Stefani Byrd &
Caroline Louise Miller
“Here There: (Re)Collecting Labor on the American Railways”
Stefani Byrd’s art practice includes video, new media, and interactive technologies. Their practice explores the impact of imbalanced power structures. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including South Korea, Switzerland, Spain, and Greece. Byrd is currently Assistant Professor of Experimental Media in the Film Studies Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Caroline Miller’s work explores affect, ecology, labor politics, tactility, and digital materiality. Her music has appeared across the U.S. and internationally, including Germany, Denmark, Australia, Mexico, Canada, Italy, the U.K., and Switzerland. Miller is Assistant Professor of Sonic Arts at Portland State University, and holds a Ph.D in Music from UC San Diego.
Gary Calcagno
“A King’s Affection: Korean Queer Cinema”
Gary Calcagno is a museum professional based in Washington, DC with a research focus on Korean culture. He researches various topics from artistic practices of the 20th century to contemporary art, film & television, and popular culture more broadly. He has held positions at the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, and the Manetti Shrem Museum. He holds a M.A. in art history from George Washington University.
Norberto Gomez Jr.
Norberto Gomez Jr. (born 1983, Alice, Texas, USA) is an artist, writer, publisher, curator, and educator based in Washington, D.C. Their work engages the interstices and chasms between death and technology, alongside aesthetics, horror, and media/popular culture. They are co-founder and editor of Sybil Press (est. 2013), an independent publisher of art books and experimental print media. Sybil Press has participated in print, art book, and zine fairs across the U.S. and internationally, including Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, Boston Art Book Fair, Tokyo Art Book Fair, and Vancouver Art Book Fair.
Mary Kearney Hull
“Feminism and Our Forced Crowns”
Mary Kearney Hull is a multidisciplinary feminist artist whose work explores the intersections of gender, power and lived experiences. She studied fine arts and creative writing at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Central Arkansas. She is featured in numerous publications and art museums and is a signature member of the National Association of Women Artists. Drawing from a lifelong commitment to human rights and mental health advocacy, her art work is rooted in personal narrative and social critique. She addresses the cultural and sexual expectations of women and children, including the impact of societal expectations, stereotypes and early experiences of sexual violence. In her art studio, she creates art that confronts silence and encourages open dialogue around justice, identity and healing.
Jayde Kim
“Series in Action”
Influenced by photography, Jayde Kim approaches the observation of her surroundings in context as a multidisciplinary artist. Born in Seoul, she began her artistic journey defined by inner reflection and its relationship to the environment. Central to her art is the figure, where the subject of the individual pertains to life. She explores themes of individuality, restriction, and emotion through her interpretation of mediums to convey the experiences in contemporary society. She held on to expression as creativity and the importance of living standards residing in countries based on the free exchange of ideas. Through her art practice, she was led to concentrate on the process of self-betterment.
Mijung Kim
“Threads and Traces: Exploring Cultural Identity Through Embodied Perception in the Work of Cynthia Brannvall and Sang-ah Choi”
Mijung Kim brings a transnational perspective to art historical and visual cultural analysis. Having grown up between South Korea and China before relocating to the United States, her research explores how cultural identity is negotiated through artistic practices, with particular interest in artists who navigate similar cultural thresholds in their work. She holds a PhD in Visual Culture Studies and a MA in Art History from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, where her doctoral research on surrealistic visual languages and cross-cultural art movements was supported by the Chinese Government Scholarship and a travel grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. She is currently teaching and researching in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Carol Seungwon Lee
“Living Monuments: Art, Trauma, and Collective Memory Through Creative Placemaking”
Carol Seungwon Lee (she/her) is a New York-based performing arts manager with experience in Korea, China, and the United States. Her academic research centers around the role of the performing arts administrator in curating spaces and arts for the performance of cultural trauma and memory, with a particular focus on their applications in memorials. Her performance research explores the East Asian diaspora, explored through the narratives on stage and administrative efforts that facilitate dialogues for the establishment of brave spaces. Carol holds an MA in Performing Arts Administration from New York University and a BA in Theatre and International Studies from Northwestern University.
Sooa Lim
“Living Archives as Resistance – Curating SEORO Korean Cultural Network Beyond Erasure”
Sooa Lim is a Korean-born curator and researcher based in New York and Seoul, focusing on the intersections of design history, archival storytelling, and Asian American visual culture. She holds an MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies from Parsons School of Design, along with both BA and MA degrees in Design and Arts Management from the Korea National University of Arts. As a co-founder of the NaUs Art Collective, she leads projects that amplify diasporic voices through collaborative curatorial practices. Her research on the SEORO Korean Cultural Network, a collective of Korean and Korean American artists active in the 1980s–90s in New York, was published in the Journal of Museum Studies in Korea. She currently works as an auction cataloguer, combining her curatorial expertise with ongoing research in design and visual arts.
Moon Uzu (Hyeyoung Moon)
“Between Hand and Code: Hybrid Approaches to Repetition, Difference, and Artistic Agency”
Moon Uzu (Hyeyoung Moon) is an artist and researcher whose practice investigates the intersections of repetition, temporality, and material transformation across traditional and digital media. Her work explores the evolution of creative tools, from hand-drawn gestures on hanji (traditional Korean paper) to AI-assisted processes, revealing the tension between permanence and impermanence. Through her ongoing Circle Variation series, Moon Uzu examines the shifting notions of authorship and artistic agency in the age of automation. A full member of the Korean Minhwa Academic Association, she collaborates with the Red Boots Project Space and the art group TAM. Her works have been exhibited at CICA Museum (Korea) and other venues, and have been featured in discussions on conceptual art, digital transformation, and the future of artistic labor.
Maurice Moore
“Silence = Death? Sonic Poetry in the Breaks of Euphoria, Indifference, and Dysphoria”
Dr. Maurice Moore is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They hold a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Moore is the author of Drawing While Black Mixtape Vol. 1 (Versal Journal, 2022), winner of the Amsterdam Open Book Prize. The book, composed of visual poems, investigates queer mark-making as a site of resistance and possibility. Their writings and artworks have also appeared in Bloomsbury, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Obsidian, and the Poetry Foundation. Since 2011, Moore’s creative work has been exhibited internationally and nationally at venues including the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD) in London, UK; Calabar Gallery in New York, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, CA; Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC; and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC.
Ivy Nicole-Jonét
“the waters whisper sweet solace: An Ode to the Black South”
Ivy Nicole-Jonét (she/they) is a Black Womxn multimedia artist, documentarian, AR/VR artist, and Afrofuturist currently based in Baltimore, Maryland, whose work merges Afrofuturism with Black Womxnism to conjure immersive spaces alive with ancestral echoes and visions of liberation. Raised in Southeast Washington, DC, and rooted in Afro-Carolinian heritage, Ivy’s practice conjures the sacred: weaving memory, land, and Black life into living portals of resistance and rebirth. Through documentary film, experimental media, and archival exploration, they weave together stories of resilience, everyday survival, and radical imagination. Their work engages the deep histories held within the soil, waters, and communities of the South, offering portals into an Afrofuture where Black existence is unbound, thriving, and free. Ivy’s art is a call to remember, to resist, and to dream — shaping collective futures that center healing, freedom, and ancestral wisdom.
PESHKAR
“Oldham Are You Coming With Us?”
Peshkar is a UK based arts organisation from Oldham in Greater Manchester that specialises in the development of artists from hard to reach communities and protected characteristics. As part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio of organisations, Peshkar is interested in the development of work created in dialogue with local communities across all artforms with outcomes having a core digital element as part of the aesthetic. This anthology of work is the culmination of their 24-25 Artist Development Programme through their annual Young Digitals Festival produced in partnership with Oldham Library and curated by the young Salford born artist and curator Stewart Knights (esk). ‘Oldham Are You Coming With Us?’ Is inspired by the history and heritage of Oldham (being part funded by Historic England), artists and community participants worked across a range of visual media to interrogate themes including craft, place, belonging, travel and aesthetic. In 2026, Peshkar will celebrate its 35th anniversary with its Young Digitals Festival entering its 10th year. This work is presented in connection with a paper on Peshkar’s international programme presented at the International Symposium on Visual Culture at Montgomery College in Maryland, Washington DC on September 20th 2025 by Executive Director Jim Johnson.
Lucy Ralph
“Sensitive Structures”
Lucy Ralph is a British-French artist born in 1994. Lucy Ralph received an MFA from the L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, a BFA from Central Saint Martins, London and was a fellow at the Cooper Union School of Art in NYC. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Paris and London and most recently participated in an exhibition curated by Oracle at a Hotel Particulier in Versailles, which was published in the magazine Architectural Digest. Lucy Ralph will also be participating in the exhibition ‘Contemporary Landscapes, 2026’ at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in January 2026. Prizes include the Clyde & Co Art Award and Altarea Cogedim Art Award. Lucy Ralph currently lives and works in Paris.
Anat Wegier
“Unmasking the Silence: Visual Narratives of Female Transformation”
Anat Wegier is a French-Israeli multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the emotional architecture of identity, feminine presence, and inherited silence. Her oil paintings are rooted in personal mythologies-poetic, cinematic narratives that unfold across the canvas in a visual language both intimate and symbolically charged. Blending classical techniques with contemporary tools, Wegier’s process begins with AI-generated storyboards inspired by imagined scenes. These digital visions are refined in Photoshop and transferred to canvas, where she paints over them by hand-layering emotion, gesture, and texture to reclaim authorship and evoke ambiguity. Wegier holds a B.A. and M.A. in Art History from Tel Aviv University and pursued advanced studies in figurative painting and contemporary art in Barcelona, New York, and Jerusalem. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and art fairs across Israel, London, Madrid, Miami, and South Korea. With a palette rich in symbolism and atmosphere, her paintings invite viewers into a world where story and silence, memory and identity, begin to merge.
Patryk Wilk
“What Happens in the Moment of Informational Overload? Where Does Art, the Human, and the Medium Begin?“
Patryk Wilk (b. 1995, Łódź, Poland) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice explores the tension between body and media, emotional overload, and the fragmentation of memory in the age of hypercommunication. Working across installation, video, and research-based projects, he approaches art as both observation and intervention, uncovering hidden dynamics of human behavior and social conditioning.
A graduate of the Iceland University of the Arts (MFA), he is a full member of The Living Art Museum (Nýló) and SÍM – The Icelandic Artists’ Association.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, and he currently serves as Managing Partner & CEO of The Light of Art Institute Foundation.
Debra Wright
“The Legendary Uprising: Women Artists Reclaiming the Narrative”
Debra Wright is an artist and curator based in Northern Virginia. Her work as a found object, installation, and avant-garde artist explores themes of social justice, human rights, and personal identity. Wright’s art has been exhibited internationally in traditional venues, as well as in public art installations throughout the Washington metropolitan area. As a curator, Wright brings her artistic vision and community engagement to the forefront. She was appointed and served on the City of Fairfax Commission on the Arts, where she chaired the Public Art Committee from 2021 to 2024. In January 2025, she was selected as the Curator of The Stacy C. Sherwood Community Center in Fairfax, Virginia.
Currently represented by Kyo Gallery (Alexandria, Virginia), Wright is actively involved in the art community through her roles as: Managing Committee Member, Regional Coordinator Chair and Northern Virginia Regional Coordinator of The Feminist Art Project (International); Member of Women’s Caucus for Art (Greater Washington, D.C., and Northern California Chapters); Artist Member of The Museum of Modern Art (New York, New York); Supporting Member of The National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.); and Ally of 5célula Arte y Comunidad, an alliance of artists and collectives from Mexico, Latin America, Asia, and the rest of the world. Wright’s commitment to social justice permeates every aspect of her work, extending well beyond her artistic and curatorial pursuits. She is a dedicated volunteer with local and national collectives, tirelessly promoting public art, fostering diversity, and advocating for equity for marginalized groups. Her compassion translates into direct action through outreach efforts directly benefiting her community. As a key organizer of events, Wright is a strong proponent of women artists, regularly moderating discussion groups that build community, forge new relationships, and confront barriers prevalent in the art industry. Through her curatorial work and presentations, Wright consistently transforms art into a powerful tool for dialogue and change, passionately advocating for a more inclusive and equitable landscape.