Participant Bios
Nayland Blake is an artist, writer, educator, and curator. Born in New York City in 1960, they attended Bard College and then California Institute of the Arts. After receiving their MFA, they moved to San Francisco in 1984. They have had one-person exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; University Art Museum, Berkeley; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Tang Museum. Their retrospective No Wrong Holes – 30 years of Nayland Blake opened in 2019 at the ICALA and closed in 2021 at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. They are currently the co-director of the studio art program at Bard College.
Liz Collins works fluidly between art and design, with emphasis and expertise in textile media. She earned a BFA and MFA in Textiles at RISD, and has exhibited and taught widely, including ten years as Textiles faculty at RISD, and will present a major mid-career survey of her work later this year at the RISD Museum. Recent and current exhibitions include Foreigners Everywhere at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Queer Histories at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil, and Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, which opens at MoMA this April. The Tang Museum published her first monograph, Liz Collins: Energy Field, in 2020.
Jon Davies is a curator, writer, and scholar focusing on film, video, and contemporary art. He worked as Assistant Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, and Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries, both in Toronto, before earning his PhD in art history from Stanford University in 2023 with a dissertation titled “The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945–1995.” He is the 2024–25 General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Ottawa, Canada.
Colleen Doyle has been working in film preservation since studying filmmaking at Rhode Island School of Design. She worked as the archivist in the Brown University Film Archive restoring the celluloid holdings for many years before moving to New York. She received an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons. For the past nine years she has worked on stabilizing, categorizing, and digitizing David Armstrong’s estate. Doyle has been a key collaborator on posthumous exhibitions and publications on Armstrong, including a major retrospective at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2024.
Jarrett Earnest is a writer, curator, and art critic specializing in queer art history. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018), and Valid Until Sunset (MATTE Editions, 2023), and the host of Angelic Transmissions, an art talk show on East Village Radio.
Evan Garza is a global contemporary art scholar, queer art historian, and is Curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Garza was the 2021-2022 Fulbright Scholar at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and simultaneously served as Visiting Research Fellow in History of Art & Architecture at Trinity College Dublin. Garza was cofounder of Fire Island Artist Residency, a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQIA+ artists.
Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Harris has exhibited and performed widely at institutions around the world, and his work is in numerous permanent collections. Born in the Bronx and raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and New York, Harris obtained a BFA from Wesleyan University, an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He is a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York.
Hub New Music actively collaborates with today’s most celebrated composers on projects that traverse a rich musical landscape. Founded in 2013, Hub has commissioned dozens of new works for its distinctive ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, played by Michael Avitabile (flutes), Gleb Kanasevich (clarinets), Magnolia Rohrer (violin/viola), and Jesse Christeson (cello). Currently based in Detroit, the ensemble’s name is inspired by its founding city of Boston’s reputation as a hub of innovation.
Tom Kalin is a filmmaker, writer, activist, and prominent figure in the New Queer Cinema. In addition to his features Swoon and Savage Grace, his award-winning, critically acclaimed work traverses diverse forms and genres. He is known for narrative features, mixed-media installations and short experimental films and videos. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, Kalin’s work is in the collection of the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, and The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. Kalin was also a member of ACT UP and a founding member of AIDS activist collective Gran Fury, known for its provocative public art projects.
Brian Lawson is an assistant professor of dance at Skidmore College. A dance performer and educator who began dancing in Toronto, Canada, Lawson spent a year at Codarts in Rotterdam before earning his BFA in dance performance from SUNY Purchase and touring internationally with the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG). He earned his MFA from the University of Washington in 2020. His artistic research focuses on queering the ballet canon (with Adele Nickel) and exploring queer masculinities (with Aaron Loux). He also engages in pedagogical research with regards to contemporary balletic practices. Brian is currently a member of Pam Tanowitz Dance and continues to dance as a guest artist with MMDG.
Matthew Leifheit is a photographer, magazine editor, and professor based in Brooklyn whose “Gay Archive” project documents ephemera from archives and historic sites across the United States. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the Yale School of Art, Leifheit is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, the journal of emerging photography he has published since 2010, and full-time faculty at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
Siobhan Liddell is a painter and sculptor whose work has been exhibited widely in the US, Europe, and Japan. Born in England and living in New York, Liddell deals with the space between knowing and unknowing, the mystery in the everyday, history and the continuum of desire to record and create our unique worlds in her work. Her paintings and sculptures are in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Dallas Museum of Art, and numerous private collections. She is an Artist in Residence in the MFA Multidisciplinary program at MICA, Baltimore.
Aaron Loux is a dance artist and educator living in New York City. From 2010 to 2022, he was a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, and he has also performed with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Christopher Williams, Charlotte Bydwell, Arc Dance Company, and Cornfield Dance. He is working towards a BA in America Studies from Columbia University’s School of General Studies, holds a BFA from The Juilliard School, and teaches ballet at Marymount Manhattan College. In 2023, Aaron was the inaugural CBA-Juilliard Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU.
Jamie Parra is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore, where he teaches courses in 19th-century American literature and culture. Before joining Skidmore’s faculty, he received a PhD from Columbia University and taught in the American Studies Department at Williams College as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. From 2007 to 2016, he wrote about contemporary art and design for Whitewall magazine, and he has written book reviews for Time Out New York and Public Books. His recent academic writing includes essays on vision, fictionality, and ethics in Huckleberry Finn; theories of literary character and personhood; and mystical encounters with paintings in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative. He is working on a book about slavery and aesthetics in the middle of the 19th century.
Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez is a photographer and art historian living in New York between Washington Heights and an intentional community in Rockland County. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, currently at work on a dissertation titled The Disappearance of Landscape: Artists on Fire Island, 1937-1983.
