Artist Bios

Alena Lipa is an asylum seeker and the mom of transgender son Daniel. She is a community member of Unlocal, a QJIP Ambassador, an advocate, supporter and builder for UnLocal’s Queer Immigrant Justice Project (QJIP). Alena was born in Russia and now lives in New York with her son. 

Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist and activist. Her practice builds bridges between disparate communities to counteract fear with a collective sense of empowered radical acceptance. She pushes the formal and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to foster progressive social change through performance, social practice, installation, video, music, sculpture, collage and writing. She has shown at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,  The Brooklyn Museum, Times Square Arts, The High Line, Artpace, Socrates Sculpture Park,  National Sawdust, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest. She has received residencies at spaces such as The Watermill Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Project for Empty Space, Anderson Ranch, and Banff Centre for the Arts. She has received a NYFA Grant, Franklin Furnace Fund and a Rema Hort Mann Grant. Khoshbin received an MA from New York University in Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in Film and Media Studies at University of Texas at Austin. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, House of Trees, and poets Anne Carson and Naomi Shihab Nye among others.

House of Trees artist collective consists of a sibling team– Amy, Jennifer, and Noah Khoshbin. HOT is dedicated to the transformative effects of contemporary art through the creation and production of dynamic, site-specific, public art projects. House of Trees brings together artists and institutions to collectively explore and expose deeper ways of connecting through artmaking. Each HOT project incorporates a variety of artistic practices, including: installation, textile art, sculpture, video and performance art, among others. House of Trees seeks to create work that is part of our personal and political conversations nationwide and internationally. HOT has shown at the The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Times Square Arts, The Watermill Center, WTC Oculus for River to River Festival, Artpace, Luminaria Festival and more. 

Naomi Shihab Nye
Work every day. Always try again. Focused practice is your friend. Tiny increments matter. Naomi Shihab Nye began writing poems in Ferguson, Missouri at age 6 and sending them to magazines at 7. She grew up in Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas . Every day, beginning again. Trying to make connections. Nye is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the Lavan Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Carity Randall Prize, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry award, the Robert Creeley Prize, and many Pushcart Prizes. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was a Witter Bynner Fellow. From 2010 to 2015 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018 she was awarded the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. Nye is the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate.

Cassandra Mayela is a self-taught textile artist working and living in New York since her forced migration from Venezuela in 2014. Her background in textile design and her personal experiences as an immigrant and a woman of color have shaped her curiosity for clothing’s story-telling capacity and how migration affects one’s identity and feelings of belonging. In doing so, her work is largely community-orientated, exploring the idea that fundamental changes in fabric can affect one’s perception of identity, highlighting new waves of empowerment.

Daniel Ramirez (Venezuelan, 1990) is a photographer and graphic designer. He lives in Miami, FL. where he continue his work as a street photographer focused on the homeless, his passion for street photography that knows no bounds.

Maria Fernando Gonzalez (Mafer Bandola) is a bandola llanera player, community organizer, self-taught composer, and educator. With a grounded understanding of the bandola llanera (male-dominated) traditions,  she focuses on bringing the instrument to a new artistic path through composition, performance, and improvisation.