Artichoke Dance Company is a nationally recognized leader in ecoarts productions and programs. Based in Brooklyn, the Company, under the direction of Lynn Neuman, has been commissioned to create works by the National Gallery of Art, the Soraya Performing Arts Center, Texas A&M, the Waterfront Alliance and for the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial ‘Nature”. The Company hosts annual Immersive Performance Tours of Gowanus and free outdoor performances, biennially hosts Global Water Dances programming, and has engaged hundreds of hands in repurposing materials headed to landfill into costumes and installations. Artichoke Dance Company offers an EcoArts Activism training program, Artichoke Ambassadors, and a year-long fellowship program, Arts Incubator for ChangeMaking, with online and in person modules for artists of all mediums. Follow @ArtichokeDance.

Interdisciplinary artist January Yoon Cho creates work that explores the interconnection between humans and mother nature. Her practice is deeply attuned to themes of ecological interdependence and environmental consciousness. She has exhibited in the US and Europe including the Hammond Museum, Islip Art Museum, Korean Consulate General, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, Austin Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts (Tallahassee), Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, Penn State University, Centro de Cultura Contemporanea, Círculo de Bellas Artes, and Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Her ongoing photo-video project, "The Walk," explores our relationship with the Earth through walk performances and digital drawings of biological life forms, receiving grants NYSCA, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and Puffin Foundation. Reviews of her work have appeared in Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and The Dallas Morning News. Cho was a visiting artist at the Ringling College of Art, and has taught at Parsons School of Design, New School University, and Hanyang University. An alumna of RISD (BFA) and Parsons (MFA), her recent projects focus on community engagement and the collective restoration of our ecological landscapes.

Inez Devereaux is a Brazilian‑American mixed media artist, fashion designer, and founder of ScreamNY, a studio dedicated to creative reuse and sustainable textile practices. With over 35 years of experience in garment construction, upcycling, and mixed‑media processes, she creates both new clothing and visual artworks from discarded materials rescued from the waste stream. Her practice embraces a philosophy of total reuse: every scrap, thread, and fragment is saved. Even the smallest remnants—loose threads, tiny cuttings, and leftover seams—are collected in glass jars and later transformed into textured visual compositions. Larger pieces become wearable art, while micro‑scraps evolve into collages, fiber works, and sculptural studies that explore memory, migration, and environmental responsibility. Inez has been an active volunteer at Materials for the Arts (MFTA), deepening her commitment to community‑based sustainability and circularity. Working from her home studio in Sunnyside, Queens, she creates pieces that honor the histories embedded in fabric while challenging systems of overproduction and waste. Her work bridges art, craft, and climate consciousness, inviting participants and viewers to see discarded materials not as trash, but as potential.

S Emsaki is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Isfahan, Iran, currently living and working in New York City. Emsaki’s practice spans collage, printmaking, in-situ drawing, video, and archival research, examining petro-subjects, extraction, and material histories. Emsaki is a 2025-26 Studio Program Resident at Smack Mellon and the 2024–25 recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program . She is a recent alum of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and earned an MFA from Yale University and a BA from UC Berkeley. Emsaki's work has been exhibited at Microscope Gallery, Smack Mellon, Ashkal Alwan’s aashra Programming Beirut, the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Westbeth Gallery, and Gallatin Galleries (NYU), and Yale School of Architecture. She’s attended fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, Blazing Start Press at Williams College, the Fine Arts Work Center, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, the ICA, and the Paul Mellon Center in London, and is a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant in 2025.

Vannia Ibarguen was born in Lima, Peru, graduated from the University of Maryland with an MFA in Dance and Certified Movement Analyst, and currently living in Long Beach, California. She is an international performer, choreographer, dance educator, and Artistic Director of VIDA - Vannia Ibarguen Dance Arts, producing dance works that are in conversation between the classical, the indigenous, and the contemporary realms. Vannia is also Artistic Director of Global Water Dances, a biennial event where hundreds of cities around the world create outdoor dances to raise awareness about water issues in the local and global community. As a dance educator, Vannia promotes body-awareness and somatic practices within the technique, to help her students build a solid foundation to achieve longevity in their dance careers..

Traci Johnson is an emerging textile artist currently living and practicing in Brooklyn, NY. After earning a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Johnson developed a practice centered at the intersection of public space, healing, and community engagement. Their work often transforms the traditional language of sanctuary shaped by their religious upbringing into vibrant environments of queer liberation and embodied healing. Central to Johnson’s practice is a focus on construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction as symbolic pathways toward selfhood. These narrative rich textile works invite viewers into their own journeys of clarity and rebirth. Johnson’s significant recent commissions include the Safe Space Installation for MTA/Chashama at the 50th Street Subway Station. Their work has been exhibited at notable institutions including the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), Canada Gallery, and the Moore College of Art and Design. Through these immersive installations and tactile media, Johnson continues to explore how art can act as a catalyst for individual and collective sanctuary within the urban landscape.

Inclined Dance Project, led by Artistic Director Kristen Klein, is a female identifying Brooklyn based contemporary dance company that presents visually intricate landscapes propelled by human experiences. Founded in 2009, this collaborative company approaches dance-making through a “set and destroy” method, allowing the performers the opportunity to deconstruct material and incite dialogue, exploration, and personal contribution to a work. The company has performed at venues and festivals throughout the USA including BAM Fisher, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Boston University, Little Boxes San Francisco, Triskelion Arts, Dixon Place, University Settlement, the BARNES Foundation, Rhode Island Ballet, the Center for Performance Research, and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, among many others. The company has been artists in residence at Chen Dance Center, the Totts Gap Arts Institute, and Union Street Dance, and their works have been supported by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, and NYSCA.

Rejin Leys is a mixed media artist and community papermaker based in New York. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally, and is included in several public collections including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Yale University, and Rutgers University Caribbean Studies Department. Leys is a recipient of a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from Brooklyn College.

Katie Pell is a biologist/ecologist, designer, and ceramic artist based in Gowanus. She grew up by the beaches of Delaware, constantly catching horseshoe crabs, doing mini-studies in the tide pools, and fishing with her dad. This eventually led her to an academic career in fisheries research through college. Once she realized her connection to Nature and the ocean was more awe-based than academic, she turned her attention to various forms of art and design. Through her work, Katie explores the purpose of beauty in our daily lives, and questions why it is present in everything in Nature. She wrestles with various lines of tension while making work: formality vs. informality, traditional vs. contemporary, corny vs. serious. All of her pieces contain some level of humor, which she considers to be a tool for connection, learning, and it relates us all to our shared humanity. Katie's relationship with the ecology of the New York City waterways is bifold. After her freshman year of college, she lived in a hotel in Long Island City doing a toxicology study on the fish in Newtown Creek (the heavily polluted canal dividing Brooklyn and Queens). Here the sacrificial fish -- Striped Bass and Atlantic Menhaden -- were thrown in a blender to be assessed for bioaccumulated toxins. While pulling gill nets out of the murky water, she watched locals pass time fishing and enjoying spending time around the water, despite its Super Fund Site designation. The locals endeared their environment and connected to the marine life surviving in it amongst floating and submerged trash. Many years later, Katie is now a Gowanus based artist and often overlooks the canal with love and reverence for it being a local waterway and witnessing how life still thrives there, despite the centuries of abuse. She knows she's not alone in this feeling.

Rulan Tangen is a dancer, choreographer, director, dreamvisioner and creatrix whose practice has been evolving for five decades — through forms including ballet and contemporary dance, opera, circus, film, visual art, and writing, which have evolved into ecological land art ritual performance. As Founding Artistic Director of Dancing Earth, she spent over 21 years creating performance opportunities for successive generations of global Indigenous and BIPOC artists as cultural ambassadors for social and ecological change — sometimes at the cost of her own health. A cancer survivor whose body carries environmental contamination in its cellular memory, she is now at a threshold: redirecting that accumulated creative force toward multi-species regeneration, toward performance that invokes and intends healing via harmonious relations.