June 2025 Residency thematic:

“Storytelling”

Art Talks Speaker Bios

Ria Brodell is a non-binary trans artist, educator and author based in Boston, and is the Visiting Faculty for our June 2025 MFA residency. Brodell has had solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, is a recipient of an Artadia Award, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and an SMFA Traveling Fellowship. Brodell’s book, Butch Heroes, was released in 2018 via MIT Press and was featured in a solo exhibition at the Fitchburg Museum in 2024.

Cuban-born mixed media artist, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons describes her work as telling “stories of forgotten people in order to foster a dialogue to better understand and propose a poetic, compassionatereading of our time.” Her survey, Behold opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 2023, and traveled to the Nasher Museum at Duke, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In 2023 she was awarded the MacArthur genius grant.

Cathy Lu is a ceramics-based artist that manipulates traditional Chinese art imagery and presentation as a way to explore how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity. Cathy’s work has been exhibited at SMoMA, Prospect 6 New Orleans, Johansson Projects, Aggregate Space, Jessica Silverman Gallery and the Chinese Culture Center SF.

De Blois is the Mannion Family Curator at the ICA Boston and has curated the first U.S. solo museum exhibitions of artists Caitlin Keogh, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Tau Lewis, and Tammy Nguyen. He has also organized solo shows with artists Charles Atlas, Rose B. Simpson, Carolina Caycedo, William Kentridge, Raúl de Nieves, and been part of the organization of over 30 shows and 10 books at the ICA.

Senior curatorial and public programs assistant at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Danni Shen has held curatorial positions at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; The Kitchen, NYC, Residency Unlimited Inc, NYC; Wave Hill, NYC, and the Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. She has written on art for BOMB, Art in America, Heichi, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, and OnScreen Today.

Lauren Luloff’s paintings are constructed, layered and torn, coalescing into moody evocations of color, time and place. Luloff’s work has been included in the notable exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Bronx River Arts Center, New York; Secret Project Robot, Brooklyn; Galeria Marlborough, Madrid; CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg and Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY.