Yasi Alipour
The Iranian artist based in Brooklyn, Yasi Alipour, explores issues of hegemony within a wider Middle Eastern context. Her research-based practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, folding, writing, lectures, and experimentation—probing personal history to parse issues around political instability and interrupted histories. Alipour holds an MFA from Columbia University, a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, and a BS from the University of Tehran. Her work has been exhibited at Venice Biennale (Italy), the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (Serbia), Limiditi-Temporary Art Project (Morocco),
the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, False Flag, Flatiron Prow, Art Space, Art Therapy Project, and Pulse Contemporary Art Fair (Miami). She is a frequent contributor of The Brooklyn Rail, The Photograph Magazine, ACAW, Dear Dave, and V1. www.yasamanalipour.com
Francesca Balboni
Francesca Balboni is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art + Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in film and photography. Her dissertation project, tentatively titled “Marie Menken: Film and Friendship in New York, 1940-1970,” explores the intermediality and joyful, queer sociality of the experimental films Menken made for friends within her creative communities.
Haley Berkman Karren
Haley Berkman Karren is an independent curator and writer as well as Junior Associate at Kinzelman Art Consulting. She has previously held curatorial positions at various arts organizations including the Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Pentagram Stiftung, Venice. She holds a B.A. with honors in Art History and Archaeology from Washington University in St. Louis, and an M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Jessi DiTillio
Jessi DiTillio is a curator, writer, and art historian. She is a 2018-19 Luce/ACLS American Art Dissertation Fellow, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art + Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She researches 20th century American Art with a focus on African American artists, affect theory, contemporary art engaging the politics of race and gender, and curatorial practice. She has held curatorial fellowships at the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin, the Art Galleries at Black Studies, and The Contemporary Austin. Before beginning her doctoral program, she served as Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and Interim Director of the Association for Academic Museums and Galleries.
Rindon Johnson
Rindon Johnson is an artist and writer. He recently mounting a solo exhibition, Circumscribe, at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf in July of 2019 as Part of horizontal/vertigo curated by Lisa Long. He is the author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient Press, 2016), the virtual reality book, Meet in the Corner (Publishing-House.Me, 2017) and most recently, Shade the King (Capricious, 2017). Johnson’s writing has been published by Artforum, Cultured, ICA Miami, The New Museum and Rhizome – among others. He lives in Berlin.
Matthew Leifheit
Matthew Leifheit is a Brooklyn-based photographer. He is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, an independent journal of emerging photography founded in 2010 that recently released its 49th issue. He was formerly the photo editor of VICE, and has also written criticism and interviews for Aperture, Foam, Art F City and TIME LightBox. Leifheit holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he was awarded the Richard Benson Prize in 2017. Currently, Leifheit is an adjunct professor of photography at Pratt Institute. He has previously taught at Yale, School of Visual Arts, Parsons, and the National YoungArts Foundation.
Leifheit’s work in photography and publishing has been exhibited internationally and is held in public collections including the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art Library and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, VICE and the Yale Daily News.
Irene Shum
Irene Shum is the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. Prior to joining the Menil, she was the inaugural curator of Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. She also worked at The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
