Michal Alpern
Michal Alpern is a New York based artist with an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. Alpern’s practice shifts between making serieses of objects to room sized sculptures, reconciling spatial thoughts like gesture and materiality with abstractions like gender and domesticity. Her works were featured in museums and institutions in NY and Israel, including solo shows at M23 Gallery, NY, The Museum of Israeli Art, Israel and group shows at False Flag, NY and the LeRoy Neiman Center, NY.
Marcelo Arroyave
Marcelo Arroyave is a sociologist and urban anthropologist who has conducted quantitative and qualitative research in Colombia and the US. Since moving to NYC in 2014, he has worked in various urban settings as an after-school teacher, consecutive translator, marketing researcher, and community outreach specialist. Marcelo is also a creator, editor, and producer of fanzines and magazines. He was the founder and publisher of the MusaEnferma fanzine in Cali, Colombia (five editions). He also created Sursystem Magazine, which has eight editions so far. He published the magazine in Cali (3 editions), Bogotá (2 editions), Barcelona (2 editions in Catalan and Spanish), and NYC (1 edition in English and Spanish). The latest edition is The Sound Map of Salsa Music in NYC. Marcelo enjoys dancing to Salsa music and giving lectures whenever possible.
Hugh Ash
Hugh Ash has taken his trumpet around the globe, performing everything from new music to standard classical repertoire, jazz, rock, and commercial music. Based in Brooklyn, Hugh is an active free-lancer and educator as well as a Teaching Assistant at Rutgers University and a faculty member at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. In addition to solo performances he currently plays with Ensemble Mise-En, The Curiosity Cabinet, and spent the majority of 2019 subbing on the Off-Broadway hit Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish. A lover of contemporary classical music, Hugh actively champions work by living composers. He has performed premieres by Philippe Manoury, Larry Sitsky, David Maslanka, Viet Cuong, Angelica Negron, Whitney George, Nicolas Nelson, Amir Shpilman, Jay Vilnai, and Harry Stafylakis. He has performed at the New Music Gathering, the Hartford Women’s Composers Festival, MoMA’s PopRally series, and as part of the Art in Odd Places Festival.
Nadia Bongo
Nadia Bongo is a teaching artist and translator with a PhD in French Language and Literature. Her writing and/or photographs have appeared in African Voices, Litro online, Solstice, The Citron Review, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. A former Brooklyn Poets Fellow, she co-directed a poetic short film with the support of University Open Air presented by BPL. Nadia is the September 2025 Teaching Artist in Residence for the Washington Square Park Conservancy. Find her at https://www.nadiabongo.com/
Enrique Enriquez
For twenty years, Enrique Enriquez has sat in the same café, sending a steady signal into the world until one day, the world began to answer back. Not through prophecy or revelation, but through the voice of a sparrow.
What started as an intuitive leap became a profound discovery: the birds responded not necessarily to specific sounds, but to rhythm, to presence itself. In this dialogue with otherness, Enrique found not answers, but a way to live. The birds taught him that meaning isn't found in interpretation, but in the moment when we forget ourselves enough to let the world speak through us.
Frahydel Falczuk
Frahydel Falczuk is a Venezuelan architect and interdisciplinary artist. She trained as a contemporary dance performer at the Escuela de Danza de Caracas, nurturing an artistic practice that weaves together body, space, and materiality. She also pursued graduate studies in Urban Design in Venezuela, expanding her perspective on the intersections between the built environment, public space, and social interaction.
Currently based in New York City, Frahydel has expanded her focus into community engagement through a Community Leadership certificate from CUNY, deepening her interest in cultural management and collaborative creation. Her work in the visual and performing arts explores sustainability and identity, often repurposing discarded materials into immersive installations that spark environmental awareness.
She was awarded an artist residency grant from Chashama as part of a collective of immigrant artists, where she presented the first exhibition of The Plastic Sea along with a series of photographic works. Her recent studies include a Self-Portrait workshop at ICP and The Trash Academy from the Sanitation Foundation of NYC.
Naama Levit
Naama Levit is a chef and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores food as a medium for cultural inquiry, critical thinking, and performance. With a background in both fine art and culinary practice, she has worked in restaurants, test kitchens, and food startups, blending research, experimentation, and storytelling. She collaborates with cultural institutions and teaches, developing projects that examine the intersections of food, materiality, and social dynamics.
Alisa Minyukova
Alisa Minyukova is a Russian born artist, researcher and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is co-creator of the Dream Mapping Project which works to bridge dream science with the creative process resulting in an ongoing series of collaborative art, film and performance works. Her drawings, film and mixed media installations explore world mythology and symbols of the collective unconscious.
Her research covers the topics of dreams, memories, liminality, emigration, heritage and the loss thereof and the exploration of the human condition by way of ancestral memory. Her current creative focus is on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - a collective memory of war, and faith healing in South African cultures.
Dr. Chok Tenzin Monlam
Dr. Chok Tenzin Monlam has dedicated his career to the continuance of Tibetan Buddhist culture and language in modern society. Ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he studied and practiced as a Tibetan monk for ten years. Having advanced his studies through institutions for two decades, Dr. Chok has obtained multiple degrees in Buddhist and Tibetan studies, including his PhD from the University of Delhi. He has studied and trained for decades in Buddhist studies, Tibetan yoga, healing, and meditation under the direction of many renowned Tibetan teachers of the major and minor Tibetan Buddhist traditions. An author, translator, and language instructor, Dr. Chok served as the Head of the Research and Translation Department at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala for thirteen years before relocating to the United States in 2019. Dr. Chok has taught prolifically in India, the United States, and over a dozen other countries, offering diverse and inclusive teaching series on meditation, Tibetan yoga, healing, Buddhist philosophy, and Tibetan language.
Ria Rajan
Ria Rajan is an Intermedia artist working across analog and digital mediums, focussing on the intimate relationships between people, places and the technosphere. Her work deals with ideas related to movement, space and time, with a focus on the intangible, ephemeral and transient experiences –- IRL and online – through performance, audio visual experiences, imagemaking, locative and lens based media, and video art. At present, her practice is centered around ideas of embodiment, personhood, inner mappings and ontological modes of artistic production. Her work examines the corporeal, temporal and spatial dimensions of mark marking and the various forms of residue these meditations leave behind.
Ria has participated in multiple public art projects both in the US and India - Urban Avant Garde (Bangalore), Investment Zone (Bangalore), Figment (NY), Prakalp Pune (Pune) and Cyberia (Pune). She is also one half of Spectra, an ongoing international collaboration with Sofy Yuditskaya. Along with these, her collaborative works have been included in art + sound festivals and developed through residencies, both locally and internationally. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, New York and currently lives and works in NY.
Hilla Shapira
Hilla Shapira is a Fiber artist, costume designer and educator. Originally from Tel-Aviv, Israel,
and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work deals with the relationships between common
design and body regimen. By making functional mundane objects she questions design norms
and the political aspects of things. She has presented her work in Israel, Europe, and the USA
including: Art Basel (Miami, FL), Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art (Philadelphia, PA), NY
Textile Month (NYC, NY), Jerusalem Design Week (Jerusalem, Israel), NY Jewelry week (NYC,
NY), Little Berlin Gallery, (Philadelphia, PA), Depo2015 (Pilsen, Czech Republic), Neve
Schechter Gallery (Tel-Aviv, Israel), Hansen House (Jerusalem, Israel), Textile Arts Center
(Brooklyn, NY) and Wasserman Projects (Detroit, MI). She was AIR in Carrizozo residency
(Carrizozo, NM), Popps Packing (Hamtramck, MI), Makerspace (Brooklyn, NY) and Neve
Schechter center (Tel-Aviv, Israel). She received her BFA in Fashion from Bezalel Academy,
Jerusalem, Israel and her MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield-Hills MI, USA.
Shapira's work had been featured in different publications including: Hyperallergic Magazine,
NY Jewish Week, Metalsmith Magazine, Portfolio Magazine, Haaretz, and the Jerusalem Post.
Stephen Tekpetey
Stephen Tekpetey holds a Bachelor of Science (BSC honors) and Doctoral Degree from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Kumasi, Ghana. He is a member of the ISO Technical Committee of the Bamboo and Rattan Standardization with extensive research work and publications on bamboo as a building material and its utilization. He is currently working with New-York Presbyterian Hospital. He loves to share time with family and friends.
Julia Adams
Julia Adams is a certified Life Coach, a Songwriter and an educator at a private museum. She is also an expert in tea cultures, skilled in the subject of Chinese Tea Ceremony and Traditional Chinese Culture, especially Tang Dynasty's culture etc. Prior to relocating to New York from Shanghai, Julia was a news anchor and hosted citywide events; she then became an HR director and often hosted nationwide conferences on HR-related topics. Julia is also a zither player, certified by Shanghai Conservatory of Music.