Kyle Coniglio
Kyle Coniglio is a painter who was born and raised in New Jersey. He is a 2012 MFA graduate of the Yale school of art and recently completed an affiliated fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Currently Coniglio works in Hoboken, NJ and teaches at William Paterson University.
Kyle worked with Geoff Chadsey on a series of self-portrait based paintings that combine anecdote and allegory.
Michael De Angelis
Michael De Angelis is a visual artist who has created video, sound, costume, prop and set pieces for theater companies HalfStraddle, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf and performance artists Becca Blackwell, Eliza Bent and Dave Malloy among others. He has also assisted on and produced projects for visual artists Sharon Hayes, Matthew Buckingham and Andrea Geyer. Commercially, Michael has shot, edited and produced video content for various websites such as BigThink.com and MarloThomas.com on Huffington Post and AOL.
Michael worked with Dan Hurlin on an experimental video piece that explores the way a queer history is perceived.
Kerry Downey
Kerry Downey (born Fort Lauderdale, 1979) is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher. Downey’s work explores how we interact with each other physically, psychologically, and socio-politically. Encompassing video, printmaking, drawing, installation, and performance, their work is influenced by Downey’s personal experience of top surgery and gender queerness. In spring 2015, mentor Angela Dufresne took Downey on a fishing trip upstate. Downey's subsequent video and performance project, Fishing with Angela, investigates intergenerational feminist and queer haptics.
Recent exhibition venues include the Queens Museum, Flushing, NY; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale, NY; the Drawing Center, New York, NY; Taylor Macklin, Zurich, Switzerland; and Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT. In 2015, Downey was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Artist-in-residencies include SHIFT at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, Real Time and Space in Oakland, CA, and the Vermont Studio Center. They hold a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College.
Kerry Downey worked with Angela Dufresne on a recent video project shot in a derelict office building in midtown. They’ll also be working out the kinks in Downey’s new print series “Phantom Bounce,” a group of monotypes about phantom boobs.
Thomas Dozol
Thomas Dozol was born in Martinique and schooled in Economics, Social Studies, and Theatre in Paris. In 2002, he moved from Paris to New York as a stage actor, and became involved, among other things, with budding cabaret act The Citizens Band. Rather than performing he decided to document and photograph the lead up to their first show at Deitch Projects. The resulting portfolio received great attention, successfully launching him as a published photographer with exhibitions in Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Sau Paolo.
Thomas worked with Billy Miller.
Camilo Godoy
Camilo Godoy is an artist engaged in a multidisciplinary art practice. His work addresses the politics of citizenship and migration, and is influenced by strategies of queer politics and theory. He received a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 2012. Camilo is a co-founder of QUEEROCRACY and a staff member of Immigrant Movement International.
Camilo worked with Carlos Motta on a project about the meaning of freedom in an effort to interrogate and examine prisons.
Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel
Tourmaline lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and believes creativity & imagination are vital in movements for self determination. She is a trans activist & artist, working as membership director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and blogging at thespiritwas.tumblr.com Tourmaline’s work has been recently featured in Barnard College’s The Scholar & Feminist Online, as well as Captive Genders: Trans Embodiement & The Prison Industrial Complex, Post Post Script Press and Randy Magazine.
Sasha Wortzel is a media artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY, working in film/video, installation, and sound. In addition to experimental and documentary film, she creates interactive multimedia installations that utilize physical computing and programming. She has most recently presented work at the Guggenheim Lab NYC, MIX NY Queer Experimental Film Festival, Leslie Lohman Gay Arts Foundation, and at film festivals nationally. She also produces and hosts a weekly radio program about queer art, culture, and politics. She is a recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg/Big Arts grant and is currently artist in residence at the Snug Harbor Cultural Arts Center where she is researching women sailors.
Tourmaline and Sasha worked with Kimberly Reed on “Star People are Beautiful People”, a hybrid documentary-narrative feature about the late transgender activist, Sylvia Rivera and STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries).
Ryan Henneberry
Ryan Henneberry, originally from the suburbs of Chicago, received his MFA in fiction from The New School. Since then, he has been teaching English, history, and public speaking at an independent school in New York City.
Ryan worked with Sarah Schulman on a novel.
Melissa Li
Melissa Li is a songwriter, composer, and recipient of the 2007 Jonathan Larson Award. Her first full-length musicalSurviving the Nian (The Theater Offensive) opened in Boston later that year and received the IRNE award for Best New Play. Since then, Melissa has toured nationally in the queer music/poetry group Good Asian Drivers and pop-rock band MLBT. Currently she is working with playwright Letta Neely on 99% Stone, a musical based on the Stonewall riots to be fully produced in 2014. In addition, she is writing another untitled musical with poet Kit Yan, based on their experiences on the road. In her spare time, she writes music for mobile games and apps (Atari, Paul Frank). Melissa lives in Brooklyn.
Melissa worked with Moe Angelos on an as-yet-untitled musical based on my life on tour with Good Asian Drivers in the summer of 2009.
Ricky Maldonado
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato's Collateral (National Poetry Series/Akashic Books) and the recipient of poetry fellowships from Queer/Arts/Mentorship and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is managing director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center and co-hosts the EMPIRE reading series with Hafizah Geter.
Ricky worked with Stacy Szymaszek on a sequence of poems.
iele paloumpis
iele paloumpis is a dance artist, choreographer and teacher. Having been raised by a disabled parent facing ablism, abuse and resulting poverty, iele thinks a lot about disability justice, youth advocacy, and classism in relation to dance and the work that they do. At the center of their practice are ideas exploring body
iele worked with Trajal Harrell as they further develop call back all the birds (working title) – a new performance piece in collaboration jung-eun kim aka je, with musical accompaniment by Joanna Groom. This work in progress is supported, in part, through a commission from New York Live Arts’ Studio Series program with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Lauren Wolkstein
Lauren Wolkstein is an award-winning filmmaker who received her MFA in film directing from Columbia University’s graduate film program and a BA in computer science and film from Duke University. She was named one of the top twenty-five emerging filmmakers through The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Independent Filmmaker Project’s inaugural Emerging Visions program at the 2011 New York Film Festival. Her last short film, The Strange Ones, co-directed with Christopher Radcliff, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Most recently, Wolkstein wrapped production on her latest short film, Social Butterfly, which was shot in the South of France.
Lauren worked with Rose Troche on the development of her first feature film.