alejandro t. acierto
co-chair & treasurer - HE/HIM/HIS
alejandro t. acierto is an artist and musician whose work is largely informed by the breath, the voice, and the processes that enable them. He has exhibited artworks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Issue Project Room, MCA Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, and Roman Susan and presented performance works at Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival, the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, the KANEKO, Center for Performance Research, and Center for New Music and Technology. Recent projects were shown at the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas and Boundary Gallery in Chicago.
acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, VCCA, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, LATITUDE, Chicago Artists' Coalition and was an FT/FN/FG Consortium Fellow and a Center Program Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center. A 3Arts Awardee, he received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, an MM from Manhattan School of Music, an MFA in New Media Arts from University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and was an inaugural Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Digital Art and New Media at Vanderbilt University.
Steven Frost
co-chair & public programming director - They/THEM
Steven Frost (b. 1981, Woodsville, NH) has been featured in solo and two-person exhibitions at BMoCA (Boulder, CO), Basement Projects (Santa Ana, CA), CU Boulder Art Museum (Boulder, CO), 350 E 3rd/ ArtX (Long Beach, CA), Robert Bills Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Coop Gallery (Nashville, TN), and Pleasant Plains Workshop (Washington, DC) and in group exhibitions at Union Hall Gallery (Denver Colorado), the Center for Visual Arts (Denver, CO), Alto Gallery (Denver, CO), Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA), Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art (Rancho Cucamonga, CA), Imersten (Vienna, Austria), ACRE Gallery (Chicago, IL), Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), and the AU Museum at the Katzen (Washington, DC) among other venues. They’ve recently taught workshops at the Penland School of Craft (Bakersville NC), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and the Haystack School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME). Frost is the founder of the Colorado Sewing Rebellion, an offshoot of the original Sewing Rebellion founded by Frau Fiber (Carole Francis Lung). They are a co-founder of the Experimental Weaving Residency and Slay the Runway (Boulder, CO). Frost holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an Assistant Professor in the Media Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder where they serve as Faculty Director for the B2 Center Media, Arts, and Performance.
Dan Paz
co-chair - They/Them
Dan Paz is a visual artist and curator whose research into image-making engages queerness, racialized identities, and the impact of migration in the Global South. With exhibitions at Hayward Gallery London, UK; the 12th Havana Biennial at Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana, CU, The Media lab, NYC; In Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gene Siskel Film Center, The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts among others; in 2019 solo exhibitions included Lee Center for the Arts at Seattle University and Holding Contemporary in Portland, OR. These exhibitions have been generated out of residencies with El Centro Desarollo de Artes in Havana, Cuba; The Studios of Key West; Chicago Artist Coalitions’ Hatch Residency; The Luminary in St. Louis, MO; ACRE in WI. 8550 Ohio, and Seattle University’s High Resolution Media Artist Residency. Awards include: The Ann Metzger National Award for Prints,The Links Hall Grant, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur’s Connection Grant, and The Wyckoff Milliman Faculty Excellence Endowment Award. Dan completed a BFA in Video with minors in Photography and Art History at The Atlanta College of Art (Atlanta, GA), and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Chicago (Chicago,IL). Currently, Paz lectures in the Interdisciplinary Visual Arts Program in The School of Art, Art History, and Design, The Department of Comparative History of Ideas, and the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at The University of Washington
Oli Rodriguez
Communications director / former co-chair - HE/HIM/HIS
Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, installation and writing. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department (Photography) at California State University, Los Angeles. His intersectional research and interdisciplinary projects conceptually focus on queerness, notions of passing, visualizing the performativity of gender, explorations in appropriation, performative interactions with the public as collaborator, visualizing other representations of the AIDS pandemic while referencing historical movements in gender, racial and feminist histories. He curated the exhibition, The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He is apart of the monograph Confronting the Abject, named from his research themed class that he co-taught with Catherine Opie at SAIC. His forthcoming publication, The Papi Project, archives the AIDS pandemic through his queer, POC family in Chicago during the 1980s. He also just finished his short documentary film, LYNDALE, exploring toxic masculinity, cyclical familial trauma and queerness. LYNDALE is currently distributed by Video Data Bank (VDB). Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured and exhibited his works internationally and nationally.