ALUMNI

Yvette Chaparro is an Associate Professor of Product and Industrial Design at Parsons, The New School. She practices through her eponymous studio and is an active researcher focusing on design pedagogy, interdisciplinary collaboration, design terminology, the development of families of objects, modularity and its applications, and typology in design.

Valerie Walkerdine (PhD) is an artist and academic. As an academic she has taught, written and researched in the fields of critical psychology, affect studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, artistic practice and theory, social theory, class, gender and feminism, community and de-industruialisation and neoliberalism.

Jake Tkaczyk's training began in live theatre performance, earning a diploma in Theatre Performance and Creation from Red Deer College and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting from the University of Alberta. While grounded in performance, his practice has evolved into interdisciplinary performance-making and practice-based research, with a focus on devised theatre, participation, humour, and contemporary performance. He has worked extensively as a performer, director, educator, and producer throughout Alberta and beyond.

Karen Ami is a visual artist, curator, and educator from Chicago. She is a graduate of The Boston Museum School, Tufts University (BFA) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) majoring in ceramics and sculpture. She is the Founder of The Chicago Mosaic School, the first and only center for academically oriented Mosaic Arts Education outside of Europe.

Daniel Arnaldo-Roman, a Puerto Rico-based media artist, works in code technology and experimental media and also designs responsive web environments and social print based projects.

Syowia Kyambi is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg as part of the visiting artist program for the 2023- 2025 cycle.  Kyambi co-founded Untethered Magic established in 2019 which focuses on supporting the process for research based conceptual contemporary arts in Nairobi. She builds networks and facilitates exchange in support of research and process-based practices. Kyambi is particularity interested in knowledge building through the merger of different disciplines. Often bringing together different age groups, areas of study as well as merging artists with creatives in the field of humanities and sciences. In her practice Kyambi examines how our contemporary human experience is influenced by constructed histories, creating installations that include a performative process to narrate stories and activate objects, exploring cultural identities, linking them to issues of loss, memory, race, and gender. She represented Kenya in the La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. Her works include a permanent commission ‘Infinity: Flashes of the Past’ Nairobi National Museum (2007). She is the recipient of the Centre for Art Design & Social Research fellowship (2018-2020), the UniArts Helsinki fellowship (2018), the Smithsonian Artist Research fellowship (2017) and the Art in Global Health grant from the Wellcome Trust Fund, United Kingdom (2013). Artist residencies include PRAKSIS, Norway (2019), Delfina Foundation, UK (2016) and IASPIS, Sweden (2013). Her work is held in a number of collections including the Kouvola Art Museum, Finland, and the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. 

Abi Tariq
Communications Director

Abi Tariq is an artist and cultural worker born in Karachi and based in Paris. Tariq holds a Masters of Fine Art from Transart Institute (Berlin/NY), a Bachelor of Fine Art from Parsons Paris (now Paris College of Art), and a Pakistani passport! Since 2023 they've taken on the role of Communications Director at Transart Institute.

Hadar Cohen is an Arab Jewish multimedia artist, healer and educator based in Los Angeles. She is the founder of Malchut, a mystical school teaching direct experience of God through heart centered spiritual traditions. Hadar is a Jewish mystic who works to build decolonial frameworks for worshiping God.

Rodolfo Cossovich is a media artist with an engineering background. His position as faculty of NYU Shanghai Interactive Media Arts has allowed him to explore and research different robotic applications, focusing on ways that machines present traits of living beings.

Gina Dominique is a New York based artist-academic. She has had 13 solo shows, most recently 'Skin Deep- On Abstract Painting & the Nature of Beauty' at Greenspring Gallery, Stevenson University, Stevenson, MD. Her art has been shown in more than 50 group exhibitions across the US and in England.

Helen Scheuer Cohen is a painter.

James Charlton is a second-generation New Zealand Post-object Artist whose work includes video, object-based sculpture, stereo-lithography, installation, robotics, interactive screen-based and performance work. He lectures in sculpture, post-material practices and interactive installation, at Auckland University of Technology.

Marie France Forcier is a Canadian choreographer, performer, writer and pedagogue of contemporary dance forms. She is the director of Forcier Stage Works and the co-director of ReLoCate . Through studio research, public performances, publications and community initiatives, she predominantly engages with the intersection between trauma studies, somatic practices and western contemporary choreography.

Jewel Fraser works as an audio documentary producer building on and utilizing principles learned during her many years writing features as a journalist. She has embraced audio now as her preferred medium since it permits her to create stories that are more multi-sensory.

Deborah Dudley is founder and artist in residence of Mehitable Blish Studios in Brooklyn, New York. Dudley specializes in curating, cataloguing, and reimagining a person's relationship to the art and artifacts within their daily lives, extracting the oral histories of individuals and families through their most treasured and mundane possessions.

Sophia Wright Emigh (she/they) is an interdisciplinary, queer mother artist and movement filmmaker working in the emerging field of somatic ecology via performance, installation, film, photography, mark-making, social practice, writing, and action. Through camera, body, sound, and embodied ritual, she traverses and transmits the dance of life around the ineffable.

Jenny Hawkinson is a social practice artist interested in the intersection of conflict engagement and contemporary art. In her practice, ‘artist’ and ‘advocate’ hold equal weight. After receiving a BA in Visual Art in 2010, she moved to Vancouver, BC to establish roots in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

Fred Han is currently an Associate Professor at the School of System Design and Intellectual Manufacturing in the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. Prior to his current position, he served as an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University for nine years.