Adrian Aguilera is a conceptual multiform artist whose work uses a variety of mediums that include print media, sculpture, video, new media art, installation, and public art. He researches the intrinsical essence that resides in materials.

With an interest in scientific observation, cultural history, and social issues Adrian uses his work to explore our relationship with the physical and cultural spaces in which we (co)exist. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally at The Philbrook Museum, The Contemporary Austin, Artpace San Antonio, The Blanton Museum of Art at the Univeristy of Texas, and The George Washington Carver Museum.

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Annie Albagli’s work explores new ways to witness a landscape and its relationship to human and nonhuman worlds by examining the cultural contexts from which they are born and the layers of manipulation that shape them. Her work has been shown nationally at such venues including the Headlands Center for the Arts, YBCA, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Art Museum of the Americas and internationally, at Art Prospect in St. Petersburg, Russia, Trash Festival in Bishkek Kyrgyzstan, and Beita Gallery in Jerusalem. Her videos have been screened as part of the Imagined Biennials Project at the Tate Modern, the Bavarian Film Festival, ZWICKL in Schwandorf, Germany, and Artist Television Access in San Francisco, CA. She has participated in residencies throughout the U.S. and internationally including Djerassi, This Will Take Time, CEC Artslink Back Apartment Residency in St. Petersburg, Russia, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany, and Art East in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Annie has contributed to various artists’ land projects such as AZ West, Mildred’s Lane, and Salmon Creek Farm. Between 2017-18, Albagli was a YBCA Truth Fellow. She is a co-founder and editor of the publication, WHIZ WORLD, and former Co-Director of the Royal Nonesuch Gallery. She is currently an Affiliate Artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and a visiting Artist at the Sierra Nevada College MFA-IA program.

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Bazinato (Bazil Stachievich) is an artist, researcher, and social and environmental activist from Belarus. They work with practices of interaction and perception exploring the world, macro and micro structures, patterns and connections. Bazinato’s work interacts with the environment, space and time, applying available art practices and scientific knowledge in experiments. They specialize in developing and leading interdisciplinary projects exploring connections between art, digital culture and science, cultural activism, and environmental movements.

Bazinato explores the connection of art to everyday experience through interaction and collaboration with the environment. An immersion in a different sensibility, where there are no binary relations, no natural and no human, and the human being is not a fundamental being. They explore the pattern of impermanence and variability of the nature of the perceived. Bazinato invites us to go beyond words, meanings and to form our own spirituality, through immersion in the natural substratum of the derivatives of being – difference and diversity.

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Natasha Chychasova is a curator and researcher from Donetsk, based in Kyiv. The focus of her research on Ukrainian contemporary art is women’s writing practices, object-oriented feminism, the deconstruction of Soviet narratives in Ukrainian art history, art institutions, and independent art collectives in contemporary Ukraine. In 2021 she started a project in cooperation with twelve Ukrainian woman artists dedicated to the topic of women’s silence and potential strategies to cope with silence through writing practices. 

Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, Natasha has been running the online platform Ukraine ablaze which collects works and statements of Ukrainian artists reflecting on the war in Ukraine from 2014 until the present.  She currently works in the Contemporary Art Department at the Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv.

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Kevin Doyle is a writer and director working between the European Union and his native New York. His work investigates the gap between what we perceive as reality – consumed on devices via compressed and consolidated formats – and what actually transpires out in the real world. Recent works include: PMURT (exploring the 2016 U.S. Election); TRIANGLE/TAZREEN (a collaboration with Bangladeshi garment factory workers); “8:46” (a deconstruction of participants in the George Floyd murder); and SVANEKE (based on interviews with Danish citizens during COVID-19). Doyle is a contributor at Diggit Magazine in The Netherlands, writing on intersections of arts funding and politics.

As part of his interdisciplinary theatre project THE ARTS (2018), exploring the history of public funding of the arts, Doyle conducted research on arts funding in Russia. Doyle also investigated “St. Petersburg The City” as an anonymous artist through his photography, short films, and original writing to reveal hidden undercurrents in the life of the city and its people.

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Meredith Drum is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, animation, installation, mixed reality, and various modes of public practice. Her initiatives center around the cultivation of care for others, both humans and nonhumans. She is influenced by cinema history, climate justice, inter-sectional feminism, her family, friends and cats, multispecies anthropology, swimming in the ocean, cultural studies, science fiction, and riding bikes with loved ones. Meredith’s work has been supported by grants and residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, ISSUE Project Room, Wave Farm Transmission Arts, and others.

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Nicolás Estévez treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively, through creative experiences that he unfolds within the quotidian. He has exhibited and performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, Hemispheric Institute, Princeton University, Casita Maria, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, CALL/WALKS, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others.

Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, he was baptized as a Bronxite in 2011.

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Lance Johnson is a visual artist who works with various materials to celebrate the complexity of the urban environment. Using vibrant colors, textures and inspirational text to convey a sense of hope and pride that is prevalent in city life.

Art has the power to connect people from all walks of life. Across cultures, languages and religions. To Lance, art has always been a us over individual pursuit. Collaboration is a large part of his practice. Collaborating with dancers, musicians, poets, singers and other visual artists throughout his artistic journey. Multidisciplinary artistic expression creating dialogues across perceived and unperceived barriers.

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Interview with Lance Johnson during his Art Prospect Residency at the Ilkhom Center for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, March 2023. Interview conducted by Jakhongir Azimov, courtesy of gazeta.uz.

Nastia Khlestova is a contemporary art curator.  Her work explores the artistic process and the place of the emerging artist in the structure of contemporary art and focuses on how artist-run spaces function, the history of local art institutions, as well as early-career artists and their personal histories.  Over the past few years, Nastia has been studying how artist-run spaces and independent contemporary art organizations function in Ukraine. 

Nastia is a curator and founder of the artist-run space 127 garage in Kharkiv.  The organization’s main goal and mission are to create a community comfortable for work and interaction and to support young artists.

She received a MA in Art History from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Art in Ukraine.

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Born in Kyiv, Tatiana Kochubinska is an independent curator, writer, and lecturer, whose work focuses on Ukrainian contemporary art. She has worked as a curator on the Research Platform of the PinchukArtCentre and on the center’s exhibition and publication programs.  As a curator, Tatiana is particularly interested in questions of responsibility, Soviet history and its relationship to today’s society. In recent years, she has collaborated with various cultural institutions, designed courses on contemporary art, co-developed curatorial residencies together with Artsvit Gallery (Dnipro, Ukraine), and co-edited a special issue about Ukrainian art and society after 2014 at the invitation of Obieg Magazine. Tatiana also became a member of the curatorial team of the International Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the War in Ukraine antiwarcoalition.art.

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Aliona Makhnach is a multimedia artist whose work explores concepts of space and time – personal and public, internal and external. Aliona is convinced that everything is interconnected, so she also pays attention to the energy component in her projects. She uses a multi-level approach in her projects to fulfill the idea and works with painting, photography, documentation, installations, and performance.

Aliona is from Vitebsk and has taken part in exhibitions and art-laboratories in Belarus, Russia, Europe and the UAE.

A seamstress, artist, queer-feminist, and grassroot activist, Antonina Melnyk works with textiles and clothing and engages in theatrical activities and performance. Antonina’s practice is focused on non-alienated, fairly-priced labour; the alternative economy as a tool against exploitation of women; and investigation of discriminatory practices. She also works with the idea of re-thinking and re-appropriating cultural, historical, and social traditions.

Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Antonina graduated from Kyiv National University of Technology and Design and studied contemporary art in Kyiv and St. Petersburg. In 2015, she co-founded the Shvemy sewing cooperative (Kyiv – St. Petersburg). In 2016, she joined the ReSew sewing cooperative in Kyiv. Antonina collaborates with her fellow artist Mariia Lukianova.

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Jill Miller is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Art Practice. She is the Founding Director at Platform Artspace, an outdoor art gallery focused on public engagement. Jill works across a range of different mediums, including public interventions, collaborative workshops, and video installations. Her research explores community-building in both physical places and virtual sites, often bridging the gap between the two. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and collected in public institutions worldwide including CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

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Daria Pugachova is an artist, performer and art activist born in Rivne, Ukraine. Daria uses participatory practices to unite communities and integrate art into daily life. She explores the themes of the transformation of place and society through the direct presence of the artist.

In 2021, Daria received a grant for a project “Microcosmos” in Poltava, Ukraine. On February 11, 2022 the solo exhibition of the artist opened in Jump Contemporary Art Centre. Two weeks later, Russia started a war in Ukraine. 

In March 2022, Daria was invited for an artist residency at Radar Sofia in Bulgaria. In Sofia, she made her latest performance “I Will Close The Sky So You Could Breathe” about the war in Ukraine. She presented the “Microcosmos” in front of the abandoned cinema “Cosmos” in Plovdiv (Context AiR residency) and opened two solo exhibitions MICROCOSMOS / SKY OF WAR connecting both projects she made before and after the war started. Currently, Daria travels across Europe, participating in residencies and art programs to bring visibility to Ukraine through her projects.

Daria studied architecture at the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture. In 2013-2019, she played drums in the band Panivalkova.

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Profile photo by Julia Weber

Mariia Ravlyk Lukianova is a seamstress, artist, and queer feminist activist. She is a member of the sewing cooperatives Shvemy and ReSew. Mariia works with a variety of mediums, including textiles, clothes, video, photo, dance, and performance. Her work focuses on topics such as overcoming discrimination, workers’ rights, poverty, self-care, migration, and the queer community. Mariia collaborates with her fellow artist Antonina Melnyk.

Born in Russia, Mariia has been living and working in Kyiv since 2016 and currently has temporary protection in Finland.

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Dr. Sasha Razor is a native of Belarus and an alumna of the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. In June 2020, she completed her dissertation titled “‘We Were the River’: Screenwriters of the Left Front of the Arts, 1923–1931.” Besides avant-garde cinema and literature, her research interests focus on Belarusian and Ukrainian literature and culture, Russophone immigration to California, postcolonialism, visual arts, and women’s studies. In 2020, Razor received ASEEES Internship Grant and completed her internship at the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco.

Sasha is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and a curator of the following exhibitions: “Dream of the Revolution” (UCLA, 2017), “Exiles, Protesters, Envoys: Russian History in Photographs” (City of West Hollywood, 2019), “The History of Belarusian Vyzhyvanka” (UCLA, 2021), and “The Code of Presence: Belarusian Protest Embroideries and Textile Patterns (University of Michigan, 2022). Razor is currently curating a digital archive of Belarusian Contemporary Art hosted by the University of Michigan Library.

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Born in Belarus in 1989, Nadya Sayapina is an artist, author of projects and art tutor. Using various disciplines and media – performance, multimedia, installations, painting, text, and art therapy – she focuses on mediation as an opportunity to reveal the voices of “others”. Her starting point is the personal stories of members of those communities to which she herself is connected in one way or another. Her methods draw on the practices of community-based and socially-engaged arts where the artist is tasked with giving space to the voices of the excluded and illuminating the issue through art.

Since leaving Belarus in October 2020, Nadya has been working on her ongoing research on forced migration.

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Jessica Segall is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Using landscape and bureaucracy as material, she explores belonging through inter-species, site-specific work. From the Global Seed Vault in the high arctic to private wildlife reserves that allow individual ownership of large predators, Jessica’s work plays with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself. Jessica’s process is a cross-disciplinary collaboration with scientists, activists and non-human beings in what she frames as a queer ecology. Her work is exhibited internationally, and she has been supported by international residencies and grants.

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Katya Taylor is a curator, manager of cultural projects, and contemporary art expert. Her current volunteer project Artists Support Ukraine helps organize exhibitions across the world to promote and support Ukrainian artists during the Russian invasion. Katya curated The Captured House, the exhibition that tells the story of the war in Ukraine through the eyes of 50 contemporary artists. The show traveled to Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, and Rome.

Katya is the founder of the Port.agency. Her multidisciplinary collaborations include projects with UNISEF, UN Woman, World Food Programme, Anti-Corruption Initiative of the European Union, UNDP, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (England), British Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce, European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, and Vogue Ukraine, among others.

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Bogdana Voitenko is an artist and educator interested in the therapeutic effects of nature and the ways that people interact with them. She currently explores botanical printing on textiles. Through her artwork, she brings attention to the hidden potential of plants as a renewable and accessible resource.

In her works that are usually shown on reused textile or clothing, Bogdana emphasizes a sustainable approach to consumption and possibilities to prolong the lifespan of things we already own. Using participatory elements in her art projects, Bogdana often engages the community with a chosen topic and her artworks are always site responsive.

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