Abdu Mongo Ali is a musician, poet, cultural organizer and multidisciplinary artist who works with sound, video, digital language arts and performance. Ali sees their work as poetic inquiries of identity and often interrogates binary ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Ali has exhibited performances and work at MoMa PS1, the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Andy Warhol Museum, and The Kennedy Center. They have held residencies with Red Bull Music, Pioneer Works, Surf Point Foundation and was a visiting artist at the Brown Arts Institute. Ali was featured in Cultured Magazine's Young Artists 2019 list, awarded a 2023 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize and was a 2023 USA Fellow. Ali is currently a Literary Arts MFA Candidate at Brown University.

 

Falaks Vasa (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist with a set of practices that move in and out of definition, but always through their body. Their practices span video, performance, fiber art, poetry, photography, 3D animation, stand-up comedy, and more. Falaks graduated with an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University (2023), and with a BFA from SAIC (2018), and currently teaches at RISD as Lecturer and Critic.

Falaks’ lived practice currently takes the shapes of an artist, writer, and professor. As an artist, Falaks has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and ACRE, and shown their work internationally. As a poet and author of speculative fiction, her work has been published by the Unnamed Zine Project and collected by the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. As a professor, she enacts her pedagogy as creative practice, and has been awarded the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence from Brown University. Falaks is from Kolkata, India, and lives in Providence, RI, with her wife, cat, and ball python.