Monira Al Qadiri is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. In 2010, she received a PhD in intermedia art from Tokyo University of the Arts, where her research was focused on the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle East stemming from poetry, music, art, and religious practices. Her work explores unconventional gender identities, petro-cultures and their possible futures, as well as the legacies of corruption.
Dorothy Berry is the Digital Collections Program Manager for the Houghton Library, and was previously the Digitization and Metadata Lead for Umbra Search African American History. Her work has focused on the intersections of information science and African American history, ranging from newspaper database research on the earliest mentions of African American concert music performances, to inventory design for the cosmetic kit of Hollywood’s first Black woman makeup artist, to exhibit curation highlighting transatlantic art inspired by African American film.
Nora Chipaumire was born in Mutare, Zimbabwe and based in NYC. Nora Chipaumire has been challenging and embracing stereotypes of Africa and the black performing body, art, and aesthetic. She is a graduate of the University of Zimbabwe’s School of Law and holds a MA in Dance and MFA in Choreography & Performance from Mills College. She has studied dance in Africa, Cuba, Jamaica, and the US, and has performed internationally in France, Italy, Japan, Senegal, Zimbabwe, and many other places.
Omer Eltigani founded The Sudanese Kitchen in 2015, after collecting family recipes and road testing them through the Americas. Omer’s project has turned him into an aspiring author, cook, and budding horticulturist, though he initially trained as a hospital pharmacist and works freelance in between frequent overseas trips. Omer hopes to one day combine his passion for food, well-being, and the sun by working in permaculture, growing vegetables and herbal medicines, while cultivating cultural consciousness.
Habibi Funk is based in Berlin. Habibi Funk is a platform dedicated to Arabic Funk, Jazz, and other organic sounds from the 1970s and 1980s.
Leena Habiballa is an editor and writer, currently pursuing a PhD in the biology of human ageing at Newcastle University. She is published in From the Lines of Dissent, an anthology of critical essays about race, religion and identity by writers of colour in the UK. She is a collaborator on various Sudanese cultural projects, including editing The Sudanese Kitchen–an upcoming cookery book by Omer Eltigani. She finds her joy and passion in contributing to productions that awaken cultural history and heritage, pluralizing horizons of Sudanese art and animating a vision of a Sudan in touch with its own creative heartbeat.
Christopher Harris is a filmmaker whose films and video installations read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work employs manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged re-enactments of archival artifacts, and interrogations of documentary conventions. He has exhibited widely at venues throughout North America and Europe including solo exhibitions and screenings in Chicago, London, San Francisco, New York, and festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the VIENNALE-Vienna International Film Festival, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, among many others. Harris is the recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital grant and a 2017 Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship.
Shambhavi Kaul has exhibited her work worldwide at such venues as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, The New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Edinburgh International Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Courtisane Belgium, and Experimenta Bangalore. Her work was featured in the 10th Shanghai Biennale, and she has presented two solo shows at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. She was born in Jodhpur, India, and lives in the United States where she teaches at Duke University.
Barbara Kapusta has shown her objects, videos, and text-based works in, among others, Empathic Creatures at Ashley Berlin (2018), In Middens at Gianni Manhattan (Vienna, 2017), Instructions for Happiness (KUP, Athens 2016), The Grasping and The Language of Things at 21er Haus (Vienna, 2016), The Promise of Total Automation at Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, 2016), Dinge und Dialoge at Scriptings (Berlin 2015), Poesie at mumok cinema (Vienna, 2015). The conjunction of the body with materiality and speech is a central, recurring element in her practice. Materiality becomes entrusted with a queer agency that allows for diversity and vulnerability. Her most recent publication The 8 and The Fist was published in 2017 by Gianni Manhattan.
Rini Yun Keagy is a moving-image artist based in Minneapolis. Her work investigates race and labor, disease, and sites of historical and psychosocial trauma. She is a current McKnight Media Artist Fellow and Olson Innovation Artist-in-Residence at University of Minnesota Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. She has taught film studies and production at Carleton College in Minnesota, University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and University of California at Santa Cruz.
Caroline Kent is a visual artist based in the Twin Cities whose practice is rooted in the historied language of abstract painting. Kent investigates how that language is understood amidst highly subjective cultural landscapes. Combining text, image, sculpture, and painting, her practice complicates the normative methods of narrative. Since receiving her MFA from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, she has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the California African American Museum; The Suburban, Chicago; Elephant in Los Angeles; and SUNY Duchess in Poughkeepsie, New York, among others. Kent has received numerous grants and fellowships, most recently from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In addition to her studio practice, Kent is co-founder of The Bindery Projects, an artist–run exhibition space in St. Paul that has been exhibiting national artists since its inception in 2011.
Sophia Le Fraga is the author of Other Titles (If a Leaf Falls 2016); The Anti-Plays (Gauss PDF, 2015); literallydead (Spork, 2015); I RL, YOU RL (minuteBOOKS, 2013; Troll Thread 2014), and I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET (KTBAFC, 2012). She has recently been included in From Concrete to Liquid (Centre d’Art Contemporain; Geneva), This Known World (MOCA, Los Angeles), Greater New York (MoMA PS1; New York) and Performa 15 (New York). Le Fraga is the poetry editor of Imperial Matters and a member of Collective Task.
Devin N. Morris is a Brooklyn-based artist who is interested in abstracting American life and subverting traditional value systems through the exploration of racial and sexual identity in mixed-media paintings, photographs, drawings, writings, and video works. Morris’s work incorporates surreal landscapes and elaborate, draped, and constructed environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on Black Americans as well as black LGBTQ interactions, platonic and otherwise. His work also explores real and imagined characters inspired by his various experiences growing as a black boy in Baltimore, MD, and his later experiences navigating the world as a black queer man. Looking to buoy his new realities in a permanent real space, Morris posits his reimagined societies as future places where his characters exist freely beyond contemporary societal marginal classification. Freedom to him is gained by allowing people to exist in anonymity.
Fin Simonetti is a Canadian artist and musician based in Ridgewood, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include LIFEMORTS at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; IS PATH WARM? at Good Weather, Arkansas; and Pastoral Emergency at SIGNAL, Brooklyn. Recent projects include a book with Rita Ackermann published by Innen/Nieves; her debut album ICE PIX released by Hausu Mountain, Chicago; and her workshop series 4th.WAV was held at MoMA PS1, New York.
Chaun Webster is a poet and graphic designer. He draws from an interest in the work of sign in graffiti, the layering of collage, and the visuality of text. These methods are used in Webster’s work to investigate race—specifically the instability of blackness and black subjectivities, geography, memory, and the body. Correspondingly, much of these investigations engage the question of absence and how to archive what is missing from the landscape, particularly as a number of communities, who are watching in real time, and their neighborhoods, which were once populated with familiar presences, dissolve in the vernacular of redevelopment and its attendant colonial logic.
