Kalia Brooks is a New York-based curator and writer. She was the Exhibitions Director at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, New York, and is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Photography and Imagining Department in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU). She is also a PhD Candidate in Aesthetics and Art Theory with the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (idsva). Brooks received her M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2006. She served as Public Programs Coordinator at The Studio Museum in Harlem and was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program 2007/2008.

Brooks was one of seven emerging independent curators nominated by A Blade of Grass Advisory Committee and interviewed by Deborah Fisher, Executive Director. She presented a compelling definition of social engagement, focused on the notion of generosity, that excelled both in its novelty and practicality.

Bogar Alonso is a freelance writer and immigrant poet who was born in Ojuelos De Jalisco, Mexico, raised in the Windy City, and who now resides in Brooklyn. His music journalism has been published in Bitch Magazine, XXL, and Potholes In My Blog - among others; as a Screenwriter, his writing has been screened internationally, including at the 25th Anniversary of the Chicago Latino Festival; and as a politically-charged poet he has performed across New York, most notably at OWS's Poetry Assembly and as a finalist in Bowery Arts + Science's "Emerging Artist" competition. In his spare time, he curates the niche Hip Hop website, On The 7th Day of Hip Hop, as Editor-in-Chief, which aims to re-explore the genre as a socially relevant art form. He is patiently waiting for the arrival of US: A Collective, an Immigrant and Pro-Immigrant Art Collective he founded.

Kerry Downey is a New York based multi-disciplinary artist and teacher. Her practice takes many forms, including site-specific installation and video, prints and drawings, and socially engaged collaborations.  The work explores intimate relationships between places, bodies, objects, time, and narrative. The "stories," constructed from remnants of the American Dream, address the isolation that comes at the expense of our capitalist fantasies. They are perverse and empathetic alternatives to hetero-normative ambitions of progress and success.

Kerry has been a contributing member of art collective Action Club since 2009 and Flux Factory since 2003.  She currently teaches at Museum of Modern Art in the Community and Access department and in the Hunter College Art Department.

www.kerrydowney.com

Juliana Driever is a curator and writer based in New York. Her interests lie with art in the public realm, particularly work that is site-specific and participatory. She is also an emerging scholar on the art of Henry Darger and is a specialist in contemporary American self-taught art. Currently, she is an adjunct professor at The City College of New York where she teaches in the Art Department. Previously, she was the Curator for the Queens Borough Public Library, and Associate Director of Gigantic ArtSpace.

Desi Gonzalez is the Kress Interpretive Art Museum Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art. As a museum educator, she endeavors to enhance the visitor’s experience with contemporary art, which can often be confusing or alienating. She previously worked in Family Programs at the Whitney Museum, where she helped manage and write texts for the Whitney's award-winning website for young artists, For Kids. She also writes for publications such as The Brooklyn Rail and Riot of Perfume, and maintains a personal blog.

Lindsay C. Harris is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, writer, and cultural worker originally from CA & NM. With a B.A. in Africana Studies & Art and M.A. in Arts Politics, she is interested in exploring methods of art-making that open up systems of oppression and fracture the rigidity of identity. She is currently working on a multimedia project Evoking the Mulatto, which has been selected for the 2012 Crown Heights Film Festival. She also serves as a teaching artist at the Center for Urban Pedagogy and an educator at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Eve Peyser-Sappol grew up in New York City and currently attends Oberlin College, where she studies visual art and creative writing.

Ernesto Pujol is a site-specific performer, social choreographer and writer. Pujol's interdisciplinary work follows the footsteps of nineteenth-century itinerant American artists traveling across the US creating psychic portraits of people and places through public, durational, group performance art. His critical practice is also informed by Zen Buddhist notions of walking meditation, seeking a mindful presence that reveals the unseen. His new book, Sited Body, Public Visions: silence, stillness & walking as Performance Practice is due this spring through McNally Jackson, New York.

Erin Sickler is an independent curator and writer based in Brooklyn, NY and the Director of Curatorial Programs, 601Artspace, New York, NY.  She has initiated and participated in numerous collective experiments.  Her latest writing on Alternative Art Economies appears in the Spring issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism. http://criticalregionalism.org/

Jessica Wallen is a New York - based arts facilitator, curator, and writer. Before moving to the East Coast to study at New York University in 2010, she produced visual and multidisciplinary exhibitions in San Francisco and Berlin while devoting much of her time to advisory board duties for non-profit alternative art spaces. She currently works as a consultant for MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design.

Hannah Zingre is a designer and sustainable design critic. She has spent the last several years working on sustainably-minded projects such as building a greywater treatment system for the Tikondane Community Center in Katete, Zambia and the 2011 PARSIT Solar Decathlon team. She spends most of her time thinking about the future, urban form, and what it will be like living on Mars (or at least what it will be like living in New York City in a few decades).