BRIClab 2024-2025 Contemporary Art Artists

Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman (b. 1995, Tulsa, OK) is a Black Lesbian American, conceptual, multidisciplinary, intersectional feminist and self-taught artist. Her art practice consists of creative writing, spoken word poetry performance, narrative painting of BIPOC people, and community art projects. Her work draws inspiration from Persian Islamic geometric art, Indian classical art, surrealism, and magical realism. Originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ibtisam moved at age six to England, followed by the UAE. Her mother made the decision shortly after 9/11 to escape the violence that Muslims and BIPOC are still facing today. From thirteen onwards, she lived between the UAE and India over the proceeding nine years.

Her work has been shown locally, nationally, and internationally at Ace Hotel, Brooklyn; with New York Health and Hospitals Arts and Medicine Program (in collaboration with Residency Unlimited); Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, Texas; and Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland, among others. She has completed residency programs at Wave Hill, Atelier Mondial, and was a Residency Unlimited Voices of Multiplicity (VoM) artist-in-residence. With a background in theater, she has also performed for Ruckus, at Columbia University, and The Gender Bender Festival co-hosted by Sandbox Collective and the Goethe-Institut. She holds a BA in Sociology, Economics and History from Bangalore University.

Johan Orellana (b. 1998) is an Ecuadorian-born and, both, Spaniard and American-raised lens-based artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. His bodies of work, a mix of photographic and visual approaches, encapsulate moments of high experiential affinity where individuals, objects, and landscapes become interrelated representations of the artist’s visual brain map. He finds interest in visual dichotomies, parallels, intersections, and tangents that mainly result in observations about the domestic and public spaces, recontextualization of national historical and family archives, and documentation of a geographical area or community. 

Orellana has exhibited at the Ford Foundation Live Gallery and Woods Studio Gallery at Bard College, both NY; Wábi Gallery and Blake Hotel Gallery, both New Haven, CT; James Kerney Campus Gallery, Trenton, NJ; and Cristian Anthony Vallejo Memorial Gallery, Las Cruces, NM. He was awarded the Magnum Foundation Fellowship and served as a mentee for NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. He received two BAs from Bard College in Spanish Studies and Photography.

Mae Howard (b. 1997, Indianapolis, IN) is a visual artist based in Brooklyn whose interdisciplinary approach extends across research-based, participatory, and collaborative projects ranging from lens-based media, sculpture, installation, and performance. Calling upon lineages of disabled/trans carework, Mae is interested in the embodied, fleshly, and material enmeshment of BDSM, the medical industrial complex, biopolitics, and disability. Their work explores the residue of discard, debilitation, and excess. 

Their work has been exhibited at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, GHOSTMACHINE, Westbeth Gallery, Worthless Studios, and Babycastles, all NY; Slought, Atelier, AUTOMAT, Vox Populi, University of Pennsylvania, and William Way LGBT Community Center, all Philadelphia, PA; Proyecto Galeria, Mexico City, Mexico; and gr_und, Berlin, Germany. They have performed for Julie Tolentino, Z Tye Richardson, and Wardell Milan. They have been a resident at ACRE, Pocoapoco, and Picture Berlin and recently completed the Whitney Independent Study Program and EmergeNYC Performance and Social Justice Program. They currently teach at the University of Pennsylvania. They received their BA in Feminist and Gender Studies at Colorado College and their MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Stephanie Santana (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) constructs mixed media textile works and fine print editions that explore interior worlds, mythologies, navigational tools and resistance strategies of African diasporic origins. Rooted in the responsive encounter with archival material while employing a range of printmaking, quilting and embroidery techniques, her practice spans time and geography with an interest in unearthing useful information and locating alternative spaces of knowledge and self-definition. 

Santana’s work has been featured in exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Textile Arts Center, Blackburn Study Center at EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Richard F. Brush Gallery at St. Lawrence University, Claire Oliver Gallery, all NY: The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; UT Downtown Gallery - University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Blue Spiral 1 and Penland Gallery, both NC; Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, MN; Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Blanc Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Samford University Art Gallery, Birmingham, AL. Santana has received artist fellowships from New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts (NYSCA/NYFA), EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, and A.I.R. Gallery, as well as generous support from Windgate Foundation and Sustainable Arts Foundation. Her work is held in permanent collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation and Janet Turner Print Museum. She has served as a visiting artist, panelist and guest lecturer at The bell hooks center, Rhode Island School of Design, and SCAD Museum of Art, among others. Santana is a founding member of printmaking collective Black Women of Print.

It began with shattered egos. Splayed across cruel concrete, light coming through. Then, no leaping, no catching. No piecing back together. Instead, quiet observation. Naturally, questions. How do we move forward? How do we move, at all? Our birth was made possible by the death of individualism. We found each other at jagged edges contemplating how to enter the art-industrial-complex with integrity, without being devoured. 

We make our home at Ujamaa Garden in the Northeast Bronx – a community food garden and site for experimentation. Growing from seed teaches us to root ourselves in the interconnectedness of all beings. We center the sacredness of our relationship to, and care for, the land we’re on, even as we commit to study our origins or, as Octavia Butler writes, “take root among the stars.” 

Inspired by Julius Nyerere’s post-colonial social theory, Ujamaa is a philosophy, a place, and an art-making collective where we subvert the myth that any art, especially that which is worthwhile, is done alone. As multidisciplinary artists and educators, our work takes life as its primary form. In the pursuit of a more liberated life for our peoples, we create with the following goals: to confront and embrace change, to build resilient communities with human and non-human life forms, to analyze our earthly experience and imagine a path beyond our subjugation here.