FROM TOP LEFT TO RIGHT:

Beth Tillman, Non-Fiction; Chapel Hill, NC — Beth’s nonfiction work has been published in Creative Nonfiction, which nominated her essay for a Pushcart Prize, HAD, Complete Sentence, which nominated her essay for a Pushcart Prize, Reservoir Road Literary Review, and Literary Mama. She was the 2022 graduate student essay contest winner in the James Baldwin Review. During the pandemic, she received her MFA from Fairfield University. For twenty-eight years, she has practiced estate law in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and has completed a memoir-in-essays, Love the Ending, about her daily dances with death and incapacity.  She has a BA from Vanderbilt and an MA and JD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Brian Truong, Non-Fiction; Brooklyn, NY — Brian is a Brooklyn-based writer, who has received fellowships and support from Periplus, Tin House, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His writing is published or forthcoming in Ecotone, The Rumpus, and The Georgia Review, where his essay won the magazine’s Prose Prize in 2022. Currently at work on a memoir about growing up in a family of working-class Vietnamese refugees in Texas.

Robin Dintiman, Visual Arts; Oakland, CA — Dintiman’s work possesses by a deep connection to nature. Whether she is working directly with objects found in nature or taking nature as her subject, she strives to capture the intimate, quality of natural settings, suffused in personal memory. With this Memory into Art, universal story is told.  Dintiman works are in Philadelphia Art Museum, National Museum for Women in the Arts, Chrysler Museum, Arkansas Museum of Art, Nevada State Museum Center for Education and Environment, Commonweal Wellness Center, Grace Cathedral. She was invited to PhD at Sheffield Hallum’s “Lab 4 Living”; Art/Science, 2020. Dintiman was nominated for a Fleishhacker “Eureka Award”; 2019. She was Distinguished Alumni from Moore College of Art and Design 2022. In 2022 -23, the PUFFIN Foundation award her a grant for furthering her work. She was awarded the Leonardo DaVinci International Prize in April 2023. The Effetto Arte Fondacione featured the work in Contemporary Masters International May 2023, Meulensteen, Holland.

MaryKate Maher, Visual Arts; Brooklyn, NY — MaryKate received her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2004 and her BFA from Arcadia University in 2001. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1999-2000 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008. Maher has received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, Franconia Sculpture Park and Socrates Sculpture Park. Exhibitions have included Hesse Flatow, NY; Gold/Scopophilia, NJ; MoCA Westport, CT; A.I.R. Gallery, NY; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, NY; Spring/Break Art Show, NY; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; Triangle Arts Association, NY; Franconia Sculpture Park, MN, with international exhibitions at CICA Museum, South Korea, Kunstwerk Carlshutte, Germany and Takt Berlin/Leipzig, Germany. Her work has been written about in Artsy, Brooklyn Magazine, Hyperallergic, L Magazine, BOMB, Art Zealous and ANTEmag.

Funto Omojola, Poetry; New York, NY – “I am a Nigerian American writer, performer, and visual artist based in New York. In 2020, I founded ẹwà journal, an online literary journal that publishes work exclusively by immigrant writers. I have shown work and done projects with the Baltimore Museum of Art, The New School, Silver Eye Center for Photography, MASS MoCA, and more. Additionally, I have read at and/or published poems with Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library, FIELDNOTES, and Pigeon Pages, among others. I hold an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.”

Susannah Sayler, Visual Arts; Hudson, NY — Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris) work with photography, video, writing, and installation to examine our changing notions of nature, culture, and ecology. Their work is often place-based and focused on historical research.      Sayler/Morris have been awarded numerous fellowships including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2023) New York Artist Fellowship (2016), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2014), the Center for Art and Environment Research Fellowship (2013), and the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2008). Their work has been exhibited broadly in the U.S. and internationally, including at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Belvedere Museum, the Museum of Capitalism and the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art. They currently teach in the Film and Media Arts Department at Syracuse University where they co-direct The Canary Lab. Their archives are collected by the Nevada Museum of Art / Reno, Center for Art and Environment. In 2006, Sayler/Morris co-founded The Canary Project, a studio that produces visual media and artworks that deepen public understanding of climate change and other ecological issues. In 2020, they founded Toolshed, a platform for connecting ecological thought and action.

From top, left to right:

Misa Dayson, Screenwriting; New York City — Misa, a native Harlem, New Yorker, is a writer, producer, filmmaker, educator, and cultural anthropologist. Her research interests broadly focus on the relationships between visual culture, race, space, place, memory, and social justice, which she popularly wtionize the World (Edition Assemblage); The Black Diaspora and Germany (Edition Assemblage); and in Contemporary And art magazine. Misa continues these explorations in her screenplays, which often revolve around a protagonist negotiating the impacts of their actions which disrupt the status quo within their relationships and communities. Before receiving her doctorate in Anthropology, she directed two short documentaries: Four Women, which explored representations of Black female sexuality in the media; and, The Love Project, which focused on the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic from the perspective of Black American women. She also worked in various capacities in film production and development, including at Alicia Keys’ film production company, Big Pita Lil’ Pita Productions. After graduate school Misa returned to film, focused primarily on screenwriting and directing. Recently, she produced the web video, “Endings: The Good, the Bad, and the Insanely Great,” directed by screenwriter Michael Arndt. She also participated in the Sundance Collab Directing Core Workshop in the spring of 2022. Misa holds her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her B.A. in African American and Film Studies from Wesleyan University. She is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor Fellowship; the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship; and the DAAD German Studies Research Grant.

Sharon de la Cruz, Nonfiction; New York City — Sharon is a storyteller, educator, and activist from NYC. Her research and practice are rooted at the intersection of STEM pedagogy, art, and social justice.  Thanks to comic storytelling, she landed in the Tin House Summer Workshop and created her first graphic novel memoir, “I’m a Wild Seed” (Street Noise, April 2021). Kirkus Reviews called the work a “potent graphic memoir about the forming of one woman’s queer identity… [that] effectively portrays both the fears and joys of discovering one’s marginalized identity” and Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “the wit and exuberance found here marks her as a worthy new artist [in her] limber, playful debut collection.” De La Cruz received her master’s from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, Processing Foundation Fellowship, a TED Residency, and a 2021-22 Red Burns Teaching Fellow at ITP-NYU. She is currently an Assistant Arts Professor at ITP-NYU.

Edward Morris, Visual Arts; Hudson, NY — Edward, along with Susannah Sayler work with photography, video, writing, and installation to examine our changing notions of nature, culture, and ecology. Their work is often place-based and focused on historical research.  Sayler/Morris have been awarded numerous fellowships including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), the Center for Art and Environment Research Fellowship (2013), and the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2008). Their work has been exhibited broadly in the U.S. and internationally, including at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Belvedere Museum, the Museum of Capitalism and the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art. They currently teach in the Film and Media Arts Department at Syracuse University where they co-direct The Canary Lab. Their archives are collected by the Nevada Museum of Art / Reno, Center for Art and Environment.  In 2006, Sayler/Morris co-founded The Canary Project, a studio that produces visual media and artworks that deepen public understanding of climate change and other ecological issues. In 2020, they founded Toolshed, a platform for connecting ecological thought and action.  Along with Susannah, I currently co-direct a research center that we founded at Syracuse University called the Canary Lab, which is a hub for art and ecology courses and programming. I also teach in the NOMAD low-residence MFA program, formerly at the University of Hartford and recently moved to the University of New Mexico.

Geeta (Gigi) Tewari, Nonfiction; NYC/Margins Fellow-AAWW — Tewari’s short stories and poetry have been published in literary magazines such as Epiphany Magazine, Granta, New England Review, The Southern Review, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writing captures identity conflicts along with a myriad of life issues such as professionalism, gender equality, and domestic violence. Tewari teaches law at Widener University Delaware Law School through an interdisciplinary lens; holding a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts and a law degree from Fordham Law School. Tewari began writing later in life: most often, at the kitchen table in the early mornings before her children wake up. Gigi Tewari lives in New York, and is a 2023 Margins Fellow with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. 

Claire McConaughy, Visual Arts; Brooklyn, NY — “My MFA in painting is from Columbia University and BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. My solo exhibition, “not so far away” at The Painting Center in November 2019 was well received with reviews in artcritical, White Hot Magazine and Hamptons Art Hub. Over decades of art making I have exhibited in galleries and non-profit spaces including The Drawing Center (NYC), The Painting Center (NYC), Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), Charles Moffat Gallery (NYC), Drawing Rooms (Jersey City), Kent State University (Canton, OH), Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery at College of St. Elizabeth (Morristown, NJ), Montserrat College of Art Gallery (Beverly, MA), Yashar Gallery (Greenpoint, Brooklyn), Storefront Gallery (Bushwick, Brooklyn), Domestic Setting (LA) and many others. For over a decade I was on the staff of New Observations Magazine, a non-profit art journal. Currently, I am an Associate Professor of Art at Bergen Community College. My experience as an educator includes adjunct teaching at the School of Visual Arts and Marymount Manhattan College.”