Profile
Emily Fitzgerald
Emily Fitzgerald is a consultant, photographer, artist, educator, and storyteller. Her practice focuses on the intersection of the social, political, and visual in order to inspire dialogue around complex issues and reframe our ways of relating to one another. Emily facilitates conversation and creates site-specific art installations in non-traditional, public, and unexpected places. She is the co-founder of Works Progress Agency, a socially-engaged art studio and consultancy, and from 2016-2019 was a co-curator of MATTER, a storefront space dedicated to social practice exhibitions, workshops, and other happenings. She teaches art, photography, Design Thinking classes at Portland State University.
Lisa Jarrett
Art + Social Practice Program Director
Lisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is: What will set you free?
She is co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and the collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century.
Lisa exists and makes work within the African Diaspora. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-authors social practice projects and continues her 17+ year art investigation into Black hair and its care in various forms. She is Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University’s Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design where she leads the Art + Social Practice MFA program.
Contact
Russo Lee Gallery:
805 NW 21st Avenue
Portland Oregon, 97209
p: (503) 226-2754
e: gallery@russoleegallery.com
i: @lisanicolejarrett
Domenic Toliver
Domenic Toliver is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Long Beach, California. He works across film, photography, performance, and socially engaged art. His practice centers on collaboration, curiosity, and community.
His practice emerges through dialogue, where responding to what people say becomes a creative act in itself. He approaches his work as an ongoing process of questioning rather than seeking fixed answers, embracing change as both material and method He is especially interested in how storytelling can serve as a powerful tool for connection and social change. A former Division I football player, Toliver’s work also explores masculinity and its cultural traditions, examining how societal expectations shape behavior, identity, and interpersonal dynamics. He is especially interested in the public “masks” people wear, and how masculine norms influence these performances
As a facilitator, listener, and collaborator, he leads community-oriented projects that value lived experience, shared authorship, and meaningful exchange.
Gwendolyn Hoeffgen
Gwen is a visual and socially engaged artist based in Portland, Oregon. With a background in psychology and social work, she brings a trauma-informed, relational lens to her art. Her work explores the physicality of emotion, memory, and storytelling through painting, drawing, photography, sound, and conversation. Currently pursuing an MFA in Art and Social Practice at Portland State University, Gwen is especially interested in themes of shelter, safety, and domestic space—how they can hold both comfort and harm. She centers listening as a practice, creating space for others to share stories often kept silent.
Adela Cardona Cardona
Adela is a Professional in noticing the beautiful small things in life / Una Profesional en ver las maricaditas lindas de la vida. Depending on the day, she poses as an Artist, Journalist, Poet, Storyteller, Gatherer, Sustainability, and Social Impact Director. But truly, she’s a druid, a plant dressed in the body of a human.
As a Colombian-Lebanese, Autistic x ADHDer, Queer woman she is constantly inhabiting the borderlines and bringing her roots everywhere, to help other people flow with the rivers of their own stories. Her work touches on the themes of family, legacy, mental health, fashion, community storytelling, identity, creativity, and sustainability.
Some of her gifts include an insane ear for music, as well as weaving words and people together. She’s now in the process of getting her MFA in Art + Social Practice at PSU, in Portland, Oregon.
Instagram @adelafajury
website: adelafajury.com
Alison Heryer
Alison Heryer is an interdisciplinary artist whose work combines costume, installation, performance, and community engagement. As a costume designer, she is a member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829. Her design credits include productions at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 59E59 Theaters, La MaMa, The New Victory Theater, Portland Center Stage, Portland Opera, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Artists Repertory Theatre, ZACH Theatre, The Hypocrites, and Redmoon. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, World Stage Design, and The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Awards include a RACC Build Grant, Drammy Award and Austin Critics Table Award for Costume Design, and the ArtsKC Inspiration Grant. Heryer is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Texas at Austin. She is a faculty member at Portland State University where she was recently granted the Sue Horn-Caskey & Charles F. Caskey Professorship of Textile Arts & Costume Design.
Alison Heryer’s 2021/2022 projects have been generously supported by a RACC Build Grant.
Peery Sloan
Peery Sloan makes art that reimagines work as something rooted in care and connection instead of exhaustion and profit. Using materials like clay, straw, and earth, she builds hands-on spaces and invites people to join in the making. Her projects—whether a gathering spot built from the ground up or a performance about unlearning old work ideals—encourage conversation, reflection, and community. Inspired by her Scottish family history and the belief that work can be more than endless production, she aims to create places where people pause, connect with the land, and feel a renewed sense of agency and belonging.
Sarah Blesener
Sarah Blesener is an educator, socially engaged artist, and visual researcher whose long-form work explores trauma, testimony, and survivor narratives through photography, archival material, poetry, and painting.
Haruka Ostley
Haruka Ostley is a multidisciplinary artist born in Japan and raised across four continents, whose work is deeply shaped by a global perspective and a profound belief in art’s power to heal and connect. From leading youth mural projects at the Seattle Family and Justice Center to her on going role as Artist-in-Residence at the Yew Chung Education Foundation in Shanghai, Haruka uses traditional symbolism and emotional honesty to create deeply human, community-rooted art. Her recent book, You Are Not Alone, launched with a live painting performance at the Being Art Museum, reflects her journey through personal health challenges and her commitment to turning vulnerability into strength. Through projects like her ongoing dragon series, she continues to collaborate across cultures and disciplines, revealing the unique creative spirit within every person and place.