Students

Areeha Ahmad graduated with distinction from the National College of Arts, Lahore, earning a B.S. (Hons) in Cultural Studies. She currently works on a project with the Lahore Biennale Foundation in collaboration with the National College of Arts focused on Mall Road's ecosystem. Areeha has also served as a member of the South Asian Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE), addressing issues of religious minority women in Pakistan.

Her research interests lie in cultural studies, particularly women and gender studies in South Asia. Areeha’s work critically examines secular-liberal frameworks of women's agency, as exemplified by her thesis on the 'Haya March'. She is passionate about social activism and the nuanced understanding of women's roles within feminist politics.

Pinar (she/her) is a designer from Ankara, Turkey. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design from Middle East Technical University. Her intellectual pursuits are deeply rooted at the intersection of design and social sciences, with a particular focus on material culture. Pinar is especially fascinated by the cultural landscapes of Anatolia and the Middle East, intrigued by the interactions between different cultures and ethnicities. She is passionate about how design and the material world both shape and reflect societal behaviors, cultural traditions, and political dynamics. She aspires to explore how design influences and is influenced by the fabric of societies and cultural narratives in her future work.

Sam Box is a writer that strives to unravel the mechanics of storytelling, creating work that plays with both its audience and the complexity of its own form. Sam received their B.F.A. from the University of Maine at Farmington in Creative Writing and English, utilizing the space between generative and analytical writing practices to fuel an interdisciplinary perspective on composition—whether creative or critical.

Focused on the study of screenwriting, Sam explores the surreal and the empathetic in comedy, designing narrative spaces that can examine reality through the creation and deconstruction of incongruity. These interests have led to research in literary monstrosities, contemporary disseminations of local legends, and comedy as a double-edged sword that rejects and reaffirms social boundaries.

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.

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.’

April Lei Liu is an art researcher actively exploring the ever-changing landscape of art and its interaction with society. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, majoring in Cultural Management with minors in Archaeology and Business. She furthered her expertise by receiving professional training in economics and business at the University of Geneva during the exchange program.

Currently, April’s research mainly focuses on 20th/21st century Chinese art and the art market. Notably, she recently co-curated the exhibition “Cast for Dignity: Early Chinese Belt Hooks from the De-Neng-Tang Collection” at the CUHK Art Museum in Hong Kong. She also gained valuable experience through internships at Christie's, Pace Gallery, Long March Space and TANK Shanghai.

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.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Mary received her B.A. in Spanish from Stanford University with minors in Art Practice and Modern Languages. Her lifelong interests in art, languages, and museums guided her academic and professional experiences at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford’s Art and Art History Department, and various organizations that support the Bay Area’s Spanish-speaking community. After graduating, Mary moved to Elche, Spain, where she worked as a linguistic and cultural representative in a Spanish public school. Her time exploring museums, libraries, and bookstores across Europe further developed her interest in the relationship between language, art, and interpretation. In her free time, Mary loves going on walks, reading books and graphic novels, and trying new restaurants in Providence.

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.

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.

Rachel Zheng is a Chinese graphic designer and curator with a Bachelor’s degree in Art and Technology from the China Academy of Art. Past research interests are in content and genealogy design in the context of social and strategic. Her graphic genealogy series has been collected by the Zhejiang Art Museum and she has participated in many exhibitions. Nowadays, Rachel tends to shift her identity from designer to curator and writer.

Given that her expertise lies in the design of spaces and exhibits, Rachel tries to combine more diverse forms of contemporary art and promote the exhibition space to realize the interactions between artworks and the audience. She will focus on critical analysis of the prevalent use of the White Cube exhibition space model, focusing on the issue of inherent homogeneity, and explore more possibilities in innovative solutions for exhibition spaces and social narratives.