Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is an American documentary filmmaker and portrait photographer based in New York City. The majority of his work is shot in large format.
Christine Sciulli is a New York-based video installation/intervention artist. Her works have been seen on the street, in New York area galleries and institutions. Exhibitions include The Arts Center in St. Petersburg, Florida and New York’s Islip Art Museum.
Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became one of the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
Tim Okamura is a Japanese Canadian artist known for his contemporary realist portraits that combine graffiti and realism. His work has been on the cover of Time Magazine and has been featured in several major motion pictures. Okamura's paintings are featured in major permanent collections around the world such as London's National Portrait Gallery and Washington DC's National Portrait Gallery. He was also one of several artists to be shortlisted in 2006 for a proposed portrait of Queen Elizabeth of England.
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality with a body of work that dates back to the early 2000s, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's Black lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex communities. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, explaining that "I'm just human".
Penelope Umbrico is an American artist best known for her work that appropriates images found using search engines and picture sharing websites.
Nina Kuo is an Asian American painter, photographer, sculptor, author, video artist and activist who lives and works in New York City. Her work examines the role of women, feminism and identity in Asian-American art. Kuo has worked in partnership with the artist Lorin Roser. Kuo has been described as being a pioneer of AAPI and Chinese American art and culture.
Rochelle Feinstein is a contemporary American visual artist who makes abstract paintings, prints, video, sculpture, and installations that explore language and contemporary culture. She was appointed professor in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 1994, where she also served as director of graduate studies, until becoming professor emerita in 2017.
Melissa Zexter is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates embroidered photography.
Lucy Fradkin is an American self-taught artist from New York who paints portraits which often include collage elements. She is inspired by Persian and Indian miniature paintings with bright palettes and flattened space as well as the ancient frescoes and mosaics of Etruria, Rome, and Byzantium. In addition, she visited the Brooklyn Museum as a young artist with her mother and was inspired by The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, as a prominent piece of art by a living woman artist.
Jessica Todd Harper is an American fine-art photographer. She was born in Albany, New York in 1975.
Amy Sherald is an American painter. She works mostly as a portraitist depicting African Americans in everyday settings. Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects. Since 2012, her work has used grisaille to portray skin tones, a choice she describes as intended to challenge conventions about skin color and race.
ruby onyinyechi amanze, is a Nigerian-born British-American artist noted for drawings and works on paper which focus on cultural hybridity or "post-colonial non-nationalism." In addition to being an artist, she has also worked as a teacher and curator. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Clarity Haynes is a queer feminist American artist and writer. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Haynes is best known for her unconventional painted portraits of torsos, focusing on queer, trans, cis female and nonbinary bodies. She is a former member of the tART Collective and the Corpus VI Collective.
Pao Houa Her is a Hmong-American photographer whose works are primarily centered around the history and lived experiences of the Hmong people. Her's photography consists of greenery and geographic images. She is also a professor at the University of Minnesota and teaches Introduction to Photography.
Adama Delphine Fawundu Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist born in Brooklyn, NY the ancestral space of the Lenni-Lanape. She is a descendant of the Mende, Krim, Bamileke, and Bubi peoples. Her multi-sensory artistic language centers around themes of indigenization and ancestral memory. Fawundu co-published the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora with photographer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn. – MFON is a book featuring the diverse works of women and non-binary photographers of African descent. Her works have been presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide. She is a Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.
Nancy Floyd, born in Monticello, Minnesota in 1956, is an American photographer. Her photographic subjects mainly concern women and the female body during youth, pregnancy, and while aging. Her project She's Got a Gun comprises portraits of women and their firearms, which is linked to her Texas childhood. Floyd's work has been shown in 18 solo exhibitions and is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the High Museum of Art. Floyd is a professor emeritus of photography at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.
Fabiola Jean-Louis is a Haitian artist working in photography, paper textile design, and sculpture. Her work examines the intersectionality of the Black experience, particularly that of women, to address the absence and imbalance of historical representation of African American and Afro-Caribbean people. Jean-Louis has earned residencies at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York City, the Lux Art Institute, San Diego, and the Andrew Freedman Home in The Bronx. In 2021, Jean-Louis became the first Haitian woman artist to exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fabiola lives and works in New York City.
Holly Lynton is an American photographer based in Massachusetts. Her portraits of modern rural communities and agrarian laborers in America have been exhibited both nationally and abroad.
