Charlotte brathwaite

Creator and Director Charlotte Brathwaite’s genre-defying work illuminates the realities and dreams of marginalized people; people whose stories have been silenced, disappeared, and ignored. Dealing with subject matter from the historical past to the distant future, her work brings to light issues of justice, race, power, and the complexities of the human condition.

A director of classical texts, multimedia, site-specific works, dance, opera, concert, film, and installations - Brathwaite’s trans-disciplinary inquiry manifests in spectacles of color and music. Her works live in the deep time of aural/oral history and create an immersive experience for audience and performer alike which offer new perspectives in both form and content with works presented in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.  Awards: Art Matters, Creative Capital, Pew, United States Artist, Map Fund, Princess Grace and others.  MFA: Yale. She has taught and mentored at international institutions.

Daniel Alexander Jones

Daniel Alexander Jones exemplifies the artist as energy worker. His roots reach deep into Black American and Queer Performance traditions. Jones’s critically-acclaimed plays and performance pieces include Black Light; Duat; An Integrator’s Manual; and Radiate (Soho Rep and National Tour). A career-spanning collection of his work, Love Like Lightwas recently published by 53rd State Press. Jones has recorded six albums of original songs as his alter-ego, Jomama Jones. Daniel’s numerous awards include the Pen America/Laura Pens Foundation Theatre Award, an Alpert Award in the Arts, a TED Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Doris Duke Artist Award, a USA Artist Fellowship, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, and an inaugural Creative Capital Grant. He is a Producing Artist at CalArts’ Center for New Performance. Daniel has been on faculty at Fordham University, UT Austin, and Goddard College.

COLLEEN KEEGAN

Colleen Keegan is a corporate Strategic Planner and arts activist. She built the Creative Capital Strategic Planning Program for Artists and is the Executor of the Theo Westenberger Estate and grants for art and conservation, the art business adviser for the TED Fellows program and the Co-Chair of the TED Fellows Arts Committee. She is a partner in Keegan Fowler Companies, and has also worked as a producer for MTV Networks, WETA and Showtime. Keegan has served on numerous boards of directors and advisory boards including New York Live Arts, the American Refugee Committee, ARTHOME, The Artist Book Foundation, The Center for Creative Arts Berlin, Emily’s list, Moveopolis, The MS Foundation, The NOW Legal Defense Fund, Show of Force, Picture Projects, The Texas Film Commissions. She lectures on art and new markets at California College of Art, Cal Arts, and the Wharton Business School among others.

AARON LANDSMAN

Aaron Landsman is a teacher, writer and performer. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Abrons Arts Center Artist Residency, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, and an ASU Gammage Residency. His projects have been commissioned and presented in New York by Abrons Art Center, The Chocolate Factory, The Foundry Theatre, EMPAC, and HERE and funded by Jerome, MAP, Mellon, Graham, NEFA, LMCC, Bossak-Heilbron and the National Performance Network. Current work includes Perfect City, a 20-year art and activism collective working on gentrification, and Language Reversal, a new theatrical work with collaborators in Serbia, Brazil and Nigeria, at La MaMa. He has taught or guest lectured at Princeton, ASU, Juilliard, NYU, Bennington and Bard. He was the first Development Director at The Field, and grants manager for the award-winning ensemble ERS Theater. He has performed with many artists, across the US and Europe and on London’s West End.

Beverly Mciver

Beverly McIver is an acclaimed visual artist whose work examines racial, gender, social identity, and occupational identity. McIver's work has been reviewed in The New York Times and named one of the “Top Ten in Painting” in Art in America in 2011. She is the subject of an HBO feature-film documentary, “Raising Renee". McIver’s work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Mint Museum, and significant corporate and private collections.

McIver has received grants and awards including the Rome Prize, 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anyone Can Fly Foundation,  Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Tiffany Foundation Award and a Creative Capital Award. She has held residencies at Yaddo, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, and Penland School of Arts and Crafts. McIver received her MFA in painting from Penn State University, an honorary doctorate from North Carolina Central University, and is currently the Esbenshade Professor of the Practice of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University.

DREAD SCOTT

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. His work is exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the new law by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He has presented a TED talk on this. Dread's studio is now based in Brooklyn.

His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Cristin Tierney Gallery, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa, and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He is a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships form Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant. In 2019, he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a public performance, which was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times and CNN. His art is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum.

Molly Surno

Molly Surno is a visual artist and cultural curator, who creates compelling programs bringing the art world to a greater audience.  She blends visual art, film, performance, music, food, and technology creating installations and experiences in cultural institutions and beyond. Surno developed the contemporary arts program, Landscape, housed within the walls of Brooklyn’s beloved nightclub Elsewhere. A portion of every ticket sale funds artists' projects reimagining the architecture and notions of patronage. In 2008, she founded her nomadic performance series Cinema 16, which pairs contemporary musicians with experimental films. Named after the New York-based avant-garde film society in 1947 and inspired by Maya Deren's Greenwich Village exhibition of experimental films, Cinema 16 has shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Kitchen, MoMA/PS1, Museum of Moving Image, among others. Surno has worked for the team that created TEDx and as the first Outreach Director for Kickstarter. She served as the Art Director for Elsewhere and consults on curating, cultural production, and creative programming. Molly was awarded a BA from UC Santa Cruz and an MFA Columbia University.

ELA TROYANO

Ela Troyano is a writer, director and producer. Her work has been shown at numerous international festivals, as well as the Drawing Center, 80WSE Gallery, El Museo, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA, where it is also in the permanent collection. Highlights include: Sundance screenwriting workshop with Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Berlin International Film Festival Teddy Bear Award for Carmelita Tropicana Your Kunst is Your Waffen—Your Art is Your Weapon (1994); and awards from Creative Capital, Ford Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Latino Public Broadcasting, ITVS, NYSCA, Rockefeller Media, Theo Westenberger Estate, and United States Artists. Troyano has worked in professional development since 2003. She developed and leads Creative Capital’s signature Spanish language program and Leslie-Lohman Museum’s Artist Fellowship