2020-2021
Sawako Nakayasu
PRACTITIONER FELLOW, CSREA, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF LITERARY ARTS AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the U.S. and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese.
k. funmilayo aileru
MELLON VISITING PRACTITIONER FELLOW, CSREA
k. funmilayo aileru is an AfroIndigenous, AfroFuturist artist, educator, and organizer. ze employs a variety of mediums including digital media, sculpture, and installation to engage concepts such as [ancestral] memory, trauma, and Otherness in celestial time and space.
Joan Naviyuk Kane
MELLON VISITING PRACTITIONER FELLOW, CSREA
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island (Ugiuvak) and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the Department of English at Harvard University, is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, and was founding faculty of the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Xandria Phillips
MELLON VISITING PRACTITIONER FELLOW, CSREA
Xandria Phillips is a writer, educator, and abstract artist from rural Ohio. Their work often dishevels the line between personal and collective in regards to generational trauma facing queer people of African descent.
James Montford
MELLON VISITING PRACTITIONER FELLOW, CSREA
James Montford AKA Ari is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work ranges from photography and collage to performance art. He works between his studios in Providence, Rhode Island and Boston, Massachusetts.
Charly Palmer
MELLON VISITING PRACTITIONER FELLOW, CSREA
Charly Palmer was born in 1960 in Fayette, Alabama and raised in Milwaukee. He relocated to Chicago to study art and design at American Academy of Art and School of the Art Institute. As a graphic designer and illustrator, he has run a successful design studio with a Fortune 500 clientele. As an instructor, he teaches design and illustration and painting at the post-secondary level—most recently—Spelman College.
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky
MELLON VISITING PRACTITIONER FELLOW, CSREA
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist that works mainly with photographs, video, and performance. She has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally.
2019-2020
Akua Naru, Practitioner Fellow in Arts and Expressive Culture, Spring 2020, Race and Media Fellow, Artist and Expressive Culture, Fall 2019