Alicia Grullón, Ebony Noelle Golden & Sonia Guiñansaca
2018 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

Propelled by an unflinching pursuit of creative emancipation, cultural wellness, and social justice, Ebony Noelle Golden, native of Houston, Texas, and currently residing in the Bronx, serves as principal engagement strategist at Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative and artistic director of Body Ecology Womanist Performance Project. As a strategist, Golden consults, co-creates, designs, implements, and evaluates impact-driven projects and initiatives that push for social transformation. As an artist-scholar, Golden stages site-specific rituals + live art productions that profoundly explore the complexities of freedom in the time of now. In 2016, she developed a seminar course, served as a lecturer of Womanist and Black Feminist performance art at The New School, and co-edited an anthology of experimental womanist writing published by Obsidian Journal of Literature and Arts.

In 2017, Golden will serve as Artist-in-Residence at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and Activist-in-Residence at the University of Oklahoma. During this time, Golden will develop 125th and Freedom, a performance art installation of ten choreopoetic rituals along 125th street between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers exploring home, migration, displacement, and the eradication of black space due to gentrification. Additionally, Golden will curate a performance panel exploring creative emancipation, one of the core aesthetic technologies guiding her current project. www.bettysdaughterarts.com

Sonia Guiñansaca is a Queer Migrant Poet , Cultural Organizer, and Activist from Harlem by way of Ecuador. Guiñansaca is a VONA/Voices alumni who has performed at El Museo Del Barrio, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, NY Poetry Festival, Galeria de La Raza, and has been featured on NBC, PBS, Latina Magazine, Pen American, and the Poetry Foundation, to name a few. She has presented keynotes, workshops, panels at universities throughout the country. She has been named as 1 of 10 Up and Coming Latinx Poets You Need to Know by Remezcla, as well as one of 13 Coolest Queers on the Internet by Teen Vogue, and recently she was announced as a 2017-2018 Artist in Residency at NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She has emerged as a national leader in the undocumented/migrant artistic and political communities. In 2007, Guiñansaca came out publicly as an undocumented immigrant. Since then she has co-founded and help build some of the largest undocumented organizations in the country, coordinating and participating in groundbreaking civil disobedience actions in the immigrant rights movement. She has also founded some of the first creative artistic projects by and for undocumented writers/artists. Currently she is working on her full length poetry manuscript on migration, queerness, and her change in immigration status from undocumented to documented. She is the Managing Director of CultureStrike. www.soniaguinansaca.com

Alicia Grullón moves between performance, video, and photography. She channels her interdisciplinary approach towards critiques of the politics of presence--an argument for the inclusion of disenfranchised communities in political and social spheres. Grullón's works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions including Franklin Furnace Archives, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC Arts | Media House, School of Visual Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery, and Performa 11. She has received grants from several institutions including the Puffin Foundation, Bronx Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York. Review's and essays regarding Alicia's work can be found in the New York Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Creative Time Reports, Art Fag City, and ArtNet News.

Grullón has participated in residencies in the United States, South Korea, and Germany, and has presented workshops as part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial with Occupy Museums, Creative Time Summit '15, and The Royal College of Art, among others. Currently, Alicia is working on a commissioned piece for the High Line and a project through the Lincoln Center Initiative with The Point CDC. She holds a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and an MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and has completed advanced graduate level coursework in art and philosophy of education at the Teacher's College at Columbia University. www.aliciagrullon.com