Shannon Finnegan
Shannon Finnegan is a multidisciplinary artist making work about accessibility and disability culture. She has done projects with Banff Centre, Friends of the High Line, Tallinn Art Hall, Nook Gallery, and the Wassaic Project. She has spoken about her work at the Brooklyn Museum, School for Poetic Computation, The 8th Floor, and The Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. In 2018, she received a Wynn Newhouse Award and participated in Art Beyond Sight’s Art + Disability Residency. In 2019, she was an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam. Her work has been written about in C Magazine, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Chitra Ganesh
Chitra Ganesh graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a BA in Comparative Literature and Art-Semiotics and received her MFA from Columbia University in 2002. Her work focuses on the marginalized and excluded figures and narratives in art, history, and literature. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Art Matters Foundation (2010), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), New York Foundation for the Arts (2009), and New York Community Trust (2006), and numerous grants including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts (2012). Her works are held in prominent public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been featured in publications, including The New York Times, Artforum, Hyperallergic, ArtNews, ArtNet News, Vogue India, Elle India, Harper’s Bazaar India, San Francisco Chronicle, Art Asia Pacific, among others. Ganesh has most recently been awarded a Hodder Fellowship for the 2017–18 academic year at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.
Yvette Granata
Yvette Granata is a media artist, production designer, researcher, and currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Haverford College in the Department of Visual Studies. She creates work across multiple media and digital arts to build immersive media installations, video art, interactive environments, and hypothetical technological systems. She writes about media theory, philosophy, and digital media culture. Her work has been exhibited at the Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, The Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam, The Kunsthalle of Media and Light Art in Detroit, Papy Gyro Nights in Norway and Hong Kong, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center in Buffalo, among others. She has published in Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, Trace Journal, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies and AI & Society. Her film design work has appeared on screens at the Sundance film festival, Tribeca film festival, Rotterdam, Berlinale, Rome International Film Fest, SXSW, and CPH:PIX. She also produced the hybrid documentary, City World (2012) which premiered internationally at CPH:DOX and won best documentary at Cinema on the Edge in LA. She holds a Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo’s Media Arts Ph.D. Program, a research masters from the University of Amsterdam in Film and Media Studies, and a BA from University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
GenderFail
GenderFail is a publishing and programming initiative that seeks to encourage projects that foster an intersectional queer subjectivity started in 2015 by Be Oakley, a writer, facilitator, and publisher based in Brooklyn, New York who received their MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018. Oakley’s projects look to what Fred Moten calls “the politics of the mess” by framing their identity as a white non-binary queer person in its intersections with failure and internationality. Their publications can be found in the library collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Book Arts, Tate Museum Zine Library and many others.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941 Cleveland, OH) lives and works in San Francisco and New York. Her recent retrospective exhibition, “Civic Radar,” traveled from ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (2014) to Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg, Germany (2015), Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany (2016), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2017). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo Comunidad de Madrid (2019), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2018), Haus der elektronischen Künste, Basel (2018), Modern Art Oxford, UK (2015), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2013), and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2007). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco (2020), The Shed, New York (2019), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019), Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2018), Whitney Museum of American Art (2017), and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016), as well as international exhibitions, including the Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018), Glasgow International (2018), and the forthcoming 2020 Gwangju Biennial in Korea. Her films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival, among others. Hershman Leeson has received numerous awards, including a VIA Art Fund Award (2019), a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), the College Art Association’s Distinguished Feminist Award (2018), the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award from the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival (2017), a United States Artists Fellowship (2016), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2014), and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009).
Aubree Penney
Aubree Penney is an independent curator whose work addresses power dynamics in art display, including disability access and ties between colonial tendencies and mimetic expectations of form and content relationships. Her exhibition work has taken her from mass graves in London at Crossbones Garden to retrofitted factories in Memphis at Crosstown Arts, spanning work with sculpture, multimedia, performance, painting, sound, and installation. She currently contracts in support of exhibitions at Tate Modern. She is developing a long-term analysis of exhibition label data as a site of artistic resistance, and her work is devoted to amplifying the voices of artists in institutional contexts, especially in regards to titling, media lists, and issues surrounding translation and standardization. In her curatorial practice, she examines and challenges constructions of professional behavior in the art world, advocating for openness about mental health, invisible labor, and emotional investment. She holds an MFA with a distinction in Curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London and a BA from Haverford College in English and Religion.
Linda Stupart
Dr Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South Africa. They completed their Ph.D. at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016, with a project engaged in new considerations of objectification and abjection. They are currently a permanent lecturer at Birmingham City University, and have previously worked at University of Reading, London College of Communication, and Camberwell Arts College. They have also run arts education projects at Tate, South London Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre, and Camden Arts Centre. Linda is interested in the possibilities for writing and making discrete grounded encounters with different kinds of bodies (of knowledge, objects, affect as well as corporeal bodies) as a way to think through less alienated ways of living and thinking together. This comes out of encounters with feminist art, postcolonial, ecological, queer, and affect theory as well as embodied and object-based critical institutional encounters. Their current work consists predominately of writing, performance, film, and sculpture, and engages with queer theory, science fiction, environmental crises, magic, language, desire, and revenge. They have recently exhibited at Lisson Gallery, Raven Rown, Tate, IMT, Matt’s Gallery, and The Showroom in London; as well as Transmission in Glasgow, DISTRICT in Berlin, Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Kunstraum Niederösterreich in Vienna, and Syndicate in Cologne. They recently produced All Us Girls Have been Dead for so Long with Carl Gent for the ICA London; a play about climate change, queer sex, and “Ecco the Dolphin.”
Eva Wŏ
Eva Wŏ is a mixed Chinese-American/white queer born 1992 in New Mexico and based in Philadelphia since 2010. She uses collaborative portrait photography, digital collage, and moving images to cast spells of queer liberation somewhere between fantasy and futurism. She also produces queer film and art-centered events. Her work creates visibility for marginalized identities, while affirming infinite self-determination and self-love for those she works with, represents, and shares community with. Her work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally, from Vox Populi to the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival. Currently she is co-organizing the annual traveling Hot Bits Festival, Philadelphia’s only sex-positive film and arts festival. She is also a recipient of the Leeway Transformation Award and Elsewhere Exchange Fellowship.