Diane Carr is a visual artist whose artworks explore our surroundings and reference the natural environment. She received an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York, and a BA from American University.

She has exhibited work with CLEA RSKY Gallery, Glyndor Gallery, Wave Hill, Arsenal Gallery, Islip Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Garis & Hahn, Allegra LaViola Gallery, NARS Foundation, Gallery Korea, Rowan University, SPACES Gallery and CUE Art Foundation.

She has received grants and awards from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Artists Space, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Americans for the Arts, and the American Institute of Architects, and commissions with New York City’s MTA Art & Design and the GSA Art in Architecture program.

Lee Cotman (they/them) writes historical screenplays with care and authenticity. Grounded in academic research, their work centers marginalized and working-class people, and insists that humans in the past were as nuanced as we are today. Common themes include gender fluidity, community care, and the absurdity of social hierarchies.

Lee is currently studying for a Master’s degree through SUNY Empire State University. Their research is focused on medieval film as a site for public history, including ways to enhance the genre’s representation of queerness and gender diversity. Their thesis project will take the form of a well-researched screenplay set in medieval England, featuring a transgender protagonist.

Their poetry has been published extensively in the U.S. and U.K. and has placed in multiple contests. Since 2015, Lee has been a student at Circus Culture, where they’ve developed two full-length shows in collaboration with other local artists. They live in Ithaca, New York with their partner, child, and two “pet” Juneberry trees.

Flynn Larsen is a photographer making photos and videos in her domestic space in order to explore rest, contemplation, and play. She is interested in the vastness that lies beneath the surface of our list-oriented days, and investigates how we can reclaim our full humanity in the midst of grind culture and nuclear family parenting through humor, dance, and making space for deep reflection. She lives in Beacon, NY with her husband and two children.

Michael Gac Levin was born in Los Angeles in 1984. His latest solo exhibition took place at My Pet Ram, New York, in 2024, preceded by presentations at Hexum Gallery, Montpelier, VT; and at Parts & Labor, San Antonio, TX.

He has shown extensively in group exhibitions, including at The Hole and Deanna Evans Projects, New York; at Marvin Gardens, Brooklyn; as well as online with Taymour Grahne and Platform. His work has been featured in Artmaze Magazine and Maake Magazine, and he has completed special projects online for the Jewish Museum and SCREEN_.

He holds an MFA from Pratt Institute (2015) and a BA from the University of Chicago (2006).

Kate May-Price inevitably finds herself living with the beginning and end in mind. She writes to examine emotional complexity and to re-enliven life when it’s grey outside her home in New York City. Her poetry has recently appeared in Hog River Press.

Santina Amato, born in Melbourne to Italian immigrants and based in the U.S. since 2010, creates multidisciplinary work that spans sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance. Her practice examines the female experience and personal identity through materials like bread dough, used bedsheets, and discarded furniture, reimagining the domestic landscape from the perspective of a single, immigrant woman. Rooted in her upbringing in a traditional Italian household, Amato uses these materials to symbolize emotional labor, resilience, and transformation.

Amato holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum. Her recent exhibitions include AIR Gallery’s 16th Biennale I Woke Up Dreaming, curated by Patricia Margarita Hernández, and The Sixth AIM Biennale at the Bronx Museum. She was the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA, and a finalist for the Monira Foundation residency. Her work has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Queens Arts Fund, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Exhibitions include the Bronx Museum, Spring/Break, Westbeth Gallery, Here Arts Center, and Governors Island in NYC; MoCA Tucson; the Arts Club of Chicago; and Samek Art Museum. Her work appears in collections at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, the Art Institute of Chicago, Samek Art Museum and the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia.

Lindsey Guile (she/her) is a figurative artist whose large-format charcoal drawings delve into themes of body liberation, femininity, and self-confidence, with a particular focus on fatness and size discrimination. Her work has been exhibited at The Arnot Museum, The Dorsky Museum, The Birke Art Gallery, Untitled Space Gallery, The Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, and more. She has also held artist residencies at Sparkbox Studios in Ontario, Canada, and The Blue Mountain Center in New York.

Beyond the visual arts, Lindsey is actively involved in the performing arts. She has served as both a director and performer in The Vagina Monologues, sings soprano in the college chorus, and studies improvisational theater.

Lindsey is an Associate Professor of Visual Art at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She holds an MFA from SUNY New Paltz, as well as BFA and MA degrees from SUNY Oswego. In 2023, she was honored with the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

C. Julian Jiménez is a Queer, Puerto Rican, and Dominican playwright. They hold an MFA in Acting from The New School for Drama. Julian is a Professor of Theatre at Queensborough Community College and the Chairperson of the Department of Communication, Theatre, & Media Production. Their work is published through TRW plays.

Playwriting awards include: New Dramatist Residency (Class of 2025), Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop Fellow at The Lark (2019/2020), Pipeline Theatre Company PlayLab (2017 & 2018), LaGuardia Community College’s LGBTQ History Project Grant (2018), Queens Arts Council Grant (2015), Best New Work Motif Award (2014), and The Public Theater Emerging Writers Group (2009).

Productions include: Man Boobs (Pride Films & Plays, 2011), Animals Commit Suicide (First Floor Theater, 2015), Locusts Have No King (INTAR, 2016), Bundle of Sticks (INTAR, 2020), and Alligator Mouth, Tadpole Ass (Theatre Rhinoceros, 2020), ¡OSO FABULOSO! & The Bear Backs (INTAR/McKittrick Hotel/Joe’s Pub, 2021), Bruise & Thorn (Pipeline Theatre Company 2022), and Ronald Reagan Murdered My Mentors (Fuse Theatre Ensemble). Other plays include: The Guilt Mongers or Los Traficantes De Culpa… (Winner – Nuestras Voces at Repertorio Español, 2017), Julio Ain’t Goin’ Down Like That (Commissioned by CUNY/NYC Council through the Office of Speaker Corey Johnson, and the Office of Daniel Dromm- District 25, 2019), Oh Deer! (INTAR Theatre Commission, 2020), Mind & Ass (New Dramatists Podcast Plays Commission, 2020), and Horny Orderly (New Dramatists Podcast Plays Commission, 2021).

Other projects include: Co-producer and co-writer of the hit web series, Bulk-The Series (Vimeo, 2011 & 2013), and Book Writer for the rock musical, The Navigator, featuring music by Alynda Mariposa Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff, (Public Theater commission, 2023).

Anne Arden McDonald (’19) is a Brooklyn based visual artist who makes images on photographic paper without using a camera or a negative.

While still working with photopaper, light, and chemistry, she uses historic processes like the photogram, and experiments to invent other ways of producing images. The methods are an unorthodox collection of materials and techniques from domestic and scientific realms brought into the darkroom, often coaxing or scrubbing an image into the photographic paper. This series explores circles and spheres as atoms or planets, representing the microcosm and macrocosm of recognizable life, as well as a symbol of growth and wholeness.

Anne’s work has been exhibited and published widely, her work is in the collections of six major museums, she has been to five residency programs, taught for six years at Parsons School of Design in New York, and lectured on many topics, mostly photography-related.

Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, Hana Widerman is a poet and essayist originally from California. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English and Creative Writing and won the James Richardson Award in Poetry.

She is currently an MFA student at Cornell University, where she works as an assistant poetry editor of EPOCH and teaches a first-year writing class in the Department of Literatures in English.

A 2024 recipient of Cornell’s George Harmon Coxe Poetry Prize, her poetry has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and appears or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Washington Square Review, The Journal, The Offing, The Poetry Society’s website, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere.

In the fall, she will return to Cornell University as a lecturer, teaching creative writing and academic composition.

Roni Aviv is a photographer and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. Roni works with photography, text, and mark making to give form to a psychological space of re-processing experiences. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.

Recent solo exhibitions include CEPA Gallery, NY and Real Art Ways, CT. Recent group exhibitions include The Bronx Museum, NY, Center for Book Arts, NY, Longwood Art Gallery, NY, and The Jewish Museum, NY. Aviv is a grant recipient of Artis Contemporary (2021) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2024). Recent residencies and fellowships include NARS (2021), the Center for Book Arts (2022), AIM Bronx Museum fellowship (2023), Centrum Residency (2024), and ProjectArt (2024-25).

Roni is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College and College of Staten Island where she teaches digital and analog photography.

Jessica Cuello’s (’15) Liar was selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize and her manuscript Feral is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2027. Cuello is also the author of Yours, Creature (JackLeg, 2023), Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello was the recipient of a 2023 NYSCA Artist Grant and is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review. She teaches French in Central NY.

Jordan Ealey is a multidisciplinary Black feminist artist-scholar based in Rochester, NY. As a playwright, they create works that center intimacy, too much banter, secret feminist histories, big emotions, and lots of politics.

Their plays and musicals include: SILHOUETTES (book & additional lyrics; Finalist, 2025 New Works/New Voices Program); JEANNETTE (additional book; Loyola Marymount University); I DON’T (Barrington Stage Company); WOMEN WITHOUT VIRTUE (Single Carrot Theatre Company); and SELF PORTRAIT WITH DIRTY HAIR (The Keegan Theatre), among others. As a dramaturg specializing in new work development, they have worked with institutions such as WAM Theatre, True Colors Theatre Company, PlayPenn, Mosaic Theatre Company, Round House Theatre Company, Theatrical Outfit, and Hush Harbor Lab, among others. Jordan co-hosts and co-created Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast, which is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons.

Proudly blending creativity and scholarship, Jordan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester and is currently at work on a manuscript on Black women-created music theatre.

Alyssa McClenaghan is a New York based artist who received her MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College. She has shown her work throughout the U.S. and internationally with recent exhibitions at Main Street Gallery 495 ( Catskill, NY), The Rad Hourani Foundation (MTL), Hesse Flatow (Chelsea, NYC), Peep Space (Tarrytown, NY), and solo presentations with Paradice Palase at NADA x Foreland (Catskill, NY), Collar Works Gallery (Troy, NY), Deanna Evans Projects (Tribeca, NYC), and blah blah Gallery (Philadelphia, PA).

Alyssa’s work has been published in ArtMaze Magazine’s 20th Anniversary issue and was featured in Friend of the Artist Book: Volume 13 and she has been an artist in residence at the Studios at Mass MoCA, at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, the ChaNorth Residency run through ChaShaMa, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Working with materials typically used in construction, Alyssa’s work continually mines the ideas of labor, femininity, gender, and her own lived history. Enacting a labor intensive process, big box store construction materials are transformed and re-imagined into bodily objects, straddling a space between the psychological and the domestic.

Emily Tironi is a disabled mixed media collage artist based in Saratoga Springs, NY. Her works are a celebration of the disabled experience and the disabled body. She has an AAS in Media Arts from SUNY Adirondack and a BA in Disability Studies from CUNY School of Professional Studies.

In 2020, her work was included in the 31 Women Exhibit at the Sedona Arts Center and she had her first solo exhibition at Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, VT. In July 2022, Emily was included in the publication, Inside Their Studio: Deaf & Disabled Artists Reshaping the Arts and participated in her first artist residency at Salem Art Works. In May 2024, Emily had her fourth solo show at the Saratoga Springs Train Station through Saratoga Arts. Emily participates in NYC Crit Club’s Canopy 2.0 program and regularly shows her work.

Aaron Landsman is a multidisciplinary artist and teacher. His awards include a Creative Capital Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship. Aaron is obsessed with cities, shadows, anonymity and how we perform power.

His current and recent works include: Night Keeper, commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2023, now released as an album on Hallow Ground Records; the libretto for the new opera Follow, at the Gaudeamus Festival in The Netherlands. His new piece, All The Time in the World, a game-based performance about collective self-regard and social media, will premiere in 2027. His prior work has been commissioned and presented in the US, Netherlands, UK, Australia, Norway, Serbia and Belarus.

Aaron is the founder of Perfect City, a working group at the intersection of art, organizing, popular education and design. He co-authored The City We Make Together with Mallory Catlett, published by The University of Iowa Press in 2022. His writing appears, or will soon, in The Washington Post, Theater Magazine, The Iowa Review and Urban Omnibus. He is a Lecturer at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts.

Rebecca Fay O’Neill is an American filmmaker based in New York. Her short SPARKS LAMPINI premiered at the 2022 Palm Springs International ShortFest and won Best Film at the Kas International Short Film Festival. She co-produced IMOGENE, which premiered at the 2023 Festival de Cannes (Official Selection, La Cinef) and screened at Telluride Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, and Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Rebecca is an alumna of UC Santa Cruz (BA, History & Philosophy) and Columbia University (MFA, Film Directing). She is a member of the Writers Guild of America.

Timothy Ree is the author of BEASTING (2022), a debut collection of poetry conceived during the pandemic, both surreal and grounded in the particularities of Korean American experience, exploring race, politics, & family dynamics at the height of the plague where anti-Asian rhetoric and violence found its way around the globe.

The son of Korean immigrants, Tim teaches literature and writing at a public high school in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BA in English Literature from Wheaton College (IL) and an M.Div from Yale University.

His poems have appeared in Tribes, Great Weather for Media, and The Cortland Review. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Cave Canem, Poets House, and the Academy for Teachers. He is a recipient of the Robert Haiduke Poetry Prize from the Bread Loaf School of English.

Diana Schmertz started her art career in Amsterdam, Holland as a recipient of De Ateliers 63’ grant and residency program.

She has received many grants and awards from organizations such as the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, the Aljira Emerge Fellowship program, and the Drawing Center. She has participated in residencies in Russia, Europe and the U.S.. Some solo shows include: They Are Each Other For A While, at Zillman Museum of Art, Bangor Maine, Soma, Muriel Guépin Gallery ,LES, NYC, “Don’t Say Other”, Art House Gallery, Jersey City, NJ, and Systemic Constructs for the Reduction of Uncertainty, at Garis & Hahn, in conjunction with Ideas City Biennial Festival sponsored by the New Museum, NYC.

Diana has made public art supported by multiple grants. Some include Declarations on Human Rights, presented through CHaShaMa & New York City Department of Transportation at Fordham Plaza, Bronx, NY and a permanent work at 125th Street Carnegie Library commissioned by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program in collaboration with New York Public Library and the Economic Development Corporation.

Jessica Stratton is an artist and educator residing in Ithaca, NY. Her work is an autobiographical examination of her joint damaged body, as well as a commentary on the healthcare industry in the United States.

Jessica employs a range of mediums and techniques including but not limited to photography, drawing, painting, collage, mixed media, and most recently, laser cut paper into her work. She generally works realistically to honor and validate hers (and others’) experiences in a chronic illness life. Her work aims to showcase beauty in what society otherwise deems as grotesque.

Jessica holds an MFA in Visual Art from the Vermont College of Fine Art.

Paul Anagnostopoulos is an artist whose paintings explore mythological desire and melancholy through contemporary queer narratives. He graduated with his MFA in Studio Art from CUNY Hunter College in 2023 and his BFA in Studio Art and Art History from New York University in 2013.

Paul presented solo exhibitions at Dinner Gallery (New York, NY), Leslie-Lohman Project Space (New York, NY), and GoggleWorks Center for the Arts (Reading, PA). His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art Archives and Library, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Yale University. 

Paul has participated in 11 artist residencies in the states and abroad, most notably the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), and the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists (Reykjavík, Iceland). His work has been featured in Hyperallergic, VICE, Artnet News, and New American Paintings. He is among the first recipients of the LI Grants for the Arts Artist Fellowship Award, distributed by the Huntington Arts Council (Huntington, NY). Paul is based in Queens, NY and Long Island, NY.

Alice Eve Cohen is a playwright, performer, author and educator based in New York City. Winner of the Jane Chambers Feminist Playwriting Award, the National Jewish Playwriting Contest, Oprah magazine’s 25 Best Books of Summer, and Elle Literary Grand Prix for Nonfiction, she received a 2025 NYSCA Individual Artist Theatre Commissioning Award for her play Oklahoma Samovar, which will be produced at La Mama in December.

Her plays have been performed at venues including the Kitchen Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, New Georges, Cherry Lane Theatre, The Women’s Project, Berkshire Theatre Group, LA Women’s Theatre Festival, and at festivals on four continents. Her acclaimed memoirs, What I Thought I Knew and The Year My Mother Came Back, are published by Penguin Books and Algonquin. A recipient of fellowships and awards from NYSCA, NEA, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Voice & Vision, and The Orchard Project, she has a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from The New School.

Alice leads creative writing workshops at a homeless shelter in NYC and has been a guest artist at schools and universities nationwide. She teaches playwriting at The New School, where she received the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Roger Ferney-Cortés is a Colombian American interdisciplinary artist, architect, and educator based in New York City. His practice incorporates public art installation, assemblage and interactive sculpture informed by the dialogues and contradictions of the street with nuanced attention to our cities’ material, political and social realities.

Roger’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery, Governor’s Island Arts, and Kickstarter Arts Features in New York, NY, and at SCI-Arc Gallery and Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, CA, among other venues. He is a recipient of the Creative Capital x Skoll Creator Fund, SCI-Arc Graduate Design scholarship, and he is a Ryman Arts scholar alumnus.

Roger earned a BA in art history from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an MA in architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). He is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture and a co-founding member of the Brooklyn-based design collaborative Stop 1 Projects.

Wayne Liu (Brooklyn) spent his formative years in flux, moving between his birthplace in Taiwan and various places across the U.S. This constant shifting, paired with a refusal to fully anchor his identity to either place, has shaped both his creative practices and the way he interprets the world—both within and beyond himself. His work integrates the materiality of time in photography, using it to explore the connections between historical processes and personal family memories.

He enjoys immersing himself with the chemicals of the darkroom and in the chlorinated waters of the swimming pool. He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Clemente on the Lower East Side.

Obi Taswell (they/them) is a queer and trans poet, abolitionist, and educator based in New York City. Their work draws on their own experiences and the power of language and storytelling to imagine the existence of disabled, trans bodies beyond systems of oppression.

They have received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Manhattanville College, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Juniper Institute at the University of Massachusetts. They have also been featured as a Brooklyn Poets Poet of the Week, and their work has been published in Third Iris, Eunoia Review, Pornstar Martini Magazine, Beyond Queer Words: A Queer Anthology, Lucky Jefferson and Qwerty Magazine.

Sergei Burbank (he/him) is a screenwriter, playwright, performer, audiobook narrator, and producer in New York City.

His works have been staged by the Scranton Shakespeare Festival, Quick Silver Theater Company, Oracle Theatre Inc., the BoCoCa Arts Festival, and the Planet Connections Festivity. His articles and short stories have appeared in Vernacular Journal, Indie Theater Now, NYTheaterNow, Parabasis, Howlround, fwriction:review, and Baseball Prospectus.

He is resident playwright with Quick Silver Theater Company and member of Actors’ Equity Association. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University and a BA in Drama from Kenyon College.

Jesse Egner is a queer artist and educator currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Often taking the form of playful and absurd photographic portraiture of himself and other individuals, his work explores themes such as queerness, body image, collaboration, humor, and play.

He received his BA from Millersville University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and his MFA from Parsons School of Design in 2020. His work has been exhibited and published globally and is included in the permanent collection at the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts.

He is a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship recipient and has participated in residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, Alaska; Studio Vortex in Arles, France; Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York; the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont; and TILT Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Julian Guy is a trans and queer poet and essayist currently finalizing his first book of poetry, In The House Where I Love You, which was longlisted at YesYes Books and named a finalist for the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize.

Julian’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Sundress Publications’ Transmasculine Poetics, Queerlings Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Catapult and more.

A 2023 Tin House Scholar and 2024/25 Tin House Reading Fellow, Julian teaches community writing workshops through the Onondaga Public Library System. His work has been supported by Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Tin House, and Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Find him online at julianguy.com.

Asia Stewart is a performance artist whose conceptual work centers her body as a living archive. Based in the United States, she devises rituals that reflect the way she weathers life in a deeply extractive society. Many of her performances unfold as social experiments that negotiate terms of agency and power with audiences.

Asia’s performances have been supported by organizations that include The Bronx Museum, The Shed, Franklin Furnace, A.I.R. Gallery, Marc Straus Gallery, Marble House Project, GALLIM, The Watermill Center, and the Brooklyn Arts Council.

Asia routinely questions how live art can be documented and represented across multiple mediums. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. Her first series of prints is also held in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC.

Natsuki Takauji is a Japanese interdisciplinary artist based in Queens, NY. Her work explores displacement, diaspora, gender, and trauma healing through both personal expressions and communal participation. Her practice ranges from intricate mixed-media sculpture, multimedia art, drawing, and painting to socially engaged and large-scale public art.

After receiving a B.A. in Creative Writing from Waseda University in Japan, she realized her strong desire to explore tactile and visual expression and moved to NYC. She studied Fine Art Painting and Sculpture at The Art Students League of New York, where she is currently an instructor of Metal Sculpture and Co-Director of Works in Public program in partnership with the NYC Parks Department. She also co-founded The Artist Gardener NYC to activate community gardens through art exhibitions and programs.

Natsuki had her most recent solo exhibit, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” at Kapow Gallery, and also recently showcased at Japan Society, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Kinosaito Art Center, JFK Airport in New York, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and Kameyama Art Trienniale in Japan, World Art Expo Seoul in Korea, and Oeno Gallery in Canada. She is a recipient of Ankhlave Garden Project Fellowship, Artport Residency Fellowship, Queens Art Fund Grant, Nessa Cohen Grant, and more.

Avital Burg (b. Jerusalem, Israel; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) creates self-reflective still-life and portrait paintings rooted in her deep connection to the natural world. In recent years, she has focused on crafting highly textured works that feature everyday imagery, particularly wildflowers gathered from the edges of her Brooklyn neighborhood. Her paintings emerge from a slow, labor-intensive process, often involving prolonged, direct observation of her subjects. Time is a central theme in her work, as her botanical subjects undergo natural decay during the rendering process, encapsulating the passage of time within a static picture plane.

Avital attended the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem; the Hatahana School of Figurative Drawing and Painting, Tel Aviv; the Slade School of Art, London; and the New York Studio School. Her solo exhibitions include Browse & Darby in association with Crean and Company, London, UK; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, New York, NY; Slag Gallery, New York, NY; and Neve Schechter Gallery, Tel Aviv, ISR. Her work was also part of two-person exhibitions at Arts at AJU, Los Angeles, CA, and Club Cultural Matienzo, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She was the May 2022 artist in residence at the Interlude Residency in NY, and at the Peleh Residency in California in 2019.

Alida Dean‘s poems and short stories have recently appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Forge, Ninth Letter, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other venues.

She earned her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati and teaches online fiction workshops through the nonprofit Literary Cleveland.

Alida lives in Ithaca with her partner, daughter, dog and two cats. These days she spends a lot of time listening to audiobooks while going for long stroller walks.

Caroline McAuliffe is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer. She blends life and art through costume and play using narrative scenes that explore the identity-shifting experience of motherhood, its myths, and her desires and discomforts within the role. Her work has appeared in group shows both nationally and internationally. She lives and creates in Brooklyn with her wife, Karen, and kid, Sal.

Marcus Newton is an artist based in Binghamton, New York. He has a deep interest in a nuanced wilderness: one that grows between the cracks in sidewalks and along the contours of civilization. Through photography and experimental image-making, he explores the complex ecologies of built environments such as retention ponds, landfills, and parking lots. By incorporating found and foraged materials—plastics, carbon, salts, and natural fibers—he both collaborates with and draws directly from these hybrid ecosystems.

Marcus’ work has been exhibited nationally and in Canada, including recent exhibitions at the Morris Gallery of Contemporary Art in Marshall, MO; Coker University in SC; the Exposure Photography Festival in Alberta; and Ohio University in Athens, OH. He is the Photography Specialist/Studio Technician at Binghamton University, where he also teaches photography.

Emily Zemba is a playwright and screenwriter who creates work that is funny, formally inventive, and female driven. The 2021 production of Emily’s play Superstitions – as part of The Pool 2021– was praised by Helen Shaw at New York Magazine as “Elegant and weird” and “a return to what Off-Off was originally for.”

Some of Emily’s other plays include The Strangers Came Today (Society: at New Ohio Theater), Deer and the Lovers (First Floor Theater), and Have You Been There (Williamstown Prof. Training Company). Her work has been developed with support from places like People’s Light, Boston Court Pasadena, Two River Theater, Rattlestick, New York Stage and Film, and more. 

In addition to plays, Emily enjoys creating guided theatrical tours and audio experiences – including the acclaimed OF A MIND: Oklahoma City (OKC Rep 2022). Emily is an affiliated artist with New Georges and The Playwrights Center, and a member of Society Theatre Company. She is adjunct theater faculty at Manhattanville College. BA: Sarah Lawrence; MFA: Yale School of Drama | emilyzemba.com