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Matthew Day Jackson is a painter, sculptor, draftsperson, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Through his multifarious practice, which includes collage, drawing, video, performance, and installation, Jackson engages with a wide range of subjects, from the historical and scientific to the futuristic and fantastical.

Deneane Richburg is the founder and Artistic Director of Brownbody. As the creative home for Richburg’s choreographic work, through Brownbody, she honors the complex narratives of U.S. based Black diasporic communities by taking participants on journeys that disrupt assumptions, ideologies, and disenfranchising popular narratives around blackness. As a modern dance choreographer and former competitive figure skater, Richburg is interested in pushing the boundaries of creative expression on the ice via engaging these narratives as a framework in which somatic based movement exploration occurs. Richburg blends different movement worlds and creates work for both the ice and the stage. Deneane grew up a competitive figure skater—spending time in a world that excluded her ancestry’s truths. Working and growing in this space, to quote Zora Neale Hurston, she always felt “most colored when [she was] thrown against a sharp white background.” She quickly realized she needed to carve out a space for herself and her ancestral history hence her decision to create Brownbody. Richburg received her MFA in dance and choreography from Temple University, an MA in Afro-American Studies from UW Madison, and a BA in English and African American Studies from Carleton College. She has created 15+ works for the ice and stage. Richburg is a recipient of a 2017 and 2022 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, administered by The Cowles Center and funded by the McKnight Foundation, a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Miguel A. Aragón (*Juárez, México) lives and works in New York City (USA) and Berlin (Germany); he is an Associate Professor in Printmaking at CUNY College of Staten Island. Aragón has exhibited internationally at venues including the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; Uferhallen, Berlin, Germany and the Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists, Canada to name a few. His awards and residences include NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship; KALA Art Institute fellowship and residency, Berkeley, CA; East London Printmakers Keyholder Residency, England; The Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia fellowship, Italy; and Till Richter Museum, Buggenhagen, Germany among many others. His work is held in collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; and Minneapolis Institute of Art. Aragón’s work has been published in A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking (Greenville, NC: Wellington B. Gray Gallery, 2012), Peenemünde Project: Geschichte wird Kunst / Imprinting History (Berlin: Edition Braus, 2017) and ¡Printing the Revolution!: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum; Princeton: in association with Princeton University Press, 2020). In 2022 he was nominated for The Queen Sonja Print Award, Oslo, Norway; and was awarded the 2022 SGC International Mid-career Printmaker award.

Pao Houa Her is a Hmong American artist whose practice engages primarily with legacies and potentials of landscape, portraiture, and documentary photographic traditions and aesthetics, creating works that examine identity, longing, and belonging in Hmong diasporic communities. Among Her’s solo exhibitions include Paj quam ntuj / Flowers of the Sky at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2022–2023), Emplotment at Or Gallery in Vancouver, Canada (2020), and My grandfather turned into a tiger at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis (2018). Recently exhibited in the Whitney Biennial (2022), her work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC; the Milwaukee Art Museum; MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; among many others. A prizewinner in the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (2022), Her was the recipient of the McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship (2022 and 2016), and the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2019). Notable public collections include the Singapore Art Museum and the Walker Art Center. Her is an assistant professor in Photography and Moving Images at the University Minnesota. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Yale University School of Art (2012) and a BFA in Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2009). Born in Laos in 1982, Her was raised in Minnesota and is based in Blaine.

Diane Wilson is a writer, educator, and environmental advocate, who has published four award-winning books as well as essays in numerous publications. Wilson’s recent novel, The Seed Keeper (Milkweed Editions) was awarded the 2022 Minnesota Book Award for Fiction. Her memoir, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past (Borealis Books) won a 2006 Minnesota Book Award and was selected for the 2012 One Minneapolis One Read program. Her 2011 nonfiction book, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life (Borealis Books) was awarded the 2012 Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado. Wilson’s middle-grade biography, Ella Cara Deloria: Dakota Language Protector, was an Honor selection for the 2022 American Indian Youth Literature Award. She is a co-author of a 2022 picture book, Where We Come From. Her most recent essays–which explore seed advocacy, food sovereignty, social justice, and cultural recovery–have been featured in acclaimed anthologies: Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations; We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World; and A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. Wilson is the former Executive Director for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a national coalition of tribes and organizations working to support food sovereignty, and Dream of Wild Health, a Native-led farm. Wilson is a Mdewakanton descendent, enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation. She lives near the St. Croix River in Minnesota, where she cares for an Indigenous seed garden, native perennials for pollinators, and a Tamarack bog.

Nicola López’s work in drawing, printmaking, site-specific installation, sculpture and video examines and reconfigures our contemporary landscape. It points to connections and rifts between our human-constructed world and the systems and cycles of nature. She engages architecture and urban structure as ever-accumulating evidence of human aspirations and failures, often contrasting and intertwining them with geological and organic formations. Her work draws on anthropology, architecture, urban planning and historical and fictional explorations of utopia/dystopia. It also leans heavily into material process, intentionally bringing joy, improvisation, and care into the work as it reflects on human patterns of extraction and construction. William Morrow is an independent curator, museum specialist, arts and culture consultant, and advisor to collectors based in Portland, Oregon. With over twenty years of experience curating high-level international art programs and expertise in building and interpreting major collections, he has become a highly effective thought partner to non-profit leaders and collectors across the country. His career-long commitment to fostering visionary artistic practices, deconstructing histories, and inspiring diverse audiences has been at the cornerstone of his curatorial practice.

Jenna Caravello is a Los Angeles-based artist and assistant professor in Design | Media Arts at UCLA, working with VR, motion capture, animation, and video game platforms. Her single-channel and interactive works explore computer culture, video game logic, cartoon language, and the role of narrative in personal and digital memory.

Natasha Bowdoin (b. 1981, West Kennebunk, ME) is a visual artist working in the space between painting and installation, interested in stretching the physical boundaries of painting and exploring notions of painting as site. Her collage inspired, large-scale installations investigate the potential intersections of the visual and the literary while reimagining our relationship to the natural world. Her work has been presented widely in solo exhibitions including most recently with In the Night Garden, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Sideways to the Sun, Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX; Maneater, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), North Adams, MA; and Lunar Spring, Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA. Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including Paper Routes: Women to Watch, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Paper Art, CODA Museum, Apeldoorn, Netherlands; paperless, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and A Torrent of Words: Contemporary Art and Language, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI. Bowdoin received her BA from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, in Classics and Studio Art and her MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. She has been awarded numerous artist residencies and fellowships, including the Core Artist-in-Residence Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2008-2010); the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (2013); the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Artist-in-Residence Program, Omaha (2012); and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2007). She is an Associate Professor in Painting and Drawing at Rice University in Houston, TX where she lives and works.

Andrew Chesworth is a filmmaker living in Burbank, CA. He co-wrote and co-directed the Oscar-nominated animated short film One Small Step at Taiko Studios. Prior to that, he was an animator at Disney on such films as Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, and more. Andrew is also an experienced character designer and director of animated commercials. His latest independent animated short film The Brave Locomotive qualified for Oscar consideration after winning at LA Shorts Fest. Currently, Andrew is at Netflix as a character lead on an upcoming animated series.