Internationally renowned artist Susana Aldanondo embodies in her work the joy found in the human connection and in focusing on the positives through gestural abstraction, splattered and dripped paint, large and thin strokes, straight lines and loose curvilinear forms, she creates movement and energy that stand out in her paintings. Her career evolved over many years, from watching her father paint and use different painting techniques to sell his art in the streets of Soho NYC, to studying with abstract master William Scharf and at the present with abstract master Frank O’Cain in New York City, and years later exhibiting and gaining recognition through her work.
Susana is an immigrant and some of her work reflects upon that identity, the contrast of life in the city to living in isolating areas of Vermont, prompting her to create awareness of the struggles attached to the immigrant identity. Susana has a studio in her home in Vermont and in Queens, NY.
Rooted in painterly abstraction, Denver-based visual artist Sarah Darlene Palmeri explores the connection between the physical body, feminine identity, and emotional spaces through painting and collage. Her abstractions use paint and recycled materials such as magazines, clothes, and bedsheets to explore the phenomenology of emotions and their physical expression in the body. Palmeri aims to reimagine abstract expressionism from a queer, feminine perspective and broaden the dialogue around intersectional identity with both traditional and recycled materials. Sarah graduated with a BFA in Fine Arts from Louisiana State University in 2011, where she studied mass communication and painting. In 2018, she expanded her practice to include more community-based projects, including The Magazine Project in 2018 and an upcoming neighborhood revitalization project in Denver’s historic City Park in 2020.
Linnea Jonsson is an artist with a background in craft, based in Sweden. Her work revolves around objects and people within the everyday. She has a special interest for the routinelike interactions with everyday objects, the powerplay between body and objects through perceptive and intuitive reactions and the interplay between them. Her objects are made to make the blindingly obvious visible in a different light, whether it is about the object itself, the relation we have to it or how the body and object mutually affects each other.
I’m a visual artist mainly working with landscape art, land art, painting and photography. I’m a traveller between artistic and scientific ways of perceiving the world. Looking simultaneously through two lenses. I hold a Degree of Master of Science, Major Biology at the University of Lund, Sweden. Central to my practice is an approach to nature, landscape and living forms from a holistic view, seeing everything as deeply connected. I ́m interested to explore the patterns, networks and relationships that interconnect. Furthermore I want to investigate and challenge how we perceive what we call nature and how perception changes the way we perceive the us and the world around us. This I do from a multidisciplinary point of view, where art, science, deep ecology, philosophy and poetry is combined.
Maxwell is a Berlin based storyteller, filmmaker and poet. He has a passionate belief in the power of stories to reshape our world to reflect the best of what humankind can be. He has spent time living in Cameroon, Chile, Panama, Turkey, Myanmar, United Kingdom and Germany. Over the last 5 year he has been exploring the questions: How do we achieve oneness without sameness? and How do we empower unity without uniformity?
His identity has been influenced by being a first generation American, the son of an immigrant, a frequent wanderer and a person of color. His work has been focused on sharing the stories of people making choices to live inside their hope for the future. He is currently working on a documentary series called This is Life and a Podcast series Proud Humans.
Thorvaldur Helgason (b. 1991) is a freelance poet and writer from Reykjavik, Iceland. Thorvaldur’s first collection of poetry, a chapbook titled Draumar á þvottasnúru (Dreams on a clothesline), was published in 2016 by Partus Press in their Emerging Poets series. In 2018 he was a recipient of the Grassroots Grant by the Icelandic Literature Center for his first full length poetry book Gangverk (Clockwork) which was subsequently published by Mál og menning in 2019.
Thorvaldur has a BA degree in Theatre and Performance Making from the Iceland Academy of the Arts and an MA degree in Creative Writing from the University of Iceland.
Michael works in the fields of Architecture and Visual Art. He obtained his Postgraduate Diploma in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art in 2012. Since graduating he has worked on building projects in Zürich, Paris and Reykjavik. In parallel, he has collaborated on installations and research with artists Jordi Colomer and Pezo Von Ellrichshausen and the artist collectives' Le 6B and EXYZT both based in in Paris. His recent work explores the body and its relationship to form and space, playing with an intimacy that architecture struggles to provide. This has led to new exciting projects where the use of fabric and photography are a recurring medium.
Hera Fjord graduated from The Kogan Academy of Dramatic Arts in London 2015 with a BA in acting and theatre directing. After graduation she started her own theatre company putting on productions which incorporated theatre, history, fine arts and music in London. In 2017 she premiered her one woman play Fjallkonan which is based on the life of her great great grandmother, kick ass entrepreneur and businesswoman Kristín Dahlstedt born in 1876. In 2018 she co founded arts festival Straumar in Flateyri, Iceland. Hera works as a theatre director and drama teacher. She enjoys combining as many art forms together as possible and has a background in physical theatre and improvisation. Hera is based in Eyrarbakki, Iceland where she works from her seaside home.