Announcing BAXTER ST’s 2026 Guest Curatorial Open Call Recipients

We are thrilled to announce the recipients of this year’s BAXTER ST Guest Curatorial Open Call! Congratulations to Lucas Ondak who will present an exhibition by Andina Marie Osorio and Lesly Deschler Canossi who will present an exhibition by Shweta Bist.⁠ Support for BAXTER ST’s Guest Curatorial program is provided by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

Lucas Ondak is a transsexual curator, researcher, and writer from Edmond, Oklahoma, the occupied land of the Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita people. Due to the severity of ongoing political and legal assaults on LGBTQ+ people throughout the United States, they are invested in understanding how artists challenge hegemonic national mythologies and provide alternative understandings of personal identity, community, and history. Their curatorial methodology relates contemporary artists’ diverse practices to trans and queer theory and discourses on Black and Indigenous studies.

Ondak received an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and a BA in Art Practice with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University. They have contributed to numerous exhibitions as a curator and co-curator, including Dueñas de la Noche: Trans Lives and Dreams in 1980s Caracas (Institute for Studies in Latin American Art, 2024), Promenade: Flowers and Figuration in the Marieluise Hessel Collection (Hessel Museum of Art, 2024), and Dystopian Ecstasy (BOFFO Performance Festival 2025), among others. Their writing can be found in Balam, The Brooklyn Rail, Burnaway, Commo Magazine, Hyperallergic, Systems of Release, and elsewhere.

Her writing and voice have appeared in E-Flux Journal, BOMB Magazine, ART PAPERS, Movement Research Performance Journal and the podcast Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything. She was a guest speaker at UnionDocs, CCS Bard, Colgate University, MoMA Doc Fortnight 2022, Cinema Island Film Festival, and a curator-in-residence at AIR351 in Lisbon, Portugal. She holds a Master of Arts from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Andina Marie Osorio (b. Bronx, NY) is a lens-based artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Osorio’s practice explores the intersections of memory, identity, queer affect, migration, and Black femme sexual politics through assemblage, portraiture and archival work centered on the familial and queer experience. Osorio’s work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, HESSE FLATOW, Sinclair Gallery, The Latinx Project at NYU, The Clemente and Webber Gallery LA. Residencies include Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2024-2025), Center for Photography at Woodstock, Fire Island Artist Residency, Ox-Bow and Wassaic Project. She is the recipient of the Aperture Creator Labs Photo Fund, was a finalist for The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers and the NYFA City Artists Corps Grant. Her work has been featured in Elephant Magazine, Port Magazine, Musee Magazine and W Magazine. She received her BFA in Photography and Related Media from the Fashion Institute of Technology (2019) and an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art (2024). Osorio is currently an adjunct professor in Photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology

Lesly Deschler Canossi is a photography educator, writer, and cultural producer. She is a faculty member at International Center of Photography and leads long-term critique groups for CPW and La Luz. Her independent project, Widening the Lens, is a research and writing practice on photography, gender, and visual culture.
Lesly co-founded Women Picturing Revolution (2016-2022), an organization dedicated to women-identifying photographers who have documented conflicts and crises in private realms and public spaces. In 2022, she co-edited Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press). She has presented widely, including “Representations of Black Motherhood in Contemporary Photography” at Fast Forward Women in Photography, Tate Modern, London, and “Interconnected Bodies: Women, Water & Photographic Urgency” at MOMus, Thessaloniki. In 2026 she founded Into the Fold / Mother Artist Identity, a nine-month online program that offers artists a structured, sustained space to explore care work, examining questions of visibility and invisibility, and the political dimensions of nurturing work.
Her personal artistic practice centers on themes of care and grief, and her research centers on recovering the contributions of women and marginalized practitioners who have been relegated to footnotes or rendered anonymous in photography’s traditional narrative, bringing this inclusive historical perspective into her teaching. Lesly lives in Beacon, New York, on a micro homestead with honeybees.

Shweta Bist is an Indian-born American lens-based artist. Informed by a politics of care, she uses implied narrative to explore the emotional lives of women and mothers. She holds a Master’s degree in Commerce from the University of Delhi, India, and developed her artistic practice following the birth of her two daughters through independent study and courses at the School of Visual Arts and the Penumbra Foundation in New York.
Bist’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in juried and curated group exhibitions, including recent shows at Pen + Brush Gallery, Filter Photo, Candela Books & Gallery, Woman Made Gallery, the Ely Center for Contemporary Art, and Old Stone House Brooklyn (USA), as well as the Procreate Project Archive and Unit London (UK). She has presented her work at conferences at the Museum of Motherhood (USA) and the University of Bolton (UK).
Bist is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowship (2025) and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship (2026). In 2022, she co-founded Mother Creatrix Collective—an egalitarian group of artists supported through dialogue and skill-sharing, curating exhibitions focused on care-based and ecological themes. Bist maintains an independent studio practice in New York City, where she lives with her family.