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2023-24 BRIClab: Contemporary Art (Pelenakeke’s Rotation)

Sef is an audio describer, access consultant, massage therapist, and somatic educator. Their work in dance, sensory design, and disability access work informs their understanding of personal embodiment as a relational project. They are a co-founder of Autosomatica alongside Wanda Gala. Their teaching practice has served students at Gibney Dance, Abrons Arts Center, Pratt Institute, UC Santa Barbara and Rutgers University. They have supported programs at The Shed, Lincoln Center, Roundabout Theatre Company, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, CultureHub, Frieze, Performance Space New York, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. 

2023-24 BRIClab CA

Informed by queer-crip experience, community, and culture, Salerno work to critique standards of productivity, normativity, 24/7 society, and the commodification of our lives in order to make space for having needs. They have exhibited at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, The 8th Floor, the Ford Foundation Gallery, all NY; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Castellón; ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels; among others. They have been awarded a Wynn Newhouse Award and an Art Matters Foundation Artist2Artist Fellowship. Recent publications include Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and Art in America. Salerno has been an artist in residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability Residency, the Artist Studios Program at the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Visual Artist AIRspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center. Salerno received their MFA from Parsons School of Design and their BS from Skidmore College. 

2022-23 BRIClab: Contemporary Art (Ezra Benus)

Brothers Sick (Ezra and Noah Benus) is a sibling artistic collaboration rooted in histories and knowledge of Jewishness, disability justice, illness, spirituality, and care. Their practice has been supported internationally through projects and exhibitions at Visual AIDS, The Shed, Gibney Dance, and Rochester Art Institute, all NY; Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College, MN; VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver, BC; Museion of Contemporary Art Bolzano, Italy; HAU Berlin and Museum für Moderne Kunst, both Germany; and Shape Arts, UK. Commissioned print contributions are included in Blackwood Gallery’s publication SDUK: Lingering, Kingdom of The Ill reader published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, and How To Be Disabled In A Pandemic (2025) by NYU Press. Their work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Pin Up, Mousse Magazine, Ocula, Art Agenda, Publico ípsilon, and Welt Kunst. They are alumni of CUNY Hunter College and CUNY City College of New York. 

2023-24 BRIClab: Contemporary Art

Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 creates art to empower relational community healing. They make space for nuanced narratives rooted in China, the Sinophone diaspora, and other experiences from the margins. As cultural organizers, they explore social justice-oriented theorizing and narrativizing through communal and processual art practices. Their interdisciplinary praxis interweaves collective poetry, performance, food art, clay, photography, sound, video, children’s games, meditation, herbal medicine, and installation. Their works investigate systems of discipline, control, censorship, and capitalist extraction and reimagine memory/memorials, rituals, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship to (re)build sustainable community infrastructures. They explore the idea of languaging as a moving and fluid site, a contact zone for improvisation. Their community-engaged art organizing has been supported by the Queens Art Fund, Asian American Arts Alliance’s What Can We Do? grant, John Hope Franklin Documentary Award, Benenson Award in the Arts, and beyond. CAO has hosted artist talks at alpha nova & galerie futura (Germany), Hamilton College, UC Irvine, Pratt Institute, Duke University, Wesleyan University, and University of Oklahoma. Their community collective poetry and translations have been published by Irrelevant Press, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Massachusetts Review.

2023-24 BRIClab: Contemporary Art

Cinthya Santos Briones is a visual artist, educator, and cultural organizer with indigenous Nahua roots. Santos Briones’ interdisciplinary practice includes photography, historical archives, writing, ethnography, drawings, collage, embroidery, and popular education. With a background in ethnohistory and anthropology, she worked as a researcher at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, focusing on issues of indigenous migration, codex, textiles, and traditional medicine. Santos Briones has participated in exhibitions at Smack Mellon, Green-Wood Cemetery, El Museo del Barrio, the Museum of the City of New York, the International Center of Photography, the Latinx Project, and the Tang Teaching Museum & Art Gallery, all NY; Sky Blue Gallery, Portland, OR; and the Trout Museum of Art, Appleton, WI. Santos Briones is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Magnum Foundation, En Foco, Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center, National Geographic Research and Exploration, We Woman, National Fund for Culture and the Arts of México. She is co-author of the book “The Indigenous Worldview and its Representations in Textiles of the Nahua community of Santa Ana Tzacuala, Hidalgo,” and the documentary, The Huichapan Codex. Santos Briones is Adjunct Faculty at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She holds an MFA focus in creative writing and photography from Ithaca College-Cornell University.

2023-24 BRIClab: Contemporary Art

Born in Germany into a military household prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dominic Cinnamon Bradley is a Brooklyn-based Black, disabled, nonbinary visual artist and writer who spent their formative years in the Crunk-era "Dirty South." Dominic's creative practice is dedicated to their late uncle Bennett Bradley (Ibaye) and relies on such mediums as mixed-media, collage, and assemblage to tell stories about trouble, trauma, grief, and growth. Their work was featured in SICK at the SF LGBT Center. Previous fellowships include RiseOut Activist-in-Residence and Crip Camp x Adobe. In addition to holding a BA in Sociology from The Johns Hopkins University and an MSW from Columbia University, Dominic recently earned a UX/UI certification from the University of Utah with the intent to design for social impact.

2023-24 BRIClab: Contemporary Art

Finnegan Shannon is an artist experimenting with forms of access. They intervene in ableist structures with humor, earnestness, and rage. Some of their recent work includes Alt Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces; and Don’t mind if I do, a conveyor-belt-centered exhibition that prioritizes rest and play. They have done projects with MUDAM Luxembourg, the Queens Museum, moCa Cleveland, the High Line, MMK Frankfurt, MCA Denver, and Nook Gallery. Their work has been supported by a Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Disability Futures
Fellowship, a Wynn Newhouse Award, an Eyebeam fellowship, and grants from Art Matters Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Disability Visibility Project. Their work has been written about in Art in America, BOMB Magazine, the Believer, and Out Magazine.

2022-23 BRIClab: Video Art

Isabella Vargas crafts poetic documentaries, combining captured footage and drawn animations to rewrite narratives about her intersectional identities of Latinidad and disability. Sometimes isolated from her multiple communities, being a multiply disabled Latina, Vargas questions marginalization of people with intersecting identities of disability, ethnic identity, and queerness, and how prejudice and struggle stem from generational trauma. Vargas has had screenings at New York Lift Off, Revolution Me Film Festival, and Painted Ladies Collective, all NY; YoFi Yonkers Film Festival, NY; Oregon Short Film Festival; WYO Film Festival, Cheyenne, WY; and Miami Independent Film Festival, FL. She has been a UnionDocs fellow and received a Merit Award from Docs Without Borders. Vargas holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

2022-23 BRIClab: Video Art

Linda Ryan is a choreographer, facilitator, and arts researcher. Her artistic work pulls from movement, video art, and immersive media to explore physical embodiment through digital means. Much of her artistic work deals with gaze and is oriented by, though not always explicitly about, her experiences as a visually impaired artist. She previously completed residencies at PlySpace, Keshet Dance+ Center for the Arts, and the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University. Linda holds a BA in dance from the George Washington University, where she studied under Dana Tai Soon Burgess, Maida Withers, Anthony Gongora, and Matt Reeves. 

2022-23 BRIClab: Video Art

Olaronke is an interdisciplinary artist who works in collage, papermaking, printmaking, book arts, and stop-motion animation. She is also a Set Decorator/Dresser for Film & TV and the Creator/Director of The Free Black Women’s Library, a social art project that features a collection of over 5,000 books written by Black women and Black non-binary folks, as well as a wide array of free public programming, mutual aid initiatives, a virtual Reading Club and a weekly book swap. Through her art, she creates, offers, and expands counter narratives around the constructs of safety, beauty and sanity and aims to highlight the importance and transformative praxis of self-reflection and collective care. Her work is guided by the principles of Black Feminism, Afro-Futurism and nature. She has received notable fellowships and residencies from various cultural institutions and art organizations including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Foundation for the Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, Baldwin For The Arts, The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Shop, Culture Push and The Laundromat Project. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Teen Vogue, Time Out magazine, and BUST magazine.

2023-24 BRIClab: Contemporary Art

Pelenakeke Brown is a disabled, indigenous, interdisciplinary artist. Her practice explores the intersections between disability theory and Sāmoan concepts investigates sites of knowledge, archives, relationality and intimacy. She uses technology, writing, poetry, and performance to explore these ideas. Her work has been presented at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Judson Memorial Church, the Bruno Walter Auditorium (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center), Marian Goodman Gallery, Flux Factory, all NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH; Schwules Museum, Berlin, Germany; and Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand. Working globally, she has participated in residencies including Kampnagel, Disability. Dance. Artistry. at Dance/NYC, Denniston Hill, Laundromat Project, and Eyebeam. Select performance works include ‘enter//return’ commissioned by Sophiensaele, Cripping the Queer Festival, and ‘Channels’ for The Shed Open Call with artist Yo-Yo Lin. She is a co-founder of Rotations, a collaborative digital practice for disabled artists to teach, share methodology and gather. Pelenakeke received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Auckland and a Certificate in Studio Practice at the National Academy Museum and School (now known as National Academy of Design).

2023-24 BRIClab: Contemporary Art

Steven Anthony Johnson II is a draftsperson, interpretive archivist, writer and curator. Utilizing the language of drawing, animation, and photo-documentary their work attempts to make peace between the religious, intellectual, and humanistic ideals in relation to Blackness and “Otherness” through multidisciplinary storytelling. Johnson’s work has recently been featured at The Armory Show and The International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), both NY; VAE Raleigh, NC; Cooper Gallery, UK; and others. Johnson has been in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ISCP, Field Projects, Inbreak, and The Royal Drawing School. They hold an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.