Profile

Erica Meryl Thomas is an interdisciplinary social practice artist whose projects occupy the space in-between the sometimes rigid lines that define other disciplines. She often works as an embedded artist, creating collaboratively with others to uncover layers of history in relation to the personal. The resulting projects take the form of installations, storytelling or documentary, interventions in public space, conversations, publications, and other experiential forms. In her studio practice, she is a printmaker, pigment forager, and book maker who always finds ways to fold words into her work.

Her work as an organizer grew out of her art practice. For the past 10 years, she has been digging deeper and deeper into the ways that art, education, and organizing can come together to make a better world. Her political activism, work as an educator, and work as an artist are intertwined, each informing the other.

https://www.ericamerylthomas.com/

Midori Yamanaka is a social practice artist and educator whose work bridges art, education, and cultural exchange. She holds an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a BFA in Graphic Design from Art Center College of Design. Raised in northern Japan, in the Okhotsk region closer to Russia than Tokyo—where the sea freezes in winter and the presence of Ainu and Okhotsk peoples remains part of the cultural landscape—she developed a unique awareness of cultural diversity and education. Drawing on experiences in both Japan and the United States, she creates participatory projects and academic initiatives that foster intercultural dialogue, mentorship, and socially engaged art practices. Her teaching and program leadership emphasize inclusivity, collaboration, and critical reflection within diverse communities.

https://www.midoriyamanaka.com/

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/midorisees/
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/midoriyama

M. Michelle Illuminato (she/her) creates events, public exchanges, and artworks that help to reveal the complicated and often contradictory relationship between people, their culture, and the land they live on. She works individually as well as with the collective, next question on projects that have been exhibited nationally as well as in Italy, Poland, Germany, and Serbia.

In 1982, Illuminato began working in the steel mill town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Over the next several years she invited hundreds of artists to collaborate with each other, the towns people and the place. The project received, ‘Best Event in Pennsylvania’, the key to the city for Illuminato, as well as broke ground on new ways that socially-community-driven artworks could receive art funding. After visiting Aliquippa, curator Mary Jane Jacob included her in a year-long project, ‘Points of Entry’, funded by the Three Rivers Art Festival and included Group Material, Ann Carlson, Fred Wilson, Daniel Martinez. Recent work includes: Momentary Monuments for a Wednesday Afternoon, Portland,Tripoli Street BakeYard, Neu Kirche Contemporary Art Center, Pittsburgh, and Lost & Found Factory, Pittsburgh and Denton, Texas, which received a national award from Americans for the Arts. With next question, she created, The Neighborhood Revisited, a trolley tour that used Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood tours as a way to better understand shifting city spaces.

For 2023-24, Illuminato will be the Coordinator of the Art + Social Practice Program and since 2016 has been the Head of the CORE Program at Portland State University. Deeply interested in alternative teaching practices, she received the Master Teaching Award from Foundations: Foundations: Art, Theory, and Education in 2017.

michelleilluminato.com

Namita Gupta Wiggers is an educator, writer, curator, and artist based in Portland, OR. Wiggers founded and directed the MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson College, the first and only low residency program focused on critical craft histories and theory from 2017 – 2023. She was a Paul J. Smith Fields of the Future Fellow at Bard Graduate Center, NYC in the Fall of 2023, and a Senior Fellow, Smithsonian Institution in the Spring of 2024. Her most recent publications are co-edited of the Journal of Modern Craft Special Issue on the MA in Critical Craft Studies (Vol. 17, Issue 1, 2024) and This is not a Retreat, co-edited with Ben Lignel for The MACR Papers. Wiggers serves on the Board of Trustees, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and began serving as President in the Fall of 2023. She is an editor-at-large for Crafts magazine, and on the Advisory Board, The Journal of Modern Craft.
Wiggers directs and co-founded Critical Craft Forum (since 2008), and served as the Director and Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland OR from 2004 – 2014.
An American of South Asian heritage, her work combines platform building roles with prior experiences as a museum educator, design researcher, and studio jeweler to understand craft and culture.

criticalcraftforum@gmail.com
instagram @namitapdx; @criticalcraftforum

Simeen is a social practice artist hailing from New Delhi, India. She was raised in post-liberalization India, a transformative period that reshaped the urban landscape and neighborhoods. While on one hand, this world presented a sense of freedom in the ways of being; particularly for young women, the stratification across class, caste and religion created tensions that manifested in everyday life of women in many ways. Simeen’s creative practice represents a conscientious effort to grapple with these tensions, offering personal insights that comment on the broader political context.

Her approach involves the intentional integration of everyday fragments from ordinary life. Through mediums such as installation, wall murals, and community art projects, Simeen endeavors to initiate conversations that can facilitate new possibilities of being, becoming and belonging in a time of repression. Her work intersects at both personal and political junctures; it is, at large, an attempt to represent lived experience of systemic oppression and collective healing in/of community. 

Simeen’s involvement extends to numerous community-based art projects addressing gender issues and marginalized identities in public spaces. Her works have been featured in the past two editions of the Students Biennale within the Kochi Muziris Biennale. Notably, she is currently engaged in an upcoming project, a photo essay slated for release in Spring 2024. This essay, which delves into the utilization of tarp sheds in India as an anti-authoritarian strategy, is set to be featured in a book titled ‘Beyond Molotovs—A Visual Handbook on Anti-Authoritarian Strategies’. 

Simeen currently lives in Portland and is working on a project that seeks to document safe spaces and spots of leisure for women in the city, further contributing to her commitment to social engagement through art.

Instagram: @loadingwaitt

Nina Vichayapai explores how surroundings embody humankind. Her work examines physical spaces as expressions of the many people who shape them. Through many mediums but especially hand stitched textiles she explores how belonging within the American landscape has been established by historically marginalized communities.

Her work has been shown nationally and locally with institutions such as the Wing Luke Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Bellevue Art Museum. She has been an artist in residence with Caldera, Inscape Arts and Cultural Center, Deception Pass State Park, Centrum, and more. She has also been the recipient of several public and private commissions including with Meta Arts, Homes for Good, Lake Sammamish State Park, and the Cities of Redmond and Ellensburg.

Born in Bangkok, Thailand, she graduated from the California College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2017. Nina currently lives in the Pacific Northwest and when she is not making art she can be found turning roadside fruit into jam, taking pictures of crows, or trail running in the rain.

Website: www.nvichayapai.com
Instagram: @nvichayapai

Clara Harlow (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and preschool teacher from Omaha, Nebraska. Her work weaves together community, personal history, and play through experiential events and interactive objects. You can most likely find her at the local swimming pool or making pigs in a blanket for her next themed party. 

Recent collaborations include Crown Heights Mutual Aid, Carrig Montessori School, Lolo NYC, Four-D, and the Fabric Workshop Museum Shop. Clara currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Check out her work at www.claraharlow.com and @all_corndogs_go_to_heaven. 

Lou Blumberg (they/them) is an artist, educator, and facilitator living in New Orleans. Their work deals with questions of personal and community safety, vulnerability and intimacy, and how to live a good life. Hire them to mediate your next conflict by emailing them at loub@pdx.edu.

Sarah Ngoc Luu (She/They) is an interdisciplinary artist and barista. She is first generation Asian-American from San Jose, California and is currently living in Portland, Oregon. She holds a BA in Studio Art with a concentration in Preparation in Teaching from San Jose State University and is looking forward to her next several years in the MFA Art and Social Practice program. 

During her undergraduate studies, she was heavily involved with her college radio station, 90.5 KSJS. Working with figures in her local music scene, Sarah collaborated with her peers and colleagues to host shows throughout the California Bay Area. Throughout her time with the station, she has also led multiple workshops introducing mediums of collage, printmaking and zine making for others within her radio community.

Sarah has created multiple zines, including 2GÜD and Sound Shock for 90.5 KSJS. Aside from specializing in D.I.Y publications, her work explores themes of Asian American identity, diaspora, intergenerational trauma and family lineage through ceramics, printmaking, and photography. She describes herself as “interdisciplinary in life”, having backgrounds in not only art but also radio broadcasting, community service, baking, music, dance and coffee. 

Laura Glazer (she/her) is an artist whose work is socially-engaged and depends on the participation of other people, sometimes a close friend, and other times, complete strangers. Her background in photography and design inform her social practice, and her projects appear as books, workshops, radio shows, zines, festivals, exhibitions, installations, posters, signs, postal correspondence, videos, and sculpture.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published in The New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC. Her book of photographs and interviews, I Want Everyone to Know: The Black History Month Doors at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, was published in collaboration with the Dr Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art in April 2022. She was a 2022–2023 Artist Fellow at the New York Public Library Picture Collection.

She holds an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice: Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. Born in northern Virginia, she was a longtime resident of upstate New York and is now based in Portland, Oregon.

lauraglazer.com  @helloprettycity