School of Art

American Artist makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video. Artist is a 2023 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Visual Art, a 2022 Creative Capital and United States Artists grantee, and a 2021 LACMA Art & Tech Lab Grantee. They are a former resident of Smack Mellon, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Abrons Art Center, Recess, EYEBEAM, Pioneer Works, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; and Nam June Paik Center, Seoul. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Cultured, Artforum, and Art in America. Artist is a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a full-time faculty at Yale.

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Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles. She is executive director and curator at JOAN. Her work begins at the intersection of art and politics, treating image making as steeped in colonial pasts and modern surveillance states. She has curated exhibitions and programs at spaces including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, The Hammer Museum, and Human Resources, Los Angeles; Oregon Contemporary, Portland; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; UKS, Oslo; and the Sursock Museum, Beirut. Halajian serves on the programming committee of Human Resources Los Angeles. She was granted The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant for Georgia Journal, co-founded with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian, and a curatorial research fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her writing has been published by ArtEast, BOMB, X-TRA, and Ibraaz, among others. Halajian is a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Pioneer of Performance Art, Barbara T. Smith began her groundbreaking work in the late 60s. Since then, she has performed throughout the US, in Europe, and Asia. She received her B.A. from Pomona College, her MFA from UC Irvine in 1971, and has taught and lectured at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and abroad. A recipient of three NEA Grants, she has also been given a Vesta award from the Women's Building in 1983 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 1999. Smith has participated in the founding of several alternative spaces in Los Angeles and has produced and curated many multi-artist performance events. She was in the LA artist show at the Pompidou in Paris, and the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show at MOCA and at PS1 in New York, more recently in several museum shows as part of Pacific Standard Time initiated by the Getty. Smith is represented by the Box gallery in Los Angeles and Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York. Currently she has a retrospective show at The Getty Research Institute and a solo show at The Box Gallery.

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Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is about the social and political contexts that influence how intangible things, such as sounds, language, and history have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history, and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. Porras-Kim received an MFA from CalArts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. She has had solo exhibitions at MUAC, Mexico City, CAAC, Seville, Kadist, Amant Foundation, Gasworks, London, and CAMSTL. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), and Gwangju and São Paulo Biennales (2021). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22), She is currently a fellow at Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.

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Sofia Borges is a conceptual artist who—for the past fifteen years—has been using photography to investigate philosophical notions around the relationship between matter, image and meaning. Considered one of the most pivotal Brazilian contemporary artists of her generation, in the first seven years of her career Borges developed a large and resounding body of works exploring photography and the expanded philosophical understanding of images. Following on from this, in the last five years, she began to produce installations and intricate practices that exercise the idea of a total artwork via complex curatorial projects and performances. More recently, she has also incorporated assemblage and painting into her image research. In 2016, she published The Swamp, an award-winning book-artwork that celebrates her first philosophical phase. In 2018, she co-curated the São Paulo Biennial, for which she put together a complex curatorial proposal in the form of a tragedy, which occupied an entire floor in the Biennial Pavilion. In 2021, Borges wrote and directed her first film The Fossil, the Eye and the Fire—the second act in her book-artwork—in which she investigates the relationship between biography, and the thinking and work that happens in the studio.

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Dhyandra Lawson is the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She is currently organizing the exhibition and publication Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st Century Art and Poetics (2024). Other LACMA exhibitions she has curated include Family Album (2021); Children of Aztlán (2021), Eleanor Antin: Time’s Arrow (2019), and Richard Prince: Untitled (cowboy) (2018). Recent publishing includes writing in the LACMA publications Black American Portraits (2022) and Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising (2022), as well as in Lightwork (2023). Her research areas include photography, performance, digital and media-based practice; contemporary African American and African Diaspora artists; rhetoric and contemporary art theory.
In addition to her curatorial practice, Lawson is Visiting Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts and Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she teaches photographic history and curatorial studies.

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Margaret Haines is a Montreal born and educated multiform conceptual artist working in film, painting, photography, publication, fashion, archive-studies and installation. Margaret received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, has held numerous fellowships, and has exhibited her work internationally; in 2015-2016 she attended the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Margaret Haines latest films and works are multifaceted meandering narratives riddled with philosophical investigation. Her shooting and editing style merges points of view, mixes staged scenes with improvised encounters. Haines’s frame oscillates between a myriad of traditional cinema styles, from hollywood fiction film to cinéma vérité, in the creation of a unique form. The films are rife with colliding references to the works of Jean Genet, Kate Millet, Adorno, and include allusions to ancient Greek mythology, celebrity culture, Astrology, and even Thrasher magazine. The result is an examination of culture and aesthetics that stretches the definitions of what is poetically and politically possible within the moving image art category of the short film.

Recent solo and duo exhibitions include MAC musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, KRIEG in Brussels, Auto Italia South East in London, 1646 in The Hague and Rozenstraat in Amsterdam. Her writing and film works have been presented at The East End Film Festival, Carroll Fletcher and The ICA in London, Today's Art in The Hague, VISIO lo schermo dell'arte in Florence, Anthology Film Archives in New York, Western Front Exhibitions in Vancouver, and le Centre Culturel Canadien and FIAC Les Jardins Tuileries, Cinephemère in Paris. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in University of the Arts of Vienna Journal, Artforum, Metropolis M, Mousse Magazine, La Presse, The Financial Times, Canadian Art, AQNB, and X-TRA. Haines’s forthcoming book On Air: Purity, Corruption and Pollution is a narrative biography of artist Cameron and pairs Haines’s formal archival work with a wider analysis of the contemporary moment and an alignment with the tangential and apophenic. Haines is the author of Love with Stranger X Coco (New Byzantium, 2012), which includes a discussion of Cameron and her work. She has been a board member of the Cameron Parsons Foundation since 2014. She lives and works in Paris, and is currently a lecturer at Sciences Po.

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