BRIClab 2024-2025 Contemporary Art Artists

Amari-Grey (b. Queens, NY) is a curator, educator, and post-disciplinary artist based in Baltimore, MD. Her research-based practice explores generational memory, gender, technology, and land cultures through experimental writing, installation, and social practice. She is particularly interested in the life and death of Black trans people in the modern world, focusing on the physical-spiritual traditions that connect their beings.

Amari-Grey’s work has been exhibited, performed, and published at/by BronxArtSpace, Icebox Project Space, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Kitchen, and the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism. Recent curatorial contributions include Clouds Are So Beautiful That I Can Bite My Toes… (Skylab Gallery, Columbus, OH); Caroline Kent: A Short Play About Watching Shadows Move Across the Room (Queens Museum, Queens, NY); and Threads of Time: Past, Present, and Future (Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Brooklyn, NY). She has received residencies and fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Wendy’s Subway, Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She holds a BA in Art, Film, and Visual Studies from Harvard College.

Guided by Black Feminist Insurgency, asmara is dedicated to the belief that freedom is a place we can build and arrive at in this lifetime. They study and practice the traditions of feminist revolution to reignite the liberatory world-building that occurs before, during, and in the wake of global systems of domination. Inspired by the ancient relationship between women and nature, her work catalyzes the consciousness shifts necessary to restore dignity to the earth and to third-world women; at the center of this is a reconfiguration of the feminine body as a precious and profound locus within earthly and cosmic ecosystems. As an artist in the experimental tradition, she focuses on raising social empathy through intimate community building and the creative practices of writing, performance, and film. As part of this practice, asmara grows food for free distribution to support resilient, sovereign communities at Ujamaa Garden in the Northeast Bronx.
Asmara is honored to participate in the BRIC Residency in collaboration with David Onabanjo.

David Onabanjo is a Nigerian-American multimedia artist, documentary impact producer, and youth educator born and raised in the Bronx, NY. Centering on an interdisciplinary approach, his practice combines photography, film, installation, DJing, and facilitation. Through these mediums, David’s work explores the concepts of grounding, drifting, and journeying as responses to external stimuli. As a Black Queer person, he emphasizes the ongoing struggle of navigating these reactions and the possibilities for healing each offers, both to individuals and communities. Influenced by West African photography, experimental Black film, radio culture, community organizing, and Black archival work, gathering is central to his art—both as a theme and a practice. His time- and experience-based work invites viewers to come together to reconsider and awaken their relationship with place, setting, and community, exploring the rhythms of healing. David is currently participating in the BRIC residency in collaboration with Asmara, in connection with the Ujamaa Community Garden in the northeast Bronx.

As an educator, he is passionate about inviting young people of color to embrace art as a vehicle for self-discovery, helping them understand what deeply resonates with them and their ongoing capacity to care.

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.