Resignifications 2018 – Artist Bios

Hank Willis Thomas was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, USA. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BFA from New York University, New York, NY in 1998 and an MA/MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA in 2004. He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017.

Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. In 2017, he unveiled his permanent public artwork “Love Over Rules” in San Francisco, CA and “All Power to All People” in Opa Locka, FL. Thomas’ first comprehensive survey Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal… will open in the fall of 2019 at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, OR.

His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands. Solo exhibitions have been held at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA.

Major group exhibitions of his work include the 2017 inaugural show at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Zacheta National Museum of Art, Poland; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, and the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Orange County, CA. Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Thomas is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), Aperture West Book Prize

(2008), Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award (2006). He is also a member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York.

Joanne Savio is a photographer who has been teaching for over twenty years. She has taught at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Arts and Science, and in the Film and Television Department at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where she was the Director of Freshman Studies for nine years. She is currently an Arts Professor in the Film and New Media Program at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Her photo-documentary portrait work began with images of the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, followed by a study of Key West’s vanishing local population. She completed her first color project, The Last Aristocrats: Florentine Women in Their Homes, while on a grant at Studio Art Center International, Florence, Italy.

Joanne has recently worked on a multi-media project, Home Sick, in collaboration with Jim Savio, which framed around the question of what home is. The film situates itself in memory, imagination, and close to the heart of one of our most basic human instincts, the longing for home. It is not meant to answer the question, but to instill a sense of contemplation in the audience.

Her work has appeared in Dance Ink Photographs and Life’s A Year in Pictures. Her images in the book Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, were also part of a traveling exhibition. Portraits of choreographer Bill T. Jones were included in the book Defining Contemporary Art. Her book, Vital Grace, published by Edition Stemmle, is an extensive photographic essay on the black male dancer, done in collaboration with choreographer, Duane Cyrus. Savio is a recipient of the PDN/Nikon Award and her work has been shown in numerous gallery exhibitions.

In 2002 she was honored with a solo show of her dance work from Vital Grace, at Tanzommer in Innsbruck, Austria. Her group exhibitions include: B4A Projects Gallery, NYC (1994); Westbeth Gallery, NYC (1994); Westbeth Gallery, NYC (1995); Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, NYC (1996); Victory Theatre Exhibition, NYC (1999); 2001-Wave Gallery in Key West (2001); and Customs House Women Artists Exhibit, Key West (2001).

Justin D. Johnson is a contemporary multi-disciplinary American visual artist. His work extends from mixed-media, painting, and photography to film and sculpture; that explore topics ranging from African/African-American history, mythology, and spirituality. He utilizes the layering of imagery, texts, various materials such as paper, paint, metal, wood in forms of collages; to shine light on themes of ancestry, race, human resilience, and humanity.

Justin utilizes people in his work as a personification of principles and ideas, the once psychology major consistently questions the ideas of multiple societies in the present and how they transcend from the past. His theological mythologies and ideologies are demonstrated through the body of work in forms of found materials, utilizing certain pieces from his past and traditional African works/sculptures. The self-taught artist was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia; he currently lives and works in New York City, and is artist in residence at The Andrew Freedman Home.

Johnson received a B.F.A in Photography and Video in 2018 from the School of Visual Arts. Although Justin was trained in photography, he is also a painter and works experimentally across many mediums. His form of artistic practice is an accumulative work that combine sculpture and painting. Inspired conceptually by the ideas of race, class, identity, sexuality, theology, science and history. He creates large-scale, multi-sensory installations that are kinetic and speaks to the human senses through a tangible experience catered to a focus on divinity of either self or an external force. Through exploration, Justin infuses meaning into his art by layering objects using various mediums and scale to create a diverse and engaging collection of work that can be read together as pages of the same book.

Justin has collaborated with noted creatives icons such Photographer Renee Cox, Actor/Singer Jussie Smollett of Fox TV’s “Empire”, Comedian Donnell Rawlings and NYU TISCH Chair of Photography & Imaging, Deborah Willis who has also served as his mentor. His past exhibitions include: “Transfguration” at The School of Visual Arts Flatiron Gallery, 2017 “Miami Art Basel Film Screening” at N’namdi Contemporary

Gallery, 2017 “The Mentor Show” at The School of Visual Arts Flatiron Gallery, 2018 “Negritude” Arts East New York Gallery, 2018.

Justin Randolph Thompson is a new media artist and educator born in Peekskill, New York, USA. Living between Italy and the US since 2001, Thompson is a co-founder of Black History Month Florence. Currently, he is a lecturer at NYU Florence and Director of the Studio Art Post Bac Program at Studio Arts College International (SACI) in Italy.

Thompson’s work questions the implications of cultural relics and the mutability of their veneration within the context of displacement. Broadly collaborative and inherently interdisciplinary he relies upon the collective power of creative dialogue to provide platforms that envision communities as temporary monuments. Resisting a legacy of American triumph and problematizing aspirations towards Roman expansionist history, site-specific works engage community-oriented groups across disciplines in the creation of installations and sound-based performances utilizing gestures of labor as rhythmic structures. The work shifts the lens of legibility in African American history against the backdrop of a culture that uses monuments to forget.

His work seeks to deepen the discussions around cultural and racial stratification and hierarchical organization by outlining a complex, hybrid and non-linear connection to history and sociopolitical discourse. The work is rooted in a multi-disciplinary approach that is as faceted in the mediums employed as in the array of art historical, literary and folk tradition references.

Thompson has exhibited internationally and participated in numerous residencies in the US and in Europe in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Reina Sofia, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, The Mobile Museum of Art, the American Academy in Rome and more. Thompson is the recipient of numerous awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Grant, The FCA Emergency Grant, The EAF from Socrates Sculpture Park and a Jerome Prize from Franconia Sculpture Park and a Visual Artist Grant from the Marcelino Botin Foundation.

Kevin Jerome Everson is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, USA. He has an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville Virginia.

With a sense of place and historical research, Everson films combine scripted and documentary moments with rich elements of formalism. The subject matter is the gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working class African Americans and other people of African descent. The conditions are usually physical, social-economic circumstances or weather. Instead of standard realism he favors a strategy that abstracts everyday actions and statements into theatrical gestures, in which archival footage is re-edited or re-staged, real people perform fictional scenarios based on their own lives and historical observations intermesh with contemporary narratives. The films suggest the relentlessness of everyday life—along with its beauty—but also present oblique metaphors for art-making.

Everson has made eight feature length films and over one-hundred and twenty short films, including award winning films such as The Island of Saint Matthews (2013), Erie (2010), Quality Control (2011), Ten Five in the Grass (2012), Cinnamon (2006), Spicebush (2005), Stone, Pictures from Dorothy (2004), Century (2013), Fe26 (2014), Sound That (2014), Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) with Claudrena Harold, and Emergency Needs (2007). Most recently he has presented the eight-hour long film, Park Lanes (2015). He also has a DVD box set of his films, Broad Daylight and Other Times, with a catalog distributed by Video Data Bank.

Everson’s films and artwork have been widely shown, at venues including Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, National Gallery in Washington DC and Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Kiluanji Kia Henda was born in the city of Luanda, Angola, and lives and works between Luanda and Lisbon, Portugal where Angola gained its independence from in 1975.

As a self-taught artist, Kia Henda was inspired by South African John Liebenberg’s photojournalism on apartheid and the Angolan civil war. He employs a surprising sense of humor in his work, which often hones in on themes of identity, politics, and perceptions of postcolonialism and modernism in Africa. Practicing in the fields of photography, video, and performance, Kia Henda has tied his multidisciplinary approach to a sharp sense of criticality. A profound springboard into this realm comes from growing up in a household of photography enthusiasts.

His conceptual edge has been sharpened by immersing himself in music, avant-garde theatre, and collaborating with a collective of emerging artists in Luanda’s art scene. In complicity with historical legacy, Kia Henda realizes the process of appropriation and manipulation of public spaces and structures, and the different representations that form part of collective memory, as a relevant complexion of his aesthetical construction.

His solo exhibitions have been held in galleries and institutions around the world, including at the Kunstraum in Innsbruck (2013); Self-Portrait as a White Man at Galleria Fonti in Naples (2010) and Portraits of a Slippery Look at the Gothe-Institut in Nairobi (2008). His group exhibitions include, among many others, Giving Contours to Shadows at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2014); The Shadow Took Shape, Studio Museum in Harlem (2013) and No Fly Zone: Unlimited Mileage at the Berardo Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Lisbon. Since 2005, Kia Henda has participated in a number of biennials and triennials, such as the Dak’Art Biennale (2014); 9th Bienal de São Paolo (2010); Trienal de Luanda (2007 and 2010); the Guangzhou Triennial (2008) and the Venice Biennale (2007). In 2012, Kia Henda received the National Award for Culture and the Arts from the Angolan Ministry of Culture.

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a documentary photographer based in New York City. She currently serves as a member of Kamoinge, a pioneering collective of African American photographers founded in 1963. Barrayn is the founder and co-editor of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, the first publication in nearly 30 years that features photography produced by women of African descent.

Using a documentary and portraiture approach to the medium, she has created compelling photographs across Europe, Africa and Asia. Barrayn’s work has been supported with grants and fellowships from the International Women’s Media Foundation, Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. She is a four-time recipient of the Community Arts Grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council. BRIC Arts selected her as a 2015 Media Arts Fellow where she produced her first experimental short, “Sunu Fall.” The Lucie Foundation included Barrayn on the Shortlist for the 2016 “Photo Taken” Emerging Photographer Prize. She is a 2018 En Foco Photography Fellow.

Barrayn’s work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad in galleries, museums and non-traditional spaces. Her third solo exhibition, Her Word as Witness: Women Writers of the African Diaspora, which focuses on literacy and women writers of color, was mounted at several East coast galleries and made its African debut at Yari Yari Ntosi in Accra, Ghana in May 2013. Her latest project on the Baye Fall sufi order of Senegal was exhibited at Galleria Biagiottie in Florence, Italy in 2015 and at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in New York. She was recently an artist-in-residence at the Waaw Centre for Art and Design in Saint-Louis, Senegal.

Her projects have appeared in the anthology, BLACK: A Celebration of a Culture, the journal Exposure, Black Enterprise magazine, The New York Times, The Washington

Post, BBC, OkayAfrica, Vogue, PDN, CBS, Quartz Africa, among other publications. She has curated exhibitions at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Port Authority of NY/NJ, galleries and non-traditional spaces; and has given talks on her photography at Yale University, Harvard University, The International Center of Photography, New York University, Howard University, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Lina Iris Viktor is a conceptual artist, performance artist, and painter. She lives and works in New York and London. Raised in London to Liberian parents, she traveled extensively in her youth, and lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for many years. The multi-disciplinary approach to her work which weaves disparate materials and methods belonging both to contemporary and ancient art forms calls into question the nature of time and being. Her practice is informed by a background in film which she studied at Sarah Lawrence College, and her continued studies within photography and design at The School of Visual Arts, along with an education in performance arts during high school.

Viktor’s works are a merging of photography, performance, and abstract painting, along with the ancient practice of gilding with 24-karat gold to create increasingly dark canvases embedded with layers of light in the form of symbols and intricate patterns. She regards these dark canvases to be light-works. Each provokes a philosophical commentary through material that at once addresses the infinite and the finite, immortality and mortality, the microcosm and macrocosm, in addition to the socio-political and historical preconceptions surrounding blackness and its universal implications. The New York Times described her paintings as queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge.

Viktor’s works have been exhibited at Harvard Art Museums and The Cooper Gallery, Harvard University, Boston; The Kentucky Museum of Arts & Craft, Louisville; and Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Spelman College, Georgia. Viktor has engaged in critical talks, panels & lectures at Harvard University, New York University, The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA, London), King’s College London, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York), Saint Louis Art Museum, and Autograph ABP (London).

Lyle Ashton Harris was born in New York City and spent his formative years in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He received his BA with Honors from Wesleyan University in 1988 and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1990. He currently lives and works in New York City and is an Associate Professor Art and Art Education at New York University.

For more than two decades Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, collage, installation and performance. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Known for his self-portraits and use of pop culture icons such as Billie Holiday and Michael Jackson, Harris teases the viewers’ perceptions and expectations, resignifying cultural cursors and recalibrating the familiar with the extraordinary. In 1993 Face: Lyle Ashton Harris was exhibited at the New Museum. The installation combined photography, video and an audio track offering a critique of masculinity and explore constructions of sexuality, race, and gender.

Harris’ work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the 52nd Venice Biennale. His work has been acquired by major international museums, most recently by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His commissioned work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. In 2014 Harris joined the board of trustees at the American Academy in Rome and was named the 10th recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was appointed a trustee of the Tiffany Foundation in 2016.

Mario Badagliacca was born in Palermo, Italy. He studied politics and international relations at the University ‘L’Orientale’ in Naples and photo reportage and photo journalism at the Roman School of Photography. Currently he is a freelance Sicilian photographer and the artist-in-residence for the Transnationalizing Modern Language Project sponsored by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, working on the Italian diasporic communities in Addis Ababa, London, New York, Buenos Aires and Tunis.

Along with his photographic activity, he has always collaborated with non-profit organizations. His work documents migration, life on the borders, human right violations, and social issues. Badagliacca’s photographs have appeared in Le Nouvelle Observateur, Al Jazeera, RAI, Sky, La Presse Canada, La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, and on several book covers.

Between 2014 and 2015, Badagliacca partnered with the Archive of Migrant Memories (AMM) on their campaign to collect, archive, and share testimonies of migrants held in Centers for Identification and Expulsion throughout Italy. He used photographs, audio, and video taken inside these centers to produce multimedia stories, which served as accessible advocacy and educational tools on AMM’s website for their network of activists, journalists, and academics. These participatory narratives were also integrated into AMM’s public programming and events. The partnership was created in the hopes that the project provides nuance and depth to both the migration debate in Europe at large, as well as to the collective memory of the migrant community.

Badagliacca’s works were exhibited in international venues, including the Hopkins Hall Gallery in the United States. He has worked with numerous international research and academic institutions such as Oxford University, St. Andrews University and San Diego State University. He is the recipient of several international awards, including the Documentary Photography Audience Engagement Grant (New York 2014) and the 2017

ACEP Projecto Media exhibited at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

Mário Macilau was born in Maputo, Mozambique where he continues to live and work.

Macilau is the founder and director of MAFOTO, an annual celebration of photography and lens-based art which organizes several numbers of events related to photography with a strong focus on emerging photographers and on providing affordable education and scholarships. The organization brings together internationally and nationally acclaimed photographers, artists, curators and experts in the field of photography and art in genre.

He started his journey as photographer in 2003, focusing on political, social and cultural issues that are linked to the radical transformations of the humans in time and space. In his photography, he deals with the complex reality of human labor and the environmental conditions evolving over the times, using the images he captures as a form of visual confrontation that state a line of reflection to the reality.

Macilau’s work has been recognized with awards and featured regularly in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in his home country and abroad. Recently he was one of three artists presented at the Pavilion of the Holy See at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), with a body of work also presented at Volta NY (2016). His work was included at the Vitra Design Museum, the Havremagasinet – Boden Art Center, Sweden (2015), Saatchi Gallery, London (2014), Fotofest Biennial, Houston, Texas (2014), International Biennial of Casablanca, Morocco (2014), ‘Tempo’ Galeria Belo-Galsterer, Lisbon, Portugal (2013), Dak’art Biennial OFF, Dakar, Senegal (2012), Rencontres de Bamako, Bamako, Mali (2011), VI Chobi Mela Photo Festival, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2011), Photo Spring, Beijing, China (2011), and Lagos Photo, Lagos, Nigeria (2010 and 2011).

Macilau was selected by Fotofestiwal in Łódź, Poland to present his first monograph ‘Growing in Darkness’ at a solo exhibition within the festival entitled ‘Discovery Show’ (2015), as well as ‘The Road Not Taken’ at The Auction Room, London (2015), ‘Nada

Como O Tempo’ at Kulungwana Gallery in Maputo (2015), ‘Fora da Cidade’ at Blank Projects, Cape Town (2014), and ‘Moments of Transition’ at Belo-Galsterer Gallery, Lisbon (2014).

Nneka Osueke is a first-generation Nigerian born and raised in Dallas, Texas, USA and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She illustrated her own handmade books at the age of five, picked up the paintbrush at age nine, and sketched her first fashion designs at age eleven. This innate appreciation for art and style led her to Sam Houston State University where she received a Bachelor’s in Fashion Merchandising in 2013. Fresh out of college, Osueke moved to Los Angeles, CA to begin her career in design, but among the path of plot twists, found herself pursuing a Master’s in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University Los Angeles.

While chasing new endeavors, Osueke discovered the golden bridge between her purpose and her passion—merging painting, fashion, and therapy together. Known for her effervescent spirit, strong work ethic, and ever-evolving aesthetic, she continues to use art, clothing, and the promotion of mental health as avenues of self-expression to inspire others and shine light on important life topics.

Osueke uses plaster sculptures of hands and papier mache moldings to create what she calls 5-D works that brings life, movement, and enticing dimension from the canvas. The hands came out of frustration due to the flatness of the canvas, as many artists do, and she was looking for ways to move past what she felt was holding her back in finding her artistic voice. Over time, as she played with it more the hands became the symbolism of moving past a “boundary” and stepping into her purpose; taking matters into her own hands.

Osuke’s work has been exhibited in solo and groups shows both in the United States and internationally at the Sam Houston State University Lowman Student Center, Huntsville, TX; Superfine! Art Fair, Miami Art, Basel Week; Metropolitan Press, Inc., Dallas, TX; Alkebulan Cultural Center, Pasadena, CA; Art Landing Gallery, Inglewood, CA; E14 Gallery, Oakland, CA; Conception Global Art Collective Houston Contemporary Art Show, Houston, TX; and Liguanea Arts Festival, Kingston, Jamaica.

Olu Ajayi was born in Ososo, Edo State of Nigeria. He studied at the Auchi polytechnic, Edo State in 2010 and undertook postgraduate studies at the National Institute for Cultural Orientation, Lagos, Nigeria. Ajayi is a portraitist, realist, experimentalist, and cartoonist who is constantly renewing ideas by expanding the realm of visual arts. Evolved from a fine illustrator and cartoonist to one of the most noteworthy artist working in Nigeria today, His evocative landscapes, searching portraits and socio-political commentary may be viewed as the culmination of a painter’s quest for empirical truth.

Using the expression of African traditional skills and their intersection with modern aesthetics, Ajayi’s metaphoric vocabulary is deeply rooted in the body of his works, ultimate vehicle in expressing life’s dualities. His sensuous colors, sweeping strokes and narrative content place the human figure on a grand scale, while the dramatic cropping of figures and forms emphasizes the immediacy of the paint. Ajayi has been recognized for his watercolors in greyscale executed in a broad gestural technique.

Ajayi has had solo and group exhibitions since 1986 in Lagos, London, New York, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Dubai, Stuttgart, Paris and Geneva. In 1993, Ajayi was listed in Who is Who in Art in Nigeria published by the Smithsonian Institute and Libraries, listed in 2012 Artist of Nigeria and in 2010, and listed in 101 Nigerian artists.

In 2004 he won the best Alumnus Merit Award of Auchi Polytechnic School of Art and Design, was made a fellow of Society of Nigerian Artist (2010), ‘Patron of the art’ by NANTAP, Lagos and ‘Distinguished Stewardship Award’ by SNA Lagos in 2008.

He is a founding member and Trustee of the guild of professional fine artist (GFA), board member of Visual Art Society of Nigeria (VASON) and former Chairman Society of Nigerian Artist (SNA), during his six years tenure as SNA chairman, (2001 – 2006), Olu articulated and implemented inclusive program of reform that revitalized the association.

Omar Victor Diop was born in Dakar, Senegal where he currently lives and works. Since his early days, he developed an interest in photography and design, essentially as a way to capture the diversity of modern African societies and life styles. ​The quick success of his first conceptual project Fashion 2112, le Futur du Beau which was featured at the Pan African Exhibition of the African Biennale of Photography of 2011 in Bamako, Mali (Rencontres de Bamako) encouraged him to end his career in Corporate Communications and turn to photography as his profession in 2012.

Omar’s body of work includes Fine Arts and Fashion Photography as well as Advertising Photography. He enjoys mixing his photography with other forms of art, such as costume design, styling and creative writing. His work is interrogative and intriguing, prospective, yet a tad vintage and draws inspiration from Diop’s international uplifting, as well as his African visual heritage. His work has been featured in solo and group shows internationally in New York, Boston, Dakar, Malaga, Paris, Brussels, Portugal, and Mali.

His series entitled Diaspora (2014) is a time travel. A journey that takes its starting point in the present with the issue of immigration of African in Europe and their place in European society. Diop forces us to reconsider our perception of history by highlighting notable Africans living in Europe between the fifteenth and nineteenth century. The integration of elements of football, weaves the links between past and present and question the position of African today.

His latest series Liberty (2017) recalls, interprets and juxtaposes moments of this Black protest differentiated by time, geography or size, placing them in the same chronology, that of a frantic quest for freedom.

Patrizia Maimouna Guerresi was born in Italy and converted to Islam after living in Senegal. She is a multimedia artist working with photography, sculpture, video, and installation. She presents an intimate perspective on spiritual ideas of human beings in relation to their inner mystical dimensions as well as on the relationship between women and society, with particular reference to those countries in which the role of women is most marginalized.

For over twenty years, Guerresi’s work has focused on empowering women and bringing together individuals and cultures in an appreciation for a context of shared humanity, beyond borders – psychological, cultural, and political. She uses recurrent metaphors such as milk, light, the hijab, trees, and contrasting white on black to create awareness of the vital unifying qualities of the feminine archetype and its special healing potential. Guerresi’s work embraces spirituality and ancestry of Africa, Asia and Europe and is ultimately reflecting the globalization in art and life. Viewed through this lens, her figures and scenes take on a new light, a universal truth about community and soul. The person here becomes a sacred dwelling, a meeting place for humanity to rediscover its shared mystic body.

Her work has been shown internationally in Italy, the United States, UAE, Bangladesh, Turkey, France, India, Finland, Morocco, Brussels and Mali, and is included in the collections of the Boghossian Foundation in Belgium, Museo d’arte Contemporanea Palazzo della Ragione in Italy, European Investment Bank in Luxembourg, Tasveer Foundation in India, M.I.A. Minneapolis Institute of Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the United States. Guerresi was invited to participate in the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1982, 1986, and 2011, as well as Documenta K18 (1987) in Kassel, Germany.

Peju Alatise is a mixed-medium artist who became one of the most powerful and widely recognized contemporary artists living and working in Lagos, Nigeria. With a strong focus on the significance and power of womanhood, Alatise uses clothing in her art as a literal and metaphorical representation of humans. She hopes that the resulting sense of emptiness gives the audience a moment of inflection, and an incentive to question prefabricated beliefs. From her initial training as an architect to her experiments with an incredibly broad spectrum of media such as words, clay and cloth, she is able to unearth multiple layers of meaning, often violent historical memories, from beneath the surface of everyday objects, language, and social relations. Crafting alternative social imageries and challenging master narratives in politics and media, Alatise’s trajectory sharply illustrates how artists in Africa are filling in the gaps left by official histories. The exquisite nature of her technique produces and encounter between what is sense and what is known—as a material means to examine Nigeria’s shifting order of visibility within the global landscape. Her hope is that the resulting sense of emptiness gives the audience a moment of inflection and an incentive to question prefabricated beliefs.

Among her extensive resume highlights her recent experiences as a researcher at the Smithsonian Institute in D.C., as an art teacher in Venice, and as artist resident in Morocco and Turkey. Her works have been included at the Cooper Gallery in Boston, MA (2017 and 2018); Aicon Gallery in New York (2017), Museo Bardini and Villa la Pietra in Florence, Italy (2015), and the Nigerian pavilion at the 57 th Venice Biennale. She is the winner of the prestigious 2017 FNB Art Prize. As a novelist, her debut novel, Orita Meta, chronicling the interwoven path of three women, was nominated for the ANA/Flora Nwapa Prize for Women’s Writing in 2006. Alatise has also been an influential voice on the Child Not Bride campaign in Nigeria, with her work regularly feeding into this discourse.

Riccardo Cavallari was born in Florence, Alabama, USA with a vision disorder that causes him to see everything double–two images that overlap with an error of 7 degrees, thus creating a very confused reality. Yet, he championed the obstacle and began taking photographs at age of ten, exploring multiple-exposure on a single frame and creating images that contain a large quantity of distortions, errors, shadows and spots allowing his medium to work itself. His work became a way to see the world as “normal” through the lens of camera and to give the viewer a glimpse into Cavallari’s vision. Some of his images tend to recreate the world as he sees it, even enhancing this distortion.

After working in New York, Berlin, and London, Riccardo settled in Donnini, Italy and mainly produced commercial photography, fashion, portraits and advertising. Besides, he works on nudes and a series of portraits focusing on the theme of racism. When he started to photograph the blackamoors at Villa la Pietra, Cavallari became more interested in making the visual connection between the statues and decorative pieces representing fifteenth century slaves and the refugee Africans who are working and living in appalling conditions in the modern era. By juxtaposing the portraits of the people and blackamoor portraits, Cavallari’s work raises awareness to the fate of the thousands of African migrants drifted to the Mediterranean.

His work was shown at the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University in 2018 and at the Museo Bardi and Villa la Pietra in Florence, Italy in 2015.

Russell Watson is a teaching artist who works in theatre and digital imaging. He graduated from the Edna Manley College in 1996 with diplomas in Drama in Education and Theatre Arts. After working as both an actor and teacher in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he completed an MFA in Film, Video and New Media.

Watson’s work explores the persistence of ancestral memory in the decorative and performative modes of the human body. It considers temporality, memory, mysticism and migration as its major themes and is primarily concerned with narrative and figurative representations. In his process, Watson explores synthesis and poly-genre approaches to art making that primarily employ photo, video, text, sculpture and/or performance.

He has been a curator of Art and Media at Chicago’s Hot House Center and Youth Program Coordinator at New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem. His first feature film A Hand Full of Dirt won the 2011 ReelWorld Film Festival Audience Award and was nominated for the 2011 Pan African Film Festival Best First Feature Director Award. Russell Watson currently resides in Barbados teaching drama, photography and video and operating his multimedia workshop RSTUDIO.

Sara Shamsavari was born in Tehran, Iran in the midst of the Iranian revolution. She overcame childhood cancer while she and her family fled persecution. Being raised in London from the age of two inspired her exploration of identity, while surviving both the revolution and illness engendered a profound desire to make a difference through art. Shamsavari was educated at Camberwell School of Art and Design with a BA (Hons) and the University of Westminster (Cert HE in Music). She has produced work in a range of mediums including music, painting, photography
and film, choosing photography as the first of her professional endeavors for its ability to create an instant bond between the artist and the outside world. Her works are of vibrant and emotive images exploring and reinterpreting identity and address current social and cultural concerns. While each of photographic series has a distinct focus, they all seek to encourage the ideals of non-judgment, equality, unity in diversity, collective responsibility.

Shamsavari’s work has exhibited internationally in galleries, museums and public spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), ICA, City Hall and The Royal Festival Hall (London), Espace Pierre Cardin (Paris) and Rush Arts NY. Her work, exhibitions and profile have featured across various media and publications including BBC 1, ITN, Reuters, The Guardian, Elle, i-D, Dazed & Confused and Volt. She has delivered a number of artist talks, lectures and workshops at cultural institutions including Tate Britain, Southbank Centre and the Royal Institution of Great Britain as well as University of Arts London, University of Creative Arts and Syracuse University.

Shani Jamila is a Brooklyn based artist and cultural worker. Her travels to nearly fifty countries throughout the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Caribbean deeply inform her photography and collage practice. She has exhibited and performed at institutions including Harvard University, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, SCOPE Art Fair, Corridor Gallery, the City College of New York, New Museum and Princeton University.

Shani regularly lectures and hosts live community conversations about art, global engagement and social change with organizations such as the Aperture Foundation, Lincoln Center, Harlem Stage, New York University and the Schomburg Center in New York.

A prolific curator of initiatives that merge culture and human rights, Jamila has worked with museums, government agencies and nonprofits on issues including organizational strategy, program development and grant administration. She served as a mentor for NEW INC — the first museum led cultural incubator. She was also the first alumni member to sit on the national selection committee for the New Voices fellowship, which allocated resources to rebuild the post-Katrina Gulf Coast.

Named “One of our 35 Most Remarkable Women” by ESSENCE magazine, she’s been awarded fellowships and residencies to support her work from the J. William Fulbright Foundation and TED. Her portrait and quote are featured in “A Choice to Change the World,” a mural of socially engaged artists and advocates at her alma mater Spelman College.

Shantrelle P. Lewis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA and is a Brooklyn and Philadelphia based independent curator and researcher. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in African American Studies from Howard University and Temple University respectively. For two years, she worked in the capacity of Executive Director and Curator of the McKenna Museum of African American Art. In October 2009, Lewis relocated to New York to accept a position as the Director of Public Exhibitions and Public Programming at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI).

Through her extensive travels to Africa, Europe, the US, Caribbean, and South America, Lewis has demonstrated a commitment to researching, documenting and preserving African Diasporic aesthetics, spirituality and the survival and nuances of Transnational African Diasporan communities. She returned New Orleans in September 2007 to assist in its Post-Katrina revitalization efforts.

Since 2011, she has also traveled to the Dutch Caribbean Diaspora and published her first book, Dandy Lion, in 2017. Her traveling curatorial initiative The Dandy Lion Project, examines Global Black Dandyism through photography and film. Other exhibits and projects have been on view in institutions throughout the U.S. and Europe. She was awarded a 2014 United Nations Programme for People of African Descent Fellow and 2012-13 Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellow.

She has written for Slate, NKA: Journal for Contemporary African Art and Art Papers. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, BBC, The Art Newspaper, Art Net and Huffingtonpost.

Vasco Araújo was born in Lisbon, Portugal where he continues to live and work. Originally trained as an opera singer, Araújo completed a degree in Sculpture in 1999 at FBAUL (Lisbon University School of Fine Art) and attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Maumaus in Lisbon from 1999 to 2000. Since then he has expanded his artistic practice to include painting, drawing, film and video, performance, site specific installations as well as sound. Araújo’s works are firmly grounded in European classical culture, taking cues from operas such as Guiseppe Verdi’s Aida, as well as works of literature such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Homer’s the Odyssey.

Araújo uses photography, art installations and video to explore how the trauma of the colonial encounter continues to haunt the modern world. His technique is to create seductive artworks that prompt questions about how Europe can overturn historical stereotypes and foster equal relationships with its diverse immigrant communities. Vasco reinterprets and reinvents these historical works to comment on current social norms and values, with a keen focus on the marginalization of minorities. The result is often a subversion of the original message, questioning issues of race, class and gender.

Araújo has participated in various solo and group exhibitions both in Portugal and abroad, also taking part in residency programs, such as The University of Arts, Philadelphia (2007); Récollets, Paris (2005); and the Core Program, Houston, Texas (2003/04). In 2003, he was awarded the EDP Prize for New Artists.

Victor Ehikhamenor was born in Udomi-Uwessan, Edo State, Nigeria and currently works in Lagos, Nigeria and Maryland, USA. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and Literature from Ambrose Alli University, Nigeria in 1991, and was awarded two Master’s degrees from the University of Maryland, U.S. in Technology Management (2003) and an MFA (2008). He has received numerous awards and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation (USA, 2016), the Nirox Foundation (South Africa, 2016) and the Norman Mailer Centre (USA, 2014). In 2015, he started an initiative called Ink Not Blood in order to promote peace and discourage the violence which often accompanies the electoral process in his home country.

Ehikhamenor is a multi-faceted artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and installation, as well as unique perforated works on paper. Hailing from a small village in Edo State, the historic seat of the Benin Empire, he draws inspiration from the dual aesthetic and spiritual traditions which infused his upbringing, using imagery and symbolism from both Edo traditional religion and Catholicism. Ehikhamenor’s signature patterning is a frenetic mélange of gestural abstraction and stylized forms, revealing faces, objects and writing systems. This patterning is used in everything from paintings to photographs to immersive installations, producing a hypnotic experience, a sense of both meditative repetition and an ongoing narrative being told.

He has held numerous solo art exhibitions in London, Lagos, and Washington D.C. In 2018, Ehikhamenor undertook a four-week residency with Art Dubai as part of a solo project. He was one of four artists to exhibit as part of the first Nigerian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions and other biennales, including the 5th Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland (2016), the 12th Dak’art Biennale in Dakar, Senegal (2016), Biennale Jogja XIII, Indonesia (2015), as well as the 56th Venice Biennale as part of the German Pavilion (2015).

Victor Ekpuk is a Nigerian-American artist based in Washington, D.C., USA. Ekpuk obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from University, Ife, Nigeria in 1989.

He is renowned for glyph-like paintings and drawings that are inspired by the aesthetic concepts of indigenous African writing systems and graphic symbols from diverse cultures. His work frequently explores the human condition, drawing upon a wide spectrum of meaning that is rooted in African and global contemporary art discourses.

Ekpuk’s works have been featured in exhibitions at Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, The Tang museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, 12th Havana Biennial, Dakar Biennial, Hood Museum, Krannert Art Museum, Fowler Museum, Museum of Art and Design, Newark Museum, The World Bank, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the 1st Johannesburg Biennial.

His artworks are in collections of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, Brooks Museum, The World Bank, Newark Museum, Hood Museum, Krannert Art Museum, United States Art in Embassies Art Collection.

Ekpuk has been awarded several commissions by museums in the United States. In 2016, he was commissioned by The Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art to design trophies awarded to recipients of the museum’s first African Art Awards. One of the recipients was Yinka Shonibare MBE. In 2017, he completed a large-scale 30 x 18ft centerpiece mural at the North Carolina Museum of Art, as well as a 58 feet mural commission at the Memphis Brooks Museum.

He is currently commissioned by Penguin Random House Publishers to illustrate new covers of popular books by Africa’s most renowned author, Chinua Achebe. These volumes include African Trilogy, Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of The People and other well-loved Achebe novels.

Wendy Bednarz is a filmmaker and a photographer whose professional work engages multicultural narratives and has screened at venues worldwide including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal World Film Festival, and the Venice Film Festival. Her work has garnered awards such as the Cine Golden Eagle, the Independent Film Award, and the Sundance Winfemme.

She taught film production at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Undergraduate Film Program and NYU Tisch Asia, Graduate Film Program, before joining the faculty at NYU Abu Dhabi. She teaches Intermediate Film, Capstone Seminar, Capstone Projects and more recently Human Value – a course that challenges students to deconstruct the historical definition of ‘human value’ across a diversity of cultures through creating still and moving images.

Among other projects, she is currently completing post-production (producer/director) on feature documentary ‘Burning Money’ that is shot in Singapore’s Chinese community and explores the thousand years plus tradition of burning paper money and facsimiles of everyday objects in order to deliver a happy life in the hereafter.

She is also developing the narrative feature project, ‘Yellow Bus Asfar,’ loosely based on the true story of a four-year-old Indian girl who fell asleep on an Abu Dhabi school bus and suffocated in the blistering heat. Germinating from a lecture she gave on ‘film adaption,’ ‘Yellow Bus Asfar’ encapsulates Wendy’s greatest passions by bridging her artistic ambitions, the classroom, and local communities.

Zak Ové was born in London, England, and lives and works in both London and Trinidad. Ové graduated with Fine Art B.A in Film from St. Martin’s School of Art, London in 1987.

Ové works between sculpture, film, painting, and photography, often collaging the various elements using found, cast and recovered materials. He finds inspiration in Trinidadian and African Diasporic legends and folklore. He is interested in reinterpreting lost culture and mythology using modern and antique materials, paying tribute to both spiritual and artistic African and Trinidadian identities which have been given new meaning through carnival and the cross-cultural dispersion of ideas.

A constant theme throughout his work is the emancipation of personal existence through incarnation with another self, showing us the power of play to free an individual from the contained experience of one’s identity. This idea is filtered through his own personal and cultural upbringing, growing up between London and Trinidad with a black Trinidadian father and white Irish mother.

A filmmaker, photographer and music video director earlier in his career, Ové has had solo shows at Vigo, The Fine Art Society, The Freies Museum (Berlin) and has participated in international museum shows from Dakar to Paris, Dubai, Prague, Berlin, Bamako and New York. In 2015, he had a solo exhibition of Moko Jumbie sculptures in the British Museum’s Grand Court with the museum purchasing both figures for the Africa Galleries permanent collection. Ové is the first artist of Caribbean heritage to have this honor.

Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, South Africa, and lives and works in Johannesburg. Self-identifying as a visual activist, Muholi’s development as a photographer is deeply intertwined with her advocacy on behalf of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community in South Africa and beyond. After Muholi co-founded the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, she enrolled in the Advanced Program in Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, South Africa, founded by the photographer David Goldblatt. In 2009 Muholi earned her MFA in documentary media from Ryerson University in Toronto. In the same year, she founded Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual (activist) media. Muholi is an Honorary Professor of the University of the Arts, Bremen.

Since her first solo exhibition, Visual Sexuality, held in Johannesburg in 2004, Muholi has produced a number of photographic series that investigate the severe disconnect in post-apartheid South Africa between the equality promoted by the country’s 1996 Constitution and the bigotry toward and violent acts targeting individuals within the LGBTI community. As an ensemble, Muholi’s photographs display the depth and diversity of this community in South Africa and in various countries she has visited in recent years. Her commitment to redressing the social injustices faced by LGBTI community members is profound, and she embraces a subjective perspective in her practice by forming relationships with the individuals she depicts.

Solo exhibitions of Muholi’s work have been hosted by Casa África, Las Palmas, Spain (2011); Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg (2012); Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena (2013); Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto (2014); Schwules Museum, Berlin (2014); and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2014); and her works were included at the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010), Documenta 13 (2012), and the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).

She has won numerous awards including the Ryerson Alumni Achievement Award (2015); the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International; a Prince Claus Award (2013); the Index on Censorship – Freedom of Expression art award (2013); and the Casa Africa award for best female photographer and a Fondation

Blachère award at Les Rencontres de Bamako biennial of African photography (2009). She is shortlisted for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for her publication Faces and Phases: 2006-14 (Steidl/The Walther Collection)