Contributor Biographies

Ryan, Hannah; Wolff, Lesley A.

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Contributor Biographies

Hannah Ryan (Editor), Lesley A. Wolff (Editor)

Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art

Contributor Biographies

Author

Hannah Ryan (Editor), Lesley A. Wolff (Editor)

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31738

Contributor Biographies

Jennifer Baez specializes in early modern art from the Afro-Iberian world, with a focus on Catholic material culture, gender, and vernacular knowledges. Her first book project is on miracle-making and Marian praxis in late colonial Hispaniola. She holds a doctorate in art history from Florida State University, and she has published on such platforms as Small Axe, Arts, and Smarthistory. Her work has been supported by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, and she is a fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership/The Mellon Foundation. At the University of Washington, she teaches courses on art from Africa and its Iberian and Caribbean diasporas.

Natasha Bissonauth is assistant professor of visual art and art history at York University, Toronto. She holds a doctorate in art history from Cornell University. Her research centers queer, trans, and feminist contemporary art practices with expertise in South Asia and its diasporas. Recent research interests expand on indenture studies, archival work, and material culture. She is working on a book project that investigates aesthetic encounters with archival fragments in ways that creates passage between histories of immigration and indenture. By threading such “areas” as South Asia, the Caribbean, and Mauritius, Black and Brown seams emerge. Select publications include “Sunil Gupta’s Sun City: An Exercise in Camping Orientalism” (Art Journal, 2019), “The Future of Museological Display: Chitra Ganesh’s Speculative Encounters” (book chapter in Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism, 2020), and “The Dissent of Play: Lotahs in the Museum” (South Asia Journal, 2020).

Comalo is a space for sharing knowledge about the culinary cultures in the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean. What we eat and how we prepare what we eat are our central ideas of a conversation in which we engage in tracing what builds culinary traditions and the politics of food in the island and region: geographical space, people, ingredients, techniques, processes, nourishment. Comalo aspires to contribute to lessen the gap between culinary heritage and people in the island and region. Through food, we create different images and thoughts that depart from the current ones, feed curiosity and share knowledge. Comalo is a collaborative project led by José Rozón, Nikita Glasnović, Olivier Bur, and Yina Jiménez Suriel.

Sophie Alexandra Cook’s interdisciplinary scholarship explores the intersections of identity, self-representation, and the experimental media practices of cultural outsiders and marginalized communities. She completed her PhD in film and moving image studies at Concordia University, Montreal, in 2021), was the curatorial assistant for the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal’s touring Leonard Cohen exhibition, and curated films for the Breckenridge Film Festival. She is a lecturer (visual arts) and union organizer at the University of Colorado Denver and adjunct associate professor (graphic communication and arts) at the University of Maryland Global Campus.

The Crystal Efemmes are a quartet of interdisciplinary artists concerned with revisionist histories and feminist agendas. Consisting of visual artists Vanessa Centeno, Robyn LeRoy-Evans, Cristina Molina, and Ryn Wilson, their alliance formed in 2014 after they learned that their individual artworks shared themes of intersectionality, mysticism, body politics, and environmental concerns. As a collective, they create immersive installations and performances, retelling myths from a perspective that empowers womxn. Together they have been awarded residencies at SALON Arts Council Residency and have performed their work at such venues as the Front in New Orleans and Aurora Picture Show in Houston.

Elizabeth S. Hawley is an art historian, writer, and curator specializing in art of the Americas and modern and contemporary art. Her work has been published in American Art, Art in America, Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, Nierika: Revista de Estudios de Arte, Religion and the Arts, and numerous anthologies and exhibition catalogs. Her research has been supported by the Lunder Institute, Wolfsonian-FIU, and Pittsburgh Foundation. Forthcoming curated exhibitions include Landscapes of Survivance (Santa Clara University Art Gallery) and Borderwaters (Alabama Contemporary Art Center). Hawley is an assistant professor of art history at the University of South Alabama.

O’Neil Joseph is a graduate student in History at the University of the West Indies, Saint Augustine Campus. His research and writing explore the social and cultural histories of Caribbean societies, issues of identity, and the intersections of gender and sexuality.

Renluka Maharaj was born in Trinidad and Tobago and works in Colorado, New York City, and Trinidad. She earned her BFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received numerous awards, including the Martha Kate Thomas Fund, the Presidential Scholarship at Anderson Ranch Center, and the Barbara De Genevieve Scholarship. Her works are in institutional collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Joan Flasch artist book collection, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College, and special collections at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as in numerous private collections. Her work has been recognized through various fellowships and residencies, including McColl Center Fountainhead Residency and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has also appeared most recently in the Washington Post, Elle India, Harper’s Bazaar India, New American Paintings, Coolitude Volume II, Hyperallergic, and Juxtapoz.

Amy Yeminne Kim is assistant professor of photography at Hope College. She holds two MFAs (studio art and art administration) from Texas Tech University. She has exhibited at the CICA museum in Seoul, Korea, the Ping-yao Photo Festival in China, and across the United States. As a Texas Photographic Society’s National Award winner, her Wolfcamp Catalogue was exhibited at the Houston Fotofest Biennale in 2022 as a solo exhibition. Her chapter “Photographic Arts and Fake News” appeared in Teaching about Fake News (2021). She directed the Cardozier Gallery at UT Permian Basin. An American-born Korean, she has lived in Michigan, South Korea, France, and Texas.

Shana Klein is a professor at Kent State University and holds a PhD in art history from the University of New Mexico. She is author of the award-winning book The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion (University of California Press, 2021), which explores how depictions of food were a platform for artists and viewers to discuss heated debates over race and citizenship. Klein teaches classes that bring together American art, material culture, and social justice.

Katherine Mato is assistant professor of art history at Penn State Abington. Her research examines the intersections between art and activism in contemporary Latin American and diasporic art. Her writing on Cuban art and culture has been published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and she regularly hosts virtual guest lectures for university students interested in contemporary Latinx art and visual culture. Katherine holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Miami, an MA in history of art and visual culture from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Latin American studies from the University of Cambridge.

María Elena Ortiz is curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Previously, she was curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she curated group shows Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection and The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Caribbean Art and solo exhibitions with Firelei Báez, Ulla von Brandenburg, william cordova, Teresita Fernández, José Carlos Martinat, Carlos Motta, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. At PAMM she founded the Caribbean Cultural Institute, a curatorial platform dedicated to Caribbean art, and worked to diversify the museum’s collection, securing works by Bisa Butler, Simone Leigh, Bony Ramirez, and others. In 2014 she was awarded the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Independent Curators International Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean, and she received the Emerging Curator Award from the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, in 2012. In 2024 the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will present Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940, her survey that explores the history of surrealism in the Caribbean in connection to Afrosurrealist and Afrofuturist art.

Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano is project director at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), where she manages university and research programs, and series editor of ISLAA’s journal Vistas: Critical Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Art from Latin America and the Caribbean. She holds a doctorate in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, which was supported by “La Caixa” Foundation, among other fellowships. Her research focuses on discourses of intellectual and manual labor in visual culture and contemporary art from the Americas. Her writing has been featured in academic publications, including Art Journal and the edited volume Craft on Demand: The New Politics of the Handmade (Bloomsbury, 2021). Blanca is also an independent curator as well as coauthor of the digital humanities project La fiebre del banano/Banana Craze (https://bananacraze.uniandes.edu.co/.)

Juanita Solano Roa is assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She holds a doctorate in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her research focuses on the history of photography, the relation between art and food, and the history of modern and contemporary art in Latin America. Her research has appeared in such academic publications as History of Photography, H-Art, and Arteologie. She is also coauthor and coeditor of Historias del arte en Colombia (Ediciones Uniandes, 2022) and cocurator of the digital humanities project La fiebre del banano/Banana Craze (https://bananacraze.uniandes. edu.co/).

Hannah Ryan is assistant professor of art history and director of gender and sexuality studies at St. Olaf College and holds a PhD in the history of art and visual culture from Cornell University. Her areas of research include Transatlantic visual culture, modern and contemporary arts of the African diaspora, African American art, Latin American art, intersectional feminism, and women-identifying artists. With a decolonial and feminist perspective, her work engages with issues of race and gender through theories of consumption, labor, recuperation, and care—frequently as they intersect with women’s lived experiences, including maternity. Ryan has curated exhibitions on contemporary film, video, and photography.

Lesley A. Wolff is assistant professor of art and design at the University of Tampa, specializing in art history and museum studies. Her interdisciplinary research on the visual cultures of the Americas, foodways, and heritage has appeared in various international publications. She has previously held fellowships with such institutions as the Texas Tech University Humanities Center, Harry Ransom Center, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in support of her forthcoming monograph on food and art in postrevolutionary Mexico City. Wolff is also an active curator committed to decolonial strategies and revisionist histories in contemporary art of the Americas (www.lesleywolff.com).

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