Aquil Charlton
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.
Aram Han Sifuentes
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist who creates participatory projects that center immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; moCa Cleveland, Cleveland; and Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
Kevin Simmons
For more than a decade, Kevin Simmons has worked in Chicago and abroad as a program strategist, project designer, and consultant for diverse cultural, environmental, and philanthropic initiatives. A former AmeriCorps*VISTA member and Site Director for LIFT, he studied housing and education policy at Princeton University, Russian language and Slavic literature at the Nevsky Institute in St. Petersburg, holds a certificate in Conservation Finance from the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, and is an NAI-certified interpretive guide and naturalist. Institutions for which he has worked in development, communications, or program management capacities include the UNDP/Global Environment Facility, Audubon Society, ANAI, ArtBasel (Basel), and the BioMuseo, in collaboration Frank Gehry, Bruce Mau, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). He is a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and serves on the boards of Molly Shanahan / Mad Shak, Opera Omnia, is the Board Chair of Opera Cabal, and served for more than ten years on the board of Mother Jones.
Peter Taub
Peter Taub is a curator and arts manager with over 30 years of experience in developing and producing artist-centered projects. Currently working on a project basis, he was the founding director of the performing arts program at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 1996 – 2016. He steered its development as a leading presenter of multidisciplinary dance, theater and music, and established the MCA Stage New Works Initiative to support artists with creative residencies and commissions. He cofounded the Chicago Dancemakers Forum to support artistic exploration and advancement for Chicago-based choreographers, and as executive director of Randolph Street Gallery, he led its growth into a nationally recognized artist-run center.
Izabella Redzisz
Izabella is an attorney who also holds a certificate in Art and Museum Law from the DePaul University College of Law, where her studies focused particularly on authentication and repatriation. During her time at DePaul, Izabella wrote for and edited the Journal of Art, Technology, and Intellectual Property Law. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and Film studies. Izabella co-owns Nightshade Floral Design, where she is able to exercise her creative side by designing floral arrangements for events all around the Chicago area.
Janet Weiss
Janet is a highly accomplished marketing and branding executive, with over twenty years of experience developing successful campaigns and strategies for cultural, art and entertainment organizations. Janet has extensive non-profit experience, including as the Head of Marketing for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences where she oversaw branding, ad creative, media planning, marketing partnerships, sponsorship, special events and digital/mobile and social media. During her tenure, Janet led an organization-wide rebranding of the Academy, launched the Academy's social and digital platforms, generated millions of dollars in new revenue streams and increased total Oscar® viewership.
Prior to joining the Academy, Janet developed a national branding and corporate sponsorship program for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and their 200+ member zoos and aquariums throughout North America.
Throughout her career, Janet has produced successful marketing campaigns for a wide range of programs and properties, across all consumer marketing channels. She is currently consulting for a number of media and entertainment clients, providing marketing strategy and business development.
A native of Chicago, Janet studied filmmaking at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and began her career in film production before turning her attention to marketing. Janet recently relocated to her hometown, where she lives with her husband, who is a musician and composer.
Yolanda Cesta Cursach Montilla
Yolanda Cesta Cursach Montilla is an independent curator and formerly the Curator of Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Her practice is defined by working closely with local and international artists at every stage of investigation, creation, and touring, and building collaborative environments that center community and partnerships. Yolanda is a recognized knowledge leader about artists in Ibero-Latin America, Europe, and Sub-Sahara Africa. She is a Practitioner with Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation; a Facilitator of Moving Forward Dialogues at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University; a mentor for Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artists; and Chair of Programming and Structure for Bodies of Work Festival of Disability Arts and Culture. She is a former Hub Site for the National Dance Project of New England Foundation for the Arts and Chair of International Programs and Board Member of National Performance Network. Panel service includes The McKnight Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Creative Capital, MAP Fund, and USArtists International.
Missi Davis
Missi Davis is a creative producer and arts manager who advances multi-faceted, non-traditional, cultural work that promotes and strengthens the intersection of the arts, social impact, and civic engagement. She brings close to 15 years of experience to HCL, having created and promoted hundreds of projects across multiple arts media; and a focus in strategic planning, business development, general management, event direction, and communications. Missi’s flagship project has been as the Producer of The Fly Honey Show, now grown into a Chicago institution with strong support and interconnection with its audience. She was a founding member of the Chicago multi-disciplinary arts organization The Inconvenience, serving as both Artistic and Executive Director; and General Manager of Hebru Brantley’s Nevermore Park. Her work also spans the cultural and commercial landscape, working with artists to create unique environments with lasting impact for the corporate field.
Angee Lennard
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.
Cynthia Bond
Cynthia Bond is a writer, educator, and project-based independent arts producer. She received a BA magna cum laude in English and Rhetoric, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; an MFA in Poetry and JD, Cornell University; and a Leadership Certificate in Arts Management, University of Massachusetts. She teaches at UIC School of Law, with a focus on writing and law in society. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, among other publications, and her scholarship centers on media and images of race in popular culture. Cynthia has produced and consulted on an array of projects, collaborating with visual artists, choreographers, and filmmakers. www.cynthiabond.net
Yoshinojo Fujima aka Rika Lin
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/
Danielle Garvey
Danielle Garvey’s current professional work focuses on digital accessibility and she has worked across the education, public service, and financial services fields. In the past, she participated in community organizing efforts for affordable housing in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. In her free time, Danielle experiments with metal work.
Samuel J. Lewis, II
Sam Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and NFP Arts director. He is an actor, vocalist, and puppeteer. In 1998, Sam co-founded Elastic Arts Foundation, where he currently serves as co-founder of the Dark Matter Series and Residency Program and is Elastic Arts director of outreach. In addition, Sam is the director of engagement and artist programs with the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, where he manages their Artist Corps and Back Alley Jazz programs. Sam has been married for 21 years, has three children, and lives in Skokie, IL.
Veronica Anne Salinas
Veronica Anne Salinas (she/they) is an arts administrator, educator, and sound artist. Her creative research practice is rooted in diverse sound disciplines including multichannel work, field recordings, live performance, podcasts, soundwalks, and text scores. Drawing from a professional background in digital media, editorial work, teaching, and non profit arts administration, Veronica brings a fusion of creativity and administrative expertise to HCL.
With an MFA in Sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and specialized studies from The Center for Deep Listening, Veronica's arts administrative journey reflects a commitment to nurturing artistic growth and immersive learning experiences.
As a teaching artist and board member of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, as well as the managing editor of the archival project Nameless Sound: 20 Years of Sound, Veronica embodies a commitment to both the sonic arts and the vital administration that supports them.
Andy Slater
Andy Slater is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and Disability advocate/loudmouth.
Andy holds a Masters in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2022 United States Artists fellow, 2022-2023 Leonardo Crip Tech Incubator fellow and a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago
Mallory Yanhan Qiu
Mallory Qiu is an interdisciplinary artist living in Chicago, IL and currently pursuing her bachelors of fine arts from the school of the art Institute of Chicago (2023). She uses digital visual media to express physical sensory experience and simulate biological action, as well as field recording and synthesizer to flip the front to back page of the world for the listeners. She also be interested in interacting the glitches between human and computer due to rapid technology development, filling the gaps as an artist. Focusing on interdisciplinary collaboration, she seeks to open up different experiences and perspectives in physical and virtual spaces.
Xinyang Xiao
Xinyang Xiao is an artist and student at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, working towards earning a BFA. Within the arts, Xinyang has a broad range of experiences and interests: She curates exhibitions, sometimes through virtual platforms; As part of the Art on the Mart program, her work has been projected onto the river facade of the Merchandise Mart; and she works on sound design for film and theater.
Within her artistic practice, she is currently focusing on sound and its interdisciplinary integration with other artistic mediums. She first became interested in different human relationships and focused on narrativizing energy movement within these relationships. Her studies have now expanded to consider the realm of audience, public, and general populations.
Xinyang splits her time between Chicago and Beijing, China.
Majel Connery
Majel Connery is a vocalist, composer and musicologist. She holds a BA in music composition from Princeton University and a PhD in musicology from the University of Chicago. She moved in 2013 to the Bay Area where she accepted an Assistant Professorship in Musicology at the University of California Berkeley. As Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University she commissioned and performed Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw’s “Contriving the Chimes” with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, staged by director Christopher Alden. As Mellon Visiting Artist at Wellesley College she commissioned and performed “Aeolus” by Rome- and Berlin Prize winner Ken Ueno. Delving recently into radio, she has written songs about porn, periods, and sad fish for Radiolab’s “Gonads” series, released in 2019 as a digital album on Bandcamp.
Juelle Daley
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.