Golnar Adili (sher/her) (b. 1976, USA) is an Iranian American artist, designer, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Adili holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and has participated in residencies with the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts (Bellagio, Italy), Center for Book Arts (NYC), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), MacDowell (NYC), Ucross Foundation for the Arts (Clearmont, WY), Lower East Side Printshop (NYC), Women’s Studio Workshop (Rosendale, NY), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace (NYC), among others. Her work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions organized by institutions such as: the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), Cue Art Foundation (New York, NY), Craft and Folk Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), and International Print Center New York (NYC). She is the past recipient of major grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, NYFA, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2021, Adili was a finalist for the Jameel Prize, sponsored by the V&A Museum and Art Jameel. Her artist books are in more than fifty collections, including the Library of Congress, V&A Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University, and the Smithsonian.

Sammy Seung-min Lee (she/her) (b. 1975, Seoul; lives and works in Denver) explores sculpture, bookbinding, and installation in her interdisciplinary practice. Shaped by her nomadic youth and bicultural identity, she creates assemblages that bridge spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural divides. Lee's materials—from paper to architectural elements—and her adaptation of traditional techniques reimagine the relationship between the East and the West and connect tradition with contemporaneity.

Lee has shared solo presentations at MCA Denver (2026), Store Namsan, Korea (2024), Emmanuel Art Gallery, CO (2021), Lakewood Cultural Center, CO (2018), and Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CO (2014). She has held residencies at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, CO, the Studios at Mass MoCA, MA, and Anderson Ranch, CO. 

A recipient of fellowships from Joan Mitchell Foundation (2025), Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program (2023–24), and Colorado Creative Industries (2020), Lee also directs Collective SML | k, a Denver-based contemporary art space she founded in 2017.

Carmen Lizardo (she/her) is a Dominican artist whose work centers on photography and experimental processes as conceptual investigations of memory, immigration, and disappearance. Often incorporating the body as a symbolic site, her work considers what is carried across borders, what is left behind, and how memory survives through the fragments of home we hold. Lizardo holds a BFA and MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She has received fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, En Foco, Women's Studio Workshop, MASS MoCA, and Ragdale. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues including the Latin American Art Triennial in New York, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, NARS Foundation, and BRIC, and featured in Hyperallergic and academic publications. A permanent MTA commission at New York's 181st Street Station anchors her public work, where community engagement links studio practice with collaborative, socially rooted projects.

Ruth Álvarez Luna (she/her/ella) is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist born in Durango, México. At the age of fourteen, she immigrated to the United States with her family in pursuit of the so-called "American Dream." Living between cultures has deeply influenced her artistic practice, leading her to examine migration, identity, memory, and belonging. Ruth earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Metropolitan State University of Denver in 2025. Alongside her studio practice, she has dedicated much of her career to mentoring and supporting immigrant and first-generation youth, experiences that continue to shape the way she approaches art. For Ruth, creating and caring for community are inseparable practices. Working across installation, ceramics, printmaking, painting, performance, and mixed media, Ruth allows each concept to determine its material form. She is interested in how everyday objects, cultural symbols, and personal archives can preserve memories, carry inherited histories, and make visible experiences that are often overlooked. Through material experimentation, she transforms intimate narratives into spaces for reflection, dialogue, and collective recognition. Rather than offering definitive answers, Ruth's work invites viewers to question systems of power while recognizing the resilience, humor, and humanity embedded within immigrant experiences.

Katie Mongoven/秋莲 (she/her) (b. 1995) is a Chinese American fiber artist from Washington, DC, based in Detroit, MI and Houston, TX. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan and MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art with the Surface Design Association’s Outstanding Student Award. She was a Roman J. Witt Visiting Artist at the University of Michigan, a Windgate University Fellow at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts (TN), and the Barstow Artist-in-Residence at Central Michigan University. Other residencies attended include Stove Works (TN), California Institute of the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Solo and group exhibitions include Art Basel Paris, Sheet Cake Gallery (TN), and Krasl Art Center (MI). Her work is held in public collections at Central Michigan University, Summa Health, and MetroHealth and in numerous private collections throughout the United States. She is currently a 2025-2026 Artist-in-Residence at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (TX).

CURATOR

Italu Ramos Hernandez (she/her/ella/they) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Denver, Colorado. Her practice emerges from the emotional and psychological space of migration, investigating how the body, material, and memory function as vessels for fragmented and often unspoken narratives. Drawing from her lived experience as an immigrant, she merges personal history and collective narrative to explore the multiplicity and shifting nature of identity. Her work examines the broader immigrant experience in the United States, questioning how histories are constructed and how institutional and cultural narratives can both reveal and obscure lived realities. Through material experimentation and embodied forms, she invites continual questioning of what is remembered, what is forgotten, and what remains unseen.