Permissions: Curator And Artist Bios
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Maya Suess is an artist, writer and arts administrator from unceded Coast Salish Territories now based in the Lower East Side. Her videos and performances have been exhibited internationally. She is currently the Managing Director of Flux Factory, where she oversees an Artists-in-Residency program hosting over 40 artists annually, managing extensive public programming, and wearing many other institutional hats. Maya is a former SHIFT Resident from the 2017/2018 cohort.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Hernease Davis is a photo-based artist using photograms, cyanotypes, sound, performance and craft to emphasize self-care through the artistic process. Hernease is on faculty at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY and has served as a Visiting Lecturer at ICP-Bard where she led a course exploring empathy through art practice. She has shown her work throughout the U.S. and a photogram from her current series, A Womb of My Own (Mistakes Were Made in Development), is now on view at Transformer Station as a part of the current exhibition, One. As a part of the EFA SHIFT Residency exhibition, Hernease is showing works that she has been developing throughout the past year from a new series entitled, “… new love.”
Asha Ganpat is a Trinidadian-American conceptual artist, born in Trinidad. Ganpat works in a wide range of traditional and non-traditional media including paper, lace, metal, gold, light and sound. Her work was cited as one of NYC’s top 10 art installations of 2012 by Complex Magazine. In 2017, Ganpat spoke at the Asia Society on the keynote panel of the South Asian American symposium "Fatal Love: Where Are We Now?" where she represented both East Indian and Caribbean diaspora. Currently, Ganpat is at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, awarded a year-long residency program, concluding with an exhibition in November 2020. Ganpat has shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Exit Art, Noyes Museum, Queens Museum, Jersey City Museum and Nathan Cummings Foundation. She is an alumnus of Aljira's Emerge, Gaia’s Wonderwomen, the New Jersey Book Art Symposium, Chashama North, Chashama, SHIFT at the Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts, and Trinidad's Alice Yard residency. Ganpat is also a professor at Montclair State University, an independent curator, and co-founded Red Saw Gallery of Newark, NJ 2005 - 2008.
Guido Garaycochea, born in Peru, is a Latino immigrant artist who works at the Queens Museum as the manager of the program for New New Yorkers. Guido moved to the United States in 2004, taught from 2004 until 2016 at Mitchell College in New London, CT, University of Connecticut, Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, CT, York Correctional in Niantic, CT, etc. He is the co-founder, curator and Artist in Residence Program Director of Expressiones Cultural Center in New London, CT, a nonprofit organization exclusively educational in nature. Guido moved in 2013 from Connecticut to NYC to resume art studies, graduating in 2015 from SVA with an MFA. Since then he has been an Artist in Residence at More Art / Engaging Artist in 2015 at that time focusing on volunteering and working with immigrant elders while participating in group exhibitions between CT and NYC.
Joy Garnett is an artist and writer from New York. She lives in the high desert of Nevada where she’s writing a family memoir of Egypt. She has exhibited her work at the FLAG Art Foundation, MoMA-PS1, Whitney Museum, Artists Space, Smack Mellon, White Columns (NY), the Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland (OR), Boston University Art Gallery, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), and the Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium). Garnett is the Art Editor of the Evergreen Review. Her art and writings have appeared in an eclectic array of publications that include: Rusted Radishes (Beirut, Lebanon); Full Blede (Los Angeles, CA); Ibraaz (Kamal Lazaar Foundation); Ping Pong (Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur, CA); and The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books, NY). She has been awarded grants from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Wellcome Trust, and the Chipstone Foundation. Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Altria, and The West Collection (Oaks, PA). She is a 2019-20 SHIFT Resident at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. For information about her family archive project: thebeekingdom.art
Gi (Ginny) Huo is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who’s interested in exploring the dynamics and intentions of beliefs. She received a BFA in Visual Arts at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT and a MFA at the Maryland Institute College of the Arts in Baltimore, MD. Huo’s work has been exhibited in places such as the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Korea Cultural Service of New York, Abrons Art Center, New York, NY. She is a participant of NADA House Residency, NY (2020), SHIFT Residency, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY (2020), Queens Museum Art Action Academy, NY (2016), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME (2015), Takt Artist Residency in Berlin (2015), Visiting Artist at American Academy in Rome (2014).
Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist, working primarily in video, text, and performance. Their work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts, framing and support, access and documentary. Their video and performance work has been shown internationally at festivals and venues including DOCNYC, QueerLisboa, Anthology Film Archives, Performance Space NY, Artists Space, and Camden Arts Centre, and they have been in study with the group No Total since 2012. Their solo exhibition of video work "After...After..." was presented at Piper Keys in London, UK in 2019. They received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College, CUNY, where they also teach.
Shona Masarin is an Australian lens-based artist whose work explores phenomenology and qualities of visual perception. Working exclusively with the medium of analog film, her abstract animations and photographs seek to touch, explore, and recreate the experience of seeing and feeling. She has received funding for her work from the Jerome Foundation, The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes in partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. Her work has been presented at Danspace Project, Dance on Camera Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Crossroads Film Festival at SFMoMA, and the Knockdown Center, amongst others. She holds a BFA in film and video from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.
Monika Wührer is the founder and executive director of Open Source Gallery and KoKo NYC. Originally from Austria, she received her MFA in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Monika founded Open Source Gallery in 2007. She has given talks at NURTUREart, Rutgers University and Hunter College. She has received awards and grants from the Austrian Cultural Forum, Austrian Federal Chancellery, Puffin Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. Monika has exhibited in the US, Norway, Austria, Italy, Thailand, Finland, France, Switzerland, and Japan.
ABOUT SHIFT
SHIFT: A Residency for Arts Workers was inaugurated as a project of EFA Project Space in August 2010 to provide studio space and peer support for practicing artists who also work as arts professionals (administrators, curators, directors, and others). Each year, outstanding artist/art workers from the NYC area are selected to participate in the residency. SHIFT honors these individuals' longstanding commitment to supporting fellow artists—one that necessitates a sacrifice of time and flexibility—with a unique environment to build on their own art practices.
Past SHIFT exhibitions have included Temporary Island (2019), Seven Senses (2018), Past Live (2017), No Atlas (2016), Double Visions (2015), and A Necessary Shift (2013). For more information about the SHIFT Residency, read the FAQ.