Jens Hoffmann Mesén is a writer, editor, educator, and exhibition maker. His work has attempted to expand the definition and context of exhibition making. From 2003 to 2007 Hoffmann was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. He is the former director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art from 2007 to 2016 and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at The Jewish Museum from 2012 to 2017, a role from which he was terminated following an investigation into sexual harassment allegations brought forth by staff members. Hoffmann has held several teaching positions including California College of the Arts, the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as others.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has curated several important exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and FRONT International, the 2016 Portland Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2018. In 2014, Grabner was named one of the 100 most powerful women in art and in 2019, she was named a 2019 National Academy of Design's Academician, a lifetime honor. In 2021, Grabner was named a Guggenheim Fellow by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Mary Kelly is an American conceptual artist, feminist, educator, and writer.
Persimmon Blackbridge is a Canadian writer and artist whose work focuses on feminist, lesbian, disability and mental health issues. She identifies herself as a lesbian, a person with a disability and a feminist. Her work explores these intersections through her sculptures, writing, curation and performance. Her novels follow characters that are very similar to Blackbridge's own life experiences, allowing her to write honestly about her perspective. Blackbridge's struggle with her mental health has become a large part of her practice, and she uses her experience with mental health institutions to address her perspective on them. Blackbridge is involved in the film, SHAMELESS: The Art of Disability exploring the complexity of living with a disability. Her contributions to projects like this help destigmatize the attitudes towards people with disabilities. Blackbridge has won many awards for her work exploring her identity and the complexities that come with it.
Zackary Drucker is an American multimedia artist, cultural producer, LGBT activist, actress, and television producer. She is an Emmy-nominated producer for the docu-series This Is Me, a consultant on the TV series Transparent, and is based out of Los Angeles. Drucker is an artist whose work explores themes of gender and sexuality and critiques predominant two-dimensional representations. Drucker has stated that she considers discovering, telling, and preserving trans history to be not only an artistic opportunity but a political responsibility. Drucker's work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and film festivals including but not limited to the 2014 Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Hammer Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Christine Sun Kim is an American sound artist based in Berlin. Working predominantly in drawing, performance, and video, Kim's practice considers how sound operates in society. Musical notation, written language, American Sign Language (ASL), and the use of the body are all recurring elements in her work. Her work has been exhibited in major cultural institutions internationally, including in the Museum of Modern Art's first exhibition about sound in 2013 and the Whitney Biennial in 2019. She was named a TED Fellow in both 2013 and 2015, a Director's Fellow at MIT Media Lab in 2015, and a Ford Foundation Disability Futures Fellow in 2020.
Deana Lawson is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.
John Isiah Walton was born in 1985 in New Orleans, where he currently lives and works as a fine artist. Walton was the first African American member of the artist collective The Front, and is also a founding member of Level Artist Collective, which includes artists Ana Hernandez, Horton Humble, Rontherin Ratliff, and Carl Joe Williams.
Joseph Grigely is an American visual artist and scholar. His work is primarily conceptual and engages a variety of media forms including sculpture, video, and installations. Grigely was included in two Whitney Biennials, and is also a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jane Panetta is a New York–based curator and art historian. Panetta is currently an associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Carolyn Lieba Francois Lazard is an American artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lazard uses the experience of chronic illness to examine concepts of intimacy and the labor of living involved with chronic illnesses. Lazard expresses their ideas through a variety of mediums including performance, filmmaking, sculpture, writing, photography, sound; as well as environments and installations. Lazard is a 2019 Pew Foundation Fellow and one of the first recipients of The Ford Foundation's 2020 Disability Futures Fellows Awards. In 2023, Lazard was selected as a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, colloquially known as the "genius grant."
Daniel Lind-Ramos is an African-Puerto Rican painter and sculptor who lives and works in Puerto Rico.
TJ Cuthand, also credited as Theo Cuthand and Thirza Cuthand, is a filmmaker and performance artist, writer and curator of Plains Cree as well as Scottish and Irish descent. He is credited with coining the term Indigiqueer, for modern Indigenous LGBTQ people. In May 2022, he changed his name to TJ Cuthand and came out as a trans man.
Adrienne Edwards is a New York–based art curator, scholar, and writer. Edwards is currently the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Woody De Othello is an American ceramicist and painter. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.
Na Mira, also known as Dylan Mira, is an American artist and educator, known for her installation art. She is based out of Los Angeles, California, "on Tongva, Gabrielino, Kizh, and Chumash lands."
Rayyane Tabet is a Lebanese visual artist, known for his sculpture.
Raul Pizarro is a queer, disabled, latinx visual artist who known for his Day of the Dead series, as well as his paintings about his queerness and his disability.
The 2022 Whitney Biennial, titled Quiet as It's Kept, is the 80th edition of the Whitney Museum's art biennial, hosted between April and October of 2022. Described by ARTnews as the "most closely watched contemporary art exhibition in the United States." The 2022 biennial was curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, exhibiting 63 artists and collectives, with installations extending over the 5th and 6th floors and adjacent balconies of the Whitney Museum building.
Katherine Sherwood is an American artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, California who is known for paintings that explore disability, feminism, and healing, and for her teaching and disability rights activism at the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.
