Students

Leslie Anne Condon (she/her) is a Boston-based Lao-American multidisciplinary artist and independent curator. As an artist-scholar and cultural worker, Leslie is interested in issues of representation within visual culture in the context of race and gender, including how images are created and consumed in response to evolving social conditions. Her current research focuses on contemporary Latin American art that gives visibility to state-sanctioned violence across the region.

Leslie’s past curatorial projects include Embodied Identities, part of New Narratives, and Call and Response: Illustration in Uncertain Times. She views her public practice, including her artmaking, scholarship, and curating, as a means to support and advocate for our BIPOC communities. Leslie earned a Post Baccalaureate in Fine Art 3D from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2011.

Kobe Jackson (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist living and working in Providence, RI, land of Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples. Jackson draws on their experience living outside of the mainstream to create work that calls conventions into question. Their practice interrogates traditional subjects through a non-binary, biracial lens, exploring how tropes can warp and change. Jackson has worked as an artist, educator and community organizer, with many public projects including exhibitions at Brown University’s Arts Institute, Dirt Palace and AS220. They have also produced zines through Brown University’s arts writing workshop. Jackson is interested in unconventional forms of curation from the vantage point of artist as curator as well as exploring generative ways to activate spaces and communities.

Chhavi Jain is an independent writer, curator, and a performing artist trained in the Indian classical dance form, Kathak. She graduated with a degree in Literature (University of Delhi, 2017) and has worked with Teamwork Arts Pvt. Ltd., Yatra Books, and more recently at Anant Art Gallery as an assistant curator. She enjoys reading, taking long walks to explore and singing. Drawn to experimental and immersive formats of storytelling- an impetus to emotional, psychological, and physical movement, she believes in pushing her boundaries to curate and execute interdisciplinary combinations in public, communal, institutional and other spaces. Her research at RISD will focus on enabling creative interventions and eventually developing educational and philanthropic resources to make art accessible.

Eunbyeol is interested in how art museums enhance regional cultural identity through architecture, exhibitions, and design and establish organic connections between the local and the international. She believes this could mitigate disparities in the artistic experiences of culturally marginalized areas. She has experience working as a curator, coordinator, researcher, community program planner, and exhibition consultant. In the latter, she consulted on the revitalization of abandoned art parks in marginalized areas. Recently, she was selected for the International Art Professional Fellowship by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and researched African art in South Africa. Additionally, she researched exhibitions at the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF). She plans to study art, design, and museum studies and develop a ‘Sustainable Museum Curating Model.’

Originally from mainland China, Fletcher received his B.A. from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey with majors in Philosophy and Art History and a minors in Classics. Although he generally enjoys reading about analytic philosophy and art history, his interests were mainly in ethics, metaphysics for the former, and the Italian renaissance for the latter. While he holds that justice, fairness and equality are ever so important, he also believes that every art historical period is spatiotemporal specific, grounded by the social and political environment in which the artistic movement took place, and therefore agglomeration based on stylistic similarities is wrong. Outside of academics, his main personal interests are (primarily) cooking and (to a lesser extent) rock and classical music.

At Sichuan University, Ziyun Ma majored in Tourism Management. Then she took a gap year as a curator assistant, coordinator, and co-curator. She organized and participated in interdisciplinary investigations and workshops with scholars, artists, officials, social workers, and residents to improve governments’ decision-making and boost community revitalization. The cross-field collaborations took her to investigate socially engaged art, especially Social Sculpture. Around site-specific art practices in southwest China, her experiences in curation, interviewing and writing, film shooting, graphic and web design inspired her to reflect on the one-dimensional atomized society. As an ethnic minority female who’s taller than most of her acquaintances, Ziyun’s always fascinated by people’s bodily experiences, sensory perceptions, and diversified cultures. In GAC, she hopes to further her research in identity, somaesthetics and more.

Born in Central Illinois, Abby grew up in Charlotte, NC before attending Colorado State University where she received a BA in Art History and a minor in French. At Colorado State, Abby focused her studies on the interplay between identity and art, specifically how modern artists in Romania have used artistic expression to form an emerging identity. She also worked at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in collections and research and interned as a photographer while running the CSU men’s basketball social media accounts. While continuing her education in the RISD GAC program, Abby will research art and identity through studying how societal heritage such as folklore or power dynamics between countries continue to influence modern and contemporary artists throughout Northern and Eastern Europe

Ruchika Nambiar is an artist, designer and writer from India. Her work ranges from books and graphic memoirs to miniature dioramas and interactive social-media narratives. With a major in Visual Communication, she runs a consulting practice for brand strategy & publication design. Her research hinges on the formation of conceptual frameworks and how this process is mediated or even impeded by the media and narratives we consume. Her ongoing book, ‘Content, Structure & the Self’, investigates the progressive fragmentation between our experiential and cognitive bodies of knowledge, hoping to develop a new visual vocabulary for deconstructing ‘experiential’ entities. Interested in art & design pedagogy, she also runs a mentorship programme and wishes to develop new pedagogic tools that enable creative research without compromising on the rigor of academia.

Protyasha is a mixed-media designer, urbanist and archivist—a hybrid practitioner seeking to bridge art direction and curatorial practices. Driven by the dual and complementary desires to investigate the roles of designer as narrator of culture, and curator as an active participant in artistic production, she values trans-discipline narratives in the crafting of spaces of collective memory. Trained as an architect, her undergraduate research at the School of Planning and Architecture examined the affects of national economic policies on Indian architecture. An art deco enthusiast, she hopes to establish a material archive of Deco architecture in the Indian subcontinent to supplement visual and textual archives.

Huang Pei is the culture creator of Nanjing city government. In this role, she manages an interdisciplinary team to scale visionary projects that reinvent Nanjing toward a peaceful outlook away from past war trauma. As the honorary zoo director of Nanjing Hongshan Forest Zoo, she initiates Hongshan Peace Ecocreations with worldwide participants to invigorate the service system of Hongshan Forest Zoo, which came close to bankruptcy during the pandemic. Through her efforts working with government, NGOs, universities, and private sectors, she facilitates collaboration and conversation to respond to the emerging complex governance issues of the city. In GAC, her research will focus on how art and design practices can be integrated as a system for social co-governance action, creating a future narrative space for structuring empathetic solutions for peacebuilding and reconciliation.

Anissa Pjetri (she/her) is an Albanian-Italian textile artist, cultural mediator, and community facilitator based in Florence. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, where her research delved into the socio-political implications of arts and crafts. Specifically, her focus centered on embroidery’s role from medieval to contemporary times, exploring its significance in cultural, ethnic heritages, and identity expression. Anissa's current collaboration with Amir projects involves illuminating unconventional perspectives on Florence’s history, uncovering traces of Colonialism in the city’s contemporary fabric, and investigating the human body’s use for political propaganda during the fascist era. In the Global Arts and Cultures program, she aims to further explore the intricate relationship between politics and art, emphasizing interdisciplinary processes that connect cultural heritage with local communities.

Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and arts administrator. Rivera uses storytelling across mediums to create immersive worlds of magic and liberation. Rivera has 12 years of experience in the nonprofit arts sector intersecting creative practice with urban planning and racial equity. Past leadership roles include: Co-Director/Artistic Director of AS220, a renowned arts organization in Providence, RI, and Director of Inclusive Regional Development at MIT CoLab. Today, Rivera is an independent artist, consultant for the arts sector, and founder of Studio Loba, a storytelling lab that designs cultural projects for social change. Rivera was born and raised in Borikén/Puerto Rico and is based in Providence, RI -land of Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples.

Senjuti (she/her) is a researcher and designer from India. Her practice explores alternative design pedagogies by centering feminist, decolonial, participatory, and community-led practices. Her work at Design Beku, a collective of designers, researchers and technologists, was based on an intuitive exchange between theory and practice but was primarily informed by practice-based projects alongside communities. As part of her graduate studies, she is interested in unpacking the exchange between lived experiences of communities and theoretical frameworks to examine how these pedagogies can inform subversive design methodology. Her other research interests include exploring feminist whisper networks and examining the relationship between gossip, knowledge production and pedagogy through a study of designed objects, systems, services, and interfaces.