Kean O’Brien (facilitator) received an MA in Education and Leadership in 2022 , an MFA from CalArts in 2011 and graduated with a BFA from SAIC in 2008.
Kean O’ Brien (he/they) is a disabled and transgender multidisciplinary artist, educator, and writer based between Madison and Chicago. His work is both personal and pedagogical, exploring the intersections of gender, whiteness, and embodied trauma.
Recent and upcoming writing publications include:
The Desire for Ugliness: Queers, Rebels, and Freaks, (part of Vol. 5 Playing Shakespeare’s Characters, published by Peter Lang Press). Home: The Trans Body (FWD: Museum, published by UIC Museum Studies Department and Sister Spit , 2020), Boyle Heights and The Fight Against Gentrification As State Violence (The American Quarterly Journal, published by John Hopkins Press, 2019), The American Culture of Guns and Prisons (FAYN Magazine, 2017), and others.
O’Brien has exhibited, screened, and curated work at Mana Contemporary in Chicago, Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Emory College, Fotografiska Museum, The Gay and Lesbian Canadian Archive, and Czong Institute of Contemporary Art in South Korea, among others. They have also shared their experience as a creative and educator with various institutions, speaking at University of Illinois, University of New Mexico, University of Lebanon, Beirut, University of Arizona in Tucson, University of California, Santa Cruz, National Women’s Studies Association Conference in San Francisco, American Studies Conference in Honolulu, and San Francisco Art Institute.
Andre Keichian is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across photography, video and sculptural installation. Keichian’s work exists at the intersection of image, sound and movement conjuring fluid identities. His intra-disciplinary practice draws on the materiality of performance, image, movement and mass to explore the boundaries of presence and absence, realism and abstraction, proximity and distance, and tangible and the ephemeral.
His work has shown both nationally and internationally at spaces such as the Metropolitan Cultural Center (Ecuador), The Craft Contemporary Museum (Los Angeles), Zuckerman Museum of Art (Georgia), El Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas (Buenos Aires), Museum of Contemporary Art Atlanta, and Anthology Film Archives (New York), among others. Keichian has completed various residencies, including The Echo Park Film Center, at land’s edge, The Camera Obscura and WonderRoot. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Avion Pearce uses photography and installation as a way to explore the potential of the image to communicate sentiment, memory, desire and longing. They are interested in investigating and uncovering the magical in the seemingly mundane experiences of everyday life. Using created environments, and props they engage with queer narratives in historical and present contexts. Pearce challenges the expected qualities of successful photography, asking several questions about the medium within their work and its potential to act as a form of repair. Can intensity of color, shadow and light be communicators of feeling? Can softness in focus describe memory? Using large format 8×10 and 4×5 cameras, they use traditional tools of historical documentation to present their own truths.
Avion studied Photography at Parsons School of Design and is a current MFA candidate for Photography at Yale School of Art. They received the Parsons School of Design BFA Photography Scholarship, and they are a 2022 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship recipient. Their work has been shown in Ryan Lee gallery, Photo Vogue Festival, and Aperture Foundation. Their work has been featured in The Cut,Dazed, W magazine and Broadly.
Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, installation, and writing. Currently, he is an Associate 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 a collaborator, and 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 a part of the monograph Confronting the Abject, named from his research-themed class that he co-taught with Catherine Opie at SAIC. His forthcoming publication, Papi, archives the AIDS pandemic through his queer family in Chicago during the 1980s. He also just finished his short documentary film, LYNDALE, exploring toxic masculinity, cyclical familial trauma and queerness, currently distributed by Video Data Bank (VDB). Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured, and exhibited his works internationally and nationally.