Art Advisory Board

The role of the Art Advisory Board is to increase Baxter St’s scope of influence within the contemporary art world. With a more formalized schedule of responsibilities, a set calendar of meetings and participation of programming initiatives the Art Advisory Committee will help to enhance the curatorial direction of Baxter St.


Sarah Arison

Sarah Arison is a passionate supporter of the arts who is committed to cultural institutions that increase access to arts education, support aspiring and emerging artists, and encourage world-class artistry. Born and raised in Miami, Arison is President of the Arison Arts Foundation, a private grant-making organization that supports emerging artists and the institutions that foster them.  She is Chair of the Board of Trustees at the National YoungArts Foundation, where she has developed strategic partnerships with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sotheby’s, and Sundance Film Festival. Arison is Vice-Chair of the board of MoMA PS1, a trustee and member of the Committee on Education of MoMA, a trustee of American Ballet Theatre and Chair of the Education Committee, a trustee of the Brooklyn Museum and Chair of the Education Committee, a trustee at Lincoln Center, a trustee at New World Symphony, a member of the Board of Directors of Americans for the Arts, and a trustee of the Americas Foundation of the Serpentine Galleries. In addition to creating alliances between cultural institutions, Arison has capitalized on her professional experience in the fashion industry to help build partnerships between luxury brands, such as Swarovski and Khirma Eliazov. In 2015, she produced her first feature film, Desert Dancer, starring Freida Pinto. She later went on to co-produce The First Monday in May, a documentary film chronicling the creation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute blockbuster exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass.  Arison earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business and French with a minor in Art History from Emory University.


Isolde Brielmaier

Isolde Brielmaier is the Executive Director and Curator of Arts, Culture & Community at Westfield. For over ten years, she has worked internationally as a curator and cultural strategist, collaborating with noted art institutions, companies, and contemporary artists including Ellen Gallagher, Leonardo Drew, Richard Mosse, Fred Wilson, and Bharti Kher. She also serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in Tisch’s Department of Photography, Imaging and Emerging Media at New York University as well as Curator-at-Large at the Tang Museum, and in December of 2016 she was named to the Board of Trustees of the New Museum. She has developed and contributed to contemporary art and culture programs and platforms for a broad range of organizations including Prospect New Orleans Biennial and the Peninsula Hotel Group, Hong Kong as well as the Armory Show/VOLTA NY, CIRCA Puerto Rico, and ARCO Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid, Spain, among others. Previously, Isolde has worked for the Guggenheim Museum, the Bronx Museum of Art, and as Chief Curator for the SCAD Museum of Art. Brielmaier is based in New York and received her Ph.D from Columbia University. 


Sonel Breslav

Sonel Breslav is an independent curator and the Director of Fairs & Editions at Printed Matter. From 2013–2017 she was the Director of Murray Guy, New York, where she curated exhibitions of work by gallery artists such as Moyra Davey, Matthew Buckingham, Zoe Leonard, Lucy Skaer, Leidy Churchman, and Alejandro Cesarco, among others. In 2012, she founded Blonde Art Books, an independent organization dedicated to promoting small press and self-published art books through exhibitions, talks, online exposure, and book fairs, including the Bushwick Art Book & Zine Fair (2013–2017). Publications to date include: Kitsch Encyclopedia by Sara Cwynar, 2014; Dust: The plates of the present, February 2013 – July 2015, published in collaboration with Secretary Press, New York, 2015; Words With Love, published in collaboration with artist Cara Benedetto and Small Editions, Brooklyn, 2016. She has organized exhibitions and events at venues such as PS1, MoMA, Queens, NY; ICA, Philadelphia, PA; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Hyde Part Center, Chicago, IL; and Dorsky Curatorial Programs, LIC, NY.


Andrianna Campbell

Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur received her PhD in Art History from the Graduate and University Center of the City University of New York in 2020. She specializes in art in the modern and contemporary period and her doctoral research focused on Norman Lewis and Abstract Expressionism. Alongside her scholarly research, she is the author of essays and reviews on contemporary art for ArtforumArt in America, and Frieze. In 2016, Campbell was a co-editor of Shift: A Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture anda special edition of the International Review of African American Art dedicated to Norman Lewis. She was a co-founding editor of apricota, a journal of literary and contemporary art. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including the Dean K. Harrison Fellowship, the Preservation of American Modernists Award, the Library Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Dia Art Foundation, the Dissertation Writing Fellowship at the New York Public Library and the CASVA Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellowship from the National Gallery of Art for 2016-2017.


Jean Marie Casbarian

Jean Marie Casbarian received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College (2000). Her creative interests lie in the reconstruction of memory, the loss and longing that occurs within personal and political mythologies, and the personal fictions that oftentimes live within one’s family history and displaced cultural identity. Migratory routes, family archives and imagined narratives have been reoccurring themes in her work. Although she defines herself as an interdisciplinary artist (photography, video, writing, sound, and performance), photographic principles have remained at the core of her practice.  Historic notions of light, the ephemeral quality of film and the delicate nature of emulsion have been analogous with her interdisciplinary intentions. Casbarian has exhibited her work extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Central America and Asia. Awards include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the LaNapoule Foundation Grant, the Chicago Artist’s Assistance Project Grant, an Associateship with the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute and was a Research Associate with Five Colleges Inc in Amherst, Massachusetts.  Currently, she teaches in the ICP-Bard MFA Program and One-Year Creative Practice and Documentary Full-Time Programs at the International Center of Photography.


Pradeep Dalal

Pradeep Dalal is Mumbai-born artist and writer based in New York. His solo show “Copy/Scan/Print/Repeat” was recently at Sala Diaz in San Antonio. His work was included in “Compassionate Protocols” at Callicoon Fine Arts, “I need my memories. They are my documents” at sepiaEYE, “Strange Invitation” at Franklin Street Works, “Picturing Parallax” at San Francisco State University, “Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic” at Murray Guy and “Fifty Artists Photograph the Future” at Higher Pictures. His photographs were included in BOMB 140, Grey Room 65 Artists Dossier, Blind Spot 43 and Cabinet 52. His artist book “Bhopal, MP” was published in 2017, and was also excerpted in “Chandigarh is in India,” and his essay “A Bifocal Frame of Reference” was published in “Western Artists and India.” He holds an MFA from ICP/Bard College and a MArch from MIT. He is co-chair of the MFA in Photography at Bard College and he directs the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant Program in New York. http://www.pradeepdalal.com/


David Deitcher

Born in Montreal, Canada, David Deitcher is a writer, art historian, and critic whose essays have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Parkett, the Village Voice, and other periodicals, as well as in numerous anthologies and monographs on such artists as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Isaac Julien, and Wolfgang Tilmans. He is the author of Stone’s Throw (New York, The Secretary Press, 2016) and Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 (Abrams, 2001) and curator of its accompanying exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York.  Since 2003, he has been core faculty at the International Center of Photography/Bard College Program in Advanced Photographic Studies. He lives in New York City.


Allen Frame

Allen Frame is a photographer and writer, represented by Gitterman Gallery in New York where he has had solo exhibitions of photography in 2005, 2009, and 2013.  He is a winner of the 2017/2018  Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. His 2013 exhibition Dialogue with Bolaño was presented at the Museum of Art of the Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, in 2014. Detour, a compilation of his photographs over a decade, was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2001.  He has been the recipient of grants from the Penny McCall Foundation, the Peter Reed Foundation, Creative Time, Art Matters, CECArtslink and others.  He has been the curator of numerous exhibitions, including Darrel Ellis at Art in General; Bearings: the Female Figure at PS122 Gallery; Anatomy, Persona, and the Moment: Experimental 70’s Photographs of Luigi Di Sarro and Linda Salerno: A Selection of Experimental Photographs from the Black Mirror Series at the Camera Club of New York, and Illusione Persistente and Fuggenti Figure at ACTA International in Rome.He has been a contributing editor for Bomb and written feature articles for The New York Times and other publications. He is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute (MFA) and also teaches at the School of Visual Arts (BFA), and the International Center of Photography in New York. He has taught workshops in photography extensively in Mexico. He graduated from Harvard University and grew up in Mississippi.


Sheree Hovsepian

Sheree Hovsepian (American, b. Iran) earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, a dual BFA/BA  from the University of Toledo in 1999, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland in 1998. Her work highlights the physicality of the photograph and photography’s relationship to the human body. Coaxed into sculptural forms, layered with tactile materials, and assembled into larger compositions, Hovsepian’s pictures oscillate between object and image, creating a sensuous, bodily experience of the photographic document. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions have been organized by Team Bungalow, Los Angeles (with Paul Mpagi Sepuya, 2019), Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago (2018), and Higher Pictures (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Seductive Reduction, CHART Gallery, New York (2019); Material Gestures, Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago (2019); and Where Do We Stand?, The Drawing Center, New York (2017). Hovsepian’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bronx Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. She lives and works in New York City.


Justine Kurland

Justine Kurland was born in 1969 in Warsaw, New York. She received her B.F.A from School of Visual Arts, NY in 1996, and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1998. Her work has been exhibited extensively at museums and galleries in the U.S. and internationally. Recent museum exhibitions include Open Road at Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Mi. and Crystal Bridges Museum of America Art, Ar; Looking Forward: Gifts of Contemporary Art from the Patricia A. Bell Collection at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ; More American Photographs at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH; and Off the Grid #1 and #2 at Fotodok in The Netherlands. She was the focus of a solo exhibition at CEPA in Buffalo, NY, and Moma’s exhibition Into the Sunset, in 2009. Her exhibition, Sincere Auto Care, was shown at Mitchell Innes and Nash in the fall of 2014.Justine Kurland has been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vice Magazine. Reviews of her work have appeared in Art Forum, Frieze Magazine, Time Out, and The New Yorker among others. Coromandel published a monograph of work, Spirit West, in 2001; Art Space published Old Joy in 2003; Ecstatic Peace Library published This Train Is Bound for Glory in 2009; and Black Threads of Meng Chiao in collaboration with John Yau was published fall 2015. Aperture will publish a monograph of her work this fall, entitled Highway Kind.Her work is in the public collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the International Center of Photography, all in New York; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. In 2013, she was awarded The New York Foundation of the Arts’ Artists’ Fellowship for Photography. She is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.


Matthew Leifheit

Matthew Leifheit is a Brooklyn-based photographer. He is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, an independent journal of emerging photography founded in 2010 that recently released its 53rd issue. He was formerly the photo editor of VICE, and has also written criticism and interviews for Aperture, Foam, Art F City and TIME LightBox. Leifheit holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he was awarded the Richard Benson Prize in 2017. Currently, Leifheit is an adjunct professor of photography at Pratt Institute. He has previously taught at Yale, School of Visual Arts, Parsons, and the National YoungArts Foundation. Leifheit’s work in photography and publishing has been exhibited internationally and is held in public collections including the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art Library and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, VICE and the Yale Daily News.


Arthur Ou

Arthur Ou was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and is based currently in Queens, New York. He works in photography, painting, sculpture, and installation, and explores photographic seeing and how it shapes our relationship to the world. He has exhibited internationally, most recently in the 2018 Queens International at the Queens Museum, “99¢” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and “Astoria,” at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria. His work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Aperture, Blind Spot, Camera Austria, and Art in America. His work has also been considered in published surveys “The Photograph as Contemporary Art,” by Charlotte Cotton, “The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy,” by Walter Benn Michaels, and “Photography is Magic,” also by Charlotte Cotton. Ou has published critical texts in Aperture, Afterall.org, Artforum.com, Bidoun, Foam, Fantom, Words Without Pictures, and X-Tra. Ou received his MFA from the Yale School of Art. He is an associate professor of photography at Parsons School of Design in New York City.


Eileen Quinlan

Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972, Boston) earned her MFA from Columbia University in 2005. She had her first solo museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2009. Her work is in the permanent collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Ackland Art Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and the Seattle Art Museum, among others. Recent exhibitions include Viva Arte Viva, the 57th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, curated by Christine Macel (2017), SYSTEMATICALLY OPEN? New Forms for Contemporary Image Production at the LUMA Foundation, Arles (2016), and Always starts with an encounter: Wols/Eileen Quinlan, produced by Radio Athènes and curated by Helena Papadopoulos at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (2016), Image Support at the Bergen Kunsthall (2016), and Transmission, Recreation, and Repetition at the Palais de Beaux-Arts Paris (2015), What Is a Photograph? at the International Center for Photography (New York) (2014), Outside the Lines: Rites of Spring at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2014), and New Photography 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2013). Her most recent exhibition of new work, Dune Woman, was on view at Campoli Presti gallery in London in the summer of 2017.


José Parlá

José Parlá, born 1973, studied at Miami Dade Community College, New World School of the Arts and Savannah College of Art & Design. Parlá is a critically acclaimed, multidisciplinary artist in painting, large scale murals, photography, video and sculpture. Layers of paint, gestural drawing and found ephemera combine to evoke the histories of urban environments. Using the backdrop of world cities, he creates abstractions that can appear to be photorealist fragments of what he sees in the chaos and rush of the metropolis. His work reflects the ephemeral layers of walls that show a place that was, but no longer is—built over, renewed in some other configuration, in the present, engaging memory and imagination with the contemporary. His work has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; The SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah College of Art & Design, Georgia; The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; National YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL; Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, North Carolina; and The Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba, among others.  Parlá’s work is in several public collections including, The British Museum, London, United Kingdom; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, POLA Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan; and The National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba. Collaborative projects include, The 11th Havana Biennial with Wrinkles of the City: Havana, Cuba project, which was completed in 2012 between Parlá and French artist JR. Parlá also worked with the Caldera Arts Program at The Portland Art Museum where he collaborated with participating youth for his Signature Roots, workshop and installation. Permanent Public Arts projects include commissions by ONE World Trade Center, the University of Texas at Austin, the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM Fisher,  North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library by Snøhetta; and at Concord City Place, Toronto, Canada. 


Rey Parlá

Rey Parla (b.1971) is a Cuban American artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature with a Certificate in Film Studies (2007) and a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (2019) from Florida International University. Rey is known for his “Scratch-Graph” pictures, which originated in a series of hand-painted experimental films the artist made in the 1990s while teaching himself cinematography and filmmaking at The Alliance Film/Video Cooperative. Parla’s films have received honorable mentions from the Cuban Alternative Film Festival (Miami Dade College), the Miami Beach Alliance for the Media Arts, The Anti Film Festival, and the 12th Annual Miami International Film Festival: The Avant-Garde Returns, curated by Bruce Posner of the Harvard Film Archives where Rey screened his silent film along works by Stan Brakhage (USA) and Jose Antonio Sistiaga (Spain). Parla has
specialized in exploring abstraction in the moving image through experimental film and video within the tradition of Visual Music animation by creating new media techniques to reprocess still frame images into large-scale unique prints he calls “Signature-Masks” and “Recursions.” Parla’s short films, documentaries, and photographic prints have been exhibited in art fairs, international film festivals, public television, and recently in solo show installations like Borderless at Happy Lucky No. 1 Gallery in (Crown Heights, Brooklyn), Intentions at Clear Edition Gallery in (Tokyo, Japan), and Multiplicities at Ben Rubi Gallery (New York City) where his work is represented. Rey collaborates with his brother artist Jose Parla at parlastudios.com. Rey and Jose share a studio and have produced solo exhibitions, group shows, editorial book projects, films, and large-scale installations throughout the United States and
elsewhere for over a decade.


Job Piston

Job Piston is the Associate Curator at Performa, and has performed various roles for the organization, including assisting RoseLee Goldberg, and working as Special Projects Manager, before taking on his current role as Associate Curator. During this time he has developed artist collaborations, brand partnerships, and digital content; and most recently co-curated commissions with Korakrit Arunanondchai and Kia LaBeija for Performa 19. Job has organized programs with Derrick Adams, Tania Bruguera, Discwoman, Richard Kennedy, Barbara Kruger, Zanele Muholi, and James Welling as well as presented  About Time (2013), AFTERHOURS (2017), Artist Party (2018) and Digital Commissions (2015) as part of the Performa Biennial. He began his institutional career while at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco where he worked with the archive of Paul McCarthy on the publication Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life published by Hate Cantz. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Job received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California Los Angeles as his Bachelors of Fine Art at the California College of the Arts.


Antwaun Sargent

Antwaun Sargent is an art critic and a writer who has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vice and more, as well as essays to multiple museum publications. His first book, The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture) is out now.


Drew Sawyer

Drew Sawyer is an art historian and a curator, who holds the title of the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator at the Brooklyn Museum. He has previously held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Columbus Museum of Art, where he co-founded the Center for Art and Social Engagement through a major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. He received a 2020 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. His most recent exhibition, Family Pictures, explored the legacy of Roy DeCarava’s 1955 book The Sweet Flypaper of Life, and included works by John Edmonds, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Lorraine O’Grady, Gordon Parks, Sondra Perry, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems. At Columbus, he also organized solo exhibitions of the work of Lucy Raven and Allan Sekula, as well as several large-scale thematic exhibitions. He is a co-organizer of the upcoming historical survey, Art after Stonewall, 1969 to 1989, which will tour during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in 2019. From 2012 to 2015, Drew served as the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He holds a Ph.D. in art history and archaeology from Columbia University, specializing in North American art and visual culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


Thor Shannon

Thor Shannon is a Senior Director at David Zwirner, based in New York. Before Zwirner, he worked for 7 years at Gavin Brown’s enterprise. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he is an alum of Phillips Academy, Andover, and of New York University, where he studied art history. 


Phil Taylor

Phil Taylor is a curator and writer working in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.  Phil is also a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University in the Department of Art & Archaeology, where he is finishing a dissertation on the Surrealist photography of Raoul Ubac and the fates of experimental darkroom practice in a time of political crisis. Previously, he was the David E. Finley Fellow 2014-2017 at the Center for Advance Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.  Phil has published extensively as a critic for Artforum, among other publications, serves on the Editorial Committee of Apricota (co-edited by Andrianna Campbell and Joanna Fiduccia and published by Secretary Press), and is the primary author of Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (MIT Press, 2013). With collaborators at Princeton, he has co-organized a workshop series with artists for the Department of Art & Archaeology, Framing Practices (2013-2014), and a forum series for the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, Sensorial Urbanism: The Aesthetics of Immateriality (2018). He lives in Queens, New York.


Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas is a 2015 United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow, distinguished visual artist, filmmaker, and curator who has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. She is known for paintings that combine art-historical, political, and pop-cultural references. Her work introduces complex notions of femininity and challenges common definitions of beauty and aesthetic representations of women. Thomas holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from Pratt Institute. She’s held solo museum exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Aspen Museum, and L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Monaco. Recent solo exhibitions include “Mickalene Thomas: Do I Look Like a Lady?” at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles; “Mickalene Thomas: Mentors, Muses and Celebrities” at Aspen Art Museum and Spelman College, and “Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs” at Aperture Foundation, New York, which is scheduled to travel to several venues across the United States through 2019 and features her notably curated exhibition, tête-à-tête. Other recent shows include the group exhibitions “Figuring History” at the Seattle Art Museum, and “You Are Here” at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Thomas’s work is in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others. She is also currently working on solo exhibitions at the The Wexner Center for the Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Thomas is represented by Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels. She lives and works in New York.


Helen Toomer

Helen Toomer is a Co-Founder and Artistic Director of STONELEAF RETREAT; a place for artists and creatives to connect and collaborate through a residency program and series of events in the Catskill Mountains of New York. She is an Adjunct Professor at Sotheby’s Institute for Art, teaching Social Media and Marketing of the Arts and The Business of Art Fairs as part of the Art Business Masters program. Helen is the former Director of PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, which she lead for three and a half years and prior to this, she was the Director of Collective Design Fair which she helped launch in New York in 2013. Helen has guest lectured at New York Academy of the Arts, Bournemouth Arts University, Pratt Institute and Christie’s Education, taken part in panel discussions with The Barnes Foundation, 21c Museum Hotel Group, Soho House, NeueHouse and Artsy, and previously taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology. in 2011-2013 she co-founded and managed a contemporary art gallery, toomer labzda, which focused on emerging artists, in the Lower East Side of New York. 


Diya Vij

Diya Vij is the Associate Curator at Creative Time who is committed to critically investigating the evolving role of public art in politics and civic life. Over the past decade, she has held programming, curatorial, and communications positions at the High Line, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), and the Queens Museum. As the Associate Curator of Public Programs at the High Line, she organized dozens of live events and performances with artists, activists, practitioners, and healers. At DCLA, Vij launched and co-directed the Public Artists in Residence (PAIR) program, a municipal residency program that embeds artists into city agencies to address New York City’s most pressing issues. Additionally, she was a project lead for the Agency’s citywide Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative, and played an active role in public monument efforts, and CreateNYC — New York City’s first cultural plan. She was a curatorial fellow and the communications manager at the Queens Museum from 2010-2014.


Hannah Whitaker

Hannah Whitaker is an artist based in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Marinaro, New York; M+B, Los Angeles; Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris; Thierry Goldberg, New York and Locust Projects, Miami. Whitaker was featured in Public Art Fund’s citywide exhibition, Commercial Break in New York in February 2017 and the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Big Pictures in 2014. Group shows include those at Casey Kaplan, New York; Galerie Xippas, Paris; Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles; Higher Pictures, New York; and Rencontres d’Arles in France, where she was nominated for the Discovery Prize. Her writing has appeared in ObjektivThe PhotoBook Review,Triple Canopy, and Blind Spot. The artist’s first monograph, Peer to Peer, was published in 2015 by Mörel Books. In addition, she is a Triple Canopy contributing editor.