Amplifying Community Voices | 10/8 from 12:30-1:30PM EST
Elisa Hamilton, Emerson College faculty/Jukebox (moderator)
Elisa H. Hamilton is a socially engaged multimedia artist who creates inclusive artworks that emphasize shared spaces and the hopeful examination of our everyday places, objects, and experiences. She holds a BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and an MA in Civic Media from Emerson College. Her work has been shown locally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. She has been the recipient of four public art grants to create temporary public works in Boston's Fort Point neighborhood, and two grants from New England Foundation for the Arts. She has held artist residencies with Vermont Studio Center, Boston Center for the Arts, the Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts, and the Fenway Alliance. Projects include Sound Lab, a special community sound project that was featured in this exhibition Listen Hear: The Art of Sound at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Community Legacy, a collaboration with the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Slideshow, a celebration of 10 Boston area women and their lived experiences that took place in and around a shipping container, co-presented by HUBweek and Now+There, and Pack Our Bags, an interactive installation which was exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York, NY in collaboration with For Freedoms. Her current public art project is Jukebox, a percent-for-art public art commission for the Cambridge Foundry, Cambridge, MA.
Photo by Suzanne Merritt
Lina Giraldo, Emerson College faculty (panelist)
Lina Maria Giraldo is a Colombian-born, Boston-based, designer, interactive media artist, and storyteller with a background in Co-design, Civic Media, Data, Art and Technology. Professor Giraldo focusses on interactive storytelling for social change through a diverse body of work, ranging from digital educational tools, grassroots storytelling, public installations, and screen-based computer-generated work. Through the power of collective storytelling, her works explore
questions related to identity, including a focus on Latino and Haitian experiences in the US; the environmental impact of consumption including projects focusing on e-waste, use of plastics, and the extinction of birds. Over the last 20 years, her work has focused on creating messages that portray the fragility of our environment, community, equality, and immigration concerns. She likes to think of her work as a visual tool with an educational and civic purpose.
Her achievements include being a Journalist in Residence at Emerson College, an Artist in Residency for the City of Boston (Boston AIR 2.0), a recipient from Now + There accelerator program for creating Public Art at the City of Boston, and the receiver of the Creative City Grant.
Christopher Hope, The Loop Lab (panelist)
Chris Hope, CTS is the founder and executive director of The Loop Lab, a non-profit dedicated to empowering young adults of color to enter careers in the media arts industry in Cambridge. Hope received his B.A. from Tufts University, and a Masters at Harvard Divinity School. He now serves on the board of advisors for the George Washingon University School of Business in D.C., for the My Brother's Keeper Task Force in the Cambridge Mayors office, and on the community board of Lesley College of Art + Design. He is also an alumnus of the Creative Community Fellowship with the National Arts Strategies and has served on board of the South By Southwest festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.
Hope is also an accomplished Audio-Video professional and on-air DJ with a podcast and radio broadcast called “Hip-Hope Radio,” having interviewed guests like Dr. Cornel West.
Photo by Matt Malikowski/The Loop Lab.
Sneha Shrestha/
IMAGINE, Mittal Institute at Harvard University (panelist)
IMAGINE (aka Sneha Shrestha) is a Nepali artist who paints mindful mantras in her native language and meshes the aesthetics of Sanskrit scriptures with graffiti influences. Being the first to mesh Nepali Alphabets with American graffiti, she has shown her work in several exhibitions, commissioned works and public walls around the world from Boston to Kathmandu. Her show “Mindful Mandalas” was recently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Sneha has collaborated with international companies like Reebok, Neiman Marcus and Red Bull. Shrestha’s work is held in the private collections of Facebook, Google, Capital One and Fidelity Investments.
Sneha is also an educator and social entrepreneur. She established Nepal’s first Children’s Art Museum to provide a creative space where children and youth can develop 21st century skills through project based art experiences.
Sneha received her Master’s degree from Harvard University. During her time at Harvard, Sneha explored effective leaderships in education and the intersections of creativity, learning and technology. Besides painting larger than life murals and paintings, Sneha passionately supports Asian art by working as the Arts Program Manager at Harvard’s Mittal South Asia Institute.
Stephen Hamilton, MassArt faculty (panelist)
Stephen Hamilton is a mixed-media artist and arts educator living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. Stephen graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and design in 2009 with a focus on illustration. He also studied Yoruba weaving, dyeing, and woodcarving at the Nike Centers for art and Culture in Osogbo and Ogidi Ijumu, Nigeria. He is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Illustration Department of Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Nalany Guerrier, Emerson College student/Yai Culture (panelist)
Nalany is the founder of Youth Artists and Innovators Culture (Yai Culture). Yai Culture is a social media project that seeks to highlight young artists of Boston through a series of interviews published on their website: www.yaiculture.com. She is also a young creative who is passionate about sharing the stories of other young artists. She is a recent graduate from Boston Arts Academy and is a full-time student at Emerson College. As a young artist of Boston, she is committed to promoting and uplifting other young individuals and their artistic endeavors, through social platforms. She created Yai Culture as a media project to fulfill this goal.