Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins received her M.F.A. as well as her M.A. from the State University of New York at Albany in cross-disciplinary art and painting. She completed her undergraduate studio studies at the Philadelphia College of Art (University of the Arts) earning her BA in art and education from Rutgers University. She has many years of experience teaching at the State University of New York at Albany, the Atelier in Albany, the Art School of Columbia County in New York State, the Arts of Southern New Jersey, and Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA.
Lost my son through gun violence 2019. My life never been the same. I started attending a group Mother of Murder Sons weekly. I started out with mosaic & weaving on sticks. The group stopped. I started coloring books, than I decided to teach myself how to paint on canvas. I also decorated sticks, anything that I can turn into some kind of art I did. Whenever I do art I would tell my son let's do this make a beautiful piece of art and we did.
Having been heavily exposed to music and the arts since early childhood, I am so grateful for my late mother who initiated my formal musical training in elementary school with piano lessons, but drums and percussion became a greater calling. My private instructor trained me as a Jazz drummer. The school band teacher required me to study Jazz, Symphonic and Pop music. The early 80's for me were filled with the sounds of Art Blakey, Coltrane, Mingus, Run DMC, Man Parrish, Fela Akuti, Stevie Wonder, Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Terry T. and B.B.
Yasi is a Mixed Media Artist. She is a photographer, painter, illustrator, Graphic Artist, T-Shirt and Hat Designer, Landscape Architecture Student, Video Editor, Animation Creator, and Writer. She is working on book publishing this summer in addition to NFT works. She has served in the military, was raised in Germany, and graduated with a Digital Design Degree in 2016. She has sold several paintings in Virginia while working for another artist.
I have worked consistently in Painting and Photography since graduating from the Arts Department of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. I was gallery manager at the African Foundation for the Arts, Lagos, and an Art teacher at Whitesands School, Lagos. I also worked briefly as an art writer for The Comet Newspapers, Lagos, and have written essays for several publications. My work focuses on the Black experience and encounters in Other spaces- with being the black male with all the connotations attached from a troubled history, the politics of being pushed to the periphery, of migrations.
Shanna Lim is a Washington DC-based second-generation immigrant of Chinese Thai, European and Indigenous American descent. She is an interdisciplinary site-specific performance and visual artist whose work is focused on the audience's interactive plain of human connection and shaking the challenges of limited realities.
An artiste with an active ache.
Amatullah'Muhyi Ali is an uprooted artist using various mediums collectively to create genre-bending cinematic pieces that feature and highlight the African diaspora while providing a call to action for all who witness.