Zain Alam is an artist and composer of Indian Pakistani origin working across sound, video, performance, and installation. Described as “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” his recording project Humeysha began during his year with the AIF William J. Clinton Fellowship working as an oral historian studying the 1947 Partition.

Alam has exhibited work at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Asian Arts Alliance, and the Center for Arts, Research, and Alliances (CARA). His performances have been staged with Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Creative Time, and the Rubin Foundation.

Alam completed his graduate studies in Islamic art and philosophy at Harvard University. His writing has been published in Miami Rail and the New Yorker, and his work has been featured in Vice, Village Voice, and the New York Times. His work has been supported by Vermont Studio Center, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Laundromat Project, Wave Farm, and the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA).

He is a 2024 Nawat Fes and Recess artist-in-residence, and his installation piece Meter & Light: Day is currently showing with Recess and the ArtPrize fair. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

June Canedo de Souza works with photography, performance, film, painting, and sculpture. Her practice engages in a conceptual exploration of memory as it relates to migration and is anchored by her lived experience. From multimedia installations to durational performances, her work mainly borrows from the domestic culture and the cultural memory of the women in her family. She is interested in asking questions about the ways in which migration affects the mental health of people who migrate, the interrelations between objects, space, and time, and how objects themselves migrate. Canedo de Souza holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.

A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York, born on the coast of Northern California in 1975. Using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and collaboration, Burns explores systems of value and the body as a contentious domain wherein socio-political issues are negotiated. A.K. is a founding member of the artists activist group W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy). In collaboration with A.L. Steiner, Community Action Center, a feature length social sexual video portrait was released this fall simultaneously at Taxter & Spengemann, NY and Horton Gallery, Berlin. A.K. also launched the inaugural issue of RANDY, a feminist queer arts magazine, in collaboration with Sophie Mörner at Capricious Publishing. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Cleo Reed is a sound composer, performer, and multi-disciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. In their creativity, they look closely at their lineage and use it as a primary reference in music-making, instrument building, and multi-disciplinary art projects. Recently, they developed software instruments for Jon Batiste’s “American Symphony” at Carnegie Hall. Their debut album project, “Root Cause" was released in 2023 and alongside the work they premiered a self-directed performance art piece titled “Black American Circus” at AFROPUNK Festival, Banlieues Bleues in Paris, France as well as Brooklyn Museum. They work toward a future that enables me to realize intentional creative endeavors and encourage joy within collaborative spaces. In their practice, they are currently drawn to notions of tradition, dissolving the binary, making noise, and breaking the barrier between artist and audience.

Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent, power, poetry and humor to create art works in various formats, for example - video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences. Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including at Gropius Bau, New Museum, MIT List Center for Visual Art, Momenta Biennale, New Museum, Himalayas Museum, Rauschenberg Project Space and Bogota Museum of Modern Art. Recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, and Flash Art International, the work has been supported by Creative Capital and the Foundations of Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Gulbenkian and Onassis

Dancing Through Prison Walls is a dance and performance project whose mission is to dance with, choreograph with, and tell stories within embodied carceral landscapes and beyond, amplifying voices of incarcerated people, and addressing mass incarceration. Begun in 2016, the work embraces a porous community of incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and “free world” dancers, choreographers, visual artists, and performers. Grounded in the gymnasium of the CRC Prison in Norco, California, and moving out into the world from there, the resulting hours of dance, dance making, performance, film creation, writing, and community conversations comprise a body of work that is at its essence a critical dialogue about freedom, confinement, and ways for surviving restriction, limitations, and denial of liberty through the act of dancing. Moving towards their North Star goal of decarceration and abolition, they dance through prison walls. #carenotcages

Kendra J. Bostock is a proud Detroit native working as a dancer, choreographer, teaching artist, facilitator and community organizer in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. As a dancer in New York City, Kendra has worked with Urban Bush Women (UBW), Andrea E. Woods/Souloworks, Ase Dance Theater Collective, Monstah Black/ Motion Sickness, MBDance, Moving Spirits Dance Company, RAKIA!, Melanie Green, Movement of the People Dance Company and as a guest artist with Oyu Oro. Kendra completed a European tour dancing with Adira Amram and DJ Kid Koala in Vinyl Vaudeville 2.0 and performed with Gyptian at the MTV Iggy awards. Kendra’s choreographic work has been presented at the Florida A&M University, the off Broadway show 7 Sins, Museu de Arte in Salvador, Brazil, Dixon Place, Ailey Citigroup Theater, Actors Fund Theater, and Mark Morris. She has been an Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Bates College, Marymount Manhattan, and The Neighborhood Project Through 651Arts, a BAX Space Grantee, and a Visiting Artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts. She was recently the 2022 Inaugural BedStuy Artist in Residence at The Laundromat Project. She is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Along with sharing her art world-wide, Kendra serves as a Facilitator with UBW’s BOLD (Builders, Organizers, and Leaders Through Dance) network and the Founder/Director of STooPS that uses art as a catalyst to strengthen ties between different entities in Bed-Stuy. STooPS has been featured as the New York Times Best of Dance/Best of the Street, New12, Pix 11, NY1, and Bare Feet with Mickela Mallozzi.

Ziedah Diata is a Brooklyn, New York-based artist, facilitator, and attorney. Since 2011, Ziedah has created participatory art experiences independently and in collaboration with cultural organizers, teachers, poets, healers and playwrights. Her work is inspired, in part, by the recurring themes that emerged in testimony during her 15 year career as an administrative law judge: harm, repair, empathy, healing and transformation. In 2023, Ziedah left her role as Chief Administrative Law Judge for the New York State Department of State. She now explores these same themes through facilitated art-making and storytelling experiences

Pia Monique Murray is a choreographer, performer, installation artist, teacher, and creative producer. She leads Pia Monique Murray Dance Collective (PMMDC), producing movement-based multidisciplinary performance works that include community engagement and audience interaction as an artistic practice. Pia was a 2023 CCI 2.0 Producing Fellow with Urban Bush Women and currently is Associate Producer of Haint Blu by Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis, co-producer of When Black Women+ Speak, and Associate Producer of the 40th Anniversary season. As Bailey’s Cafe’s Producing Artistic Director she produces and curates As Quiet as It’s Kept, a multidisciplinary ethnography project about longtime residents in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Additionally, Pia is Creative Producer of Kendra J. Bostock’s KJB Works company and the STooPS Summer Festival in Bedford Stuyvesant. She is also the creator of Black Daisies, an interdisciplinary project that centers joy as political activism.

Anna RG (she/they) makes work in composition, ancestral songs, sculpture, and community organizing. They've performed at Carnegie Hall, Newport Folk Festival, Big Ears Festival, NPR Tiny Desk, Hirshhorn Museum; played with Lonnie Holley, Paul Wiancko (Kronos), Jim White (Dirty Three), Ellen Fullman, Glen Hansard; and her longtime duo (on Smithsonian Folkways) was heralded “a radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do”(The New Yorker). She recently completed her MFA in sculpture at Bard College, and was a MacDowell fellow. They are a founding member of Artists In Resistance, a disabled-led collective committed to supporting covid-safer events in the city, through an air filter library, masks, education, and resources.

Kriss Li is a multimedia artist who creates films, installations, and conceptual projects that explore structures of power. Kriss’s work has been shown at over 100 festivals including screenings at DOC NYC, Vancouver International Film Festival, Images Festival, and Oberhausen. Kriss has participated in international residencies including Amant New York (USA), Villa Sträuli (Switzerland), Paper Machine (USA), Struts Gallery (Canada), Vidéographe (Canada), and Ada X (Canada). Kriss is the recipient of multiple grants from Canda Council for the Arts and Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. In 2023, they were a finalist for the New Generation Award from the United Association for Labor Education for their work as a labour organizer.

Zeelie Brown is a cellist, composer, multimedia artist, farmer, and chef. Their first art museum was the loblolly pine woods in coastal Alabama and the limestone walls of San Antonio. Their work investigates the vernacular cultures and ecologies of the Black Gulf and Global South as a means of overcoming the plantation to petroleum legacies of genocidal white greed that threaten to drown our world. They studied Black performance, jazz cello and Black vernacular art at Oberlin College. They have been a Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project, a Forge Fellow, a Climate Rising fellow at A Studio in the Woods, a FARMS apprentice at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an apprentice butcher at Fleishers, and Transjustice Community Fellow at the Audre Lorde Project. They've lectured at MIT, Tulane, Harvard, York University, Beam Camp, and the University of Southern Illinois. They have performed at CACNO, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, El Museo Del Barrio, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and The Caribbean Cultural Center and Afro-Diasporic Institute. They've mounted exhibitions at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Harvestworks, Elsewhere Museum, and Flux Factory and have been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Jerome Foundation, and Franklin Furnace.

Bel Falleiros is a Brazilian artist whose practice focuses on place and belonging. Starting with her hometown, São Paulo, she’s worked to understand how contemporary constructed landscapes (mis)represent the diverse layers of presence that constitute a place and how that affects those who inhabit them. In her work, she creates spaces to be in community with nature, with our own inner being and with the beings around us. She is a fellow artist from Sacatar Institute in Bahia, Brazil (2014), Pecos National Park, New Mexico (2016), Burnside Farm, Detroit (2017), Santa Fe Art Institute Equal Justice Residency (2018), Socrates Sculpture Park (2020), More Art (2021), and Dia:Beacon artist-in-residence for the Dia Teens Program (2021-2) and Wave Hill (2023). She had a commissioned piece for the 37o Panorama of Brazilian art show at MAM, São Paulo (2022) and recently had a solo show, with a collection of works made in the past 7 years, at KinoSaito Art Center (2024). In addition to her studio practice, she participates in collaborative projects across the Americas connecting art, education and autonomous thinking.