Dessane Lopez Cassell is a curator, writer, and film programmer based in New York. A former US Fulbright fellow, she has held curatorial positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Cassell has organized curatorial projects and screenings for Flaherty NYC, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), MoMA Film, and the Allen. Her writing has been published in catalogues issued by the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the BlackStar Film Festival, and elsewhere. Cassell’s research interests include experimental film, contemporary practices that draw upon the archival, and examinations of race, gender, and representation. Cassell is chair of the experimental film subcommittee for BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, and served as a 2019 Advisory Committee member at UnionDocs — a center for documentary arts in Brooklyn. She has also produced podcast and radio projects for Bay FM and Creative X (both South Africa), and Roskilde Festival (Denmark). Cassell currently serves as Editor of Reviews at Hyperallergic.

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013). She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop and Art Omi. She has been awarded a Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship as well as grants by Artadia, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Minaya’s work is in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Centro León Jiménes in the Dominican Republic.