Collaborative Artists

Alexandria Bombach (they/them) is an award-winning filmmaker and story consultant known for character-driven documentaries capturing human stories with empathy and depth. Living in their hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico, they are building a residency for documentary filmmakers working to sustain their craft in a time when pursuit of truth matters more than ever.

Instagram handle: alexandriajb
Photo credit: Kerry Kehoe

American Artist (b. 1989) makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, design, and video. Artist is a grant recipient of Creative Capital, Artadia, and Trellis Art Fund and is an alumni of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have held solo exhibitions at MIT List Center, Queens Museum, REDCAT and Pioneer Works. They have also participated in exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul. Artist is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art among others. They are on the board of directors of the School for Poe*c Computation and are a visiting critic at Yale School of Art.

[Photo credit: Myles Loftin]

Andrea Chung lives and works in San Diego, California. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York, and a Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Her recent biennale and museum exhibitions include Prospect 4, New Orleans
and the Jamaican Biennale, Kingston, Jamaica, as well as the Chinese American Museum and California African American Museum in Los Angeles, and the San Diego Art Institute. In 2017, her first solo museum exhibition took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, You broke the ocean in half to be here. She has participated in national and international residencies including the Vermont Studio Center, McColl Center for Visual Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been written about in the Artfile Magazine, New Orleans Times, Picayune, Artnet, Los Angeles Times, and International Review of African-American Art, as well as a number of academic essays looking at the subject of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean.

Ann Johnson Born in London, England and raised in Cheyenne, WY, Ann Johnson is a graduate of Prairie View A&M University in Texas, (where she now teaches) and received a BS in Home Economics. She has received an MA in Humanities from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, and an MFA from The Academy of Art University, in San Francisco with a concentration in printmaking. At Prairie View she received the distinguished Presidents Faculty of the Year award, and Art Teacher of the year. Primarily an interdisciplinary artist, Johnson’s passion for exploring issues particularly in the Black community has led her to create engaging works such as: The Hoop Dreamin Collection. A series of decorative basketball goals that explore the social issue of a Hoop Dream. It Is the Not Knowing That Burns My Soul, an investigation of exploratory mixed media works that examine the “Black Indian”. Her series Converse: Real Talk has been exhibited at Women and Their Work in Austin, TX, The Kansas City Art Institute, and The Community Folk Art Center in Syracuse, NY. Johnson has been an invited resident at: Tougaloo Art Colony in Jackson, MS, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston CAMLAB, Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, The Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, The Plains Fine Art Museum in Fargo, ND, and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. She was resident guest artist at Kansas City Art Institute in 2023. In 2024 she was an Artadia Finalist. Johnson was included in the Texas Biennial in 2013, and 2021. She was acknowledged as an “Artist to Watch” in the International Review of African American Art and is a member of the Bearden 100 (honoring artist Romare Bearden). She is a member of the ROUX Collective and is co-founder of the organization PrintMatters and PrintHouston. In 2023 Johnson was listed as one of the most transformative artists of the year by Black Art In America. Johnson earned the name Sole Sister because she paints portraits with her feet. Johnson aspires to leave a legacy of challenging and thought-provoking work that will entice the viewer and inspire younger artists. Johnson is represented by Hooks Epstein Gallery Houston,  TX, and Spillman Blackwell Fine Art in New Orleans, LA.

Multimedia Artist. Social practitioner. Musician.

Aquil (‘AQ’) Charlton uses his imagination to envision a more just world. As an electronic musician, he performs live improvisations and collaborates with other electronic musicians and visual artists to create immersive experiences.

Since founding Mobile Music Box in 2016, AQ teaches intergenerational groups how to make instruments from recycled materials to encourage more environmental consciousness — particularly in communities of color. Additionally, he frequently engages the public in live music-making.

A Bronzeville resident, AQ is a teaching artist in his community and father to a young son with a passion for youth development.

Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer whose work spans photography, video, performance, sculpture, and mixed media. Her creative process is experimental and collaborative, blending research, poetry, oral histories, material experimentation, and somatic approaches to explore how memory, identity, and place are embodied.

She is an Afro-Caribbean woman who has lived in a few places, but most recently moved from New York to Washington State nine years ago, swapping the familiar density of concrete for the foreign spaciousness of the evergreen state. Drawing from her multi-im/migrant heritage and lived experiences, Berette approaches her practice as a site for communal inquiry and cultural storytelling. She considers questions of belonging, myth, trans*national identity, and exile as emotional terrains of yearning and desire.  She has exhibited widely, including Metamorphic Return (4Culture, 2024–25), My Oma (Kunstinstituut Melly, Netherlands, 2023–24), Glow in the Dark (Jacob Lawrence Gallery, 2024), New Dialogues (National Gallery, 2023–24), Migration Stories (Art Alive, India, 2021), and ReKON (Annenberg Space for Photography, 2019). Her works are held in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Jamaica and the International Center of Photography (as ‘SeBiArt’).  Her award-winning experimental short, land.scape notes on exile (2025) is in selection screenings at festivals worldwide, including Cadence Video Poetry Festival and Seattle Black Film Festival in Seattle, the New York African Film Festival at BAM, and Short Way Int’l Festival in São Paulo. 

Berette’s work has been generously supported with grants and residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Seattle Foundation, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, National Performance Network, Jack Straw Cultural Center, CENTRUM, and others. Her commissioned writing spaces include catalogs, editorials, journals, and artist monographs. Publications of her written and visual work include Feminist Media Histories (UC Press), UNESCO Courier, MONDAY Art Journal (UW Press), O Quilombismo Reader (Archive Books/Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin), and Praise House (Archive Books Berlin, 2026). In 2024, she curated the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency exhibition at UW, where she also served as editor and contributor for the artist catalogue Simon Benjamin: A Bolt from the Blue. She was also the commissioned curator for the 2025 Neddy Finalist Exhibition at the Behnke Gallery at Cornish College for the Arts at Seattle University.

From 2021–2023, Berette received the inaugural Curatorial Fellowship at On the Boards, where she developed the socially-engaged work UN-[TITLED]—an immersive collaborative performance and oral history project on gentrification, displacement, and cultural memory in Seattle. The multi-scoped project was performed as site activations in formerly redlined Central and Chinatown Int’l Districts, and includes the publication, Si’ahl ATLAS: A Walking Guide of Community and Cultural Memory. She is also the founder of
Black Cinema Collective, a film programs and regranting initiative dedicated to showcasing global Afrodiasporic cinema, which is housed within her collaborative arts incubator,
i•ma•gine | e•volve ®.  Berette received a BA in Theater Arts from Marymount Manhattan College and MA in Cultural Studies from University of Washington.

Betelhem Makonnen is an artist from Ethiopia, based in Austin, Texas. Her practice, which includes photography, video, and installation, translates perception, memory, and place through anthropological, philosophic, and historical inquiries. She holds an MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and co-curates the Addis Video Art Festival.

Social Media:
#betelhemmakonnen

Carol Zou is a community-engaged artist whose work engages themes of spatial justice, public pedagogy, and intercultural connection in multiracial neighborhoods. They engage durational, process-based collaborations with community contributors using mediums of craft, media arts, and public installation. Their work gestures toward an interdisciplinary, liberatory future in which we are all hopefully a little more undisciplined.
I am on Instagram and Upscrolled as @coralzoa.

Ellington Robinson
Based in Washington, DC and the Virgin Islands, Ellington Robinson earned his MFA in Painting and Mixed Media from the University of Maryland, College Park. His work has been acquired by institutions worldwide, including the nation’s first museum of modern art, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Art in Embassies Program for the US Embassy of Oslo, Norway; the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in Abidjan, Republic of Côte d’Ivoire; and the Grand Crossing Library, Chicago, IL. Robinson has received such prestigious honors as the US Virgin Islands Ambassadorship for his contribution to and promotion of the cultural richness of the territory and the Caribbean (2013); the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, St. Croix, Residency (2015); and The Fountainhead Residency, Miami (2018). Robinson’s work is currently in the exhibition Rendering Memories in Color and Line at the Phillips Collection.
Social Media:
Instagram – @ellivesart

I am an interdisciplinary artist and art therapist based in Chicago. My studio arts and somatic art therapy practices exist independently, yet are intertwined as my professional training informs my artistic inquiry of how trauma manifests in the body. Incorporating tools from ancestral healing and spiritual wisdom for the recovery of the somatic experience while relating to the natural world. My visual arts practice rooted in photography expands through video, performance, sculpture and installation. As my material practice grows, my origins in photography influence ways I use materials to sensorily embody and frame concepts I grapple with. My art making process engages personal memories, reflections on present circumstances, and stories of participants/members of my community whose experiences intersect with mine. I balance play, art-based research, and knowledge gathered from my career in somatic-centered art therapy and trauma counseling. All of these components serve as a basis for my studio practice’s process. 

My artistic goal has consistently been to bring multiple worlds together, capturing portals and spaces between them. Finding subtle affinities between geologic time, somatic movement, gendered trauma, and Arabian Peninsula ceremonial healing rituals. Through relational merging and mapping of human and geological bodies, I vision their liberation. I envision liberation as embodiment of agency, resourcefulness on their own terms, restored and devoid of extraction. By doing so, I examine themes of access, agency, power, the invisibly visible, and potential erosion of socio-cultural conditioning distorting our shared realities. I work with the body as a site of transgenerational experiences, a container of memory, in correspondence to geologic time. Expanding on how land formations shaped by weathering and erosion parallel our human bodies’ vast inner worlds. Bodies and landscapes are constantly in flux, against the backdrop of time, a vital force shaping endurance in the face of change, redefining agency and adaptability. 

My current research explores two parallel threads, the renegotiation of trauma within an extracted, trauma-endured body as it moves towards belonging and re-emerges as a liberated body. Liberated from the seizing of autonomic trauma-responses, instead present in its inherent agency. Secondly, I attune to the experience of being desensitized and disembodied from the earth. Reorienting the body towards a reciprocal relationship with the earth. I explore these concepts through my artistic process moderating the somatic and internal tensions of grief and acceptance by tracing and re-embodying migratory ancestral healing practices linking bodies and land. These practices remind us to welcome vulnerability. Be humbled by natural cycles. To live in reciprocity with the land.

[Photo Credit:  Tamara Hijazi]

Hope McMath is a visual artist, educator, curator, art historian, cultural leader, and organizer who has shaped a practice around community care, truth telling, and social action. As a printmaker her work is activated in both movements for change and as a personal excavation of her ancestry and deep roots in the story of the South. Hope is the founder of Yellow House, a cultural space in Jacksonville, FL that sits at the intersection of art and social justice.
Social Media
FB: @hopemcmath
@yellowhousart
IG: @hopemcmath
@yellowhouseart

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago.They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah. As a data thief, Jared Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of Black American subculture, history and technology. Jared repurposes these fragments in audio, performance, text, and video to investigate the relationship between history and digital, immaterial space.

Photo Credit: Eva(n) Geczy
Instagram: @jsbxse

Jenelle Esparza (American, b. 1985) is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in the coastal city of Corpus Christi, TX. She attended the University of Texas at San Antonio and received her BFA in photography in 2010. She currently lives and works in San Antonio. Esparza examines the lesser-known history of cotton and labor in South Texas through textiles and installation, and incorporates concepts of body+land connection, history, gender, identity, culture, and race. Her recent projects utilize textiles and found objects to explore the parallels between landscape and bodily experiences, and the implications of generational trauma. Esparza has exhibited nationally in institutions such as The DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, IL; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Momentary in Bentonville, AR; and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She is the recipient of numerous honors including National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) Artist Grant (2015), the Artpace International Artist Residency (2018), and the US Latinx Artist Fellowship (2024). Her work is also included in the permanent collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Art Museum of South Texas.

Presa House Gallery Instagram: @presahousegallery
Facebook: @PresaHouse
My (Jenelle’s Instagram): @jenelle.esparza

jireh l. drake (they // them) is a Chicago-based unapologetic queer, black, trans non-binary baddie & abolitionist organizer. they are a mixed media drawing and sculpting artist & writer. ​they use art to tenderly unearth trauma & imagine new worlds where we strive to put things as right as possible to heal.

Jon Henry is a visual artist working with photography and text, from Queens NY (resides in Brooklyn). His work reflects on family, sociopolitical issues, grief, trauma and healing within the African American community. His work has been published both nationally and internationally and exhibited in numerous galleries including Aperture Foundation, Smack Mellon, and BRIC among others. Known foremost for the cultural activism in his work, his projects include studies of athletes from different sports and their representations.

He was recently named one of The 30 New and Emerging Photographers for 2022, TIME Magazine NEXT100 for 2021. Included in the Inaugural 2021 Silver List. He recently was awarded the Arnold Newman Grant for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture in 2020, an En Foco Fellow, one of LensCulture’s Emerging Artists and has also won the Film Photo Prize for Continuing Film Project sponsored by Kodak.

[Photo credit: Luis Santana]

Jorge Félix is an Afro-Boricua multidisciplinary artist, and curator based in Chicago. He became known in the city for his ‘Body Construction’ painting installations where he molded the canvas to create reliefs, sculptures, and installations. From an early age, Félix’s grandfather instills a passion for community organizing, and in Chicago, he found that the research of food culture could become a tool to ease community in conversations. Félix’s Sofrito Conversations welcome community leaders, elected officials, artists, and neighbors to make old fashion recipes of ‘sofrito’ at a round table while facilitating a storytelling conversation about cooking traditions. There Félix highlights a dialogue that celebrates cultural differences and commonalities among participants to create bonds among participants. Félix focuses his work on the Hermosa neighborhood where he is a 22-year resident but also addresses issues relevant to the northwest community of Chicago. Félix, a biracial gay man born in Puerto Rico, is particularly invested in addressing the racial divide between Latin@s and African Americans in northwest Chicago. Félix earned a Master of Fine Arts in painting and history from Bowling Green State University and a Master of Arts in Arts Administration from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Professor Jose Orozco is an expert in modern Mexican and Latin American history, as well as Chicano History. His interests are varied and include research on the history of Tequila in Mexico, Chicano art, and immigration. He is currently finishing a manuscript based on over two hundred letters written by a Mexican sharecropper between 1950 and 1952 to his daughter who lived in Stockton, California. He is also working on a book on the region of Los Altos de Jalisco, Mexico and the question of “whiteness” in post-Revolutionary Mexico. In addition, Orozco is a practicing artist whose work was featured in the book, Contemporary Chicano and Chicana Art: Artists, Works, Culture and Education (The Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2003).

Josué Esaú Romero Velasquez was born in Honduras, raised in San Antonio, and currently lives in Chicago. He is an educator at Arts + Public Life on the city’s South Side, sharing design and fabrication skills with youth. He is also a visual artist and multidisciplinary fabricator, building furniture, sets, and installations in support of his community. Josué holds a BFA from Southwest School of Art (now UTSA Southwest) and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. He is an alum of the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago) Center Program Biennial and Class of 2025.

Kiela is a lifelong Chicagoan with a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and 30 years of professional arts experience teaching, consulting, planning, and creating collaborative community-based mural projects. Kiela’s leadership in conceptualizing, designing, and creating art with community was also seeded by her family legacy of licensed architects/designers and civil rights activist parents. Her desire to collaborate with and empower other artists and non-artists community about the power of art and the importance of art spaces has fueled her engagement around concepts of artist ownership and community placekeeping.

Le’Andra LeSeur (b. 1989 in Bronx, NY) is a multidisciplinary ar=st whose work encompasses a range of media, including video, installa=on, photography, pain=ng, and performance. Her body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, LeSeur provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins. The artist has received several notable awards, including the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2024-2026), Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize, and the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018). LeSeur has appeared in conversation with Marilyn Minter at the Brooklyn Museum, presented by the Tory Burch Foundation, and has lectured at The New School, NY, NY, and the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, among others. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at MFA Boston, Boston, MA; Swivel Gallery, NY, NY; The Shed, New York, NY; Marlborough, New York, NY; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Assembly Room, New York, NY; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Arnika Dawkins, Atlanta, GA and others. Residencies include Pioneer Works, iLab at The University of the Arts, Visual Studies.

Lovie Olivia is an autodidact mul1disciplinary ar1st who employs pain1ng, printmaking, collage and installation works that engage with the archives of multiple marginalized embodiments. Her practice takes cues from the decorative, ornamental and pop arts miscellany and considers the poetics of Black historic, visual vernacular, Domestic interiority, Southern hospitality and Queer aesthetics through a profusion of mediums and methodologies. Her work aims to disrupt the preexisting art canon by prioritizing variations on cultural models. Olivia’s work further explores these concurrent corporealities with culturally loaded materials from the past like Plaster. Her usage of plaster adopts an au courant process of fresco-secco, buon fresco and castings specific to her style. Her Collages utilizes clinical files in concert with layers of extracted refuse and incised renderings fabricated into compelling works on paper and Sculptures that gesture to the archaic and futurist optics of design that when arranged into museful installations, beckon the viewer with curiosity and inquiry. Olivia’s practice is informed by the simultaneity of Black, Southern, Queer, Womanist existance and is manifested through a performances of excavation that furnishes a liminal landscape for her to explore the multidimensionality of marginalised Americans. Joy, liberation, jubilee, pleasure and leisure keep score and these notions do not relent; instead they serve as sparks to her radically creative impulses.

Marlon Tobias (b. 1988, Queens, NY) is a visual artist and art educator whose work reclaims and amplifies marginalized narratives, particularly within the African diaspora. Rooted in drawing, painting, and installation, his practice often draws on archival materials and collected objects to  explore themes of erasure, Black rural southern traditions, spirituality, place, domesticity, and community.

His first solo exhibition, To Come Together, To Get Together, was presented at the Museum of Florida Art and Culture. Tobias’s work has since been featured at the 2025 Chicago Expo Art Fair and exhibited at institutions including the Art Center Sarasota, the Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.