Faculty Bios:

Jason Lord
Jason Lord is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, drawing, installation, print-based media, photography, sound, video, performance, and other time-based processes. His work explores perception, systems, and the relationship between parts and wholes through modular structures, long-duration rituals, and material accumulation. Jason has been a teacher for the past 30 years, including pre-K, K-12, undergraduate, and community education. He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina–Greensboro and a BFA from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. His work has been supported by McColl Center, the Hambidge Center, Vermont Studio Center, Penland School of Craft, the National Gallery of Art (DC), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. This summer he’ll be the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Scrap Exchange in Durham, NC, transforming space with post-consumer cardboard and found objects.

Emma Singer
Emma Singer is an interdisciplinary artist based in brooklyn, NY. Her work is a practice of moving with and through the grief of sudden body change. Rooted in the world of creative reuse, her work spans quilts, soft sculpture, puppetry, and performance art. Often quilting and sewing by hand, her art is meant to be gently held, touched, and experienced physically — affecting and being affected by those who experience it. Emma is a proud member of the Brooklyn Quilters Guild as well as PussyPaws Puppetry, a collaborative puppet troupe of people with and without disabilities.

Taylor Hanigosky
Taylor Hanigosky is an interdisciplinary artist working to translate and tangle relationships between materials, movement, ecologies, and place. Her creative process is a multi-dimensional practice of active listening, tactile exploration, research, play, repetition, and commitment that seeks to re-integrate and re-imagine the human and the environment. Currently, Taylor has been working in methods of wet felting, improvisational movement, performance, and storytelling to learn from and ally with feral places that offer alternative perspectives on human control over the trajectory of landscapes. Collaboration and participation are important methods of learning and experimentation that push the possibilities of Taylor’s practice and challenge her to hold many intersecting stories and ideas in conversation with each other. As such, she engages a variety of workshops, dialogues, and interactions with human and non-human communities alike. Her work remains devotional and in service to a wildly alive, multi-species co-conspiracy to compost extractive empires into new paradigms.

Miriam Saperstein
Miriam Saperstein mourns alongside rivers, tracks air quality through their pathologized body, imagines rhizomatic trans-affirming body modification, and collaborates with disabled humans and other ecological beings to create accessible arts programming and rituals. Recent work includes co-curating a Haptic Gallery with disabled artist collective Hook & Loop, and serving as access coordinator for SEPTINDECIM, a radical ecology exhibition at School of the Alternative. They have taught disability justice and creative writing at the Poetry Society of New York, Bennington College, Yale University, the Bartol Foundation, Velocity Fund, Threshold Academy, Blue Stoop, and Bulk Space. Their work has been exhibited at Waterway Arts, and the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center and is published or forthcoming in The Encyclopedia of Radical Helping (Thick Press), Uncommon (Game Over Books), The Poetry Project, Jewish Currents, and QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion. Find them online at miriamsaperstein.com

Maya Williams
Maya (they/them) is a multimedia artist and writer who is experimenting with ways to reconcile emerging technology with the more ecological principles that are reflected in Black, Indigenous, and Queer cultural/ancestral technologies. Their work is particularly informed by practices of caretaking, resistance, and land stewardship. With a background in sociology and fabrication, they create installations, tangible objects, and events to engage, reclaim, and reorient how we experience physical spaces. They are based in Brooklyn, New York.

keondra bills freemyn
keondra bills freemyn is a writer, memory worker, and archivist in the Black tradition currently serving as Co-Executive Director of Black Lunch Table, a radical archiving project centering Black visual artists. Originally from South Central Los Angeles, keondra’s work centers Black creativity and cultural production as a means of intergenerational communication and wayfinding. She is the founder of Black Women Writers Project, a digital archival initiative highlighting the contributions of Black women and gender expansive writers to the literary canon. A poet, essayist, and fiction writer, keondra is the author of Things You Left Behind and the forthcoming collection, for lovers.

Sabel Santa
I am a visual artist, astrologer and educator specializing in grief work and altar making. In my practice, I transmute grief into creativity and allow the viewer and my students to do the same thru somatic healing, shadow work and grief processing. My goal is to engage with my community and assist in the collective process of mourning in order to be better equipped to handle the world of today.

huiyin zhou 徽音
Born and raised in the industrial hub of Dongguan, China, huiyin zhou 徽音 (they/ta/她) is a transnational queer feminist organizer and community-based photographer, writer, multimedia artist and cultural producer. A diasporic bird constantly up- and re-rooting themselves, they are currently based in Durham, NC, and NYC. Creating with intimate and tender sensibilities, huiyin explores themes related to queer feminism, intimacy, memory, diaspora, and community building.

huiyin co-founded and co-directs Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective离离草. They are currently a resident artist at Queen Street Magic Boat, a surrealist artist-led space; and a co-curator at NorthStar Church of the Arts. Their work has been published by positions: asia critique, The Seventh Wave, Scholar & Feminist Online, The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Apogee, Irrelevant Press, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. huiyin has taught at Squeaky Wheel, Artspace, Feminist Center for Creative Work, Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, AWID Global Feminist Forum, and more.