From the BRIClab: Works from the 2025-26 Artist Residencies

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.

Aika Akhmetova (b. 1995 Almaty, Kazakhstan) is an interdisciplinary artist based between New York City and Almaty. Their practice consists of installation, video, and performance exploring intimate corners of being. Interweaving fading memories, kink, queerness and Central Asian traditions Akhmetova’s practice relies on performative action to leave traces of naughtiness behind in any form.   

Akhmetova studied Painting at RISD and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. They’ve had solo exhibitions at Ortega y Gasset Projects in 2023 and A.I.R. Gallery in 2021 and participated in numerous group shows across the US, Central Asia and Europe, including Fondazione Elpis in Milan, Smack Mellon, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Jewish Museum in NYC. Akhmetova was a 2025 artist in residence at FIAR and an AIM fellow at The Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2022 and an artist in residence at LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island in 2023. They work as a teaching artist at Harlem School of the Arts and a visiting instructor at Pratt Institute.

Brandon Follick is an actor, writer and stand-up comedian whose work has been featured in New York Magazine, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Overheard NY, Buzzfeed, Betches, and more. He writes for The Onion, The New Yorker, Reductress, and McSweeney’s. He contributed to the essay collection How To Stay Productive When the World is Ending, which Vulture listed in Best Comedy Books of 2023.

He is a founding writer/performer/producer on Going Down with Ella Yurman (filmed at BRIC) and has performed in national and international comedy festivals, including New York Comedy Fest, Edinburgh Fringe, and Philly SketchFest. He organizes the DaF writing workshop in partnership with The Onion, teaches at Brooklyn Comedy Collective, and taught at the 2026 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. His humor book was a finalist in 2024’s Yes, And Laughter Lab’s Program, he was a quarterfinalist for the 2024 Writers Guild Foundation’s Writers’ Access Program, and if he had any real wins, that would appear in this sentence too.

Camila Galaz is a multimedia and video artist based in New York. Her work explores how personal identity is informed by histories of technology and cultural media, often including the use of archives, found footage, and reconsiderations of cultural touchstones. Her projects have engaged with institutions such as the Media Archaeology Lab, New Museum, Nieuwe Instituut, MoMI, MoMA PS1, National Communications Museum, National Gallery of Victoria, MIT, and Rhizome.

Dr. Evilletown is an interdisciplinary artist working with sound and visuals. Her work generally involves animation, nature footage, sculpture, movement, original sound, public art, and textile work. She explores themes of gender, personal injury, environmental stewardship, and future biological issues. Her videos and films have been projected in and onto theaters, gallery spaces, skyscrapers, small screens, roof tops, restaurants, sidewalks and sidewalks in Tampa, NYC, L.A., Austin, Portland, Seattle, London, and Kyoto. Most recently she received the NYFA / Queens Council for the Arts 2025 New Work Grant.

Ghazal Ghazi (Iran, 1990) is a visual artist, writer, and archivist whose life has spanned three distinct regions: the Middle East, the U.S., and South America. Through oil paintings, ceramics, and handwoven kilims, she addresses empire, collective memory, and archival silences. In 2022, she was a semifinalist in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian Institution. As a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress, she created Unraveling ‘Ishq, a digital humanities project about cultural production in medieval Persianate art and literature. She has been an artist-in-residence at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn, as well as at the Hambidge Center and the Salina Arts Center.  

In her work as a writer, she focuses on facilitating South-South connections. To that end, she writes in Spanish and publishes regularly throughout Latin America. She is the author of two books of poetry in Spanish: El ancestro del poema es la herida (Chile: Ginecosofia, 2024) and La frontera desemboca en ti (Guatemala: Cafeína Editores, 2019). She lives and works in New York City.

Juan Alvarez, aka Wamoo, is a Dominican-American audiovisual artist. Working at the intersection of visual art, music and performance, he constructs experimental music videos using self-produced and found footage. These videos regenerate and mold video game imagery, early digital aesthetics, and music into immersive audiovisual experiences.

Wamoo’s practice draws from his experience immigrating to the U.S. as a child, when video games and music served as tools that helped him adapt to and cope with his new context. His latest work, Tranquilo (2019–2025), is a coming-of-age story told across multiple installments. In this multimedia installation, Wamoo depicts a bildungsroman marked by assimilation, disruption and the noise in between. The challenging experiences and interactions the immigrant child faces are contrasted with the agency and control that gaming brings.

Wamoo has exhibited at The Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and FluxusMuseum, among other venues. He is currently a 2025–26 Video Art resident for the BRICLab Video Art Residency. He was a recent resident at NARS Foundation and a 2025 Media Arts Fellow at En Foco Inc. He holds a BA in philosophy and history from SUNY Albany.

Leo Pontius’ work is a ritual of building resilience, illuminating the power of the overlooked, and celebrating transness and gender nonconformity as liberating forces. He is fascinated by queerness as a verb - an invitation to meander past the boundaries of convention into a complex world of possibility and connection. Drawing from personal experience, mystical spiritual traditions, posthumanist discourse and lgbtqia+ history, his sculptural works span scale and slip between categories.

Textile techniques, such as basketry, embroidery, and sewing root the work in queer craft traditions. Materials like canvas, fabric remnants, photographs, and yarn are taken through alchemical cycles of accumulation, alteration, and reconfiguration. They are meticulously disassembled and slowly reformed to become simultaneously more complex and more cohesive. This material shapeshifting mirrors the ever-evolving nature of identity, becoming simultaneously more complex and more cohesive. The work moves at the pace of relationship, slow and deliberate, allowing discomfort to ruminate and wisdom to emerge. Each completed work becomes a sacred vessel, an invitation into the wisdom of queerness for everyone, regardless of identity.

Mauricio Delfín is an artist and researcher whose work examines the politics and poetics of cultural governance, drawing on over a decade of direct experience inside those systems.

His earlier film and video works like Noqanchis, Viaje hacia la Noche, and VIVO move from historical testimony and artistic biography to interactive media. More recently, his practice has turned toward installation and participatory work. In The Timelines Project, he uses workshops and handmade punch cards to map histories of cultural advocacy, assembling them into open datasets and modular installations where multiple community timelines intersect. Capital of Culture uses sequential and installation art to materialize the gap between New York City's self-image as a cultural capital and the structural precarity its artists and organizations actually face.

His writing has appeared in Third Text, Cultural Trends, Media, Culture & Society, and ARTnews, as well as UNESCO policy publications. Delfín is co-founder and Co-Director of the Culture & Arts Policy Institute in New York City and a member of the EU/UNESCO Expert Facility on Cultural Diversity.

Nate Dorr is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker interested in the complicated landscapes of the late Anthropocene. His projects investigate human-altered shorelines and post-industrial wildernesses, while seeking new ways to work with old media that better capture his subjects. He is a lapsed neuroscientist, sometimes curator, and a habitual wanderer of transitory pseudo-urban spaces. His films have shown in festivals around the world and all along the New York City coasts, from the Gowanus to Hunters Point South.