PARTICIPANTS

Jameson Alea (they/he) is an artist and poet whose work is informed by their interests in history, magic, and alchemy. They were born and raised in the Buffalo area and graduated from Canisius College with a degree in digital art and computer science, which led them to a career as a software engineer, public speaker and podcast producer.

Nevertheless, Jamey remains passionate about art, working in various mediums, but particularly letterpress. They completed a studio residency at Book Arts in early 2022, producing a 28 card hand-printed deck called the Tarot of Sorts, and since then have worked in and a number of Print Shops as a resident and visiting artist. In their capacity as a teaching artist with the WNY Book Arts Center, Jameson leads hands-on printmaking classes in the Book Arts Studio, and out in the community for learners of all ages. They are currently pursuing a degree in Arts Education at SUNY Buffalo State. 

George Caldwell has conducted and played on Broadway (’Black & Blue, ‘Play On!’, ‘Bring In ‘Da Noise …’, ‘The Full Monty’). He has served as musical director for international tours (‘Body & Soul’; ‘Black & Blue’), as well as US regional tours (‘Ella! The Musical’, ‘Thunder Knocking On The Door’, ‘Cookin’ At The Cookery’). He toured the world with the Count Basie Orchestra for over 7 years (winning a Grammy award for the recording ‘Live at The Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild’), and the Duke Ellington Orchestra for 3 years. He has performed with such diverse artists as George Benson, Quincy Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby McFerrin, Elvis Costello and The Urban Bush Women, to name but a few. He is a professor on the jazz faculty at UB. For more info, visit george-caldwell.com.

Robert Caldwell studies Indigenous history, particularly the history of tribal Nations of what is now the Southeastern U.S. Some of his interests include cartographic history, ethnohistory, foodways, the history of the social sciences, the study of colonialism, imperialism, race and indigeneity, and the history of migrations. He has published two books and articles focusing on his own tribe, the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb, LA. His manuscript Indians in their Proper Place, which details the historical evolution of linguistic and ethnological maps is under contract with the University of Nebraska Press.

Millie Chen creates visual, audio, and performance works that challenge habitual viewing and emphasize sensory knowledge. Her socially driven art has been exhibited globally at venues and festivals including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, The Power Plant, Toronto, Centro Nacional des las Artes, Mexico City, The Contemporary Austin, Shanghai Expo, Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, and FILE-Rio: Electronic Language International Festival, Rio de Janeiro. Her work is in several public collections including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, University of Colorado Art Museum, Art Bank of Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Pacific Railway, and Toronto Transit Commission. Her most recent awards (media arts grants from Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council, and a University at Buffalo Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship) are for SRS (Silk Road Songbook) https://www.silkroadsongbook.com. https://www.milliechen.com

Alissa Ujie Diamond’s work focuses on histories of spatialized inequity and action-research as a basis for systems change in the contemporary world. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she draws on an early career in applied architectural and landscape design as well as scholarly frameworks from environmental history, geography, plant humanities, urban planning, and ethnic studies.

Dawne Hoeg holds an MFA in Textile Design/Fiber from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. Prior to founding Stitch Buffalo in 2014, she taught in the Textile and Fiber Arts Design Department at Buffalo State University and served as the handwork teacher at the Aurora Waldorf School. In 2024, she received a citation from Governor Kathy Hochul in honor of Women’s History Month, celebrating “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” As the Executive Director of Stitch Buffalo, she has guided the organization from its start as a weekly embroidery class, held in borrowed community rooms, to its current form as a comprehensive textile arts center. Along the way, she has provided pathways to success for hundreds of refugee women artisans and established a vibrant community of diverse volunteers, students, and artists.

Chanon is an investigative-innovator. In the tradition of a litany of makers that have used the arts to unmask history, mend, learn and access liberation, Chanon collages multiple modalities of performance practice to craft solutions. Largely, Chanon makes by way of dance-theatre, performance, visual design, and the curation of art-based communal practices that encourage play, self reflection and engagement with jazz as an organizing aesthetic. 

Chanon is a Visiting Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo. She served as a visionary organizer during Urban Bush Women’s leadership Evolution as Co-Artistic Director and ensemble performer. Choreographic credits include “Haint Blu,” “Hair and Other Stories” (UBW), “The Priestess of Twerk” (Nia Witherspoon),“The Hang” (HERE Arts, Taylor Mac, Niegel Smith), “Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville” (La Mama, Talvin Wilks) “The Invention of Tragedy” (Flea Theatre, Meghan Finn). Performance-Collaborator Credits include, Snake Hips in our DNA (Talvin Wilks), A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (Taylor Mac, Niegel Smith), God’s Trombone (Craig Harris), and the Tony award winning musical Fela! (Bill T. Jones). 

Matt Kenyon is a new media sculptor who lives and works in Buffalo, N.Y. He has participated in numerous collaborations with artists, architects, and technologists, including McLain Clutter, Adam Fure, Tiago Rorke and Wafaa Bilal.

Kenyon’s work has been exhibited internationally and collected by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It has received a number of awards including the distinguished FILE Prix Lux Art prize. Reproductions of SWAMP’s work have been featured in mainstream publications such as Wired and Gizmodo, and also appear in edited volumes such as A Touch of Code (Gestalten Press) and Adversarial Design (MIT Press).

Kenyon is a 2015 TED fellow and a Macdowell fellow. He was recently selected for Coolhunting’s CH25 a showcase of creators and innovators from a broad range of disciplines who are currently working to drive the world forward.

Celeste Lawson is a published poet who embraces the literary arts through her love of dance and music.  Early on (1987-89) Celeste received grants for her re-creation of ancient North African coffeehouse dances that influenced her later stage productions: The Whale Speaks, (2023) – marine life conservation, Running On Faith: Freedom Seeker Stories As Recorded by William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad (2022);  “Letter From A Birmingham Jail: If Martin Were Here Today,” (2021) an enactment of King’s letter juxtaposed to Black Lives Matter; and Typography of Women: I Am Not Invisible, (2020) exposing the impact of human trafficking using survivor poems. Her latest project, Hidden Patriots, sheds light on slaves engaged in espionage during the American Revolution, American Civil War, and the CIA in the 1970s. Funders of Lawson’s work include: MAP Fund, NYSCA, David Fendrick Fund, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Covid Assistance), NYSCA Individual Artist program, Creative Impact Fund, and Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Philip Longson is an international award-winning and internationally published illustrator from the UK. He earned his MFA at the University of Edinburgh and has taught in higher education for over 10 years.

Janet McNally is author of the novels Girls in the Moon and The Looking Glass (HarperCollins), and a collection of poems, Some Girls, winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. She has an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and has twice been a fiction fellow with the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places including Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Ecotone, and Southern Review. Janet teaches creative writing and directs the All-College Honors Program at Canisius University.

Ariel Nereson is the author of the award-winning book Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (University of Michigan Press, 2022); coeditor of the forthcoming collection Critical University Studies and Performance (Vanderbilt University Press); and currently at work on a monograph about institutions, the arts, and reparations. Her research has most recently been recognized with the Sally Banes Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research. Ariel is Editor of Theatre Journal and a practicing choreographer and dramaturg.

Yotam Ophir (PhD, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2018) studies political and science communication, with a focus on media effects, persuasion, misinformation, conspiracy theories and extremism. Dr. Ophir’s work was published in journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Public Health, and Journal of Communication. His book Misinformation & Society was published in 2025 by Wiley-Blackwell. Dr. Ophir is a member of UB’s Center for Information Integrity, and UB’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. He is also a distinguished fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at University of Pennsylvania. In 2023, he received UB’s Exceptional Scholar: Young Investigator Award, and in 2025 received the SUNY Chancellor’s Horizon Award for Faculty Research and Scholarship. In 2024, he was selected as one of 10 “Early Career Scientists to Watch” by Science-News Magazine.

Dedicated to building community through site-responsive projects, C.S.1 commissions and produces new work in unexpected spaces, often helping artists and businesses expand their practices and reach new audiences. With a focus on experiential knowledge, C.S.1’s projects have highlighted bartering, food, gardens, drawing, healing modalities, birth, interactive play spaces and created cross-neighborhood conversations using dance and literature. 

A long-time museum curator (Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art), in 2013 Schneider organized the traveling exhibition More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s for the Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill. Accompanied by a 240-page catalogue, More Love won an American Association of Museum Curators Award for Best Exhibition. With renowned positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, she co-authored a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities, 2022, on the psychological mechanisms through which social practice art can raise community-level positivity resonance. 

Shasti O’Leary Soudant was born in New York City, dropped out of The LaGuardia High School of the Arts, received her BFA in Sculpture and Photography from Purchase College and obtained her MFA in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo. In addition to her faculty position at Buffalo State University, she is a multidisciplinary artist, sculptor, designer and writer whose colorful public art is inspired by humanist, philosophical, political, and scientific concepts. This work is developed in collaboration with community, designed to invite engagement and interaction, and involves hidden systems, power dynamics, human relationships, balance and hegemony. Recent large-scale sculptures include Dyad for the Buffalo AKG Museum, De Nobis Abundans for the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, Kaleidoscope Grove for the City of Erie, Pennsylvania, and Do Not Mistake Our Softness for Weakness for the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

Victoria Udondian’s work is driven by her interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity, informed by the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday materials. In 2020, Udondian was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has participated in numerous residencies, including Fountainhead (Miami, 2023), Instituto Sacatar (Bahia, Brazil), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown), Villa Strauli (Winterthur, Switzerland), Fondazione di Venezia (Italy), and Bag Factory Studios (Johannesburg).

Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Bronx Museum, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, the National Museum (Lagos), the Whitworth Gallery (Manchester), the South London Gallery, and Villa Strauli Art Centre (Switzerland). Recent exhibitions include the British Textile Biennial (Blackburn, UK, 2023), Fragmented World/Coherent Lives at Ten North Group Gallery (Miami, 2023), and Hacer Noche: Promised Land Biennial at Museo Textil de Oaxaca (Mexico, 2022). 

Udondian received an MFA in Sculpture and New Genres from Columbia University, New York and a BA in painting from the University of Uyo, Nigeria.

Mark Warren teaches ethics, philosophy of art, philosophy of mind, and critical thinking, focusing on how generative AI reshapes public reasoning and expression. His research centers on later Wittgenstein and neo-pragmatist philosophy, exploring questions in metaethics and objectivity. A frequent speaker on pedagogy and AI, Warren designs customized GPT tools for classroom use and advises on institutional policy regarding emerging technologies. He lives in Buffalo with his family, a hot tub and some half-finished philosophy papers.

Julio is an adjunct lecturer, teaching artist, freelance grants and proposals writer, an uncle, and soon-to-be Dad who makes time to serve an ever-changing community of socially engaged writers through trauma-informed, re/generative workshops. Julio also serves as a member of the Latino/a/x arts collective called Los Artistas del Barrio Buffalo (LAdB), the Spark Filmmakers Collective, and various boards across New York State. Julio also took part in the three-year TimeSlips: WNY Tele-Stories Project, where four local community-based artists facilitate and cultivate creativity with under-connected elders over the telephone. Julio was also led the BPS “Woke Words” program for several years. Aside from completing a Teaching Artistry residency at Starlight Studio and serving various art communities through backend support, you can always find Julio ready to share their love of words through their next project near you.

Christina Vega-Westhoff is a poet, translator, choreographer, and educator living in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of Suelo Tide Cement (Nightboat, 2018), which won the Nightboat Prize for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Words Without Borders, Emergency INDEX, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. Her creative research has recently been supported by a New York State Choreographers Initiative Grant and an Artpark Writer’s Residency. She served as translator for the bilingual Stories that Cook: Art, Memories, and Recipes / Historias que Cocinan: Arte, Recuerdos, y Recetas (Genesee Valley Council on the Arts, 2024). She teaches creative writing and aerial dance to youth and adults.

Edreys Wajed is a catalyst of inspiration and a walking enterprise of all things creative. The Buffalo native boasts a toolbox chock-full of talents and experiences ranging from a visual artist, jewelry designer, musical entertainer, educator, and entrepreneur with notable recognitions in each.

From touring nationally and internationally as a hip-hop artist to writing a play based off his poetry; Edreys is exceptionally diverse with his avenues of expression, including the fine craft of jewelry making, passed down from his father and master craftsman. Most recently, Edreys was part of the group exhibitions Buffalo AKG “Hi-Vis” Celebrating 10 years of Public Art in Buffalo, NY and “PULSE” 5th Annual Fountain Plaza Art Exhibit Buffalo, NY. A 2024 NYSCA Artist Grant awardee, Edreys holds an M.F.A. (2022) from the University at Buffalo as a Schomberg Fellowship Program Scholar. Visit eatoffart.com for more about Edreys.

“Creativity is my neighbor, I live by it,” says Edreys.

Professor Yvonne K. Widenor, MA has taught art history for thirty years at Canisius University. She has also taught at the University at Buffalo and Hilbert College. She earned her Undergraduate and Master’s degrees in art history at the University at Buffalo. As a native Buffalonian, she incorporates the stunning and sensational artistic, historical, cultural, and architectural achievements of the region into her teaching. She oversees ArtsCanisius, a yearlong celebration of student music ensembles, local artists’ work, and art history lectures. Professor Widenor organizes student trips to Europe to study museum exhibitry practices (alongside a colleague in Animal Behavior who studies zoo exhibitry procedures) and offer them opportunities to “sit” with art and explore historical spaces. 

Jerome Williams is a Latin Dance and Urban Ballroom instructor, versed in styles such as Salsa, Bachata, Merengue, Kizomba, Detroit Style Ballroom, Chicago Stepping and Line Dance. Primarily performing and instructing with Buffalo’s Own Smooth Steppers and Salsa for the Soul.

Above all, Jerome believes that dance should be fun and accessible to all. He prides himself on taking a practical approach to teaching that results in less pressure on the student, stronger retention of class material, higher self-esteem and more fun!