About the Speakers

• Scott Vincent Campbell

  Scott Vincent Campbell (b. 1983) is an artist, arts administrator, and curator from New York, NY, who earned a BA in Fine Art from Haverford College in 2005 and an MFA from The University of Chicago in 2022. Campbell’s work has been exhibited across the US at institutions such as the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, IL; the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI; Library Street Collective in Detroit, MI; Big Medium in Austin, TX; and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and Pierogi Gallery in New York, NY. He was a resident at Red Bull Arts Detroit in 2016, and in 2017 became the first Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Campbell is a recipient of the SPARK Grant from the Chicago Artist Coalition, the Artist Grant from The Reva & David Logan Foundation, and a 2025 DCASE IAP award. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL, where he serves as the Midwest Programs Manager for Independent Curators International, was named one of Newcity’s 2024 Art 50, and recently curated Biennial 33 at the South Bend Museum of Art.

• Joseph Archie Cuillier III

  Joseph Archie Cuillier III (b. 1988, Marrero, LA), Co-Founder and Creative Director, is a multidisciplinary artist who explores Black radical pedagogies through social practice, installation, textile, and design, with a practice at the intersections of education, visual art, and design that centers on deconstructing histories to build counter-narratives. Currently based in New Orleans, LA, Cuillier received a master’s from Pratt Institute and previously held faculty positions at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute in New York City. His work has been exhibited, collected, and presented internationally at the New Museum, The Museum of Modern Art Library, Bauhaus Dessau, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, and The Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery at Pratt Institute, among others. Cuillier has been an artist-in-residence/fellow at Sweet Water Foundation via the Chicago Architecture Biennial, IdeasCity New Orleans, Spillways Antenna, the New Museum, The Laundromat Project, and A Blade of Grass. He is the co-director of The Black School and Black Love Fest with Shani Peters, and his work is deeply connected to a lineage of Black educational and community-building practices that inform the development of The Black School.

• Shani Vanessa Peters Cuillier

  Shani Vanessa Peters Cuillier, Co-Founder and Managing Director
  Shani Peters (b. 1981, Lansing, MI) is a multi-disciplinary artist/administrator based in New Orleans, LA. She holds a B.A. from Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from the City College of New York. Peters’ multi-disciplinary art encompasses activism histories, community care, and the creation of accessible imaginative experiences. She has presented work in the U.S. and abroad at the New Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in South Korea, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and the Bauhaus Dessau. Selected residencies include those hosted by the Mississippi Museum of Art (MS), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Laundromat Project (NY), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (NY), and Project Row Houses (TX). Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Creative Capital, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Peters has served as a faculty member of The City College of New York, Pratt Institute, and Parsons School of Design. In 2016, Peters co-founded The Black School with her partner Joseph Cuillier. Her practice contributes to a broader lineage of Black cultural and educational work centered on care, access, and collective imagination.

• Torkwase Dyson

  Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973 Chicago, IL; lives and works in Beacon, NY) describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining the history and future of black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with how space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by black and brown bodies. The artist has distilled a vocabulary of poetic forms to address the spaciousness of freedom and question what types of climates are born out of world building.

  Dyson studied sociology and social work at Tougaloo College, Mississippi (1996), and received a BFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University (1999) and an MFA in Painting from Yale University School of Art (2003). In 2026, Dyson debuted a commissioned work as a featured artist for the 59th Carnegie International, as well as a new installation for the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. This fall, she will have her first solo exhibition in Austria at Kunsthaus Bregenz, as well as her first solo show in Canada at Goldfarb Gallery at York University. She will also premiere new work for MoMA PS1’s Hard Art, a major exhibition examining the legacy of abstract painting by Black artists in the US from 1969 to today.

  _Assigned to terimhenderso@gmail.com_

• Brendan Fernandes

  Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is a Canadian artist based in Chicago whose interdisciplinary practice brings together dance and visual art to explore race, queer culture, migration, protest, and collective movement. Often taking hybrid forms that merge ballet, social dance, and political action, his work creates spaces for participation, solidarity, and belonging. Fernandes is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program and has received numerous honors, including the Platform Award (2024), the Creative Voice Award from Arts Alliance Illinois (2024), the Artadia Award (2019), and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020). His work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the National Gallery of Canada. Fernandes is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.

• Nu Goteh

  Nu Goteh is a designer, strategist, and educator who envisions conditions for communities to thrive. A recipient of the 2025 National Design Award (Emerging Designer), Goteh is the Co-Founder, Managing Partner, and Creative Director of Deem Journal and the Founder and Principal of ROOM FOR MAGIC[1] . Nu is at the forefront of an emerging generation of designers who integrate design, culture, art, community, and social practice. He has partnered with influential clients, including nonprofits such as the Art for Justice Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the World Peace Foundation; cultural institutions such as the National Memorial for the Underground Railroad; and global brands like Nike and Google. He serves on the board of SEGD, and his work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Wallpaper, Design Miami, Monocle, and The Architect’s Newspaper. Influenced by his Liberian heritage and passion for counter-culture, he also presents keynotes globally on design as an invitation for communities to reclaim their futures.

• Curry J. Hackett

  Curry J. Hackett is a multimedia artist and educator whose work explores Black relationships to land, media, and memory. A native of Farmville, Virginia, his practice speculates on the aesthetics, histories, and ecologies of the American South. Hackett’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg, among others. He has exhibited and lectured widely, including at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s Making Home Design Triennial, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Hackett was named a 2026 United States Artists Fellow and currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

• jada-amina

  jada-amina is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural worker whose practice spans sound, moving image, writing, collage, and public programming. Taking instruction from the ancestral, the contemporary, and the unsung, they draw from familial archives and the public domain to examine Black memory across space and time.

  An independent scholar and psalmist, jada-amina approaches curation as a practice of remembrance, stewardship, and world-building. They serve as Curator of the Black Harvest Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center and as Programmer for the Chicago International Film Festival. Their work across museums, film organizations, and interdisciplinary arts institutions centers public engagement, curatorial research, and the development of programs that connect artists, audiences, and cultural histories.

  jada-amina’s work has been presented by and in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center, the South Side Community Art Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution, UChicago Doc Films, The Music Box Theatre, ACRE Projects, OTIS College of Art and Design, Echo Park Film Center, and Roots & Culture.

• Kahlil Joseph

  Kahlil Joseph is a filmmaker and artist whose work inhabits the space between cinema, memory, music, and visual art. His films unfold less as linear narratives than as living constellations, where personal history, archival fragments, performance, and dreams converge to reveal new ways of seeing Black life across time. Moving fluidly between the intimate and the epic, his practice is rooted in the belief that images can carry memory, spirit, and possibility simultaneously. Working across feature films, installations, and moving-image works, Joseph has developed a distinctive cinematic language that resists convention while remaining deeply emotional and accessible. His projects have been presented internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, reflecting a practice that dissolves the boundaries between contemporary art and cinema. His feature debut, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, extends his ongoing exploration of media, history, and the Black imagination into a work that treats news, myth, and lived experience as parts of the same continuum. Whether working with musicians, artists, or communities, Joseph approaches filmmaking as an act of listening, seeking not simply to document the world, but to uncover the hidden frequencies that connect people across generations, geographies, and time. His films invite audiences to slow down, to look again, and to experience cinema as a space for remembrance, revelation, and collective dreaming.

• Elijah McKinnon

  Elijah McKinnon (they/them) is an award-winning strategist, entrepreneur, and visionary from the future, currently residing on planet Earth, known as a thought-leader and ecosystem builder for designing and resourcing networks that mobilize intersectional communities across media, culture, and civic life. Over the course of their career, McKinnon has unlocked more than $20 million in resources to support artists, cultural workers, and community-driven initiatives to access, shape, and redistribute power. They are the Co-Founder and CEO of Open Television (OTV), an Emmy-nominated, award-winning nonprofit streaming platform and incubator advancing narrative infrastructure and artist-centered distribution, and also serve as Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Twenty43 Ventures, where they help shape new pathways for investment, collaboration, and cultural strategy across the storytelling ecosystem. Their work and leadership have been recognized by the MacArthur Foundation, Forbes, Harvard University, Salzburg Global, and the Elevate Prize Foundation.

• Ari Melenciano

  Ari Melenciano is a research artist and theorist investigating technoculture and forms of intelligence. She has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture at institutions including New York University, Pratt Institute, Hunter College, and Parsons School of Design. Her work has been presented internationally at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai. She is the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution dedicated to cultivating and expanding Black imagination and culture through art, design, and technology.

   

• Patricia Nguyen

  Patricia Nguyen, PhD is an artist, educator, and scholar born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, who earned her doctorate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and currently teaches in American Studies at the University of Virginia. She has published work in Women Studies Quarterly, Women and Performance, AmerAsia, Journal of Asian American Studies, Harvard Kennedy School’s Asian American Policy Review, The Funambulist, and The Methuen Drama Anthology of Modern Asian Plays. Nguyen has over 20 years of experience working in the arts, community development, and human rights in the United States and Vietnam. As a performance artist, she has performed at the Nha San Collective in Vietnam, Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Jane Addams Hull House, Oberlin College, Northwestern University, University of Massachusetts Boston, Links Hall, Prague Quadrennial, Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Contemporary Arts Network. She is co-founder and executive director of Axis Lab, a community-centered art, food, and design studio based in Chicago focused on inclusive and ethical development for immigrants and refugees, and is an award-winning designer for the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project, entitled “Breath, Form, and Freedom,” part of a historic reparations ordinance and the first monument in the nation to address racially motivated law enforcement.

• Kameelah Janan Rasheed

  Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner, occasional theremin player, and death doula in training. Her middle name, Janan, meaning heart and soul, comes from the Arabic trilateral root (J-N-N / جنان), evoking that which is unmoored and veiled. Accordingly, she explores the politics and poetics of non-compliance and disobedience. Her genre-expansive work has been presented worldwide. Currently, she is featured in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (Greater New York) and ICA Philadelphia (The Shakers: A World in the Making). Recent solo exhibitions include High Line Art (2026), Henry Art Gallery (2025), REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum, the Bronx Museum, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Palais de Tokyo, MASS MoCA, The Kitchen, and the ICA Philadelphia, among others. She is the recipient of several honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), a Creative Capital Award (2022), the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2022), an Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant from Experiments with Google (2022), an Artes Mundi 11 nomination (2024), a High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree (2024), and a VIA Art Production Grant (2025). She has participated in residencies at UCross (2025), Triangle Arts (2018), Pioneer Works (2018), Denniston Hill (2017), Smack Mellon (2016), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2016), Lower East Side Printshop (2015), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2015), and the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2012), among others. Having taught at Barnard College, Cooper Union, and the School for Poetic Computation, among others, she currently serves as a critic at Yale University’s School of Art and holds the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at CalArts.

• Carrie Sandahl

  Carrie Sandahl is Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Disability and Human Development. She directs Chicago’s Bodies of Work, an organization that supports the development of disability arts and culture through festivals, advocacy, and an artist residency program. Her research and creative activity focus on disability identity in live performance and film. Sandahl’s publications include a co-edited anthology, Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, which garnered the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy (2006). Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Cinema Journal, and Disability Studies Quarterly, among others. Sandahl frequently travels nationally and internationally to speak about her research and arts advocacy initiatives. Her 2003 article, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance,” inspired the name of a 2022 exhibition at Berlin’s Schwules Museum. She was invited to share with museum visitors how the concepts from that article were conceived and how they have evolved in her work as an artist, activist, and scholar. She collaborated on a documentary, Code of the Freaks, a critique of disability representations in cinema, which premiered in 2020 and has been shown in festivals, on television, and online streaming platforms in the US and internationally.

• Debra Yepa-Pappan

  Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean) is a visual artist and the co-founding director of exhibitions and programs at the Center for Native Futures, a vibrant contemporary art space located in Downtown Chicago dedicated to supporting Native artists. She previously served as the Community Engagement Coordinator at the Field Museum, where her work was crucial in developing the current Native Truths exhibition. Her multimedia art practice combines digital collage and photography, focusing on themes related to her mixed-race identity, cultural heritage, and family and home, as she incorporates Pueblo and urban aesthetics. Her works can be found in various museum and private collections worldwide. Through her artwork and her role at the Center for Native Futures, she is dedicated to changing inaccurate representations of Native people, advocating for the inclusion of Native voices and perspectives, and supporting other Native artists. She currently serves on the Terra Foundation’s Indigenous Advisory Committee and on the Cultural Advisory Council in the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Debra lives in her hometown of Chicago with her husband, artist Chris Pappan, and their daughter, performing artist Ji Hae Yepa-Pappan.