ARTIST BIOS
NANCY BURSON
Nancy Burson is an acclaimed artist/photographer who combines art and innovation in a way that challenged photographic truth at the birth of digital manipulation. She is best known for her pioneering work in morphing technologies, which age enhance the human face and still enable law enforcement officials to locate missing children and adults. Her Human Race Machine, commissioned by Zaha Hadid for the London Millennium Dome, was used for over a decade as a diversity tool that provided viewers with the visual experience of being another race. Her work is included in museums worldwide including the MoMA, Metropolitan Museum, and the Whitney Museum in NYC, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the LA County Museum of Art and the Getty Museum, MoMA (San Francisco), the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, as well as many others. She has collaborated with Creative Time, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Deutsche Bank in completing several important public art projects in NYC.
CELINE CANNON
Celine Cannon is a Sculptor from Ireland based in New York, working primarily in stone and fiber. She apprenticed at her family’s quarry in Dublin where the ancient techniques were passed down through the generations. As a contracted artist, Celine has carved architectural details for several building facades throughout New York, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and the Jewish Museum. She was amongst a select few artists invited by Donna Karan, in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, to work on a Philanthropic Art Project in Haiti. Celine has exhibited in both New York and California and her work is held in private collections reaching as far as Singapore and the UAE. She is an internationally published artist.
ALISON CORNYN
Alison Cornyn is an interdisciplinary artist whose work often incorporates public memory and archives. For over 20 years, Cornyn has initiated new forms of storytelling in installations, films, and online, investigating pressing social issues from multiple perspectives. Many of her projects address the US criminal legal system and mass incarceration.
Her current project, Incorrigibles, examines youth justice for girls – past and present, starting in New York. Incorrigibles investigates the long-term use of stigmatizing language to define and confine young women and tells the stories of women who were incarcerated in their youth to create an archive of first-person testimonies that counter institutional histories.
Cornyn received a Creative Capital award for her pioneering interactive documentary about US prisons. Her work has received numerous awards, including a Peabody, the Gracie Allen for Women in Media, and Pew’s Batten Award for Innovation. She serves on the Board of the NYC Municipal Archives and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.
YOLANDA CUOMO
Yolanda Cuomo is an experienced art director and avid educator. As Principal of Yolanda Cuomo Design, she provides the creative vision, direction, and passion behind all of the Studio’s work. Cuomo and her team work collaboratively with their clients, which include leading publishers, museums, authors, editors, artists, and photographers, to develop memorable and meaningful cultural and commercial projects.
ELENA DEL RIVERO
Elena del Rivero has dedicated her work to study diverse written and visual forms for communicating personal experiences with an emphasis in the epistolary format. Born in Valencia, Spain, she has lived in New York since 1991. Her focus is on painting and works on paper but she has also produced large-scale installations and performances with an interest in printmaking and analog photography. Her projects develop gradually and do not always possess predictable end points. She welcomes improvisation and free associative connections and meanings amass over extended periods of time. One of her ongoing drawing series, “Letter to the Mother,” initially inspired by Franz Kafka’s Letter to his Father, has, since the 1990s, grown in various directions. Del Rivero draws inspiration from what is at hand, historical events that she has witnessed, and the everyday with its multiple symbolical references. She contemplates a utopian idea of mending action that she takes whenever the opportunity arises when the works get damaged, intentionally or not, during the process of making them; in this manner she, metaphorically, sutures their “wounds”.
Elena del Rivero’s work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT); National Gallery of Art (Washington DC); Pollock Gallery at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX); and The Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), among others.
Major grants and prizes include, Academia Bellas Artes de España in Rome (Prix de Rome 1988), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1991 and 1995), Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2001), The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2001 and 2002), The Rockefeller Foundation Residency at The Bellagio Center, Italy (2005) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2015). Most recently, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and the Anonymous Was A Woman grant (2020.
HEATHER GREER
Heather Greer is an Emmy-winning producer, award-winning filmmaker, media artist, and educator. She is the founder of Black Tartan Studios, a boutique creative agency and production company that guides process and production for her own projects and for clients whose mission embodies transformation. Black Tartan Studios specializes in short-form, nonfiction content centered around powerful human-driven stories.
Heather’s films and video installations have screened and been exhibited nationally and internationally at leading festivals and arts venues including MoMA, Tribeca, BAFICI, the Female Eye Film Festival, and CineDoc.
In a humanitarian capacity and as a media educator, Heather has worked in several countries including Rwanda, Malawi, Mali and Bangladesh. She holds a master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she served as an adjunct professor and thesis advisor for 12 years, and a Bachelor of Arts from Georgetown University.
SANDRA HARPER
Sandra Harper is an artist and writer living in New York City and Marfa, Texas. Her paintings and sculptures explore the intersections of language, ritual, myth and the natural world through an ongoing art practice called The Plant Project. She has applied the intentions and study of this project to site specific locations where she has worked for significant periods of time: the Northern Chihuahuan Desert in Texas, the Downeast coast of Maine and the Hudson River Watershed.
JAZMINE HAYES
Jazmine Hayes is an interdisciplinary visual artist, musician and poet born and based in Brooklyn, New York. Through a research-based lens, her practice explores histories of the African diaspora and the ways they are preserved and reproduced through cultural traditions. She is a 2023 U.S. Fulbright researcher, in which she traveled to Senegal, Africa to study weaving traditions and pattern, as coded communication, protection and preservation of Black American, Afro-Caribbean & West African histories. For over 14 years, she has worked with community-based youth organizations across New York City as an educator and muralist with several reknown non-profits and has been featured in Art Forum, Interview Magazine, Artnet, and several other publications.
OFELIA MANGEN
The daughter of a beautician and a builder, I’ve been gardening since I could walk.
For 20 years, I’ve worked with some of the world’s leading universities and cultural institutions to develop learning programs for global audiences.
My current series of “plantworks” weave together these threads of practice to invite joyful exploration of the connections between plants and people.
TANYA MARCUSE
Tanya Marcuse (b. 1964) is an American photographer most known for her large-scale photographs that explore the imperiled natural world. Her projects use increasingly fantastical imagery and elaborate methods of construction to explore cycles of growth and decay and the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium. A Yale MFA graduate, her work is held by major museums, including the Met and the National Gallery. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and other awards. Tanya has published several books, including Fruitless | Fallen | Woven. Tanya is a student of martial arts as a method of cultivating mental and physical discipline. She teaches at Bard College.
JILLIAN MCDONALD
Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist living in New York where she is a professor at Pace University. Recent exhibitions and screenings were held at Undercurrent and Air Circulation in New York; AxeNéo7 in Québec; aCinema in Milwaukee; Philip Steele Gallery in Denver; and The Esker Foundation in Calgary. She has mounted performances for 50 to 1000 performers in natural and urban settings in Tempe at The Arizona State University Art Museum, in Sweden in collaboration with Lilith Performance Studio, and in Toronto at La Nuit Blanche. Critical discussion appears in The Transatlantic Zombie by Sarah Lauro and Deconstructing Brad Pitt, edited by Christopher Schaberg. Awards include grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts, and participation in numerous residencies at Wave Farm in Acra, NY, The Arctic Circle Expedition in Svalbard, Norway, The Headlands Center for the Arts in California, Glenfiddich in Dufftown, Scotland, and The Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada.
RITA PERESS
Rita Peress is an artist, environmentalist, and a current student at Bard College. She likes listening to conspiracy theory podcasts and is trying to become the apprentice of the Lorax.
NEGIN SHARIFZADEH
Negin Sharifzadeh is a cross-disciplinary artist and storyteller based in Newburgh, New York. She is fascinated by the mechanisms, patterns, and interplay of systems ranging from biological and emotional to speculative and surreal. She has explored these themes through the mediums of sculpture, stop-motion animation, live-action short films and more recently photography. Sharifzadeh has had solo exhibitions and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Florence, Melbourne, and Tehran, and has been part of numerous international group exhibitions and festivals. Sharifzadeh’s filmmaking grew out of her sculptural practice, bringing constructed pieces to life with stop-motion animation, often displaying them within physical installations built with sculptural work drawn from and inspired by the films, so the audience can be immersed within the work. She is increasingly incorporating live-action genre filmmaking and photography to further explore storytelling and the themes of her work. Her animated films have won numerous awards, including New York 3rd-I Film Awards and the films have been shown at numerous festivals internationally including the San Paulo Biennale, Brazil; the Melbourne International Film Festival, Australia; Firenze Suona Contemporanea, Italy; Iga Annual Light Festival, Japan. Her body of work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Herald Sun, Global Voices, Art World Women and Voice of America. She received her BFA in Sculpture from Tehran University in Iran in 2002, and her BFA in Performance Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.
MAGGIE SIMONELLI
Maggie Simonelli received two Master's Degrees in Fine Art and Art History from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, and a BA from Connecticut College in New London in 1987. Exhibitions this year include a solo exhibition at Venus Rising (2025) at Gary Marotta Fine Art, g-1 in Provincetown, MA. Simonelli’s artwork has been commissioned for private and corporate collections including Kirkland & Ellis LLP and David Rockwell both in NYC and the InterContinental Hotel in Boston. Simonelli has lectured on her art for the NY Society of Cosmetic Chemists, COLOR 2020 and #BeyondTheBrief 2019 at Peclers Paris, The Artist in the Studio series for 92nd Street Y all in NYC. She has been interviewed for Intelligentsia Journal (2019) online magazine, COLOR a Virtual Conference for the NY Society of Cosmetic Chemists, NY, on radio From the Artist’s Perspective (2016, WOMR,) and Be Happy Dammit ( 2007, Sirius Radio). Reviews of Simonelli’s works appear in Provincetown Banner, New York Magazine, Artscope, Easthampton Star, Southampton Press, Journal of Medicinal Health, and Hamptons.com. Maggie Simonelli lives and works in New York City.
NINA SOBELL
Nina Sobell is an interdisciplinary artist whose thinking of herself as an electronic medium led her to originate BrainWave Drawings, the interactive synchrony of brainwaves between two or more people, creating a combined physical and mental portrait by visualizing non-verbal communication, as evidenced at Dr. M. Barry Sterman’s Neuropsychology Lab in 1973. She pioneered video, Brain-Computer Interfaces and created the first live interactive and transcontinental web performances at NYU’s Center for Advanced Technology in collaboration with Emily Hartzell with the historic internet collective, ParkBench. She was in shows curated by C. Hart, N Chuck, M. Cotten, S. Lacy, B. Viola, P. McCarthy and invited by Joseph Beuys to speak about her social sculpture, Videophone Voyeur at Documenta 6. Her work has been shown at or is in the collection of DIA, the Whitney, Hammer, LACMA, LAICA, LBMA, CAM Houston, Blanton Museum, MIT, Getty, ZKM, Whitechapel, Zwirner, WP Phillips Gallery, Louisiana MOMA, Denmark, Kunst Forum, Cornell and the Kramlich collection among others. She has taught at UCLA, SVA and received an Arts Council of Great Britain, NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, Turbulence, Franklin Furnace awards, an Acker Award in Video. She holds an MFA in sculpture from Cornell University, where she is credited with doing the first thesis in video and founding interdepartmental collaboration 1969-71.
DIANA WEYMAR
Diana Weymar is an artist and activist. She grew up in the wilderness of Northern British Columbia, studied creative writing at Princeton University, and worked in film in New York City.
She has worked on projects with Build Peace (in Nicosia, Bogota, Zurich, and Belfast), the Arts Council of Princeton, the Nantucket Atheneum, the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst, the University of Puget Sound, The Zen Hospice Project (San Francisco), the Peddie School, Open Arts Space (Damascus, Syria), Trans Tipping Point Project (Victoria, BC), New York Textile Month, Textile Arts Center (Brooklyn, NY), The Wing (NYC and SF), and Alison Cornyn’s Incorrigibles project, as well as Syrian journalist and activist Mansour Omari. She is a judge / presenter for All Stitched Up at the University of Puget Sound. She has also curated exhibitions at the Princeton, NJ headquarters of Fortune 500 company, NRG Energy, and exhibits for the Arts Council of Princeton.
Diana is the creator and curator of Interwoven Stories and The Tiny Pricks Project, both of which are open for public participation. Her work has been exhibited and collected in the United States and Canada.
MARINA ZURKOW
Media artist Marina Zurkow invites people to explore ways of knowing and feeling nature-culture tensions and environmental messes. By engaging research, speculation, and technologies, she fosters intimate multispecies and geophysical connections. Zurkow works as a founding member of the collaborative initiatives More&More (Investing in Futures), Dear Climate, and Climoji.
Her most recent solo show Parting Worlds, including the Hyundai Terrace Commission at the Whitney Museum of American Art opened in April, 2025. Recent exhibitions include WHAT IF? at MoMA’s Creativity Lab (New York); Antroposcenes, Lo Pati Centre d’Art (Amposta); The Breath Eaters, Wolfsonian Museum (Miami); Underfoot/Overhead, Wasserman Projects (Detroit); and Can the Substrate Speak? Festival Art Souterrain (Montreal). Zurkow was a 2022 fellow at the Environmental Media Lab, Princeton University; and received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rice University, NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She resides in the Hudson Valley, New York, and teaches at NYU.