Week 6, Wednesday, February 9,  Lauren Alyssa Bierly  is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY with over ten years experience in contemporary art, design and fashion exhibition management. Her artwork is rooted in phenomenology and informed by ecology, language and architecture. As a synaesthete, Bierly is interested in the intersection of sensory languages—like color perception, sound recognition, and time sensing—and how these sensory vocabularies shape one’s subjective experience of identity and place. She’s exhibited in New York City, Oregon, Kolkata, India and Moscow, Russia. She was artist-in-residence at Playa Art + Science (2020); chaNorth Residency (2018); Starry Night (2017); Panoply Performance Lab (2016) and Trestle Art Space (2015). She was a member of collective Incredible Witness from 2015 – 2017, and a participant of the Universityof Sussex’s ongoing synaesthesia research since 2013. In 2021, Bierly joined Brooklyn Museum as Exhibition Project Manager following prior exhibition management roles with the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture and minor in Art History from Pennsylvania State University (2009) and Masters of Art in Modern Art, Connoisseurship, and History of the Art Market from Christie’s Education (2010).

Week 8, Wednesday, February 23: Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

“In the late 1970s I lived in Guayaquil (Ecuador), the city where my mother was born. The contrast between my memories and experiences in Ecuador with my life in the US has been central to my practice, which uses personal narratives as a gateway to explore broader questions of place, identity and nationhood.”- Karina

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky (b.Providence, RI) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice began in photography and grew into video and performance. In 2019, she received a grant from Creative Capital to produce How to build a wall and other ruins, a project that includes a series of sculptural photographs, a multi-channel video installation and live performances. She has exhibited the project in solo exhibitions at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico and Ponce + Robles Gallery in Madrid, Spain. Other important international exhibitions include her participation in Impermanence, the XIII Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) curated by Dan Cameron in 2016 and There is always a cup of sea for man to sail, the 29th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2010).