Presenter Bios

• David O. Alekhuogie

  David Alekhuogie (b. 1985) received his MFA from Yale University and post-baccalaureate BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alekhuogie’s multidisciplinary art practice is centered around photography and examines the dialectical relationships between politics, race, gender, media, and power.

  He has had solo exhibitions at Skibum MacArthur (2017) and at Chicago Artists Coalition (2016.) Alekhuogie has participated in group shows at High Museum of Art (2017), Fraenkel Gallery (2015), and Regen Projects (2015.)

  His work has been published in the The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Timeout, Chicago, Vice, and the Los Angeles Times.

  Alekhuogie’s solo exhibition Gravity will be on view at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery from February 14 to April 14, 2019.

  David Alekhuogie lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

• Meiko Arquillos

  Meiko Arquillos lived in Tokyo until she was sixteen years old. While in high school, she came to the United States on her own with a secret desire to become a writer and an intention to change the world.

  During her college years, while completing a degree in sociology, she discovered photography. After several years of honing her own unique style and finding her voice in photography, she started doing editorial portraiture in San Francisco. She works mostly in advertising, shooting still lifes and people.

  Meiko’s work is known as playful, lighthearted, colorful, and graphic. She photographs everything from kid’s fashion to cosmetics, but she knows she has accomplished something when her photographs make people smile.

• G L Askew

  G L Askew – For me, being a photographer is about the ability to translate the intention behind each moment into a visual reality. I’ve always been drawn to the subtle elements of humanity. The things that make us all do what we do. The camera often grants me access to things I might never witness otherwise.”

  An Atlanta native, G L Askew, has worked with the likes of such iconic talents as Dr. Dre and John Mayer, as well as brands like Samsung and Adidas. He currently resides in Los Angeles, CA

• Michele Asselin

  Michele Asselin’s photographs explore the impact of social constructs on human experience. She draws on editorial techniques to examine how people and places come to reflect the systems of which they are a part.

  Early in her career, she worked for the Associated Press in the Middle East while living in Jerusalem. Back in the U.S., she worked as an editorial photographer, creating memorable portraits of the people of our time. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, TIME Magazine, Esquire, FORTUNE, and New York Magazine.

  Asselin has been an artist-in-residence for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and has collaborated on projects with the social organizations Street to Home in New York City and The Institute for Facial Paralysis in Los Angeles.

  In 2017 Asselin’s work was included in the Orange County Museum of Art Pacific Triennial: Building As Ever. Since then, she has completed public art commissions in Los Angeles for LA Metro and in Washington D.C. for 4th Wall’s COORDINATES project.

  A new body of Asselin’s work will be featured in a solo show at there-there in April 2019.

  Michele Asselin lives and works in Los Angeles.

• Steve Banks

• João Canziani

• Naomi Harris

  Visual artist Naomi Harris seeks out interesting cultural trends to document through her subjects. Personal projects include Haddon Hall in which she followed the last remaining elderly residents of a Miami Beach hotel; America Swings, which documented the phenomenon of the lifestyle and was published by TASCHEN; and EUSA, a reaction to the homogenization of European and American cultures through globalization, published by Kehrer Verlag.

  Her recent forays into performance art include I, Franny Anne, a 70-day canoe trip dressed in 19th century period costume and Always a Bridesmaid, a look at marriage through the eyes of a happily single woman.

• Gizelle Hernandez

  Gizelle Hernandez is a Mexican-American Artist who grew up in South El
  Monte, CA. In high school, she went nowhere without a disposable or video camera, and she could always be found working in the darkroom.

  Her first job was at a mall photo studio mostly taking photos of groups of friends and young couples posing against painted backdrops. She graduated from Art Center College of Design with a B.F.A. in Photography and Imaging.

  Gizelle is currently based in Los Angeles and is a full-time freelance photographer and director with a focus in fashion and portraiture. Her work is recognizable by the way she uses surreal lighting, set design, and vivid color.

• Janna Ireland

  Janna Ireland was born in Philadelphia, but has chosen Los Angeles as her home.

  She holds an MFA the from UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Ireland is the 2013 recipient of the Snider Prize, presented by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago.

  Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Chicago, and in group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. She has been published in Aperture, Art Papers, Vice, and the Los Angeles Times.

• Bijou Karman

  Bijou Karman is an artist and illustrator from Los Angeles. She graduated with Distinction from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.

  Selected clients include The New Yorker, Nike, Rolling Stone, Penguin Books, Rihanna, The Atlantic, and W. She published her first book, Dream, Draw, Design: My Fashion, A Sketchbook for Artists, Designers, and Fashionistas, in 2016.

  Bijou is inspired by nostalgia, strong women, plants, and a love of print and bright colors. She spends most of her time working on illustrations for editorials, books, and advertising, but also works in gouache to create paintings centered around fashion.

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  Oriana Koren

  Oriana Koren is an artist-researcher-speculatist working at the intersection of language and optical technologies.

  Their photography and writing centers the perspectives of colonized people and historically exploited communities, and, for the last decade, they have worked to dismantle revisionist histories around the cultural contributions African descendants have made in building American culture.

  Oriana is a founding member of the Authority Collective, founder and curator of the Lit List, and currently a member of the Candor Collective.

• Lisa Schulte

  Lisa Schulte, “The Neon Queen” is an American artist best known for her work in expressive neon sculpture. Schulte began bending neon in the early 1980s, creating custom pieces and providing prop rentals to the entertainment industry from her Los Angeles-based studio Nights of Neon, which houses one of the largest neon collections in the world.

  In addition to gallery and museum shows across the US throughout her career, she has recently shown at the Museum of Neon Art (2017) and the Museum of Art and History (2017.) Her recent solo show Encounters With Light was at the Riverside Art Museum (2018) and The Significance of Light (2018) was at Samuel Lynne Gallery. Lisa’s work also showed at Mash Gallery in the group exhibition Forces of Nature (2018.) Her work is included in the private collections of LeBron James, Fritz Hoelscher, and Diane von Furstenberg.