Presenters
Addison MacDonald
Managing Director of Performing Arts and Film, MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA
Addison MacDonald is Managing Director of Performing Arts and Film at MASS MoCA, where he leads the programming, production, budget, and operations across the museum’s indoor and outdoor venues. He programs more than 75 performances and developmental residencies each year. Additionally, Addie helps produce MASS MoCA's flagship festivals, including Wilco's Solid Sound, FreshGrass, and the Bang on a Can Summer Festival. Previous to MASS MoCA, Addie held similar positions while working at Smith College and the Directors Guild of America in New York.
Althea Erickson
Co-Director, National Arts Policy Alliance
Brooklyn, NY
Althea is Co-Director, Advocacy & Policy for the National Arts Policy Alliance, which is dedicated to building collective power among arts workers to win economic rights and security for all. She is a policy, research, and advocacy professional focused on labor and social protections for the self-employed, with over twenty-five years experience starting and leading advocacy teams in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. She previously served as Vice President of Global Advocacy & Impact at Etsy, and Advocacy Director at Freelancers Union, in addition to working as a community and campaign organizer for various grassroots advocacy organizations.
Anna Stothart
Co-Founder of Davila-Villa & Stothart
Brooklyn, NY
Anna Stothart is co-founder of DVS and an art historian specializing in contemporary art. She oversees institutional relations, market growth, sustainability, and studio management, guiding placements of significant works and long-term artist strategies. Formerly Curatorial Director at Lehmann Maupin, she also held roles at the San Antonio Museum of Art and ICA Boston. Stothart holds a master’s from Tufts University and has led seminars in New York City programs.
Bozkurt “Bozzy” Karasu
Associate Director of Programs and Production, MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA
Bozkurt “bozzy” Karasu had been in the performing arts in one way or another since 1991, starting in Istanbul where he was born and raised. He worked as Production Manager, Technical Director, Instructor, and Designer in numerous institutions, including Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, The Wooster Group, MIT Music and Theater Arts, Center for the Art of Performance UCLA, amongst other individual theater and dance companies, and festivals. He lived in Istanbul, New York, Cambridge, and Los Angeles before moving to North Adams in 2025 to join MASS MoCA as their Associate Director of Programs and Production in the museum’s Performing Arts and Film department. While not programming, producing and designing for performing arts he obsessively reads, travels, and cooks.
Dyalekt
Get Shameless, Inc.
Brooklyn, NY
Dyalekt has been an MC, theater-er, and educator (mostly all at once) for over twenty years and has been in financial education since 2014. As a co-founder and Director of Pedagogy at Pockets Change, he uses Hip Hop pedagogy to help students heal their relationship with money. He brings hip hop to places that don't know they need it but desperately do.
Evan Garza
Curator, MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA
Evan Garza is a global contemporary art scholar, queer art historian, Fulbright Scholar, and curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. They earned their MA from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute.
Fred Moten
Poet and Cultural Critic
New York City, NY
Fred Moten (2018 USA Fellow) teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. His latest book is préfume, a collaboration with Nan Collymore. He is also co-author with Stefano Harney of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and All Incomplete and with Wu Tsang of Who Touched Me? In addition, Moten frequently accompanies musicians Gerald Cleaver and Brandon López. Their latest recordings are the blacksmiths, the flowers, and revision.
Helena Huang
Co-Director, National Arts Policy Alliance
Long Island City, NY
Coming from a family of artists and human rights activists, Helena is most at home working at the intersection of culture and public policy. She is a collaborative social justice leader with more than twenty-five years of experience in philanthropy, civic engagement, narrative change, and movement building. She is dedicated to bridging the worlds of foundations and advocacy to support artists, organizers, and communities working for policy and systems change. Helena has co-launched and led several start-up initiatives, most recently serving as Project Director for the Art for Justice Fund (A4J).
Jane Yong Kim
The Atlantic
New York City, NY
Jane Yong Kim is a deputy editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees its culture coverage. She was formerly the culture editor at the Village Voice, and has also edited at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Al Jazeera America. She grew up in Los Angeles.
Jenn Kidwell
Performing Artist and Educator
Philadelphia, PA
Jenn Kidwell is a performing artist, educator, current Co-Artistic Director of Under the Radar Festival, and chaos muppet. Original projects: we come to collect: a flirtation, with capitalism (The Flea Theater/UTR Commission/Under Construction presentation, Woolly Mammoth Weissberg Commission), Those With 2 Clocks (The Wilma Theater), Underground Railroad Game (2017 Obie Award, Best New American Theatre Work). She’s also down with OPP including: Atlantic Theater Co., Nichole Canuso, Rosie Herrera, jaamil olawale kosoko, Geoff Sobelle. She thanks family, friends and these friendly strangers for supporting the work: 2015, 2021 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant, 2016 Pew Fellow, 2017 Independence Fellowship, 2020 Ruthie Award and Hodder Fund Grant, 2023 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, 2025 Helen Merrill Award.
Jenny Toomey
Founder of Quietnova
Catskill, NY
Jenny Toomey is a Mozilla Foundation Fellow and associate at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. She founded Quietnova, exploring tech, arts, and labor. At the Ford Foundation, she spent seventeen years building the Public Interest Technology field, leading the International Technology and Society and U.S. Internet Freedom teams. She founded Future of Music Coalition in 2008 and co-founded independent label Simple Machines in the 1990s. A Grammy-nominated musician with thirteen albums, she is currently writing a book and obsessing over quilts.
Jillian Steinhauer
Journalist and Critic
Brooklyn, NY
Jillian Steinhauer is a journalist and critic who writes about art and comics. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, and many other publications. Jillian has won a 2023 Rabkin Prize, a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and the 2014 Best Art Reporting award from AICA-USA. She was previously an editor at Hyperallergic, and she organizes with the National Writers Union's Freelance Solidarity Project.
Kim Córdova
Boston Art Review
Boston, MA
Kim Córdova is a Mexican American journalist and critic. She is the Arts Policy and Civic Culture Desk Editor at Boston Art Review. She is also a contributor with several publications including The New York Times, El País, and e-flux among others. Previously, she was the Mexico City contributing editor at Momus. She is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation arts writers grant and a Critical Minded fellowship.
Liz Pelly
Writer
Brooklyn, NY
Liz Pelly is a writer based in New York. Her first book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her byline has appeared at The Baffler, Guardian, Harper's, NPR, Financial Times, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, and many other outlets. She currently co-hosts Critical Listening, a podcast about music and technology.
Marjani Forté-Saunders
Choreographer/7NM
Pasadena, CA
Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a three-time Bessie Award-winning choreographer, performer, teaching artist, mother, and 2023 United States Artists Fellow. Her credits include the Metropolitan Opera’s El Niño, Chicken Soup 2025 at Danspace Project, and Dreaming Zenzile Off-Broadway. She co-founded 7NMS with Everett Saunders and is the Visioning Founder of Art x Power, a platform supporting resilient futures for Black radically experimenting artists through investment, innovation, and purpose-driven creative practice.
Mel Chin
Conceptual Artist
Burnsville, NC
The work of Mel Chin (2010 USA Fellow) employs a wide range of approaches, from unique, idiosyncratic objects to operations that require multi-disciplinary collaboration. He insists that projects in the public field are dosed with a rigorous pragmatism and an elevated poetic. His studio work is notably without a signature style, resulting in works suffused with a deeply considered restraint or excess to promote an unpredictable aesthetic.
Pamela Capalad, CFP® AFC®
Get Shameless, Inc.
Brooklyn, NY
Pamela Capalad is a Certified Financial Planner™ and Accredited Financial Counselor™ She's been in financial services since the last bad time, and we'll get through this one too. She is a co-founder at Pockets Change. Her work is centered around helping people heal their relationship with money and navigate predatory financial systems while honoring their humanity and dignity.
Susan Cross
Director of Curatorial Affairs, MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA
Susan Cross is a curator and the Director of Curatorial Affairs at MASS MoCA, where she focuses on emerging and mid-career artists working in all media. She has organized major exhibitions and commissions with a diverse range of artists, including Alex Da Corte, Sarah Crowner, Liz Deschenes, Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Spencer Finch, Liz Glynn, Katharina Grosse, Allison Janae Hamilton, Tomashi Jackson, Steffani Jemison, Eric N. Mack, Anina Major, Richard Nonas, Elle Pérez, Carrie Schneider, and Cauleen Smith, among many others.
Terence Trouillot
Writer and Editor
Brooklyn, NY
Terence Trouillot is a writer and editor based in New York City. He is a contributing editor at BOMB and has written about contemporary art and visual culture for magazines including BOMB, Momus, The Brooklyn Rail, The Village Voice, Arts.Black, Artnet News, Art in America, Artforum, art-agenda, and Eye on Design, among others. He is currently an associate editor at frieze.