Sage Ni'Ja Whitson | |
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Occupation(s) | Interdisciplinary Artist, Writer, Performer, Founder/Artistic Director of The NWA Project |
Sage Ni'Ja Whitson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, writer and the founder/artistic director of The NWA Project. Whitson is non-binary and gender non-conforming, and uses the pronouns they/them. [1] [2]
A Bessie-Award-winning interdisciplinary artist, performer and writer, Whitson has been referred to as "majestic" [3] and "magnetic" [4] by The New York Times , and is recognized by Brooklyn Magazine as being one of the 100 culture influencers. [5] Recent awards include a Hedgebrook Residency, LMCC Process Space Residency, Bogliasco Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist Residency, two-time Creative Capital "On Our Radar" award including being an inaugural recipient, among many other recognitions across disciplines.
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
The State University of New York at Purchase, commonly referred to as Purchase College or SUNY Purchase, is a public liberal arts college in Purchase, New York. Established in 1967 by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, SUNY Purchase is one of 13 comprehensive colleges in the State University of New York (SUNY) system.
Annie Baker is an American playwright and film director. She is known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Flick (2013). She has written a string of plays which are set in the fictional town of Shirley: Body Awareness (2008), Circle Mirror Transformation (2009), The Aliens (2010), and Nocturama (2014). She made her feature film directorial debut with the A24 coming-of-age drama Janet Planet (2023).
Kenny Fries is an American memoirist and poet. He is the author of In the Province of the Gods (2017), The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory (2007), Body, Remember: A Memoir (1997), and editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (1997). He was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone, which premiered in 2013. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan (2017), Desert Walking (2006) and Anesthesia (2000). He received a 2009 Creative Capital grant in Innovative Literature, the 2007 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the Gregory Kolovakos Award, a Creative Arts Fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment, and has twice been a Fulbright Scholar. In 2017, he created the Fries Test for disability in fiction and film, akin to the Bechdel Test for women.
Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.
Pioneer Works is a nonprofit cultural arts center in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City that was founded by artist Dustin Yellin in 2012. Pioneer Works includes a large exhibition space, a garden, an artist-in-residency program, a class and lecture series, and a press, and "aim[s] to foster innovation in the performing and visual arts, music and science."
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a published poet, performer, educator, food writer, cultural strategist, and transgender, gender non-conforming, and disability advocate based in New York and New Jersey, whose work has been showcased nationally and internationally. Their second book, More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature Finalist. They are a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship recipient, three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. Barrett's writing and performance centers on the experience of queer, transgender, people of color, mixed race people, Asian, and Filipino/a/x community. The focus of their artistic work navigates multiple systems of oppression in the context of the U.S.
Katrín Sigurdardóttir is a New York-based artist who works in installation and sculpture. Katrin studied at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, Reykjavík and received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She creates complex structures built to be viewed in exhibition settings but not used as functional architecture. Conceptually, her work reflects issues of intimacy and memory in built spaces, historical recreations, and disorienting shifts in scale. Her work has appeared at the 2013 Icelandic Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale, the 33rd São Paulo Bienal, in 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sculpture Center, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center.
Jennifer Monson is an American dancer and choreographer. She has been actively creating dance work since the 1980s. She works with dance improvisation and creates choreography that is at times improvised or devised through scores, as well as collaborating with other dancers, visual artists, architects and scientists. Monson grew up in southern California and, at one point, wanted to be a park ranger. She was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (1998) and in 2000, Monson received the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award. She now resides in Illinois as a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, after living in Williamsburg in Brooklyn from 1991–2002. At one point, she was also involved with the University of Vermont, where she was a professor at large from 2010–2016 with the dance, environmental studies, and library faculty.
Steffani Jemison is an American artist, writer, and educator. Her videos and multimedia projects explore the relationship between Black embodiment, sound cultures, and vernacular practices to modernism and conceptual art. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other U.S. and international venues. She is based in Brooklyn, New York and is represented by Greene Naftali, New York and Annet Gelink, Amsterdam.
Abigail DeVille is an American artist who creates large sculptures and installations, often incorporating found materials from the neighborhoods around the exhibition venues. DeVille's sculptures and installations often focus on themes of the history of racist violence, gentrification, and lost regional history. Her work often involves a performance element that brings the artwork out of its exhibition space and into the streets; DeVille has organized these public events, which she calls "processionals," in several U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and New York. Deville likes to use her own family as inspiration for her art work. She decided to use her grandmother as inspiration because of her vibrant personality, to help her articulate ideas from the neighborhoods of the Bronx. Deville is pleased that her art works are unique, as many people see trash as useless to them, while DeVille instead sees an opportunity.
Shaun El C. Leonardo is an American artist and performer best known for his work exploring the relationships between masculinity, sports, race, and culture.
Bernice L. McFadden is an American novelist. She has also written humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday. Author of fifteen novels, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Kimberly Drew is an American art influencer and writer. She is best known as the former social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her use of the social media handle @MuseumMammy. Drew released her first book, This Is What I Know About Art in June 2020, as part of a children's book series from Penguin, and published an anthology titled Black Futures with New York Times staff writer Jenna Wortham in December 2020.
A.K. Burns is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and educator working with video, installation, sculpture, drawing-collage, writing and collaboration. Working through a trans-feminist lens Burns explores the nexus of language and materiality. Her artwork troubles hegemonic systems and their impact on gender, labor, ecology and sexuality. A.K. Burns is an Associate Professor and MFA Co-Director at Hunter College, Department of Art & Art History. Burns is a 2023 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Art. Burns has works in several public collections including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Burns is currently represented by Michel Rein Gallery, Paris/Brussels, and Video Data Bank, Chicago. Burns is gender non-conforming and has no preferred pronoun.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine. In 2021 her work was featured in an Art 21 documentary, "The Edge of Legibility."
Roberta Allen is a conceptual artist, and fiction writer who explores ways in which language changes or informs perception of images. She is known for her multi-media conceptual works. She has appeared in over one hundred group exhibitions worldwide.
James Hannaham is a writer, performer, and visual artist. His novel Delicious Foods (2015), which deals with human trafficking, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was named one of Publishers Weekly's top ten books of the year. The New York Times called it an “ambitious, sweeping novel of American captivity and exploitation.”
Sharon Butler is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her art and writing, particularly a style she called "new casualism" in a 2011 essay. Butler uses process as metaphor and has said in artist's talks that she is keenly interested in creating paintings as documentation of her life. In a 2014 review in the Washington Post, art critic Michael Sullivan wrote that Butler "creates sketchy, thinly painted washes that hover between representation and abstraction.Though boasting such mechanistic titles as 'Tower Vents' and 'Turbine Study,' Butler’s dreamlike renderings, which use tape to only suggest the roughest outlines of architectural forms, feel like bittersweet homages to urban decay." Critic Thomas Micchelli proposed that Butler's work shares "Rauschenberg’s dissolution of the barriers between painting and sculpture," particularly where the canvases are "stapled almost willy-nilly to the front of the stretcher bars, which are visible along the edges of some of the works."