ARTISTS
Meet the creative collaborators of Forest For Trees!
Josh Tafoya, New Mexico-based CFDA Interim Member of Indo-Hispano, Genízaro, Chicano lineage, explores his family’s complicated history and rich textile tradition, inspired by a Ranching grandfather and a Weaving grandmother. Josh’s work is an exploration of old and new techniques brought into his weavings/ garments. Keeping old traditions alive, and furthering a continuing conversation of New Mexican heritage and craft, he shares a new vision of “American Fashion” and a reclamation of the “Southwestern Look”.
Meaghan Elyse is an artist working at the intersection of design, biomaterial sculpture and performance. Her work explores the precarious and porous dynamic between our bodies, other beings, and our wider ecological surroundings. Along with collaborators, she is interested in creating spaces for interaction, for rest, for dreaming, for mourning, and for healing.
Edgar Fabián Frías is a boundary-breaking multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles with degrees in Psychology, Studio Art, and an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley. Their immersive works blend diverse artistic disciplines, challenging conventional categories. Frías explores resiliency and radical imagination through Indigenous Futurism, spirituality, and queer aesthetics.
Magali Wilensky, originally from Argentina and now based in New York, is renowned for her pioneering work in fabric manipulation. Since 2013, Magali has been dedicated to crafting immersive fabric installations, offering transformative holistic art experiences. Her work has garnered attention in publications such as “Museu Textil,” "Fiber Art Now," “New Times Miami,” and “Miami Art Exchange.”
An interdisciplinary and intersectional ecofeminist artist, Anu’s work explores poetry through the material and closely considers the importance of grandmothers in restorative justice, and a possible futurity. A published author, filmmaker, exhibiting visual artist, and climate education strategist, Anu creates in celebration of elder feminist luminaries, botanics, myth, and semiotics. Coalescing provocative language, pop iconography, and wisdom traditions, their work initiates public discourse on environmental justice.
Disengineering Society is a multidisciplinary hardware-hacking group focussing on instrument building using e-waste, resisting planned obsolescence in modes of mass production, and running workshops that hold these pursuits at the forefront. Through workshops and publications, Disengineering aims to combat “planned obsolescence” by pointing to DIY culture as a tool.
4KINSHIP is a Diné (Navajo) owned sustainable artwear brand dedicated to producing handmade, one of a kind, restored, repurposed and lovingly upcycled, artisanal and small batch products. Their inspiration is the all the surrounds them in the Southwest. The clouds, the sky, the mountains, the land, which has led their founder back to New Mexico, and back to her Diné tribe.
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet and author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts. Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, CantoMundo, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. A longtime editor, she helps edit poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the online zine Visible Binary. She is the current Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University.
Indigo Goodson-Fields is a poet, writer and birder based in Brooklyn. She served as a New York Birding Consultant on the For the Birds exhibition committee at Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Indigo is featured on an episode of Always Be Birdin’ and The Brian Lehrer Show. Indigo is currently facilitating the Birding, Poetry and Power workshops for Field Meridian’s Nature School.
Juan Pablo Caicedo Torres (Bogotá, 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and producer with a background in cultural, human rights, and environmental organizations across Colombia, Spain, and the United States. His work encompasses visual art, performance, photography, poetry, curation, education, and public art. Caicedo Torres approaches multiple cultural and political notions from critical and communitarian perspectives, weaving themes of decolonization and counter-narratives into his practice. His work engages multiple media and often involves creating educational experiences and building cultural platforms where art catalyzes public dialogues towards social justice. He holds an MA in Arts & Public Policy from NYU Tisch and a BFA in Visual Arts from UNAL. Originally from Colombia, he is currently based in NYC, where he coordinates public programs and community partnerships at MoMA PS1.
Rose Malenfant is a multidisciplinary artist from New York, based in Brooklyn. Her work is material and process oriented, centered in cycles of the body and environment. Rose uses a variety of techniques and materials including nylon pantyhose, bioplastic, silicone, gravity and time. Her work has been exhibited by galleries throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens including El Barrio Art Space, Atlantic Gallery, and the Factory LIC. She has received awards from The Art Students League of New York and the International Society of Experimental Artists. Rose continues to invest in her practice with the Textile Study Group of New York and The Alternative Art School. Rose was a recipient of Beam Center’s Artist in Residency Program on Governors Island, New York where she focused on textile installation and sculpture. Rose is also a recipient of the Textile Art Center Artist in residence September 2024-2025.
Peter Schumann is a German-born dancer, sculptor, painter and bread-baker and the founder and director of Bread & Puppet Theater, one of the oldest and most influential theater companies in the country.
Julie Schenkelberg was born and lives in Cleveland, Ohio. Her practice is nomadic and she frequently relocates for months at a time, throughout locations such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, NYC, Italy, Norway and more. Schenkelberg received a BA in Art History at the College of Wooster, OH, and MFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY, NY. Her work is influenced by her eighteen years of professional experience of working in the theater in NYC and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations start with furniture, dishware, textiles, and marble, combined with construction materials, to transform notions of domesticity, to the sacred and engage with the American Rust Belt's legacy of abandonment and decay. She is represented by Asya Geisberg Gallery, in Tribeca in Manhattan, NY and Materia Gallery in Detroit, MI. Her large-scale installations have been displayed in exhibitions at art fairs, residencies, museums, artist’s spaces, sculpture parks, non profit spaces, private collections and galleries. She teaches and she is dedicated to helping emerging artists.
Samar Hussaini, a Palestinian-American fine artist based in New Jersey, is known for her captivating artwork that blends various layers of mediums and techniques. She graduated with a BFA in Art History and Studio Art from the University of Maryland before pursuing a Master's degree in communication design from Pratt Institute in New York. With a successful career in advertising, Hussaini’s design work earned her multiple awards in advertising including the Silver Award and Gold Award from DTC, as well as Creative Recognition from The One Show RX. Despite her professional success, her passion for fine art remained undiminished and she has earned several fine art awards, including the Innovative Fine Art Award from the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club in NY. In 2022, Hussaini achieved international acclaim for her participation in the Venice Biennale collateral group exhibit. Her work has been showcased in several prestigious galleries, museums, group shows, and solo shows around the world. Currently, Hussaini resides and creates her artwork in West Orange, New Jersey, where she continues to explore and push the boundaries of mixed-media fine art painting.
Maxfield Biggs (they/he) is an award-winning filmmaker, editor, and artist. After finishing a cli-fi short made entirely in NYC parks, Stomach of the Earth (2020), their focus shifted towards animated works and documentary to discover and abstract the living world around them. Most recently, they edited Gen Z Mental Health: Climate Stories (2022), animated Dog Years (2023), and directed Out of Plastic (2024). Their work has played at Rooftop Films, LAAF, Los Angeles Super Shorts, the TCL Chinese Theater, Hawai’i International Film Festival, Final Girls Berlin, Jackson Wild, and at the Museum of Moving Image. Maxfield co-founded Stranded Astronaut Productions with a hope to use storytelling through film in order to explore social justice and everything weird about being a human in the Anthropocene. As an artist and animator, they focus on a stripped back, DIY approach - oftentimes voice acting, scoring, and illustrating much of their own personal projects. With interests in the creation of soundscapes and experimental photography, they’ve honed in on an ability to not rely on much more than a core group of collaborators within the artist collective they co-founded. This approach allows for a more unified vision with each creative project, and grandiose ideas seem less daunting with an assured ability to complete what artistic visions they set out to explore.
Tehya Jennett (she/they) is a climate storyteller, award-winning filmmaker, and Green Producer for Stranded Astronaut Productions, an artist collective and production house focused on telling impactful stories. She is the Director of "Gen Z Mental Health: Climate Stories" (2022), which has screened for the UN and WHO, at COP27 and COP28, and at the Hawai'i International Film Festival. Tehya was selected as a 2024 Aspen Institute Future Leaders Climate Fellow, and is currently producing "Healing Lahaina", a documentary on the 2023 Lahaina wildfire. They have served as a LCOY Youth Delegate, an LA2050 Youth Ambassador, and a consultant on UNICEF publications, centering the importance of storytelling as a source of power in the discussion of climate justice. Most recently, Tehya was selected as a Creative in Residence at Painted Brain in Los Angeles and is currently exhibiting two artworks combining themes of climate emotions, material circularity, and socially engaged art practice.
Kaden Bard Dawson was born in 1999 in Bisbee, a thriving creative community for artists and musicians. They have been interested in art for as long as they can remember. At an early age, they enjoyed drawing and fabricating works of art from recycled material. Currently they reside in New York City. They have worked in painting, drawing, watercolor, ceramics, fashion, and mixed media. Over the past ten years they have focused specifically on photography as the medium of choice for the expression of their creativity. They enjoy both digital and film photography, as well as experimenting with alternative printmaking, specifically cyanotype printing. They are a well accomplished artist, receiving many honors and awards for their work. Their photography has appeared in numerous art galleries and exhibitions, and has frequently been published in digital and print magazines.
Emily Pacheco is a multimedia artist working mainly in sculpture, illustration and textile design. Her work focuses on themes of playfulness, surrealism, humanity and texture and is largely created from repurposed materials.
Nina Riley is a multi-hyphenated storyteller, organizer, and scholar shifting through Brooklyn and Philly. Her artistry is rooted in ancestral memory, black queer femme praxis, and healing modalities. She's created curriculums, performances, and social justice campaigns alongside equitable humanities based organizations. She has developed her multi-hyphenated practice in the Art and Public Policy Masters Program at New York University (May 2023) where she expanded her research on performativity, corporealities, and cultural intimacies; as a freelance director and dramaturg. She’s here by way of her Mj, late father, Eugene “genuwin” Riley of west philadelphia and Ms. Gloria Jean herself.
Paris Alexander is a Brooklyn based multidisciplinary performance artist. Their origins are with the Wooster Group Summer Institute (2014–2015) they are the curator and director of la mama’s squirts, an annual queer intergenerational performance festival taking place at La Mama in NYC every June. they are one of three producers of Sylvester: a black experimental drag show, since 2021. Blending old and new, black and white, femme and mask, smart and dumb, fiction and non. referential. Hyper visual. A retro futurist. A bridge in time. An audience testimonial: “paris speaks with the dead”
Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish is a multi-ethnic artist and poet preoccupied with ancestors, art, Environmental Justice, and the deep, urgent yearning to help Earth (re)become the paradise it could be. Michelle is in constant dialogue with the past and present, trying to wrap her mind around the vast richness of Earth, the violence of our era, and scheming to reclaim our true inheritance. From the high lands of Colorado where she has lived since the age of five, much of her art is an artifact of longing for ancestral wisdom and her many homelands including Colombia, Samarkand, and the Middle East. Her poems have resonated across Colorado and are currently featured at Meow Wolf Denver.
Madre Jaguar (she/they) is a Queer, Non-Binary Intuitive Artist, Birth Doula, Oracle and Curandera of Mayan, Pipil, Nahual and Garifuna descent. Born in Los Angeles, CA to Salvadoran immigrants and raised in Mexico Madre Jaguar has always walked between the worlds. Their practice is rooted in Nature and takes inspiration from their ancestral heritage and indigenous traditions of Mexico and Central America.
Lydia Dean Pilcher is an artist, filmmaker, and two time Emmy winning and Oscar nominated producer. She is founder of the New York based production company Cine Mosaic, working in the international landscape of cinema and multicultural storytelling. Before transitioning to writing and directing, she produced over 40 feature films and series working with auteur directors including Mira Nair, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Wes Anderson, Barry Levinson, Ritesh Batra, George C. Wolfe, and Kathryn Bigelow. Her director credits include the WWII female spy thriller, A Call to Spy (IFC Films), and the climate narratives Radium Girls (Amazon) and Homing Instinct, a science fiction multi-screen film installation (based on a story from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories form Social Justice Movements). A long time cultural strategist and climate leader, Pilcher works with the UN initiative Entertainment and Culture for Climate Action, and is involved in leading efforts to promote climate storytelling on screens and new media. Pilcher is a Professor of Climate and Storytelling Arts at the Columbia Climate School.
Eva Arroyo is an ecologist and zine maker who bridges gaps between scientific observation and raw emotion. Arroyo's work began as a response to scientific data, evolving into a practice that facilitates collective processing and action. Through the medium of art books, Arroyo explores themes of memory, memorial, and nostalgia - emotions central to her experience of loss in the climate crisis. Collaboration is crucial in her practice. Arroyo's zines blur the lines between art, poetry, and emotional archive. Materials play a crucial role, with handmade papers and collage elements creating tactile experiences that complement the emotional content. Arroyo explores the gaps between what we feel and how we express those feelings, creating an intimate but playful sanctuary for overwhelming emotions.
Benjamin Von Wong is a hidden gem in the climate movement, seamlessly blending artistry with catalytic action and collaboration. Von Wong's impact isn't confined to galleries or online platforms; his work serves as foundational material in art classrooms across the globe, inspiring the next generation of climate advocates. His installations and photographs—such as the 4-story tall Giant Plastic Tap showcased at the United Nations Headquarters, the Perpetual Plastic Machine commissioned by Greenpeace, and the Guinness-recognized Strawpocalypse crafted from 168,000 plastic straws—have captivated millions, becoming cornerstones in conversations that prompt nonprofits, corporations, and governments to "Turn Off The Plastic Tap." His artistry transcends mere visual appeal, underlining the essential role of art in climate discourse. Beyond drawing attention, Von Wong actively raises significant funds for frontline communities, often employing local talent and channeling resources where they matter most.
Christy Rupp is a conceptual artist and citizen scientist, who's work is informed by the study of animal behavior and habitat. Since the late 70’s Rupp has collected and worked with discarded material to consider its intervention and importance in the food web. Growing up in the Great Lakes rustbelt of the ’50s and ’60s, she was aware at an early age how the language we use to describe the environment establishes our place in the natural world. Rupp highlights that our perceptions are as much framed by stories of waste as they are of wonder. Upon moving to NYC in the late ’70s, like many artists, Rupp was fortunate to be a participant in the petri dish of economic decline and urban ecology, and for the past four plus decades a focus on Discard Studies has mobilized her sculpture practice. Rupp has come to believe that although the landscape of ecocide is a sad place, it is also a place of rebirth.
Nicki Koning (they/them) is a fiber artist working with themes of climate resilience, grief and hope originally from Missoula, Montana, based in New York. They work at the intersection of printmaking and sculpture through recycling paper, envisioning a future where excess paper and packaging are a remnant of a time of unchecked production. Drawing on the bodily associations of paper pulp, they make compostable art that can degrade, rot, and interact less harmfully with the environment and viewers. They are also interested in spirituality, mental health, and nature.
Dejah Gomez is an inimitable talent, accomplished and seasoned vocalist with a solid history of achievement in music entertainment. Dejah is committed to building you up, enhancing the quality of your life, and promoting a heightened state of awareness for greater clarity, intention, and purpose through music medicine and spiritual counseling.