The Bronx Museum

Heather Bhandari (she/her) is the Program Director at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is known for her work as a curator, writer, educator, and artist advocate.

Most recently, she co-founded CreativeStudy, a business and financial health education platform for creatives. She is a trustee of Art Omi, a visiting critic at RISD, and an adjunct lecturer at Brown University. The 2nd edition of her book, ART/WORK, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2017 and updates will appear in its 26th printing this winter.

From 2000 to 2016 Heather was a director of Mixed Greens gallery where she curated over 100 exhibitions while managing two-dozen emerging to mid-career artists. Immediately following, she was the Director of Exhibitions at the nonprofit gallery Smack Mellon.

Heather received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Pennsylvania State University. Her career began at galleries Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin.

Born in the United Kingdom, Felicity Hogan was formerly trained as an artist. Since residing in the United States, she expanded her skills to arts administration and curating with over 25 years of experience in commercial, alternative, and non-profit spaces.

In her current role, Director of NYFA Learning at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Ms. Hogan oversees free or low-cost professional development offerings for artists, creatives, and arts cultural workers in all disciplines, locally, nationally, and internationally. Programs focus on fostering community support for immigrant artists, community-based organizations, and leadership training for arts leaders of color. She is co-editor for NYFA’s publication The Profitable Artist, now in its 2nd Edition and an outgrowth of the Artist as Entrepreneur.

Melissa Levin is a values-driven arts administrator and artist-centered curator with more than 15 years of experience in the field. Levin is currently the inaugural New York City-based Program Officer with Jerome Foundation, supporting early career artists in MN & NYC.

Previously, she worked at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) for more than 12 years, where—as Vice President of Cultural Programs—her role encompassed wide-ranging institutional and artistic leadership, including overseeing the organization’s major artist-centered and public-facing initiatives: the River To River Festival, the Arts Center at Governors Island, and LMCC’s exhibitions and artist residency programs.

Since 2016, with collaborator Alex Fialho, Levin has stewarded the legacy of artist Michael Richards.

Saya Woolfalk (Japan, 1979) is a New York-based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions.  With the multi-year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who can alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women’s lives and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.