2023 Jurors
Maya Curtis
Cleveland native, Maya Curtis, currently serves as a grants manager at Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, one of the largest local public funders for arts and culture in the nation. As a former George Gund Foundation fellow and Cleveland Institute of Art admissions counselor, she is inspired by the numerous ways artists bring joyous, challenging, and humanizing experiences to the stage and is always looking to support creative people in their journey. Maya holds a bachelor's and master's degree from Columbia College Chicago and The University of Akron respectively. Her education in fashion business, art education and administration gives her a unique perspective on the arts in her community. When not at work, you can find her spending time with her family at her home in the Larchmere neighborhood, exploring parks with her puppy or teaching children's yoga!
Kate Sierzputowski
Kate Sierzputowski is a curator, writer, and arts organizer based in Chicago, IL. Her practice focuses on presenting artists’ practices outside of their typical confines - curating exhibitions in vases, on ears, and at miniature scale. Using scale as an inclusive tool, she co-founded the international miniature fair Barely Fair in 2019 to promote under-recognized spaces. Kate is co-director of the artist-run space Julius Caesar, runs the apartment gallery AIRLOCK, and has a small curatorial project on her ear called Chandelier. Kate’s exhibitions and projects have been featured in the Chicago Reader, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, and she was recently featured in NewCity’s Art 50 in 2022. Currently she is the Director of Programming at EXPO CHICAGO where she helped launch the first edition of the fair’s Director Summit in 2022, produces the exposition's Curatorial Forum, Curatorial Exchange, and organizes dozens of panels with institutions, curators, and artists.
Ray Caspio
Ray Caspio is a performance and conceptual artist creating intimate, immersive, multidisciplinary performance installations. Their work ranges from confessional to camp, exploring Self, sexuality, the subconscious, Pop, and Queerness. It’s been performed at BorderLight ("Uncle Toots"), Theater Ninjas (Associate Artistic Director 2012-2015), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), among others. Ray's training includes Celebration Barn for Physical Theatre, Second City, the Alba Method, and Chekhov Technique with MICHA and The Michael Chekhov School. They've taught for CMA, Baldwin Wallace, Dobama, MetroHealth Arts in Medicine, and through their studio, Michael Chekhov Center Cleveland. Caspio received an Associate in Illustration from Cuyahoga Community College. Exhibiting locally and nationally, their drawings and paintings are in private collections in North America and Europe. Ray received a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellowship, and a 2022 Satellite Fund grant from SPACES, funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation, for the durational performance installation, "The Wall".
Lo Smith
Lo Smith is a print maker and curator interested in reproductive justice, revisionist history and black joy. In their silkscreen and collagraph prints they interrogate hidden histories of medical experimentation on black bodies, untold stories of black American life, and interrogate their own queer positionality and future. They are also interested in the racial democratic possibility of print. Their work has been shown at ORI Gallery, Granoff Center for the Arts, Emerson College, The Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender, The Cleveland Institute for Art, and The Morgan Conservatory. Their curatorial work has been presented at / published by New York University, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Sculpture Center, and the Photographers Green Book. They currently are adjunct faculty in printmaking at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Their work can be found at LoSmithStudios.com or @LoSmithStudios on Instagram
Laurie Rojas
Laurie Rojas (IG @lauriered) is an independent art critic, journalist, lecturer and grant writer. She recently moved to Miami after 8 years in Berlin and is currently the Grant Programs Manager at Locust Projects. Her writing explores the relationship and tension between art and politics, examining the conditions that shape artistic communities in international art hubs. She recently won the Artlab Editorial Fellowship.
2022 Jurors
Naomi Columna
Naomi Columna, musician and artist based in Cleveland Ohio, was trained in the western classical style of music, (BM from CIM, 2016, MM from SFCM, 2019.) Though a vocalist by degree, Columna engages a shape-shifting practice which balances performance, audio/video work and installation art, resulting in a varied portfolio of projects. Focused in ensemble and collaboration, Columna often blends the roles of project manager, performer, and artistic director, and is committed to showcasing/commissioning new works. Recently, Columna with artistic partner Melanie Emig, was awarded the ‘Satellite Fund’ from SPACES to curate and perform a live, multimedia music show, “What I Meant: DANCING_BANANA.gif” with a cast of 10 other artists. Continuing in this style, Columna’s next multimedia ensemble piece, an experimental narrative album paired with fusion dance, will premiere in October, 2022. You can also hear Columna in early-music ensemble, Quire Cleveland and experimental trio, Halumnen, which released its debut EP, ‘Rectangular Oracle’ in May. Outside of performance work, Columna is currently the Gallery Assistant at Transformer Station, and Visitor Services Manager for FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, where she is also featured as the sound designer for Triennial podcast, ’The Pod of Dust and Rainbows.”
Qualeasha Wood
Qualeasha Wood (b.1996, Long Branch, NJ; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) combines traditional craft and contemporary digital materials inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, queer craft, Microsoft Paint, and internet avatars. Her work engages questions of the place, purpose, and hope for the non-ontological Black queer femme body. Wood holds a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Meg Matko
Meg Matko is a visual / interdisciplinary artist focusing her work in object-based and durational performance, sculpture / object-making and two-dimensional works. Her often ephemeral explorations tend to center on witness of a private or intimate gesture surfacing in a public environment; returning continually to themes of feminine identity, masochism, emotional processing, collecting/coveting and preciousness. Body-based investigations push the limits of her own physicality, become exercises in repetition and/or unpack the artist - audience relationship through both personal and universal meditations.
Meg holds a BFA in sculpture from Kent State University and has spent 15+ years in active creative practice, 8 of those years in a dual focus of nonprofit arts advocacy as Community Relations Manager at Assembly for the Arts. She is a 2021 Satellite Fund grant recipient through the Warhol Foundation in collaboration with SPACES and has exhibited works in throughout Northeast Ohio including with and for Maelstrom Collaborative Arts, Conundrum Co-op, Rooms to Let, Re|Marking, artist-led group shows and independent collaborations. She likes cats, documentaries, processing animal carcasses, and is mom to 13-year-old Ronin.
Darnell-Jamal Lisby
Darnell-Jamal Lisby is Assistant Curator of Fashion at the Cleveland Museum of Art. A fashion historian, his charge is to develop exhibition projects rooted in fashion studies, ranging across the museum’s various curatorial departments. Lisby has a thorough understanding of the broader history of fashion dating back to the 14th century, but one of his particular focuses is illuminating the intersection of Blackness and fashion studies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Before moving to Cleveland in 2021, Lisby was an education coordinator at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where he was also on the curatorial team for the Willi Smith: Street Couture exhibition. He has also worked at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, he served as one of the managing curators for the traveling exhibition The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Claire Voon
Claire Voon is a writer and editor who has contributed to publications including Artforum, ARTnews, the Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, the New York Times, and Teen Vogue. Previously a staff writer at Hyperallergic and an assistant editor at Chicago magazine, she currently edits for Aperture and Borderless Magazine, a news outlet working to reimagine immigration journalism. She was born in Singapore and lives in Brooklyn.
2021 Jurors
Vincent Uribe
Vincent Uribe is an artist and creative community builder based in Chicago, IL. A Los Angeles native, Vincent is a dual degree graduate from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. He is the Founding Director of LVL3, an artist-run exhibition space and online publication launched in 2010. Through LVL3, Vincent has organized hundreds of exhibitions featuring exceptional emerging and mid-career artists both nationally and internationally, including in Miami, New York, and Mexico City. In 2013, Vincent joined the team at Arts of Life to help expand opportunities for artists with disabilities. Through the Artist Enterprise Program, he launched Arts of Life’s in-studio Circle Contemporary galleries and expanded Arts of Life’s public exhibitions locally in Chicago and on a national scale. His work includes shows with the Chicago Cultural Center, Art on theMART, INTUIT Center for Outsider Art, and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art among many others. Vincent serves as a founding board member for Equity Arts. He has participated in numerous talks dedicated to artists’ professional development. His work has been featured in publications such as The Chicago Tribune and New City.
Maceo Keeling III
Maceo “Paisley” Keeling III is a multi-disciplinary artist, designer, curator, and cultural producer based in Los Angeles, CA. Maceo is a lifelong artist who chose to forego art school after 9/11 to serve in the U.S. Army.
After service he made his way back to the arts to unpack his experiences as a poet and dancer. For the past decade Maceo has danced professionally, performed on national stages as a spoken word and performance artist. Maceo is the Executive Director of Citizens of Culture, a nonprofit that uses art to help communities and organizations develop critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and combat resource inequality.
Maceo is a Bronze Star awardee for his service in Iraq, traveled across the U.S. by train in 2015 he was a participant of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a NBC Universal Challenge Grant recipient, in 2016 he was a member of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs exhibition SKiN, and continues to work as a dancer/choreographer for the likes of indie rock sensation Beirut, Justin Timberlake, and performance art exhibits with groups like Marciano Art Foundation, (LAND) Los Angeles Nomadic Division, and Museum Of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Ben Oblivion
Ben Oblivion is an interdisciplinary artist currently living and operating in Cleveland, Ohio. Ben is a Graduate of the Sculpture + Expanded Media program at The Cleveland Institute of Art. His installation work has been seen at Ingenuity Fest 2017, and at SPACES Gallery for their 2019 Benefit. Ben is the host and organizer of the currently hiatus-ed Conundrum Co-Op, a semi-regular “open-mic” of sorts for performance art, housed at Maelstrom Collaborative Arts in Cleveland. Ben has performed in many of Maelstrom’s shows, and alongside Chicago experimental comedy troupe HellTrap Nightmare. With his collaborator, Marcia Custer, Ben was the recipient of one of the Satellite Fund Awards in 2019.
Corrie Slawson
Corrie Slawson’s collaged landscapes explore forms and narratives related to social and environmental equity. In this work, she analyzes overarching patterns in development, population loss, land-use and climate change through layers of printmaking, painting, photography and drawing. The imagery is garnered from personal experiences with collaged elements from magazines and the internet. Visual references to history related to land-use are presented in the context of imperiled with decision-making stuck in a cycle of sprawl and divestment. In addition to her two dimensional work, Corrie works in performance, installation and through various collaborations with other artists and activists. A Native Clevelander, Corrie grew up in Cleveland Heights and earned her BFA at Parsons School of Design in New York City (1997) and her MFA at Kent State University (2006). Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, including at MOCA Cleveland, The Toledo Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, Centro Culturel de Tijuana, Galerie Module Drei in Dresden, SPACES and Zygote Press. She has been the recipient of two Individual Artist Awards from the Ohio Arts Council in 2012 and 2019. Slawson is currently part-time faculty in the Painting and Drawing Department at Kent State University School of Art. Her work is represented by Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Gallery in Cleveland, OH.
Danté Rodriguez
Danté Rodriguez was born in Uruapan, Michoacán, Mexico in 1978 and raised in Lorain, Ohio. He received a BA in Studio Arts from Cleveland State University. Although his concentration was in Drawing, he took additional courses in painting, printmaking, and sculpture. During his time at Cleveland State, he was a gallery attendant at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery where he learned art handling, exhibition design, installation, and lighting. This experience eventually led him to a position at The Cleveland Museum of Art as a Mount maker within the Exhibition & Design Department. Danté has been researching his transnational cultural background as a Puerto Rican-Mexican American and exploring the different social dimensions of his multiple identities. His work uses the possibilities of portraiture to explore the layers and complexities of identity as influenced by time, personal experiences, and national and transnational culture. Danté’s portraitures, both in representational and abstract forms, are informed and filled with complex narratives that have the power to generate multiple interpretations. His work is characterized by powerful drawings intersected by strong and brilliant colors and shapes that invite to think about the self as a fragmented and distorted metaphor that reflects the constant flux of our multiple identities.
2019 Jurors
Jennifer Coleman
Jennifer Coleman is the Senior Program Officer of the Arts at The George Gund Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio. The Foundation was established in 1952 with the basic goal of advancing human welfare, concentrating in the Greater Cleveland area. To date, the Foundation has made grants totaling over $740 million dollars. Jennifer oversees the arts grant making of the Gund Foundation, which invests in primarily local arts-focused organizations that directly impact the City of Cleveland. Jennifer has always followed her passion for the development of a more creative and vibrant Cleveland. Prior to joining the Foundation, she had her own architecture and design firm and also founded CityProwl, a company that produced digital audio walking tours. She served as chair of the Cleveland Landmarks Commission and the Downtown/Flats Design Review Committee. She also has been a member of the board of trustees of many organizations, including the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Cleveland International Film Festival, LAND studio, the Downtown Cleveland Alliance and the Cleveland Botanical Garden. Jennifer received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University. She was an American Marshall Memorial Fellow, voted as one of Cleveland Magazine’s Most Interesting People and a speaker at TEDxCLE.
Rob Lehr
Rob Lehr has over 15 years of professional experience in organizational development, community engagement, and project management for nonprofit organizations. His career has been dedicated to the nonprofit sector, starting with ten years of service as an arts administrator for the National Costumers Association where he connected to creative entrepreneurs across the United States. In recent years, he has served as the Marketing Director at the Canton Museum of Art and the Gallery Director at Summit Artspace. Since 2018, Rob works to advance GAR Foundation’s mission of helping Akron become smarter, stronger and more vibrant. As program officer, Rob reviews and evaluates grant applications with a focus on the Foundation’s community grant making.
Roopa Vasudevan
Roopa Vasudevan is an American visual artist, computer programmer, and researcher, currently based in Philadelphia. Her work uses data and technology in order to interrogate or subvert social and cultural practices. She is primarily interested in the historical reading of data as a form of collective memory, how surveillance and data collection is altering our notions of what archives are and who is remembered, and coming up with more creative and ethical practices for data culture. She has exhibited internationally in Belgium, China and the United States, and been featured on Reuters, Slate, Hyperallergic, Jezebel, Complex, PSFK, the FADER, PBS NewsHour, Public Radio International, and more. Recently, she has been a participant in the SOHO20 Residency Lab (Brooklyn, NY); the Arctic Circle Residency (Svalbard); China Residencies’ #Slowtrain digital residency (Trans-Siberian Railway); the SPACES World Artists Program (Cleveland, OH); and the Flux Factory artist collective (Queens, NY).
Katherine Cooper
Katherine Cooper has written everything from insightful interviews to cultural critiques to an advice column for Playboy. Her work has been published in Architectural Digest, Hyperallergic, Playboy, and BOMB magazine, among others. She pulls from her background in feminist and performance theory to frame questions about art and intimacy in a literary context. She has been awarded fellowships through the Hemera Foundation and the NEA-funded Art Writer in Residence Program at the SPACES Gallery in Cleveland. Prior to becoming a writer she was a professional matchmaker, a job she got on Craigslist.
Dee Perry
Dee Perry began her broadcasting career in 1976 and worked for more than a dozen years hosting shows on commercial radio stations. During that time, she was also attending classes at Cleveland State University. She majored in communications and graduated in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree. In 1989, she took a job with what was then known as Cleveland Public Radio, becoming the morning host for WCPN 90.3FM. That station became the multimedia content provider ideastream in 2001, following a merger with WVIZ/PBS.Since then she has written, produced and conducted thousands of interviews about arts and culture for radio, television and the web. Her many honors include multiple Emmy Awards, induction into the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame, and the Cleveland Arts Prize’s Robert Bergman Prize.