Marwa Arsanios

Marwa Arsanios (lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon) received her MFA from University of the Arts London in 2007, and was a researcher in the Fine Art department at Jan Van Eyck Academie from 2011 to 2012. She has had solo exhibitions at the Beirut Art Center (2017) the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2016), Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2016), Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015), and Art in General, New York (2015). Her work was also shown at the Thessaloniki Biennial (2015), 55th Venice Biennale (2013), l the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011), Home Works Forum in Beirut (2010, 2013, 2015), Ludwig museum (2016), the New Museum, New York (2014), M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2013), and nGbK, Berlin (2012). Screenings of her videos have taken place at the Berlinale, Berlin (2010, 2015), e-flux storefront, New York (2009), and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017, 2011). In 2012 Arsanios was awarded the special prize of the Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize. She was nominated for the Hans Nefkens Foundation award in 2014 and more recently the Paulo Cunha e Silva art prize. Marwa is also the co-founder of 98weeks research project.

Nicole J. Georges

Nicole J. Georges is a writer, illustrator, podcaster, and professor. Her Lambda Award-winning graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura, was called “engrossing, lovable, smart and ultimately poignant” by Rachel Maddow, and was an Official Selection at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Nicole does a weekly queer feminist art podcast called Sagittarian Matters, and is currently on a dog-themed book tour in support of her new graphic memoir, Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home.

Youmna Chlala

Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer born in Beirut and currently based in New York. Her work investigates the relationship between fate and architecture through drawing, video and performance, prose, and poetry. Her book of poetry, The Paper Camera, is forthcoming from Litmus Press. She is the founding editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art and the recipient of a Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Her writing appears in publications such as Guernica, BOMB, Prairie Schnooner, Bespoke, CURA, and MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies, among others. She has exhibited widely including in the Performa Biennal 2011, LIAF Biennal 2017, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, The Drawing Center, Dubai Art Projects, Rotterdam International Film Festival and Art In General. She is the co-founder of the Mutating Cities Institute and Associate Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies and Writing Department at the Pratt Institute.

Sara Jane Stoner

Sara Jane Stoner is the author of Experience in the Medium of Destruction (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2015), nominated for a Lambda Award in poetry, and the chapbook Grief Hour (Black Warrior Review, 43.2, Spring/Summer 2017); other writing can be found in VIDA (“Failing at Subjects”), the Recluse, La Vague, and Fence, but more often at live readings. She holds an MFA from Indiana University, and is a PhD candidate in English at CUNY Graduate Center. She has taught workshops at Poet’s House and Wendy’s Subway, as well as classes at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, the CUNYs, Bard Microcollege Holyoke, and the New England Literature Program through the University of Michigan. From 2014-2017, she served as the Reviews Editor for the Poetry Project Newsletter.

Rachel Valinsky

Rachel Valinsky is a writer, researcher, and translator living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, BOMB, East of Borneo, Millennium Film Journal, C Magazine, and Art21, among others. She was a curator for the Segue Reading Series in 2015 and has presented projects at Judson Memorial Church, Lisa Cooley, Spectacle Theater, and elsewhere. Rachel is a co-founder of Wendy’s Subway, a nonprofit library and writing space in Brooklyn and a contributing editor at Éditions Lutanie, Paris. She is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and currently teaches Art History at Hunter College.

Autumn Knight & John Pluecker

Autumn Knight & John Pluecker will present READ (Cont.), a collaborative performance combining movement, poems, improvisation, reading and writing. A continuation of an on-going collaboration that began in Houston, Texas in 2013 in two spaces: Tony Feher’s Free Fall exhibit at Diverseworks and Autumn Knight’s futz: a research method installation at Project Row Houses. An embodied conversation around ephemerality, bottles, trash, flawlessness, generational legacy and fantasy. Keywords: Gulf Coast, George Michael, cowboyhood, dirty water, Mary J. Blige, eating without hands, Whitney Houston, Nina Simone, knives, plates.

Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation and text. Her performance work has been in group exhibitions at various institutions including DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Skowhegan Space (NY), The New Museum, and The Contemporary Art Museum Houston. She attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and New York University (MA Drama Therapy). She is currently based in Harlem, NY, where she is an artist in residence of the Studio Museum of Harlem.

John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, translator and co-founder of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena. His work is informed by experimental poetics, radical aesthetics and cross-border cultural production. His texts have appeared in journals in the U.S. and Mexico, including The Volta, Mandorla, Aufgabe, eleven eleven, Third Text, Animal Shelter, HTMLGiant, and Fence. He has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press) and Feminism: Transmissiones and Retransmissions (Palgrave Macmillan). His most recent chapbooks are Killing Current (Mouthfeel Press) and Ioyaiene (Handmade for Fresh Arts Houston-based Community Supported Art Program). His book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was recently released.

Et Cetera Gallery

Et Cetera Gallery is a collective of multimedia artists whose current members are Galen Beebe, John West, Fontaine Capel, and Lauren Clark. Galen Beebe is a Boston-based writer and maker whose work been published by Full Stop, Hypocrite Reader, Patient Sounds, Hound, Satellite Press, and Bello Collective. She holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. John West makes things with words, code, and music. He is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction Writing at Bennington College and works as a data journalist at the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab. Fontaine Capel is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and facilitator whose work has appeared domestically and internationally: digitally, and IRL. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the alternative art space Hume Chicago and has worked as a teaching artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Marwen. She holds a BA from Oberlin College, where she studied Art History and Studio Art. Lauren Clark is a poet, classicist, and editor. Their first collection of poems, Music for a Wedding, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2016 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where they were the recipient of a Zell Fellowship, several Hopwood Awards, and a Civitas Fellowship. They work as Program & Development Coordinator at Poets House in New York.

M. NourbeSe Philip

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright who was born in Tobago, in the twin island state of Trinidad and Tobago, and now lives in Toronto. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Zong!, a novel, and three collections of essays. Wesleyan University Press brought out a new edition of She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks in 2015.

Sharon Hayes

Sharon Hayes is an artist who engages multiple mediums–video, performance, and installation–in ongoing investigation into specific intersections between history, politics and speech. Hayes’ work is concerned with developing new representational strategies that examine and interrogate the present political moment as a moment that reaches simultaneously backward and forward; a present moment that is never wholly its own but rather one that is full of multiple past moments and the speculations of multiple futures. From this ground, Hayes often addresses political events or movements from the 1960s through the 1990s. Her focus on the particular sphere of the near-past is influenced by the potent imbrication of private and public urgencies that she experienced in her own foundational encounters with feminism and AIDS activism. Hayes teaches in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Fine Arts.

Emji Spero

Emji Spero is a performance artist and writer living in Oakland, California. They are an editor at Timeless, Infinite Light and the author of almost any shit will do. They are currently working on Exhaustion: A Retching, a dry lyric essay that documents the affective weight of the accumulated, subthreshold violences, which daily permeate a body in transition. Code-switching between poetry and essay, Spero explores Jose Muñoz’s notion that “utopia exists in the quotidian.”

Autumn Knight

Fontaine Capel

Fontaine Capel is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and facilitator whose work has appeared domestically and internationally: digitally, and IRL. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the alternative art space Hume Chicago and has worked as a teaching artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Marwen. She holds a BA from Oberlin College, where she studied Art History and Studio Art.

The Poetry Project

Artists