Amanda Abi Khalil is an independent art worker and curator based between Beirut and Rio de Janeiro, founder of Temporary Art Platform (TAP), a curatorial platform focusing on social and public art practices. She works across disciplines and formats. Her projects investigate forms of social engagement and commoning through art and cultural practices in and from the Global South.

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selma banich (1979, Yugoslavia) is an artist, activist and community organizer. Her socially engaged art practice is grounded in explorative, processual, and activist work, and is politically inspired by anarchism and feminism. selma has worked independently and in collaboration with other artists, curators, groups, and initiatives in the Balkans, Europe, and the US. She has participated in numerous dance, theater, and opera productions as a choreographer, and has also performed on film. She participates in local and transnational solidarity initiatives related to the ongoing feminist, anti-fascist, migrant, and workers’ struggles. Currently, those initiatives are Zagreb Solidarity City, Transbalkan Solidarity and For BREAD.

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Khaled Barakeh is a conceptual artist and cultural activist whose works revolve around power structures in the context of politics, identity and culture. Considered part of a global artivism movement, he approaches creative practices as a tool of social change. As a continuation of these activities he has founded the non-profit CoCulture, focused on connecting and empowering cultural producers worldwide. 

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Kim Chan is Deputy Director for Advancement at National Sawdust, a music incubator in Brooklyn. She has worked extensively in Washington, D.C. and New York to leverage the civic power of arts and culture in shifting public discourse and fortifying a more just and democratic world. She is a board member for Ping Chong + Company and Pick-Up Performance Co(s). Her work has investigated issues of cross-border relationships, free expression, and racism with artists and organizations such as Souleymane Koly, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Toni Blackman, Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, Afro Cuba de Matanzas, GALA Hispanic Theatre, and APAP where she worked on the start-up of the international festivals Globalfest and Under the Radar. 

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Michelle Coffey is the Executive Director at Lambent Foundation in NYC. She designs, implements and furthers the strategic agenda, leadership and vision of the Foundation. Prior to the creation of Lambent Foundation, and she was Director of Starry Night Fund and Senior Philanthropic Advisor at Tides Foundation. With a global lens, her areas of focus included Human Rights, Women/Girls, Criminal Justice Reform, Arts and Culture and HIV/AIDS. In addition, Michelle serves on the national boards of The Schott Foundation for Public Education and the Brownsville Multi-Service Family Health Care Center in East New York.

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Hadrien Coumans is a Co-founder and Co-director of Lenape Center, Advisor for wellbeing / peacemaker.

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Matthew Covey is the co-founder and executive director of Tamizdat, a nonprofit with the mission of facilitating international cultural exchange. He has presented and chaired panels on artist mobility issues at numerous conferences, including SXSW, WOMEX, Folk Alliance, APAP, and many others. In 2015 he launched Tamizdat’s affiliated law firm, CoveyLaw, which has quickly become the U.S.’s leading authority and advocate for arts immigration.

Matthew is admitted to the New York Bar, and is also president of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

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Rusanda Curcă is a cultural worker, environmental and civic activist living in Hîrtop village, Republic of Moldova. She is a co-director of the Center for Cultural Projects Arta Azi, with a focus on developing the theatre sector in the country. Rusanda serves as a co-director of the Coalition of the Independent Cultural Sector of Moldova. This umbrella organization works to consolidate the independent cultural sector in the country with the goal of improve the legislation in the field of culture through advocacy activities.

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Mike de Seve is President of Baboon Animation in NYC. He is an Emmy-nominated animation writer and director, working in both feature films and television.  As a director-writer at Dreamworks, he served as a sequence director and story consultant on Madagascar, and as a story consultant on several films including Shrek 2, Shrek The Third and Monsters Vs. Aliens.

Mike has served as Head Writer/Story Editor on the Nick/Teletoon hit Rocket Monkeys, Fox Kids’ Viva Pinata and the forthcoming season of YFE’s Heroes of The City. He’s a contributor to many international hits including the current season of Arthur and the Boomerang series Jelly Jamm; and written and directed animated shows for Dreamworks, Cartoon Network, NBC, NICK and Disney, THE CW, WB and FOX TV. His other work includes directing the full 7 seasons of the original Beavis and Butt-Head series, for which he earned that show its Emmy nomination;  sequence writing/directing on the Beavis and Butt-Head feature film; and writing and/or directing multiple animated Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live segments. 

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Marianna Dobkowska is a curator of residencies, projects and exhibitions and a co-creator of the residency program at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. She sees curatorial practice as a tool for building relations and situations based on long-term and often international collaboration, combining practices of the visual and performative arts, education and activism.

Marianna is also a co-author and co-curator  of the international curatorial seminars Re-Directing: East (2013–current), two-year project Social Design for Social Living (2015-2016) presented as part of 2015 Jakarta Biennale and at the National Gallery of Indonesia in Jakarta as well as the exhibition-meeting Gotong Royong: Things We Do Together (2017-2018) at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Lastly, Marianna is a recipient of two scholarships from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2012, 2016); a CEC Artslink Fellow (New York); and a Backers Foundation (Tokyo) fellow.

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An experienced arts manager, curator and policy maker, Fatin Farhat is the founding director of the Palestine Observatory for Cultural Policy, where she curates and manages projects that foster community participation through the arts.

Fatin has overseen a broad spectrum of cultural initiatives and artistic programs from street festivals to municipal policy. Currently she is working on her Ph.D. from Hildesheim University (Germany) and examining the potential that grassroots initiatives and the local government can play in fostering community engagement and cultural development in Palestine. Fatin is currently developing a new art and community program – In Our Houses – in Kobar village in the West Bank, where the inhabitants become curators, organizing and presenting shows in the village’s houses and gardens.

Passionately interested in community-based art, Fatin wanted to engage in projects that involve the Arabic community in the US. In the climate of Islamophobia and racism, she was interested in exploring art as a form of resistance and resilience for marginalized communities. She believes the gap between the US and her home region is widening and that artistic cooperation is a powerful and vital instrument to foster deeper understanding.

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Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,500 public television and radio stations worldwide. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.”

Amy has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, looks back over the past two decades of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world. 

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An installation, sculpture, photo and video artist, Ivaylo Hristov’s work is often based on questions related to the objectives of space missions, but in the context of everyday life. Where to look for wealth? What is truly valuable today? How do we see our own future and the future of the planet and humanity? In his exploration of the problems of the modern world and the role of humans in the era of robotization and digitization, Ivaylo closely collaborates with communities collecting and documenting narratives, interviews and stories. His current solo exhibition LIGHTFLIGHT explores the topic of the cosmos and the boundaries of what is possible.

During his residency, Ivaylo intended to meet with members of both scientific and non-scientific communities to learn about their perspectives on current events and scientific achievements in space and how they affect people’s everyday lives and dreams.

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In a time marked by a proliferation of digital technologies, neo-liberalism and growing nationalism, theater artist and playwright Ivana Ivkovic, examines ways to open up spaces for public engagement and collective agency and encourage social solidarity. Her current research is rooted in the civic and professional sense of urgency around the global crisis created by growth-based neoliberal capitalism and peoples’ concurrent loss of a sense of belonging.

Being deeply interested in the destabilization of a theatrical act as an act of performance, an act of spectating and an act of communication, her work produces more problems than attempts at unequivocal understanding, immersion and identification. Drawing inspiration from her work with dancers, her recent work is focused around a study on pedestrian walking practices from meditation walks to protest marches.

Through her residency Ivana wanted to engage with artists, organizations and community groups that question the public sphere; namely, what is and isn’t allowed and how can this reshape the political reality and further develop the sense of communality.

Through his work, photographer and activist Sasha Kurmaz analyzes modern society and the ways it can be influenced by an artist’s practice. Driven by socio-political issues, Sasha immerses himself in a local environment, exploring local social conditions, their historical backgrounds, and their political context. This deep research informs his work and resonates with the place where it is created and presented.

Sasha is editor and designer of 5.6, an independent Ukrainian photography magazine, and has shown his work in numerous exhibitions, the most recent of which is Revolutionize, an international research and exhibition project demonstrating that the aspiration for freedom, decent living standards, and respect for fellow citizens are the universal values shared by all people around the world.

During his residency in the US, Sasha wanted to meet with members of artistic communities, activists, researchers and urbanists. He is particularly interested in grassroots initiatives and innovative networks of activists and organizations that explore practical solutions for sustainable development. 

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Barbara Lanciers is the Director of the Trust for Mutual Understanding (TMU), a private American foundation that funds professional exchanges in the arts and environment conducted in partnership with institutions and individuals in Central, East, and Southeast Europe; the Baltic States; Central Asia; Mongolia; and Russia. 

Barbara was a Fulbright Scholar with the Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute. She has written independent articles on American performance for Szinhaz Hungarian theater magazine and Didaskalia Polish theater magazine. She is the director and co-creator of Kaddish, a staging of Hungarian Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész’s novel Kaddish for an Unborn Child. 

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Martyna Marciniak is a Researcher at Forensic Architecture at the University of London, UK. Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The agency undertakes advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights organizations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups and media organizations.

Martyna now works as a Researcher at Forensic Architecture. She studied architecture in London, where she currently lives.  She creates spatial narratives that explore the connections between body and space in choreographic works, films and animated sculptures. Martyna is the winner of the Bauhaus Residency Programme’s Open Call 2017. 

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Noura is an actress, choreographer, and the founder and artistic director of Leish Troupe, a Syrian physical theater. Since 2001, she has been supervising and organizing workshops in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Dubai. Murad participated in many conferences in the region and abroad.

Noura served as a member in the jury of the Philadelphia Festival for University Theater in 2005-2006. In 2009, she co-organized the 1st Damascus Contemporary Dance Platform. In 2013 – 2019, and she also taught Physical Theatre and Contemporary Performing Arts classes at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus at Acting, Dance, Scenography and Technical departments. Noura headed the Dance Department between 2013- 2015 and as an actress, she has played many roles in theater, television, radio and cinema.

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Thomas Nail is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015), Theory of the Border (Oxford University Press, 2016), Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Being and Motion (Oxford University Press, 2018), Theory of the Image (Oxford University Press, 2019), Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2020) and Marx in Motion (Oxford University Press, 2020).

His publications can be downloaded at this website.

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Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a filmmaker, writer, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is also the founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive. She is also the author of Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism in Native Nations and Latinx America (2017). Her most recent films include Small City, Big Change (2013), War for Guam (2015) and Life Outside (2016). 

Frances has received Ford, Truman, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships. In 2008, the United Nations’ Rapid Response Media Mechanism recognized her as a global expert in the areas of mass media and Latin/o American studies. She is also a recipient of the Lenfest Award, one of Columbia University’s most prestigious recognitions for excellence in teaching and scholarship (2012); an inaugural OZY Educator Award (2017); the Latin American Studies Association’s 2019 Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award, and the 2019 Media Trailblazer Award from the National Association of Latino Independent Producers.

In 2019, Frances launched Valor y Cambio, an art, digital storytelling and just economy project in Puerto Rico and New York for which she was awarded the 2019 Premio Borimix from the Society for Educational Arts in New York. 

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