The HCL Team

A diversely creative and visionary leader, Aquil “AQ” Charlton leverages a wealth of experience as a teaching artist, consultant, and co-founder of artist collaboratives to make positive contributions in Chicago communities and the arts sector. Aquil is a gifted independent musician, rapper, songwriter, DJ, and producer who also plays electronics. He is the founder of Mobile Music Box, a mobile workshop practice of making musical instruments from common and recycled materials, and co-founder of Mobilize Creative Collaborative, which leads mobile play-based community art activations.

Angee Lennard is an arts administrator and printmaker dedicated to advancing Chicago’s non-profit arts sector in regards to equity, accessibility, community support, and operational and artistic excellence.

Motived by her own need for a welcoming and accessible space to take artistic risks, she founded the community printmaking studio, Spudnik Press Cooperative in 2007. She envisioned and built an innovative studio model where professional printmaking facilities offer a foundation for residencies, fellowships, education, exhibitions, collaborative projects and public programs, all grounded in printmaking’s history as a community-minded and accessible art form. She led the organization as Executive Director for 15 years.

As a professional printmaker, she has collaborated with local and nationally-recognized artists. Prints published by Angee Lennard have been exhibited at museums and galleries including The MoMA, the Smart Museum of Art, Monique Meloche, Editions VFO.

Her deep involvement in the arts, spanning organizational leadership, operational management, program development, studio maintenance, and print production has led her to a variety of local, regional, and national speaking engagements, as well as consultancy roles with colleges, universities, non-profits, and museums. She has been a lecturer at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Arts Administration and Policy and the Printmedia departments. She has served as a Marwen Foundation Teaching Fellow, a grant review panelist for the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and Treasurer for the Chicago Printers Guild (CPG). She earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from SAIC in 2005, and has completed additional professional training through Kellogg School Center for Nonprofit Management.

Yoshinojo Fujima (aka Rika Lin) is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and Grandmaster in Fujima style Japanese classical dance. She is a “shin-nisei”, part of the postwar Japanese American diaspora. She has performed original work and as part of many collaborations at Links Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), where she premiered her full length solo Asobi: Playing within Time in 2018. Her works embody her identity and tradition through performance as well as her teaching practice in Japanese classical dance. Yoshinojo is a 2021 recipient of the Digital Dance Grantand Production Residency by Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and a 2021-2022 Fellow in Residency by High Concept Labs, for her ongoing virtual reality project “Kurokami E{m}Urge, #ChooseYourReality”. She was a John D. and Susan P. Diekman Fellowship Djerassi Resident Artist (2019), awardee of Ragdale Foundation (2019) and High Concept Labs (2018) residencies, a Links Hall Artistic Associate Curatorial Resident, 3Arts Make a Wave artist, and Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist (2017.)

Yoshinojo is founder and curator of the series “Beyond the Box”, launched in 2017 at Links Hall and that centers on female performers and creatives. Her own dance investigations alter the traditional pedagogy of Japanese dance with humor and subtle transgressions by way of questioning ideas of role and identity. Her collaborative project with puppet artist Tom Lee, Suji: Lines of Tradition, was featured as part of the 2019 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, Links Hall 40th Anniversary LinkSirkus, as well as “Beyond the Box”. She performed in March 2020in Kyoto, Japan at UrbanGuild as part of the MushiHime Festival, just before the pandemic came into full force. She is a recent Master Apprentice Ethnic Folk Arts Grant recipient, and adapting the pedagogy of traditional Japanese Classical dance with her mentor/teacher.

For more information please www.yoshinojo.org/

Juelle is French-trained, an independent curator, art administrator and art advisor with a passion for curating visual arts, cultural productions, and developing public programming. She’s gifted at connecting people, incubating possibilities and making art projects happen. She was recently Associate Director of Arts Engagement at University of Chicago’s Reva and David Logan Center of the Arts.