Elena Ailes

"Elena Ailes (b. Albuquerque, NM) is concerned with the encounters, intimacies and discordances found between human (actions, bodies, histories) and nonhuman (thing, being, astral) worlds.

She has presented her texts, videos, and installations widely, including at Apparatus Projects (Chicago), the SculptureCenter (NYC), Randy Alexander Gallery (Chicago), Sector2337 (Chicago), the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Cambridge), and 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago.)

She is interested in that which makes her a better person and a worse person, especially in theory. In reality, she is an artist and writer living and working in Chicago, and currently teaches at SAIC.

Visit her site at elenaailes.com

Cecil McDonald Jr

I am most interested in the intersections of masculinity, familial relations, and black culture's artistic and intellectual pursuits, particularly as this culture intersects with and informs the larger culture. Through photography, video, and dance/performance, I investigate and question the norms and customs governing our understanding of each other, our families, and the myriad of societal struggles and triumphs. I studied fashion, house music, and dance club culture before receiving an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. I currently serve as a lecturer at The School of The Art Institute and as an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago.

My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with works in the permanent collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Chicago Bank of America LaSalle Collection, and Museum of Contemporary Photography. I was awarded the Joyce Foundation Midwest Voices & Visions Award, the Artadia Award, The Swiss Benevolent Society, Lucerne, Switzerland Residency, and the 3Arts Teaching Artist Award. I participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence program in July 2013. In 2016, the first edition of my monograph In The Company of Black was published and was shortlisted by the Aperture Foundation for the 2017 First PhotoBook Award.

Visit his site at www.cecilmcdonaldjr.com

Rhonda Wheatley

Rhonda Wheatley is a multidisciplinary artist, intuitive energy worker, and educator whose installations and interactive projects are grounded in the speculative and metaphysical. Her recent projects include solo shows at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC), and Aurora Public Art and group shows at the South Side Community Art Center, the Lubeznik Center for the Arts, 6018North, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), Buffalo AKG Art Museum (NY), and Art League of Houston. Wheatley has also performed as part of the MCA’s In Progress series, at Gallery 400 (UIC), HPAC, The Terrain Biennial, and the Eclipsing Festival.

As part of her practice, Wheatley facilitates workshops centered in healing and personal transformation. She’s partnered with organizations and academic institutions throughout Chicagoland and across the United States, including Creative Capital, NYC Crit Club, Ox-Bow School of Art, The University of Chicago, Threewalls, Indiana University, Chicago Artists Coalition (CAC), 6018North, and more. Additionally, Wheatley served as ‘Healer in Residence’ for the pilot “Healing Centered Practices” program, which served The Terra Foundation’s Art Design Chicago partner organizations, 2024-2025.

For 11 years Wheatley has taught art to students of all ages at HPAC. She also taught contemporary art at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis for several years. She was a recent Jackman Goldwasser Radicle Resident at HPAC, a Loghaven Fellow, and a recipient of CAC’s inaugural Coney Family Award and the 3Arts ‘Make a Wave’ Grant. She received her MA from DePaul University and BA from Loyola University.

Visit her site at www.rhondawheatley.com

Jenny Polak

Jenny Polak’s large-scale interventions in public space and intimate subversions of domestic design highlight and transform unequal social relations. The art is fueled by her work in architecture, family history of migration, and collaborations with directly impacted community members. Raised in coastal communities in England, she is inspired by waterfront structures, signals and flotation equipment. Her first public work in the US was installed on Lower Manhattan’s East River waterfront.

Her art has been exhibited widely and she has created site-responsive, community engaged projects for Socrates Sculpture Park, MoMA/PS1, Concerned Citizens of Hobart, IN, the Center for Arts and Public Life, Chicago, Griffiss International Sculpture Garden in Rome NY, Exit Art and The Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Since 2020 she has worked with members of the Fortune Society - people rebuilding lives after incarceration - co-creating artworks that give a platform to their experiences. Her latest project, for MoMA PS1, includes protective puffer outfits whose stuffing is made from participants’ shredded documents.

Polak has degrees in Architecture (Cambridge University,) Art (St. Martins School of Art, London) and an MFA (School of Visual Arts) and was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her work has been discussed in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Bomb Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail and has won support from Creatives Rebuild NY, MoMA PS1, BRIC, Villa Albertine, NYFA, the Graham Foundation, Franklin Furnace, and residencies including Camargo Foundation, Northwestern University, Newark Museum, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Visit her site at jennypolak.com

Christian Ortiz

Christian Ortiz was born in Mexico but has lived in Chicago most of his life, where he works as an artist and educator. Christian received his BFA in fiber studies and BSED in art education from Northern Illinois University, and his MFA in fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There he was the first recipient of the Wilson/Livingstone Graduate Fellowship and received the World Less Travelled Grant, through which he researched weaving traditions of Oaxaca. In his practice, Christian uses fiber processes to explore themes around immigrant labor, migration, and displacement by connecting it to the immigrant labor experiences of his family and his own labor as an artist. Christian is a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the fiber and material studies department.

Visit his site at christianortizstudio.com

Chau Nguyen

Chau Nguyen (b. Hanoi, Vietnam) is a Vietnamese American conceptual artist based in Philadelphia. She navigates the intersection of art, technology, memory, trauma, and Vietnamese histories in her creation of transnational art objects. Nguyen received her BA in Fine Arts and History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and her MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her work has been in group and solo exhibitions at the National Liberty Museum, Delaware Contemporary, Woodmere Art Museum, Pentimenti Gallery, Temple Contemporary, Automat Collective, Studio Montclair, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (Vietnam), Gallery Steinsland Berliner (Sweden), and others. She has been awarded residencies including Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL), Millay Arts (Austerlitz, NY), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Byrdcliffe Artist Residency (Woodstock, NY), and others.

Nguyen has received fellowships, grants, and awards from The Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio at Temple University Libraries, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Woodmere Art Museum, Joseph Robert Foundation, Ragdale Foundation, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and others. Her work has been featured on WHYY, Artforum, Artblog, and Hanoi TV. She has held teaching positions at Moore College of Art and Design, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and Fleisher Art Memorial. She is on the Board of Directors at the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.

Visit her site at chaumnguyen.com

Antonietta Grassi

Antonietta Grassi was born in Montreal, Canada where she lives and works. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at museums and public galleries in Canada, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Quebec, the Katonah Museum of Art in New York and the Canadian Pavillion at Expo Dubai. She has participated in numerous artist residencies such the International Studio and Curatorial Program, the Ragdale Foundation, the Studios at MASS MOCA, the Vermont Studio Center, Banff Center for the Arts, Centre Sagamie and the Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie- Saint- Paul in Québec. Her work has been reviewed in various publications such as Artforum, Whitehot Magazine, Vie des Arts, Revue Esse, Canadian Art and The Globe and Mail. A monograph of her work including texts by curators Sylvie Lacerte and Laura Vigo was published by SAGAMIE Publications in 2024. She holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from l’Université du Quebec à Montréal. Since 1998, Grassi has been a professor in Visual Arts at Dawson College in Montreal.

Visit her site at www.antoniettagrassi.com

Whitney Bradshaw

Bradshaw is an artist, activist, educator, curator, documentary film producer and former social worker living in Chicago. Her work has been shown widely across the United States, including solo shows at Atlanta Contemporary, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the DePaul Art Museum, and Wave Pool Contemporary Art Fulfillment Center. The Museum of Contemporary Photography, the DePaul Art Museum, Northwestern School of Law and Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell collect her work, which has been published in Ms. Magazine, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Vogue. In 2023, Bradshaw was named one of NewCity Magazine’s top 50 Chicago Artists’ Artists. Both she and OUTCRY are the subject of a documentary film titled OUTCRY: Alchemists of Rage directed by Clare Major, which premiered at the Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco in June of 2024 and has been screening across the country at museums, galleries, film festivals, colleges and universities, community centers, and non-profit organizations. The most recent screenings were at The Broad Museum in LA, the Athena Film Festival at Barnard College in NYC, and at the McConnell Arts Center in Columbus, Ohio. Now curator at the Lubeznik Center for the Arts, she was previously the chair of the visual art conservatory at the Chicago High School for the Arts (ChiArts), an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago, and curator of the renowned LaSalle Bank Photography Collection.

Visit her site at www.whitneybradshaw.com

Susy Bielak

Susy Bielak is an artist and writer who draws upon encounters in daily life to speak to larger concerns including migration, displacement, and disaster. With a practice centered in drawing, painting and text, she also works in installation, photography, printmaking, and video. Her projects have ranged from drawings made with her breath to videos staged in sites of scientific testing, and from town hall meetings to sculptures transforming domestic furniture. Her collaborators include writers in exile, bus drivers, social workers, choreographers, engineers, and musicians. Bielak’s work has been collected, exhibited, and published widely, including by the Museo Tamayo, New American Paintings, Poetry Magazine, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Walker Art Center. Bielak received her MFA from the University of California San Diego, and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Lake Forest College, where she is currently a Mellon Fellow. Bielak regularly collaborates with Fred Schmalz, with whom she has been in residence at Grand Central Art Center, participated in the binational festival Lit & Luz, and performed at the MCA Chicago.

Visit her site at www.susybielak.com

Andre Barker

Andre Barker Jr. (b.1997) is a figurative painter from Detroit, Michigan. He graduated summa cum laude with his BFA from Wayne State University (2022) and MFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2024. Currently, he is an Adjunct Professor at the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art, Art History & Design at Wayne State University in Detroit MI, and is represented by M Contemporary Art. He has received two Art Activity and Achievement awards from Wayne State University, a Dwight W. Follett Continuing Graduate Student Fellowship, and a Diversity and Inclusion Award from Columbia College Chicago. He has shown his work at The 3 Square Art Gallery in Fort Collins, CO; The Buckham Gallery in Flint, MI; The KCAD Alluvium Gallery in Grand Rapids, MI; The Detroit Historical Museum in Detroit, MI; and a solo show at M Contemporary Art in Ferndale, MI in 2024. He was also selected by the Ragdale residency in Lake View, IL as the recipient of the 2025 Judy Sigunick Fellowship in the Visual Arts!

Visit his site at www.andrebarker.com

Ian Weaver

Ian Weaver is an artist and Associate Professor at Saint Mary's College, South Bend, IN. His M.F.A. is from Washington University in St Louis (2008). He has exhibited nationally, including at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM); The Chicago Cultural Center; and Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. His residencies include Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts; Ox-Bow; Ragdale; the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York; Yaddo and the Millay Colony, both in upstate NY. Weaver’s awards include: the DeHaan Artists of Distinction Award; Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award; Artadia, NY; Joan Mitchell Foundation, NY; and the Illinois Arts Council. He is in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis, MO; The Duke Wellington School for the Arts, Washington, D.C.; The Illinois State Museum in Springfield, IL; and many private collections in Saint Louis, Alabama, New York, and Los Angeles.

Visit his site at www.ianweaverartist.com

Nazafarin Lotfi

Nazafarin Lotfi is a Chicago based multidisciplinary artist, working in painting, sculpture, and drawing, often all at once. Using voids, negative space, shadow, and horizontality, Lotfi materializes the haunting power in the absent and seemingly immaterial, challenging the monumental and direct modes of representation. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA from the University of Tehran. Lotfi’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Artpace, Phoenix Art Museum, Tucson Museum of Art, Elmhurst Museum of Art, MOCA Tucson, among others. She is the recipient of 2023 Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence. Lotfi’s practice has received support from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona, and the City of Chicago. Lotfi is the founder of Hamrah Ars Club, a creative mentorship program for refugee-status youth.

Faylita Hicks

FAYLITA HICKS (she/they) is a queer multi-genre writer, interdisciplinary artist, Hoodoo practitioner, and cultural strategist working at the crossroads of social justice and spirituality. Author of A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), a 2024 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Award shortlist finalist, HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry shortlist finalist, and the debut memoir-in-essays, A Body of Wild Light: The Fall and Rise of an American Poet (Haymarket, 2027), Hicks is a 2025 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow, a 2024 Gwendolyn Brooks Living Legacy Honoree, a 2024 Chicago Reader’s Best Poet shortlist finalist, a 2023 Illinois Humanity’s Envisioning Justice Awardee, a 2022 Art for Justice Fund Awardee, and the winner of the 2021 Sappho Poetry Award and Best of Net Prize for Poetry. She was the solo performer in the nationally touring production of Your Healing Is Killing Me and was a featured spoken word recording artist on a Grammy-nominated album in 2024. Hicks holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Reno and is the recipient of several fellowships and residencies from Black Mountain Institute, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, the Center for Art and Advocacy, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and others.

She currently serves as Board Chair for The Guild Literary Complex, Core Faculty in Poetry with StoryStudio, adjunct faculty with the University of Reno’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Incline Village, and is a voting member of the Recording Academy. She currently lives, dreams, and creates in Chicago, IL.

Visit their site at WWW.FaylitaHicks.com

Sara Borjas

SARA BORJAS is a Xicanx pocha, a Fresno poet and a poetry editor at Noemi Press. Her debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff was published by Noemi Press in 2019 and won a 2020 American Book Award. Sara was named one of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets and has received fellowships from MacDowell, CantoMundo, The Poetry Foundation and others. Her work can be found in AGNI: To Never Have Risked Our Lives: A Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing, The Rumpus, Manoa, The Gettysburg Review, Catapult, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day by The Academy of American Poets, Alta and The Offing, amongst others. She teaches innovative undergraduates at CSU East Bay, believes that all Black lives matter and all Palestinian lives matter and will resist white supremacy and settler colonialism until Black liberation is realized and Palestine is free. Sara lives in Oakland and stays rooted in Fresno. Say their names.

Visit her site at www.saraborjas.com

Laura Joyce-Hubbard

Laura Joyce-Hubbard’s work appears in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction was selected as a Notable in Best American Essays 2022 and 2023 and won an AWP Nonfiction Intro Journal Award. Laura was Finalist in the National Poetry Series. She won The Iowa Review’s Veteran Writing Award, the Poetry Porch Prize, the Ned Stuckey-French Nonfiction Contest at Southeast Review, and the Individual Poem Prize and Essay Prize in the William Faulkner Pirate’s Alley Writing Competition. Laura’s work has been supported by Aspen Words, the Fine Arts Work Center, Longleaf Writers, Community Building Art Works, and the National Endowment for the Arts with a residency at VCCA. A twenty-year veteran of the US Air Force, she was among the first women to pilot the C-130 after legal exclusions were lifted. Currently, Laura serves as the inaugural Highland Park Poet Laureate and a fiction editor at TriQuarterly.

Visit her site at linktr.ee/laura.joycehubbard

Bruce Morrow

Bruce Morrow is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes writing, theater, filmmaking, and photography. His short film "In Dreams Begins…" won the Best LGBTQ Jury and Audience awards at the 2023 Paris Short Film Festival and has been shown at 11 other international film festivals. He has co-produced three full-length plays at Theater for the City in New York City. He is a former fiction editor at Callaloo and a co-editor of "Shade: An Anthology of Short Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent." His writing has been published in the New York Times and in numerous anthologies, including "Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream." His photography-based work has been included in group shows at Local Project, Gowanus Arts Pride All Day, the NYC LGBT Center, and Flush Gallery. He is the co-founder of scopOphilic, a digital art collective, and has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Ragdale Foundation Artist Residency, and the Kimbilio Black Writers Retreat.

Visit his site at brucemorrow.me

Amy Eaton

Amy is a creative nonfiction writer and Live Lit performer living in Chicago. She currently co-hosts the monthly Lady Live Lit show, MissSpoken, which features female identifying and nonbinary readers. She has performed with numerous Chicago Live Lit and storytelling shows, including Write Club Chicago, 20x2 Chicago, You’re Being Ridiculous, and Stoop Style Stories. Published work can be found in The Coachella Review, Mulberry Literary, and Hippocampus Magazine. Amy has also worked as a director, coach, choreographer, and arts educator for Urban Gateways and Gallery 37. She served as the Artistic Director of Evanston Children’s Theater and is the founder of Mudlark Theater Company.

Visit her site at www.amyeatonwriter.com

Ursula Pike

Ursula Pike is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the author of An Indian among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir from Heyday Books. Her work has been included in the collections Know We Are Here: Voices of Native California Resistance (Heyday Books) and A Fire to Light Our Tongues: Texas Writers on Spirituality (TCU Press). Her writing won the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest in the memoir category and has appeared in Lit Hub, Yellow Medicine Review, World Literature Today, and Ligeia Magazine. Ms. Pike has an M.A. in Economics from Western Illinois University. She is an enrolled member of the Karuk Tribe and lives in Western Oregon.

Visit her site at ursulapike.com

Alejandra Oliva

Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer and translator. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, and was honored with an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her book, Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration, was published by Astra House, and received a Whiting Nonfiction Grant. She was the Yale Whitney Humanities Center Franke Visiting Fellow in Spring 2022.

Visit her site at olivalejandra.com

Chelsey Hillyer

Chelsey Hillyer is a multi-genre writer. They were selected as the inaugural recipient of Ragdale's Anne Searle Bent Spiritual Artist Fellowship for their nonfiction work. Chelsey works in non-violent education and spiritual formation. Their latest writing project is nonfiction work that explores the relationship seeds and the human soul. They live in the Missouri River watershed.

Visit their site at www.amateurefforts.com