BRIClab 2025-2026 Contemporary Art Artists

Amadi Williams (b. 2002) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY, whose practice is deeply rooted in family history, storytelling, and the act of painting. Williams’s work explores the complexities of Blackness, memory, and family, seeking to historicize the stories of loved ones through abstract and figurative pieces. Living with a memory disorder and a family history of dementia, Williams relies on personal archives and intimate conversations—often calling her grandmother for stories that anchor and contextualize her paintings. Through geometric abstraction and evocative use of color, she questions the reliability of memory and invites viewers, especially family members, into dialogues about their own recollections.

Influenced by artists such as Barkley L. Hendricks and Kerry James Marshall, Williams is dedicated to social justice, cross-cultural dialogue, and the celebration of underrepresented groups. Her multidisciplinary approach includes painting, curatorial work, and conservation, reflecting a drive to deepen the understanding of diverse narratives in art spaces.

Ghazal Ghazi (Iran, 1990) is a poet and visual artist. Through embroidered oil paintings and ceramics, she investigates collective memory, language, and belonging, within a larger examination of diasporic centers and peripheries and their relationship to the imperial core. She was a semifinalist in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2022 at the Smithsonian Institution, and a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. She is the recipient of grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, and the Norman Arts Council, and her work has been shown in exhibits at the Albin Polasek Museum and Woodbury Art Museum. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Leo Pontius (they/he) is a community-taught interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. They make two and three dimensional works that explore connection, healing, and transmutation from a posthumanist trans perspective. Their process-based pieces incorporate sculpture, basketry, and painting to create two and three dimensional works. Human-made materials ground their practice in identity and personal narrative.

They have a degree in Religious Studies from Naropa University. Over time, their spirituality evolved into a fascination with the wisdom of the ineffable and found expression through art. They continue to learn in alternative art education environments including The Alternative Arts School and AIR 16 Residency at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. They teach textile dyeing with procion dyes in private and public workshops.

Mauricio Delfin (he/him) is an artist, researcher, and expert in cultural policies and civic technologies, focusing on making culture and arts policies more democratic and transparent. As director of Realidad Visual, a Peruvian media arts organization, he headed the creation of artworks, international media art exhibitions, publications, and initiatives that examined the intersections of art, culture, and technology. Mauricio’s creative practice involves documentary filmmaking and other time-based and sequential media. He currently works as a member of UNESCO’s Expert Facility and Co-directs the Culture and Arts Policy Institute in NYC.

Yolanda Hoskey is a multidisciplinary artist and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across portraiture, post-documentary, and film, her practice explores the richness and complexity of Black identity. With a background in Theatre Arts and Film, Yolanda brings a narrative-driven approach to her work—centering care, collaboration, and authenticity to create images that feel both intimate and expansive.

Raised in East New York, her perspective is deeply informed by the beauty and multiplicity of her community, often overlooked or misrepresented in mainstream media. Her photographs reclaim narrative space, honoring Black life in all its dimensions—joyful, nuanced, unapologetic, and free.

Yolanda’s commissioned work has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Times Union, while her photography has been featured in Essence, Hyperallergic, and by the Columbia School of Journalism. Her images have been exhibited in Body Freedom for Every(Body), Vote for Democracy, SaveArtSpace: Tigueras, Sula Playing in the Dark, A Tapestry of Aliveness at the Magnum Foundation, and Our Black Experience at Photoville.

She is a 2024 Magnum Foundation Fellow, a 2023 Getty Images Creator Accelerator recipient, and the 2025 recipient of the International Photographic Council’s Rising Star Photographer Award, presented at the United Nations.