Presenters & Artists

Laurie Fuller is a Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and a pandemic sourdough bread baker, a cat lover, a feminist science & speculative fiction aficionado, a cocktail creator and an enthusiastic bike commuter. As a lifelong feminist and queer outsider, early in life Laurie learned the power of connecting across differences as an avenue for social justice. Since high school, she has organized to use education as both a tool for liberation and a vehicle to lessen the intersectional oppression of white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchy [thank you bell hooks!]. In her writing and in her classes she teaches and learns about pedagogy, resisting white supremacy, LGBTQ+ issues, accountability and violence intervention, intersectional feminisms, and activism for justice and transformation. 

Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist who creates participatory projects that center immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (Chicago), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), moCa Cleveland (Cleveland), and Skirball Cultural Center (Los Angeles). 

She has been a recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Map Fund, Asian Cultural Council’s Individual Fellowship, Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, AHL Foundation’s Andrew & Barbara Choi Family Foundation Grant, Illinois Art Council Agency’s Artist Fellowship Award, Center of Craft’s Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship, 3Arts Award, and 3Arts Next Level Award. Her project Protest Banner Lending Library was a finalist for the Beazley Design Awards at the Design Museum (London, UK) in 2016. She earned her BA in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a professor, adjunct, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a board member of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC) fighting for Citizenship for All 11 million undocumented immigrants and adoptees. 

Hazel Meyer is an artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work recovers the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics, and illness. Drawing on archival research, she designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbians-feminists, incontinent-queers, leather-dykes—into a performative space that centres desire, queerness, and sweat. 

Hazel presently lives and works on the stolen and unceded territory of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations with her frequent collaborator and partner Cait McKinney. 

Fawn E. Pochel (Saulteaux) is an advocate for social and environmental justice. Their Father is a full status member of Key First Nations and a treaty 4 Indian born in Swan River, Manitoba. Fawn was born and raised in Chicago the way of the 60's scoop and is a co-foaunder of the First Nations Garden located in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood. Fawn has over a decade of community organizing and advocacy experience focusing on raising awareness of Native Peoples living in Chicago. Fawn has worked closely with communities across the city to incorporate land-based pedagogies and Indigenous worldview into curricula and policy while working towards dismantling systems of white supremacy. Fawn is currently the coordinator for Northeastern Illinois University’s Angelina Pedroso Center for Diversity and Intercultural Affairs and pursuing their Master's in Higher Education from NEIU's ENLACE Leadership Institute. 

Catherine Reinhart is an interdisciplinary artist based in Iowa. Reinhart creates fiber work and conducts social practice with abandoned textiles around themes of domestic labor, connection, and care. She received her BFA in Integrated Studio Arts in 2008 from Iowa State University. In 2012, she completed her MFA in Textiles from the University of Kansas. Her works have been exhibited locally, regionally, and nationally. She is the recipient of numerous local, state, and national grants. Reinhart was honored as a 2020 Iowa Artist Fellow, an Artist-in-Residence at Terrain Residency (2021), a recipient of the Alex Brown Foundation’s Residency (2022), and an Artist-in-Residence at the West Cork Arts Center in Ireland (2023).

Georgina Valverde is a Mexican-born multimedia artist and educator whose work encompasses sculpture, performance, writing, and critical pedagogy. In her sculptural work, Valverde incorporates crafts and a wide range of everyday materials to create minimal sculptures that invite viewers to re-examine the familiar and explore the wealth of meanings inherent in material culture.

Since 2012, Valverde has broadened her practice to include curation, participatory art, and design. Examples of this include Caracol, an outdoor learning and creative space along the Burnham Wildlife Corridor in Chicago on which Valverde was lead artist. She is also the founder of the Society of Smallness and Documents Bureau, two platforms that invite audience participation and focus on curation and creative writing.

Valverde holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking and BA in Modern Languages from James Madison University, Virginia. Valverde has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally including at the MCA, the Hyde Park Art Center, the Evanston Art Center, and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago; University of Texas Rio Grande Valley; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Tamaulipas and Centro Cultural Jaime Sabines, in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico.