In Dialog: Roya Amirsoleymani, Tanya D Garcia, & Imani J Brown

The Platforms Fund is excited to host an evening with three incredible organizers, Roya Amirsoleymani, Tanya D Garcia, and Imani Jacqueline Brown. Roya and Tanya will give brief presentations about their community focused practices in Portland, OR and Baltimore, MD and then will have a discussion around community engagement and it’s role within their practices, moderated by Antenna’s Director of Programs, Imani Jacqueline Brown.

Hosted by Pelican Bomb
1612 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd.
Thursday March 9, 7pm.

Roya Amirsoleymani (https://royamir.com/) is Director of Community Engagement at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (http://pica.org/), where she designs and oversees educational and public programs, audience engagement and diversification initiatives, and community partnerships and outreach, both year-round and for the annual Time-Based Art Festival (http://pica.org/programs/tba-festival/tba16/). She serves in a co-producing capacity on artistic projects and residencies that demand deep, expansive, or long-term participation with diverse publics and communities, including projects by choreographer/performance artist Keith Hennessy (San Francisco); musician and composer Holcombe Waller (Portland, OR); Darren O’Donnell of Mammalian Diving Reflex (Toronto, Canada); and choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen (Morocco). Roya also manages PICA’s Precipice Fund, which similar to the New Orleans own Platforms Fund, awards grants to experimental visual art collaboratives and alternative spaces as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Re-granting Program. Roya is a founding member of Arts Workers for Equity, a grassroots group seeking to advance racial equity in Portland’s arts and culture sector.

Tanya D Garcia (http://tanyadenisegarcia.com/) is an artist, curator, educator, and organizer based in Baltimore whose media include photography, video, installation. Garcia works artistically with communities to create spaces for dialogue around identity and social difference. In 2012, Garcia received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and subsequently pursued and received her MFA in Community Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. From there she became the first Creative Alliance Community Art Fellow supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. As part of her fellowship in 2015, Garcia curated eight artists and made documentary work for the traveling exhibit Despues de la Frontera | After the Border. The exhibit honors the stories of unaccompanied immigrant youth and families who fled their homes in Central America. Currently, Garcia is the co-founder and editor of HYRSTERIA Zine, a publication with artistic and literary contributions from Baltimore with a focus on social difference. She is an instructor for Wide Angle Youth Media and adjunct at Maryland Institute College of Art.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is a New Orleans native, activist, cultural organizer, Co-Founding Cultural Activist of Blights Out, and Director of Programs at Antenna, New Orleans (http://antenna.works/). She is a member of Occupy Museums, an international artist/activist collective formed in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street to challenge and deconstruct the commodification of art and culture (http://occupymuseums.org/), which will be featured in the forthcoming 2017 Whitney Biennial. In 2014, Imani worked as Curatorial Associate and Manager of Publications for Prospect.3, New Orleans under the Artistic Direction of Franklin Sirmans. That same year, her paper “Performing Bare Life: Occupying the Liminality between Civilizations” was named best in stream at the 5th Annual Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies in Havana, Cuba. She received her BA in Visual Arts and Anthropology from Columbia University in the City of New York in 2010.