Reviewers
We are honored to host this year’s distinguished Portfolio Reviewers
Reviewers are listed below in alphabetical order by last name. Please familiarize yourself with their background and expertise. A ranking form and a brief description of their interests will be emailed to you.
Gabriel Almeida is a Director at Craig Starr Gallery and the Art Editor of Caesura. He received his Masters in Art History from William College and was previously the Curatorial Assistant to the 2022 Whitney Biennial ‘Quiet as Its Kept’.
Shira Backer is Leon Levy Associate Curator at the Jewish Museum, where has worked on exhibitions including After “the Wild”: Contemporary Art from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection; The Hare with Amber Eyes; We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz; and Martha Rosler: Irrespective.
She is interested in contemporary art with a special focus on sculpture, as well as on the intersection of art and politics. Previously, she was Assistant Curator at the American Federation of Arts.
Nydia Blas is a visual artist who grew up in Ithaca, New York and currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia.
She holds a B.S. from Ithaca College, and received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.
She has taught courses for the High Museum of Art, Anderson Ranch, Image Text MFA program at Ithaca College and Syracuse University in the Department of Transmedia. She has completed artist residencies at Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her work has been commissioned by The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Airbnb, Harper’s Bazaar, and more.
Nicole Dial-Kay joined the Harwood Museum of Art as Curator of Exhibitions + Collections in February 2020 with a passion for curating exhibitions that reflect the diversity and talent that exist in Northern New Mexico.
Nicole joined the Harwood team with 15 years of museum programming experience, she held positions at Breckenridge Creative Arts, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CU Art Museum in Boulder, Colorado, Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska, Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri, and more. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Art History from University of Colorado, and a Master of Arts degree in Museum Studies from University of Missouri.
Nicole loves to travel the country in her 1978 VW Bus with her husband and two dogs, read lots of historical nonfiction, ski the beautiful Rockies, and swim in cold mountain lakes.
Erin Dunn is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Telfair Museums in Savannah, GA where she has been a member of the curatorial team since 2014. She has organized numerous exhibitions including Watershed: Contemporary Landscape Photography, Feels like Freedom: Phillip J. Hampton, Bruce Davidson: Face to Face, and solo presentations of work by artists Sonya Clark and Noel W Anderson. Current projects include the first major museum exhibition of the photographer Frank Stewart co-organized with The Phillips Collection. Her writing has appeared in the exhibition catalogue for Phillip J. Hampton, Late Night Polaroids: Photographs by Emily Earl, and Seven Rivers, a monograph of photographer Ansley West Rivers. Dunn was the recipient of the Fall 2023 Margie E. West Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. She holds a BA from Emory University and an MA from the University of Georgia.
Lares Feliciano (b. 1985 Oakland, CA, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker based in Alamosa, CO. Feliciano uses animation, installation, and collage to create worlds where marginalized experiences are front and center and all of time exists at once. Her work explores the in-between, layers of diaspora, and the complexity of memory. She holds an M.F.A in Cinema Production from San Francisco State University and a B.A. in Film & American Studies from Smith College. She has completed residencies with RedLine Contemporary Art Center and Grand Canyon National Park and was a participant in the Colorado Creative Industries Change Leader Institute.
Jesse Feinman owns and operates the independent publishing house, Pomegranate Press. He founded the imprint in 2015 while studying poetry in Florida, and since then has released over 60 titles, working closely with artists on every step of the way. In 2021, he founded Agony Books, a physical space in Richmond, Virginia, with the intention of further highlighting beautifully designed and accessibly priced publications, while providing a room for discourse, discussion, and gathering.
Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger is a NY-based curator with a focus on place-based practices around social, cultural, and civic issues. She is currently an Editorial Fellow at Independent Media Institute where she is the founding editor of &Art, a project of Earth I Food I Life which highlights the work of cultural workers—artists, activists, curators, arts organizations and art initiatives—who integrate art, environmentalism, food justice, and the wellbeing of the planet’s inhabitants with examples of pragmatic approaches and actions towards manifesting change.
Exhibitions include Storying and This side, or the other…. the culminating exhibitions for the 2020 and 2021 RU NYC-based artist residency programs; Bound up Together: On the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Jameco Exchange, a site-responsive and socially engaged education exhibition in a vacant storefront in Jamaica, Queens; and Hold These Truths at Nathan Cummings Foundation in Manhattan. Exhibitions on the intersection of art and data include Once Upon a Time There was the End, Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; Data Deluge, Ballroom Marfa, TX; and Library Science, Artspace, New Haven, CT. Gugelberger has served as curator at No Longer Empty (NLE), a non-profit organization that curated site-responsive and community-centered exhibitions, education, and programs in unique spaces, where she also served as director of the NLE Curatorial Lab. Prior, she was a curator at Exit Art where she curated the organization’s final exhibition Every Exit Is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art and co-curated Collective/Performative.
Alana Hernandez is a curator currently based in Phoenix. She is invested in working closely with artists to develop projects and exhibitions that underscore multifaceted understandings of U.S. Latinx art. She actively seeks to expand the presence of underrepresented, diverse communities while working directly with these constituencies that are integral to understanding the cultural fabric of the greater United States. Much of Hernandez’s curatorial work over the past several years center on how aesthetic statements made in print—through prints, posters, and photographs—are integral in shaping an often-political, cultural consciousness, specifically regarding Latinx art and artists. Her practice aims to bolster conversations of Latinx art that include Afro-Latinx and Indigenous perspectives, asserting that these narratives have always been integral to understanding the histories of this country.
Hernandez is Senior Curator + CALA Alliance Curator of Latinx Art at the ASU Art Museum. She has recently curated artist projects with Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, Sam Frésquez, and Luis Rivera Jimenez. She is currently at work organizing the solo presentation of Sarah Zapata. Previously, Hernandez was Executive Director & Curator at CALA Alliance. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Páramo, Guadalajara, Mexico; Hunter East Harlem, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Phoenix Art Museum; and BRIC Arts Media, Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in several exhibition catalogues and online journals, including HereIn Journal. Hernandez received her M.A. from CUNY Hunter College, where she specialized in Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art.
José Ibarra Rizo (b. 1992) is a Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist living and working in Atlanta, GA. His work primarily focuses on identity and is currently exploring the migrant experience in the American South. Primarily working with photography, Jose also utilizes drawing, painting, and sculpture in his creative process to convey genuine human narratives. José is the recipient of the inaugural MINT + ACP Emerging Artist Fellowship, one of three awardees for the 2022 Atlanta Artadia Awards, and one of three winners of the 2023-2024 Working Artist Project for MOCA GA. His work lives in the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and his clients include Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, and The New York Times.
Michael Itkoff is a publisher, creative consultant and former Chief Content Officer at Britelite Immersive. Michael Cofounded the internationally-celebrated art book publishing house, Daylight as well as content experience platform, Fabl.
For nearly twenty years, Michael has been a leader in publishing both digital and print media.
Along the way, Michael has written for the NYTimes Lens blog, Art Asia Pacific, Nueva Luz, Conscientious blog and the Forward. Michael’s photographic and video work is in public and private collections in the United States and his work has appeared on the covers of Orion, Katalog, Next City and Philadelphia Weekly. Michael was the recipient of the Howard Chapnick Grant for the Advancement of Photojournalism (2006), a Creative Artists Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Arts Council (2007), and a Puffin Foundation Grant (2008). Michael’s monograph Street Portraits was published by Charta Editions in 2009.
Dr. Sarah Kennel is the inaugural Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and a specialist in the history of photography. She has previously held curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem; and most recently, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta where she and Gregory Harris co-curated A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845.
Ramsay Kolber is an Assistant Curator for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project living and working in New York. Previously, she served as the Curatorial Research Associate at the Whitney Museum of American Art working on the Museum’s Collection Strategic Plan, a multiyear research project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, and as the Curatorial Project Assistant for the 2019 Whitney Biennial working alongside co-curators Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta. She has held additional positions at the Brooklyn Museum, Chapter NY, Independent Curators International (ICI) and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. She holds an MA in Global Conceptualism from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, Osmos Magazine, and 3rd Dimension, PMSA Journal.
Colleen Keihm is the Executive Director of LATITUDE and a photographer based in Chicago, IL. Keihm received her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA in Photography at Drexel University. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, FLXST Contemporary, Flatland, Roman Susan, Gallery 400, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Chicago. She has been an artist in residence at Hatch Projects within the Chicago Artist Coalition, Institut fur alles Mogliche in Berlin, Germany, and Studio 3325 in Chicago. Her work is a part of the photography collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and she is a proud member of the Midwest Photographers Project.
Julie Lohnes is the School of Art Director of Galleries and Collections at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has over 20 years of experience working with contemporary arts, in not-for-profit, commercial, and academic galleries, most recently as Director and Curator of Art Collections and Exhibitions at Union College (2013-2022) and Executive Director of A.I.R. Gallery (2011-2013), the first artist collective for women in the country. She co-authored “Tripping the Black Fantastic at a PWI: or, how Afrofuturist exhibitions in an academic library changed everything,” Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues. She has curated numerous exhibitions, most recently, “Embody” at Union College, which featured contemporary diasporic artists, who employed collage, as a technique to construct identity and/or selfhood within the mode of portraiture or figuration. Julie has participated in many panel discussions, most notably as moderator of “Transnationalism and Women Artists in Diaspora” at the Brooklyn Museum. Lohnes earned her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and her B.F.A. from Boston University in painting, with a minor in art history.
Courtney McClellan is an artist, writer, and educator. Currently, she is the Editor of Burnaway, an online art magazine that celebrates art in the South. She lives and works in Atlanta, GA.
Mia Matthias is a curator and writer based in Washington, D.C. Mia is currently Assistant Curator at Glenstone Museum where she has worked on Kara Walker (2023), Barbara Kruger (2023), and Iconoclasts, a group exhibition spanning a century of art history (2023-Ongoing). Matthias has previously held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Joe Rodriguez is the Senior Visuals Editor at Rolling Stone, where he produces shoots for Rolling Stone’s print and digital entities. Before joining Rolling Stone, Rodriguez was a Photo Editor at ESPN the Magazine, Men’s Health, People & Entertainment Weekly.
Jil Weinstock is an experienced executive and dedicated arts professional who facilitates inclusivity by championing innovative programming that urges audiences to investigate, engage, and create. Throughout her 15-year career, she has held positions at the Whitney Museum, Drawing Center, and, most recently, the Children’s Museum of the Arts, where she helped shape exhibitions, programming, and financial sustainability that reached and engaged new audiences. Represented by the Winston Wachter Gallery in NYC and the Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Weinstock is a practicing artist who has completed residencies at the American Academy in Rome and the Museum of Art and Design in New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally and written about in the New York Times; The New Yorker; Art in America; New York Magazine. Weinstock received a joint MFA from the University of California Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. Currently, she is the Executive Director of Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York and can be reached at jil@baxterst.org.
