Artists’ Bios

Destiny Belgrave (b.1996) was born and raised in Brooklyn NY and nurtured, with a Bajan and African American upbringing. Belgrave graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2018 with a BFA in General Fine Arts, and a concentration in Painting. Since then her work has been shown locally and internationally. Belgrave is a mixed media whirlwind, almost always using papercuts as her primary medium and family as a source of inspiration.

May Maylisa Cat is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans new media, performance art, sculpture, and installation. Her projects have received support from the Franklin Furnace Fund; Oregon Arts Commission; Open Signal New Media Fellowship; and Regional Arts and Culture Council of Portland, OR. Residencies include: Chautauqua Visual Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, Fountainhead Arts, Pilchuck Glass School, Wassaic Project, Caldera Arts, and many others. In June 2022, Cat earned the Lilla Jewel Award, named in honor of the artist, radical feminist and suffragist, Lilla Jewel, for advancing a social change message through her work. She is a recipient of the 2022 Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship.

Ilana Yacine Harris-Babou
Ilana Harris-Babou’s work is interdisciplinary; spanning sculpture and installation, and grounded in video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever-unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. She has exhibited her work internationally, with recent survey exhibitions at Kunsthaus Hamburg & the ICA Chattanooga. Other venues include The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; SculptureCenter, New York, USA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA; The High Line; New York, USA; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark; West Space, Melbourne, Australia; Gallery Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb, Croatia; and Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi, UAE. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Yale University.

Jeanne F. Jalandoni (b.1993) is a painter and textile artist born and based in New York City. Her practice involves personal research, relating family stories to historic Filipino American archives, in order to draw out a mythological narrative that traces the complexities of inheriting two cultures. Jeanne received her BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in painting from New York University (2015). Jeanne has had solo shows with Taymour Grahne Projects (2023, 2021; London, UK), Real Art Ways (2019; Hartford, CT),  and the Berkshire Art Museum (2018; North Adams, MA). Jeanne has exhibited in various group shows including, “Wonder Women”, curated by Kathy Huang (2022; Jeffrey Deitch NY & LA), and “Ghost of Empires”, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah (2022; Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong & London), "Super Sarap", curated by Patricia Cariño Valdez (2019; Asia Society Texas, Houston, TX), and curated "Cultural Cousins: a show of Filipinx and Latinx artists" (2019; ChaShaMa, New York, NY). Jeanne was an artist-in-residence at 36 Chase & Barns Residency ( 2018; North Adams, MA), the Textile Arts Center (2021; Brooklyn,NY), and ChaNorth Artist Residency (2022; Pine Plains, NY). Jeanne has been awarded the 2019 Real Art Award (Hartford, CT), and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Creative Engagement Grant (2019; New York, NY). 

Hayoon Jay Lee is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the fundamental tension between indulgence and abnegation as it exists in terms of mind and body as well as on the level of social and political dynamics. Lee makes use of rice as object, motif, metaphor and visceral biomorphic forms. Born in Daegu, South Korea, Hayoon Jay Lee obtained a BFA in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2007, and an MFA degree from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at MICA in 2009. Among her many honors and awards, Lee has received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship award (2008) from the U.S. Department of Education, a Full Fellowship Artist in Residency Award (2012) from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a best in show distinction award (2008) at the 14th International Exhibition at the SoHo 20 Gallery in Chelsea, New York City, and a Dapu International Art Award (2011) from the Northern Art Museum, Daqing China. She has exhibited her work widely, both nationally and internationally. In recent years, Lee has shown her art, created installations and held performances in New York (John Jay College, Jamaica Center for Arts, King Manor Museum, Gallery 456, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts), Maryland (Montgomery College), South Korea (Gwangju Museum of Art and Kim Man-duk Museum), China (Guangzhou Fine Arts University Museum), and Poland (University of Krakow), among other locations.

TJ Shin (b. 1993) has exhibited internationally at Doosan Gallery, Cuchifritos Gallery, AC Institute, Abrons Arts Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, all in New York, NY; Knockdown Center, Queens, NY; and Cody Dock, London, England, among others. Shin recently was an artist-in-residence at Recess in Brooklyn, a Visiting Artist Fellow at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, and Col(LAB) artist-in-residence at Princeton University in New Jersey. Shin received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. They were Wave Hill’s 2020 New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow.

Curators’ Bios

Emily Alesandrini (she/her) is an independent curator, art historian, and advocate working in Philadelphia and New York. Her research concerns contemporary representations of race and gender with a particular focus on issues of opacity, ornament, and the diasporic body in art by women and artists of color. She strives to spotlight underrepresented voices in the field and work in community-based collaboration to subvert systems of oppression and erasure within and beyond art history. Alesandrini has contributed to exhibition planning and publications at Wave Hill in the Bronx, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, The Ford Foundation Gallery in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Sex in New York, and The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York (forthcoming). Her writing has been featured in A Women’s Thing, The Offing, and Independent Curators International publications. Alesandrini graduated from Smith College with Latin Honors and a BA in Art History. As a fully-funded Elizabeth Allison Emory Scholar, she earned her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History from Tulane University. She continues her studies as a doctoral student in Art History at Bryn Mawr College working as a Curatorial Fellow in Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections.  

Danni Shen is an independent curator, writer, and editor. She is currently Curatorial & Public Programs Assistant at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Previous curatorial roles include at The Kitchen, SPRING/BREAK Art Show NY & LA, and Empty Gallery in Hong Kong. She is based in New York, where she was also the Curatorial Fellow at Wave Hill, Curator-in-Residence at Residency Unlimited, and Guest Critic at NYU Tisch-ITP. She is a contributor to various publications including BOMB Magazine, The Boston Art Review, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, AICA Magazine, among others. Shen is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) Bard College.