Speaker Biographies
Eve Biddle, Executive Co-Director, Wassaic Project
Eve Biddle is an artist, co-founder of the Wassaic Project, culture maker and collaborator from a family of artists. Her culture making practice is an outgrowth of the Wassaic Project and her collaboration with Bowie Zunino, Jeff Barnett-Winsby, and Elan Bogarin. The Wassaic Project has hosted 38,000+ visitors, 680+ artists in residence, 1,000+ exhibiting artists through over 30 exhibitions, hosted 50+ dance companies, 150+ bands, 50+ film makers, and served 6,000+ students. They have curated performance at MASS MoCA, and spoken on panels at Open Engagement, Storm King, The Aldrich Museum, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Tyler School of Art, School of Visual Arts in NYC, and Preservation’s Studio-X.
Jamie Blosser, Executive Director, Santa Fe Art Institute
Jamie Blosser is the Executive Director of Santa Fe Art Institute, working to creatively address equity in the arts and built environment through cohort building and participatory processes. A licensed architect, Blosser believes in housing as a right. She was an AIA United Nations delegate for the 2016 Habitat III convening and serves on the Ohkay Owingeh Housing Authority and National Development Council boards. Blosser was awarded a Harvard Loeb Fellowship, was Executive Producer of a PBS Natural Heroes documentary, and her community design work and writings have been published in several magazines and books. Blosser received her Masters in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.
Tania Candiani, artist
Tania Candiani has developed her work in various media and practices that maintain an interest in the complex intersection between language systems—phonic, graphic, linguistic, symbolic, and technological. She has worked with different narratives of association, taking as a starting point a proposal to invent from reordering, remixing, and playing with correspondences between technologies, knowledge, and thought using the idea of organization and reorganization as discourse, as a structure of creative and critical thinking, and as material for actual production. Since 2012, she is a fellow of the National System of Art Creators from Mexico and has received the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018); Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2011) and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (2013), among others. She represented Mexico at the 56th Venice Biennale. Her work has been exhibited widely around the globe and is part of important public and private collections.
M. Carmen Lane, founder and director, ATNSC/Center for Healing & Creative Leadership
M. Carmen Lane is a two:spirit African-American and Haudenosaunee (Mohawk/Tuscarora) artist, writer and facilitator living in Cleveland, Ohio. Lane’s work ranges from experiential educator to diversity practitioner to organizational systems consultant to experimental artist—all of it integrates ancestry, legacy, and spirituality. Lane is founder and director of ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership, a socially engaged artist-run urban retreat, residency, research and exhibition space located in the historic Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood.
Lizania Cruz, artist
Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist and designer interested in how migration affects ways of being & belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects highlighting a pluralistic migration narrative. Cruz has been an artist-in-residence and fellow at the Laundromat Project Create Change (2017-2019), Agora Collective Berlin (2018), Design Trust for Public Space (2018), Recess Session (2019), IdeasCity:New Museum (2019), Stoneleaf Retreat (2019), Robert Blackburn Workshop Studio Immersion Project (2019), A.I.R. Gallery (2020-2021), BRIClab: Contemporary Art (2020-2021), Center for Books Arts (2020-2021), and Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Visual Arts (2021-2022).
Laila Hida, Founder and Francesca Masoero, Assistant Director and Curator, LE 18
LE 18 is a multidisciplinary cultural and residency space established in 2013 and located in the medina of Marrakech. It aims to provide time and space for research, creation, encounter, mutual learning, and knowledge cross-pollination. The space has developed organically and through a collaborative, open ethos, (un)learning from and in dialogue with the various communities it works with, in an institutional practice based on horizontality and collaboration. Engaging with a fluid network of collaborators and a variety of formats including exhibitions, residencies, conversations, workshops, and publications, LE 18 has become a collective learning platform. One which permits it to listen to, and critically tackle the multiple dynamics, processes, and infrastructures which shape the cultural, political, and economic lives of our local ecosystem and its place in a global dynamic.
Emily Jacir, artist and Co-founder and Founding Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research
As poetic as it is political and biographical, Emily Jacir’s work investigates translation, transformation, resistance, and movement. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures, and in-depth research. Her work spans a range of strategies including film, photography, sculpture, interventions, archiving, performance, video, writing, and sound. She is founder and the Founding Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, Palestine, a multi-faceted artist-run space for artistic, educational, cultural, and agricultural exchanges and research. Founded in 2014 it is an experimental learning hub for the Bethlehem community and beyond. Knowledge production and research are the key pillars behind Dar Jacir.