Category Spotlight

Member Spotlight: Justin Siji Waddell

I'm Japanese Canadian Nikkei, third generation, which has a lot of influence in my work as well, as Scottish and French Canadian.  That side of my family Is also very much involved in the labor movement in Canada, so a lot of my work deals with working within the labor movement being active within my own unions, also within larger regional and national organizations, towards social justice and equity work.

2023 Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead Microgrant grantee: Wednesday Kim

Wednesday Kim is an interdisciplinary artist and a co-founder of De:Formal Online. She is from Seoul, South Korea, and is currently based in California. Kim works with a mixture of analog and digital media, including 3D animation, video, performance, installation, print, and sculpture with clusterfuck aesthetics. Her artistic endeavors delve deep into the realm of personal experiences and the intricate workings of human psychology. Drawing inspiration from the most enigmatic corners of her mind, she masterfully crafts imagery that transcends the boundaries of the ordinary.

2023 Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead Microgrant grantee: Change Choi

Chanee Choi is a transdisciplinary artist and currently serves as an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico in The Department of Film & Digital Arts. She has developed a ritualistic craft-based art practice that transcends the conservative and isolationist roots of traditional East Asian craftwork by focusing on a celebration of feminist theory and modern tech. Within this hybrid genre, she produces both embodied and virtual immersive experiences exploring the effect of immigration on issues of identity, and the synesthetic processes of corporeal-cognitive space.

2023 Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead Microgrant grantee: Asma Kazmi

Asma Kazmi’s large scale installations blend physical and virtual spaces. Her sculptures, connoting materiality, cultural lineage, and craft are juxtaposed with virtual and augmented reality models of art historical objects and particular geographies. Taking an expansive approach to installation art, she researches and reassesses the intertwining histories of Western colonialism and her diasporic Muslim culture. Using transgressive curatorial tactics, she combines visual and textual detritus from historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of locations, and mixes them with her own “critical fabulation.” Drawing on her own history as a third generation émigré, migrating across continents, Kazmi’s installations are experimental museums that make use of Islamic display devices and strategies to address colonial and indigenous technologies and knowledge systems, global flows of people and commodities, and interspecies entanglements.
Yan Shao. head shot

Judson-Morrissey 2023 Fellow: Yan Shao

Yan Shao is a terrestrial artist and creative technologist based in New York. Yan received a MPS from Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2023. Yan’s imaginative new media works explore the uncharted territories of perception, mediating the complex interrelations between humans and the environment. Yan's artistic language draws inspiration from geopolitics, the transitory essence of nature, and the human responsibility towards ecology, resulting in a unique and evocative visual narrative. Through her  photography, video and interactive installation, Yan invites viewers on a journey of discovery and reflection, exploring the depth of our connection with the earth. Yan’s work has been exhibited in several Bay Area galleries, and she has been recognized with a fellowship from the Tisch Initiative of Creative Research. She has also been featured in the recent 28th ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art). 
Rose Ansari head shot

Judson-Morrissey 2023 Fellow: Rose Ansari

Rose Ansari is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist. She attended Alzahra university of Tehran for her BFA and School of the Art Institute of Chicago to earn her MFA degree in Art & Technology Studies. Rose has a sensible and scientific approach to art. For a while she worked as a designer for plays, which made her sensitive to the potential of mise-en-scène, lighting and acting as a living being on the scene. Rose Ansari believes deeply in the power of technology in arts which makes the artwork relevant. Her recent works are inspired from architectural space and elements, science of materials, and body movements. Her works have been shown nationally and internationally.

Judson-Morrissey 2023 Fellow: Michael Luo

Michael Luo(he/him) is a game maker & artist. Born as an anchor baby in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Southwestern China, he spends his time making computer games based on hunches about diaspora, hallucination, vulgarity, crudeness, roughness, and anything else that doesn't fit with the gamer culture. He seeks to confuse, provoke, and undermine the status quo by making short, eccentric, mildly interesting projects. He also promises that there will be no armored knights in his work. He's a member of UCLA GAME LAB and a current MFA candidate in Media Arts at UCLA.
Jae-Eun Suh head shot

Judson-Morrissey 2023 Fellow: Jae-Eun Suh

Jae-Eun Suh, a multidisciplinary artist from Austin, Texas, completed her Master of Fine Arts in New Media at the University of North Texas. Suh creates compositions using analog methods, digital images, and projection. Her work conveys the longing, embodied experiences, and Third Culture Kid (TCK) experience in various media. She received the Talley Dunn Gallery Equity In The Arts Fellowship. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally such as the Centre Culturel et Littéraire Jean Giono in Manosque, France, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Gimpo, South Korea, and The MAC in Dallas.