Maddy Bremner is an artist based in Minneapolis. Using material and digital methods, her practice engages with systems of creation where craft, medium, and process are a means of inquiry. Her work incorporates a context-informed approach to typography, and she has worked with the Hamilton Wood Type Museum as a student researcher. Bremner received her B.F.A in graphic design from the University of Minnesota in 2018.
Nelis Franken is an artist interested in systems, randomness, and time — specifically, how we use our tools, words, and images to construct and reinforce our beliefs. He hopes to one day better understand our obsession with predicting the future.
Born in New York City, Catherine Gans works and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. As a writer, she is committed to situating intimate narratives in the context of history, politics, or, more precisely, in relation to power. This interest in the tension between private and public is what draws her to family stories and photography, the sites of our earliest ruptures between mythology and truth. She is currently working on a nonfiction project about her own family and their generations-long pursuit of the archetype of a normal, white American family.
Danielle Garcia (they/she or siya [SHAH] in Tagalog) is a Filipino-American artist — born in Las Piñas City, Philippines and raised in Jacksonville, Florida — who practices traditional illustration, creative writing, acting, and modeling. Garcia explores questions of identity, history, and heritage through the lens of queerness in the Filipino diaspora, modern spirituality, and the superimposition of personal/collective past, present, and future. Garcia graduated magna cum laude from the University of Florida in 2018 with a B.A. in art history; by senior year, they had co-created the School of Art+Art History's student publication Dinner + No Show; completed curatorial internships at the Harn Museum of Art and Princeton University Art Museum; and published their honors thesis in the UF Journal of Undergraduate Research. Garcia went on to work full-time as a museum educator for the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens and, most recently, the inaugural Director of Arts Education for the St. Petersburg Warehouse Arts District Association. Garcia is currently based in Queens, New York.
Maxwell Harvey-Sampson is an upstate New York-based artist working primarily in the mediums of photography and writing. Coming from a small Pennsylvania town instilled him with an interest in and adoration for the other, himself having accepted such a moniker. The resulting images and writing center queer visibility and honesty as a powerful political statement; ultimately, the images elevate the subject to that status of an icon, often referencing Renaissance-era artwork. Harvey-Sampson's writing centers upon unexpected humanity found in adverse situations while providing an irreverent perspective into the struggles he has experienced, as engendered by his mental illness.
Crystal Lamar is a Great Lakes-born, Philadelphia-based artist working with image and text in photography, comics, and textiles. Her work asks questions about perspective-making and explores how space, and traversing space, informs meaning. She's motivated by threads that cross divides as well as the transformative properties of a process itself.
Sara Minsky is an artist and educator from New York City. Her work explores loss, familial history, and record keeping. She has been the recipient of residencies at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and Trestle Art Space. She holds an M.A in art education and teaches photography at the High School of Fashion Industries in Manhattan.
Marié Nobematsu-Le Gassic is a Japanese-Taiwanese American artist working with photography, writing, movement, and temporary text-based sculpture. Her practice reflects on the conditions and contradictions of belonging and the embodied experience of "mixed" identity. Nobematsu-Le Gassic holds a B.A. in architecture and urban design studies from New York University and a Diplom in sculpture from Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin as a DAAD Scholar. She has recently exhibited at EMOP Berlin, Kommunale Galerie, and Beaux-Arts de Paris. She is based in Berlin, Germany, and in her hometown of Berkeley, California.
Monica Regan is a writer and image-maker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In search of the accidental insights and surprising new dimensions which open up as linguistic and visual mediums collide, her current work is an inquiry into the profound uncertainty of our collective future. Combining poetry, essays, and photographs of found objects, the work explores the nature of individual, subjective experience against the backdrop of larger systemic failures and unraveling. Regan holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her writing has been published in VERSE, New American Writing, VOLT, sidebrow, and 26, among others, and she has exhibited images and multimedia works in shows at Lincart Gallery in San Francisco, Recology, Inc., and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In her other vocation, Regan is a long-time social justice strategist and movement-builder who works with progressive leaders and organizations across the country. She lives in Oakland, California, with assorted family members and her dog, Oblio.
David Richards is a photographer based in Fresno, California. His work investigates ideas of place and landscape — issues relating to our understanding of home, wilderness, and civilization. He is interested in images that explore areas of humor and contradiction within our environment. He has a B.A. and M.A. from California State University, Fresno.
Genevieve Sachs is a writer and visual artist from Chicago, based primarily in Brooklyn. She focuses on text art and visual poetry, exploring ideas around forced or misdirected nostalgia. Excerpts of her prose serve as the basis of her artwork, which takes form through graphite drawing and an array of printmaking processes predominantly including intaglio and cyanotypes. She received her B.F.A. in studio art from New York University in 2018 and has since been developing her practice at Shoestring Press (Brooklyn, New York), Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, and residencies including Directangle Press (Bethlehem, New Hampshire), Kypseli Print Studio (Athens, Greece), and Can Serrat (Barcelona, Spain). Her writing has been published by Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Pioneer Works Press, Devastation Baby Literary Magazine, Breadcrumbs Magazine, and S/WORD Literary Journal.
Yonatan Schechner is a photographer based in Boston, Massachusettes. He is interested in the mysteries of everyday life. Schechner is working in conjunction with his immediate family in Vermont, his first home in Israel, and his current home in Massachusetts.
Kamaria Shepherd is an interdisciplinary artist based in Houston, Texas. Her work explores themes of race, womanhood, and femininity as an African American woman. She works within poetry, painting, printmaking, and installation. Shepherd has exhibited throughout the United States. Her installations and paintings have been featured on episodes of The L Word GQ. She earned an M.F.A. in painting from UCLA in 2018 and a B.F.A. in painting from RISD in 2015. Shepherd is the 2018 UCLA recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. She attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Frans Masereel Centrum, and was a Visiting Researcher at CAD+SR in Spoleto, Italy.
Chris Stiegler is a writer, art historian, curator, and educator. Working across the academic system, within alternative spaces, and with various publics, Stiegler's practice has a discursive and dialogical aim. Over the last decade this has taken shape as ad-hoc symposia and museum tours with Town Hall Meeting; exhibition design and public engagement with the Institute for American Art; and teaching, lecture series organization, and artworld field studies with Maine College of Art & Design's M.F.A. in studio art program. Many of his projects have explored ideas of performance, queer cultural production, value systems, and — more recently — the tropes of masculine romance. His scholarship has been focused on historiography, criticism of the contemporary, and recent-century art history. Broadly, this work is supported by a devoted attention to American moviemaking, contemporary literature, queer zines, and travel. Stiegler's projects have been presented throughout the United States. He holds twin bachelor's degrees from the University of Delaware in art history and printmaking, and a master's degree in modern art history and connoisseurship from Christie's Education.
Luke Christiansen is a photographer and writer based in Pella, Iowa. His work currently explores fatherhood, middle age, and place. In concurrence with his creative practice, he is an adjunct photography professor and a lacrosse coach at William Penn University. He has a B.A. from Southern Virginia University and an M.A. from SCAD.
Vernell Dunams is an artist living and working in New Orleans, LA, and Seattle, WA. Dunams' work is created at the intersections of lens-based mediums (analog photography and video) and prose poetry. Dunams' process is often rooted in the idea of translation and questioning how visual imagery is translated into a literary language and, oppositely, how literary language is translated into a visual matrix. Likewise, Dunams is conceptually driven by the desire to translate interpersonal experience, identity, and storytelling into intrapersonal dialogue about race, gender, and sexuality. Dunams holds a B.A. in Hispanic Studies and a B.F.A in Studio Arts from Louisiana State University.
Monique Flynn is a poet, storyteller, and artivist from Ithaca, NY. Her creative practice embodies topics of identity, culture, class, gender, intergenerational trauma, resistance, and resilience. Monique incorporates storytelling, performance, literary arts, photography, music, video, and installations created from everyday material in her work. As a descendant of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ, who have been sustained by Turtle Island since time immemorial, and Irish settlers, Monique values the braiding but not blending of Indigenous and Western ways of knowing and being. Through her work she shares stories carried in her DNA and her decolonial journey through womanhood. Monique holds a Bachelor of Arts from the State University of New York, Albany.
Smith Galtney is a Maine-based photographer, writer, and documentarian. A storyteller at heart, his work — a mix of autobiography and fiction, images and text — concerns experience, everything we gain and lose with age, the way our pasts continually unfold and reveal themselves, and how the profound changes in gay culture through the last thirty years are both liberating and alienating. Born and raised in New Orleans, he graduated from New York University, the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and the International Center of Photography. A longtime entertainment journalist, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, GD, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and NPR, among other publications.
Jacquelyn Johnson is a project-based artist from Western Pennsylvania, working interdisciplinarily between photography, time-based media, textiles, and prose. She is bound to art and writing through vernacular language, failures in storytelling, daily practices, and the affective openings that make her want to corroborate her experiences with others by making things. Johnson is a codirector of the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair and self-publishes under the moniker Cool Dry Place. She received her B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.
Breanna Maxine (she/her) is an artist, maker, photo editor, and researcher currently working within photography and textiles to explore memory, archives, the sensory experience, and the nuances of understanding what's in front of you. Born in the high desert of Nevada, she received her B.A. in Journalism from the University of Nevada, Reno, before spending time in New York City working as a photo editor at publications including The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, a curatorial fellow at The Walther Collection, and a library and archive work scholar at The Aperture Foundation. She is now traveling full-time.
"Hometown San Francisco, CA. My name is Joseph A Rafferty III (he/him). I speak in abstraction. Aesthetic decisions guided by unpredictability, and curiosity. Currently my practice entails: photographic self-portraiture, wall-based text, illustration, on-site installation, video, sculpture, collage, mixed media artist books. I had a transformative experience attending the International Center of Photography's Creative Practice program (2021-22) where I first learned of Image Text. Looking forward to entering Image Text through one door, and exiting the other. 'Essential to surrealist behavior is a constant state of openness, of readiness for whatever occurs, whatever object might be encountered by chance that has something marvelous about it, manifesting itself against the already thought, the already lived. Everything is new, and happens, over and over, always for the first time.' NOTES: 1) Mary Ann Caws, quoted in her book of edited writings, Milk Bowel of Feathers: Essential Surrealist Writings. 2018. 2) Catherine Taylor (co -founder), quoted in Image Text MFA Program, "Zoom Info Session", the University of Cornell. Jan. 13, 2024. Image context: Getting pierced, x3. After confirming admission to the Image Text program, Joseph visited a tattoo shop."
Angela Rauf is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Salt Lake City and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Utah with a B.S. in Multi-Disciplinary Design. She is interested in identity, place, and documentation. Her work explores methods of drawing, text, and photography with regard to archival research. Site-specific spatial explorations and theatre ensemble productions have been a driving force in her recent creative process, where imagery, space, sound, and bodies coalesce.
Jared Radin is a photographer, writer, and software developer based in Oakland, California. He is interested in the relationship between personal experience and collective social change and the unique vantage points from which individuals observe history as it unfolds. His creative practice is focused on memory, monuments, and a search for sacredness in everyday life. He has a B.A. in American Studies from Wesleyan University.
Clare Sheedy lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a neighborhood called Polish Hill. She images as a practice of imagining and longs to produce no thing but self — to come to what that is and to see it blank. She currently works at a children’s museum and has previously studied literature.
Marsha Taichman is the Art + Design Librarian at OCAD University in Toronto. She has an M.A. from Concordia University and an MLIS from McGill University, both in Montreal. She has published essays in the academic journals Art Documentation, ASAP/Journal, Le Journal de l'université d'été de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky, and Visual Resources Association Bulletin, and has co-curated three artists' book exhibitions at Cornell University. She is interested in the concepts of grief, family, food, and community, as well as how they intersect in visual art and writing.
Caroline Wallis is an artist from New York City. Through her photographic practice and research, Wallis charts the American landscape. She is particularly interested in histories of place-making, genealogical geography, extractive economies, and the politics of land use. In 2019, Wallis received her B.A. in Art and Art History from Barnard College.
