The Speakers

Aalaa Yassin

SHE/HER

Aalaa Yassin is a visual development artist from Cairo, Egypt, aiming to work in games and animation! She believes in doing the right thing and practicing empathy and kindness wherever possible. She is currently a Digital Media graduating senior at Otis College of Art and Design.

THURSDAY TALK

Abby Hermosilla/Anti-Racism and Criticism Collective

SHE/HER

Abby Hermosilla is a MA Candidate in Art History at Kent State University and a Curatorial Assistant at the Art Bridges Foundation. Her research concentrates on contemporary Native and Indigenous art, new media/Internet art, and decolonial studies.

THURSDAY TALK

Amber Hickey

THEY/SHE

Amber Hickey is a visiting assistant professor of American Studies at Colby College. They specialize in Contemporary Art and Activism with focuses on Environmental Justice Movements, Indigenous Visual Culture, and Military Aesthetics. Hickey’s recent publications include pieces in Aperture (2020), Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present (2021), and The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021). They are cofounder (with Laura Sachiko Fugikawa) of the American Studies Program’s Critical Indigenous Studies Initiative.

WEDNESDAY

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Dr. Ame Lambert

Vice President, Global Diversity and Inclusion, Portland State University

SHE/HER

Dr. Ame Lambert is currently the Vice President for Global Diversity and Inclusion at Portland State University. Lambert has served for almost a decade as a Chief Diversity Officer at and has almost 2 decades of experience in higher education, justice and equity work, and student success initiatives. Lambert previously served as the Inaugural Vice President for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at Roger Williams University and the Inaugural Chief Diversity Officer at Champlain College. In these roles, Lambert leads strategic planning and implementation, the embedding of equity into all university operations, and supports the thriving, agency and self-determination of minoritized students and employees. Lambert’s aim is to close the gap between potential and thriving and help individuals, organizations and communities BE-COME. Evaluation data from initiatives Lambert has led, always in strong partnership with critical stakeholders and the campus community, show an impact on 1st year minoritized student retention, academic success and climate; an increase in the yield on faculty and staff of color hires and the launching of successful employee initiatives and pro equity policies and practices.

Lambert designs and hosts the pre-conference institutes, including one for new Chief Diversity Officers,at the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education annual conference and has supported several nonprofits and institutions with their equity work. Her interdisciplinary lens helps her integrate the best of disparate disciplines such as organization development, neuroscience, education and intercultural communication in the creation of complex, holistic responses to complex human challenges. As a bi-cultural black, immigrant woman, Lambert believes the answer is often and/and rather than either/or.

A strong introvert, Lambert loves nothing better than a long snuggle with her spirited and smart young daughter who she wishes she could spend more time with.

FRIDAY

FACULTY/STUDENT SHAREBACK

Ana Tuazon

SHE/HER

Ana Tuazon is a writer and independent curator. She often writes on the intersection of American art and social movements, and studies how radical political imaginaries are generated through art and cultural production. Her MA thesis research centered on the practices of women of color artists and their complex relationships to feminist art collectives in New York City in the 1970s and '80s, and she has written on artists' anti-racist and decolonial activist work from the 1960s to the present.

WEDNESDAY

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Antonio Serna

HE/HIM

Antonio Serna is a Mexican-American artist, activist, and educator living in New York. His current artistic visual research project, 'Documents of Resistance: Artists of Color Protest, 1960–present’, has recently been included in the following publications: Making and Being (2020); Art As Social Action (2018); Reconstructing Practice: Anti-racist Art & Design Field (2018). Antonio has exhibited his art in museums and cultural spaces internationally in New York, Texas, Las Vegas, Spain, Mexico, Berlin, and Romania. Antonio Serna holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College, and a BFA from Parsons School of Art.

WEDNESDAY TALK

Aviva McClure

THEY/THEM + SHE/HER

Aviva McClure founded Our Turn as a response to organizations needing to connect with change makers in the arts community for better outcomes. After 20 years working as a K-12 teacher, administrator, artist, and activist; Aviva journeyed outside of institutions to design programs and professional development that move humanity and community development to the forefront. In collaboration with teaching artists and activists, Our Turn seeks to bridge the gaps between social learning, academia, and open spaces. In addition to local ventures in advocacy and K-12 to adult education, Aviva has also developed programs with international partnerships. Out of a desire to promote excellent outcomes for historically marginalized populations, Aviva’s practice aims to include all of us as Leaders. They are also co-director & field coordinator at Signal Fire.

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Bri Robinson/Anti-Racism and Criticism Collective

SHE/HER/THEY/THEM

As co-founder of both Kent State's Anti-Racism and Criticism Collective and Within.Digital, Bri Robinson is committed to the decolonizing and radicalizing of art spaces, institutions and beyond.

THURSDAY TALK

Emily Squires

SHE/HER

Emily Squires is an artist and facilitator and has worked for a variety of organizations, including the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, Fleisher Art Memorial, the Sexual & Gender Minority Youth Resource Center, and the Center for Equity & Inclusion. Alongside her experiences in community organizing, youth justice and education, Squires trained as a printmaker and uses art-making as an organizing tool. Her art practice is multidisciplinary, collaborative, and investigates themes such as voice, participation, belonging, and love. She makes bagels, loves science fiction, writes two poems a day, and co-parents two tiny humans and a muppet dog.

FRIDAY TALK

Gena Rynae

Otis College of Art and Design

Gena Rynae is a Los Angeles based multidisciplinary artist that combines painting and quilt-making to create work that engages with issues of agency, loss, and a desire for social change. Gena has exhibited her work within the last year in group exhibitions all over LA including Reciprocity at Art Share LA and Lines of Stitching at LASC Gallery.

THURSDAY TALK

Joni Boyd Acuff, PhD

SHE/HER

Joni Boyd Acuff is currently Associate Professor of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State University. Acuff has art and art education teaching experience in both traditional and non-traditional classrooms and has taught throughout diverse demographic settings. She has worked extensively with classroom art teachers and art museum educators across the United States, facilitating in-service training, leading professional development workshops, and presenting lectures about anti-racism, Afrofuturism and abolitionist teaching practices in the art classroom.

WEDNESDAY STUDENT WKSHP A

Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank

SHE/HER

Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank is the Dean of Content and Strategy at Smarthistory, and before that was a professor at Pepperdine University and Brooklyn College. She teaches classes on the arts of the Americas, early modern Europe, and digital humanities/digital art history.

Lauren Williams

SHE/HER

Lauren Williams is a Detroit-based designer, organizer, researcher, and educator. She works with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power. Her work can be found at williamslaurenm.com.

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Dr. Leah Q. Peoples

SHE/HER

Dr. Leah Q. Peoples is the Assistant Director of Research to Practice and Community Initiatives and the Research Director of the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative at the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. Dr. Peoples is a cisgender Black woman who utilizes transformative and critical approaches to inform her work such as critical race theory, afrofuturism, and culturally responsive and sustaining approaches. Her research interests encompass three broad areas: building equity in schools, developing equitable measures/tools for research and evaluation, and program evaluation.

WEDNESDAY

FACULTY/STUDENT WKSHP B

Dr. Lori Santos

SHE/HER

Dr. Lori Santos sees art as a central human expression and a tool to explore the intersection between place and self. As an educator, she strives to assist students in being active agents of change, to use critical discourses to explore one’s transformative and empowering role within the world. Her pedagogical practice includes exposing students to cultural and community-based artists and discourses of identity, culture, and place. Dr. Santos has served on several art-related boards and regularly presents through the state, national, and international art education associations, such as Kansas Art Education Association, National Art Education Association, United States Society for Education through the Arts, and the National Association of Multicultural Education. Her research and teaching interests include cultural and community curriculum development, cross-cultural and indigenous arts, diversity in preservice teacher training, and social justice and critical theories in art. Dr. Santos’ recent scholarship includes a collaborative article in the journal Visual Arts Research, Summer 2019, Mapping Our Practices, a chapter in the 2018 NAEA publication Transforming our Practices: Indigenous Art, Pedagogies, and Philosophies, and a chapter in a 2017 NAEA publication Culturally Sensitive Art Education in a Global World: A Handbook for Teachers. In 2012-2013. She was awarded the Utah State UAEA Art Education Higher Educator Award.

WEDNESDAY FACULTY WKSHP A

Melanie Hope

SHE/HER

Melanie Printup Hope is from the Tuscarora Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in Western New York State. She is Associate Dean, Academic Affairs and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Design at Ontario College of Art & Design University.

FRIDAY TALK

Melissa Fernandez/Antiracist Classroom

THEY/THEM

Melissa Fernandez, was born and raised in Miami, Florida, in a Mexican immigrant family. They are pursuing an Illustration degree at ArtCenter to develop and excel in the craft of storytelling and community building. The Antiracist Classroom encourages and facilitates anti-racist art and design practice. To this end, we curate spaces, ways of working, and relationships through which artists and designers, especially, can practice cultivating anti-racist creative practices — from our actual classrooms to our studios to our neighborhoods.

THURSDAY TALK +

FRIDAY STUDENT WORKSHOP A

Nia Musiba

SHE/HER

Nia Musiba is Tanzanian American artist and designer using art and design as a tool to discover Black history. Her depictions of Black and brown bodies are a direct response to the hyper-sexualization, brutalization, and overall negative depictions of BIPOC individuals within art and media.

THURSDAY TALK

Mr. Nick Gehl

HE/HIM

Nick Gehl is the Department Chair of Fine Arts at Evanston Township High School in Evanston, Illinois. He enjoys working with arts teachers to improve the experience for all students in school and in the art classroom. His other professional interests span a number of areas including arts leadership, curriculum and professional development, school culture, and organizational practices in the building. Nick also works with The Art of Education University to help bring relevant and engagement professional development to art teachers everywhere.

WEDNESDAY TALK

PJ Gubatina Policarpio

HE/HIM

PJ Gubatina Policarpio is an educator, writer, curator, and community organizer. He has organized exhibitions, public programs, and publications at Southern Exposure, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Asian Art Museum, Dixon Place, and NURTUREart. Born in the Philippines, PJ moved to the United States in his early teens.

WEDNESDAY TALK

Ramon Tejada

HE/HIM

Ramon Tejada is a (New Yorkino / Afro-Caribbean / American) designer (as Estudio Ramon) and educator based in Providence, RI. He works in a hybrid design/teaching practice focusing on collaboration, inclusion, unearthing and the responsible expansion of a design practice he has named “puncturing.” Ramon is an Assistant Professor in the Graphic Design Department at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

WEDNESDAY STUDENT WKSHP A

Sadie Red Wing

SHE/HER

Sadie Red Wing is a Lakota graphic designer and advocate from the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation. Red Wing earned her Master of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University. Red Wing urges Indigenous graphic designers to express visual sovereignty in their design work, as well as encourages academia to include an Indigenous perspective in design curriculum. Currently, Red Wing serves as a Student Success Coach for American Indian College Fund (Denver, CO) where she specializes in student retention and resource building for the Indigenous demographic in higher education.

FRIDAY TALK

safiyah maurice

THEY/THEM

Safiyah Maurice is a Portland based artist, curator, and co-founder of SHED. As a multi-disciplinary artist, they investigate sensory-based practices and enjoy creating works which activate a variety of senses, reflecting varied ways people learn and experience.

THURSDAY TALK

Terresa Moses

SHE/HER

Terresa Moses is a proud Black queer woman dedicated to the liberation of Black and brown people through art and design. She is the Creative Director at Blackbird Revolt and an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and the Director of Design Justice at the University of Minnesota. As a community engaged scholar, she created Project Naptural and co-created Racism Untaught. She is currently a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. She serves as a core team member of African American Graphic Designers and as a collaborator with the Black Liberation Lab.

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