Vesna Pavlović

Born and raised in Serbia, Pavlović received her BFA in cinematography from the University of Belgrade and then went on to earn an MFA in visual art from Columbia University.  She is currently associate professor in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University.  The movement from Belgrade to New York, and the combination of cinematography—especially the notion of the projected image—are themes that run through her art.  Much of her work mines history and personal experience to ask the viewer to consider both the utopian impulses and, at times, empty pageantry of sites of display.  Her masterful plotting of installation draws upon a cinematic sense of mise-en-scene in a way that encourages us to question photography’s perceived “truth.”  This consideration of the nature of the photographic image, or, in her words, “the photographic moment,” also allows her to explore related questions of memory and representation.  

Sylvie Fortin is an independent curator, critic, and editor based in Montréal (Canada) and New York. She was Executive and Artistic Director of La Biennale de Montréal, Canada’s leading international contemporary art event, from 2013 to 2017, following her tenure as Editor-in-Chief, and later Executive Director/Editor, of ART PAPERS between 2004 and 2012. She was also Curator of Manif 5 – the 5th Québec City Biennial (2010). Her critical essays and reviews have been published in numerous periodicals, catalogues, and anthologies. 

Dr. Jordan Amirkhani is a Professorial Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at American University in Washington, DC. She received her PhD in the History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom in 2015 and has published scholarship on the Franco-Cuban painter and polemicist Francis Picabia, the British conceptual art collective Art & Language, and the photographic work of Crow artist Wendy Red Star. Recent curatorial projects include Identity Measures, an exhibition of 23 New Orleans-based artists for the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans’ 2019 Open Call exhibition, and DIALOGUES, an inaugural exhibition of 32 artists for STABLE—a subsidized studio, gallery, and educational space in northeast Washington, DC. In addition to her academic scholarship, Jordan also writes art criticism for a number of contemporary art publications including Artforum, Art Practical, Baltimore Arts, and Burnaway.org. Her emphasis on contextualizing contemporary art and artists working in the American Southeast garnered her a prestigious Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation “Short-Form” Writing Grant in 2017 and three nominations for The Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Lisa Tuttle is an artist, curator, arts administrator, educator and writer.  She has worked as a lead administrator with the Fulton County Public Art Program since 2003. Previously, she was the gallery director for both Nexus Contemporary Art Center (now Atlanta Contemporary) and the Atlanta College of Art, and the Visual Arts Director for The Arts Festival of Atlanta, where she oversaw NEA-funded site work projects, organized and curated temporary exhibitions of contemporary art including during the Olympics in 1996. As an artist, her work is interdisciplinary, lens-based and mixes mediums. She has completed several public art projects, including Harriet Rising, in collaboration with Alice Lovelace, which received an Americans for the Arts Public Art Network 2012 Year-in-Review award as one of the top 50 public art projects in the country.

Nikki Searcy, the “Mistress of Mixology”, has been working in the hospitality service industry for close to two decades. She has spent the last 10 years bartending at a variety of venues, clubs, and restaurants in Atlanta. Currently, she owns and operates a professional bartending service, Liberating Libations, as well as Simply Natural For You, specializing in “mixing” natural & organic fruit juices.