, we need strategies and practices that will ensure that we remain active, not lulled into passivity by these devices. Project 404 is a practice of attention that aspires to help us remain fully, creatively engaged with the world and ourselves while using the very devices that threaten us with passivity. 

The practice itself consists of two phases: a silent phase of fifteen minutes during which the participants look intently together at a single image on our individual devices. The image will be chosen by someone offsite from among the images submitted by the participants in the practice. The subsequent phase is a colloquy of between 60 and 90 minutes, during which the participants discuss their experiences of the silent phase (with devices put aside).

Project 404 rests on the belief that it is practice, rather than theory, that makes us who we are. Our practice of attention can be social as well as pedagogical; in either case, it is designed to enable us to be more fully attuned to the infinitely complex nexus of external stimuli and interior consciousness that constitutes much of our experience, and it allows us to enjoy collaborative sociability, as we discuss with one another the experience of paying focused attention to our devices and the images they display.

This practice of attention is a particular way of being and becoming, one that revolves around the twin axes of creativity and generosity. You are welcome to join us.

Drawing from images and video footage of miscarriages of justice, multidisciplinary artist Shaun Leonardo breaks down media's complicity in shaping, informing and circulating racial bias, and consequently, memories of past events. Through an anatomy of scene that employs strategies of extraction, omission and the dissection of an image into a sequence of parts, Leonardo challenges the culpability of the viewer's gaze. elcleonardo.com

Susan Jahoda is an artist, educator, and organizer whose work includes video, photography, text, performance, installation and research based collaborative projects. Works have been produced for venues  in London, Paris, Basel, New York, Seoul, and Moscow.  Currently, Jahoda is a core member of BFAMFAPhD, and a co-founder of NYC To Be Determined and The Pedagogy Group, collectives of socially engaged artists and educators based in New York City.

 Jahoda has organized exhibitions and screenings including Documents from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Interference Archive, Brooklyn, (2014-15), Susan Kleckner and Documents from the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, (2013), The Martha Rosler Library, and Beyond the Instance of an Ending, (2009), Setting in Motion (2006), and Global Priority (2002), This is My body: this is My Blood, (1992), Herter Art Gallery, UMass, Amherst. She has published short stories and essays including "Spring Flowers," in Class and its Others, University of Minnesota Press, (2000) and “Theatres of Madness,” in Deviant Bodies, Indiana University Press, (1995). In 1993, Jahoda joined the collective and journal, Rethinking Marxism, where she continued to serve as arts editor until 2014.

 Her projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Trust for Mutual Understanding, NYC. Jahoda is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and resides in New York City.

The CIHC works at the edges and interfaces of health, education and the professions to discover and share promising practices to promote interprofessional education and collaboration in areas that will enhance patient care. CIHC is the hub for Canadian interprofessional activity.

The Extrapolation Factory is a design-based research studio for participatory futures studies, founded by Elliott P. Montgomery and Chris Woebken. The studio develops experimental methods for collaboratively prototyping, experiencing and impacting future scenarios. Central to these methods is the creation of hypothetical future props and their deployment in familiar contexts such as 99¢ stores, science museums, vending machines and city sidewalks. With this work, the studio is exploring new territories for democratized futures by rapidly imagining, prototyping, deploying and evaluating visions of possible futures on an extended time scale.