Previous Communitas Speakers

Alexa Hampton

April 16, 2026

Since taking the reins as owner and president of her father’s iconic firm, Mark Hampton, in 1998, Alexa Hampton has advanced its legacy of elegant, practical, and classically based interiors for modern living. Her global project portfolio ranges from New York City to Hangzhou, China, encompassing luxury urban apartments, expansive town and country residences, private airplanes, and yachts. Translating classical principles into functional domestic landscapes, Hampton is regularly featured on Architectural Digest’s AD100, House Beautiful’s Top Designer list, and Elle Décor’s A-List. She was inducted into the AD100 Hall of Fame after 20 years of continuous recognition. An honors graduate of Brown University, she pursued graduate studies at NYU's The Institute of Fine Arts and holds honorary doctorates from Moore College of Art & Design and the New York School of Interior Design. Her accolades also include the International Furnishing and Design Association's Circle of Excellence Award, the LCDQ Living Legend Award, and the Connecticut Cottages & Gardens Innovator Award.

Dr. Sadé Ayorinde & Chadric Devin

April 2, 2026

Dr. Sadé Ayorinde serves as a Curator at the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina. She brings a rigorous academic background to her curatorial practice, having received her PhD in the History of Art & Visual Studies from Cornell University. Additionally, Dr. Ayorinde holds a MA in Art History from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. 

Chadric Devin serves as the Director of Learning and Engagement at the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina. He holds a MFA in Photography, which he earned from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.  

Gregg Deal (Partnership with NEHMA)

March 26, 2026

Gregg Deal is a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and self-described "disruptor". His artistic work is deeply informed by his Native identity (Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe) and involves exhaustive critiques of American society, politics, popular culture, and history. Deal challenges viewers to confront these issues in both past and present contexts through his paintings, murals, performance work, filmmaking, and spoken word. In a 2018 TEDx Talk, Deal described his work as aiming to honor Indigenous experiences, challenge stereotypes, and push for accurate representations of Indigenous people in art. These intentional "disruptions" of stereotypes and ahistorical representations define his practice. Deal has exhibited his work locally, nationally, and internationally at notable institutions such as the Denver Art Museum, RedLine Gallery, and The Smithsonian Institution. 

Kevin Snipes

February 26, 2026

Kevin Snipes is a visual artist whose work primarily features an interplay of narrative drawings and hand-built porcelain constructions. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Snipes holds a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and a MFA from the University of Florida in Gainesville. Alongside his studio practice, he has taught numerous workshops and delivered lectures on topics including creativity, art, and the construct of otherness. Snipes’s work reflects his deep interest in understanding human behavior through psychological attributes like attraction and repulsion, internal versus external identity, and the relationship between the self and the other. Ultimately, his art embodies his role as a storyteller, as he continually seeks to draw audiences into meaningful conversations through his visual works.  

Issac Avila Vazquez

November 20, 2025

Isaac Vazquez Avila is a painter and sculptor currently residing in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Avila earned his BA in Latino/a Studies from San Francisco State University and received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016. Alongside his studio practice, Avila operates Avila Mio Studio, a business dedicated to designing murals, producing hand-painted signs, and creating custom art installations for both public and commercial clients. His artistic work has been exhibited at prominent venues, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Additional exhibitions of his work have been hosted at Guerrero Gallery and Right Window in San Francisco, Tlaloc Studios in Los Angeles, and pt.2 Gallery in Oakland.  

Joseph Velasquez

November 13, 2025

Joseph Velasquez is a printmaker and Latino Veteran of the US Armed Forces whose work utilizes social issues and provocative symbols to create compelling, unique narratives. The diverse geographic locations of California, Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida, where he Velasquez lived, have profoundly shaped his experiences and expression. The resulting work invites viewers to share his perspective on social activism and community engagement issues. A deep passion for printmaking and the multiple process has driven this work into various conceptual research areas. Viewing printmaking as both a form of activism and an educational tool for classrooms and the public, Velasquez draws continuous inspiration from the fragmented combinations of his life experiences. Furthermore, teaching, community engagement, and the ability to share techniques and their histories serve as major influences, continuously fueling his practice and visual narratives.

Tyrrell Tapaha (Partnership with NEHMA)

October 23, 2025

Tyrrell Tapaha is a Diné weaver and fiber artist whose practice encompasses the intergenerational pastoral lifestyle passed down through their grandfather, great-grandmother, and other relatives. Tapaha creates woven textiles and felted objects designed for both aesthetic and utilitarian purposes. These textiles are crafted using raw natural fibers predominantly grown on the Navajo Nation and are hand-dyed with local flora native to the Four Corners Region. Intimately interwoven with feelings, memories, and experiences, Tapaha’s weavings are deeply tied to a lived life. Tapaha has apprenticed under Master Weaver Roy Kady and also works as a sheep herder in the Four Corners region of the Navajo Nation. Their work was recently featured at the Museum of Contemporary Arts Flagstaff (MOCAF) and in Shaun Price's film, "Weaving the Future". Additionally, Tapaha has conducted archival and curatorial work at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles.  

Kristen Laciste

October 2, 2025

Dr. Kristen Laciste is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Professions at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) SUNY in New York. She holds a MA and PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Laciste specializes in art and visual culture from Africa, she teaches courses focused on African art history. Her research and writing interests center on African fashion subcultures, specifically The Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons (La SAPE) based in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as Afrofuturism. Prior to her current faculty role at FIT, Dr. Laciste served as the 2023 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Smarthistory: The Center for Public Art History. During her fellowship, she contributed various scholarly essays to the arts of Africa section.  

Tetsuo Kusama

March 20, 2025

Vance Byrd

March 6, 2025

Sage Perrott

Februrary 20, 2025

Renee Cox

February 6, 2025

David Benjamin Sherry

November 14, 2024

David Benjamin Sherry (b. 1981) is an artist working to challenge and reinvigorate the American Western landscape tradition by examining our complex interconnection with the natural world, with an emphasis on queer identity, color and magic. Sherry’s work aims to celebrate the beauty of the American landscape and engage with the fraught history of the West, with its glorified legend of freedom fabricated from stolen lands, which continue to be threatened today. Through the media of analog film photography and painting, his vibrant, large scale and often monochrome works present a new perspective on the subject. Sherry states that “color is a conduit for me to convey and promote an emotional resonance for the landscape, while weaving in my sense of otherness as a queer person, and to symbolically represent those who have been inaccurately left out of the American West’s mythical narrative of rugged (straight, white, male) individualism.”

Sherry was born in Stony Brook, NY and lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He received his BFA in Photography from RISD in 2003 and his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2007 where he was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize. In 2010 he received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant. A multi-part installation of his work was exhibited in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1, New York. Sherry taught Western Landscape and Large Format photography as a distinguished faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018. In the fall of 2020, he joined the Yale MFA Photography program as a Visiting Critic and in 2023 he taught the Graduate Seminar in Photography at UNM Albuquerque.

His work has been exhibited in numerous solo presentations and also included in many group presentations including: “Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene” Nasher Museum of Art, Durham North Carolina (2024) “More Than: Expanding Identities of Artists from the American West” Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona (2022), “Ecstatic Land”, Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas (2022), “Ansel Adams In Our Time”, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas (2021), ”Color Fields” MassArt Museum (2015), ”What is a Photograph?”, ICP International Center for Photography, New York (2014), “Western Romance” Fotofocus Biennial, Cincinnati, Ohio (2014), ”Lost Line”, LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013), ”Out of Focus” at Saatchi Gallery, London (2012), “The Anxiety of Photography” Aspen Art Museum (2011).

Sherry's work is in permanent collections at The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus, OH, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, The RISD Museum, Providence, RI, The Saatchi Collection, London, UK, The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, FL.

Janina Myronova

October 10, 2024

Janina Myronova (Poland/Ukraine) is a ceramic sculptor who creates narrative through figurative forms and composed backdrops. Utilizing a specific and distorted representation of the body, each composition shows a different personality and personal story to collectively reference a graphic novel and arcing story. Imparting her own emotion through linework, Myronova’s works are strategically charged with color to saturate and amplify their individual stories.

Born and raised in the Ukraine and living now in Poland, Myronova has been enjoying the artist-in-residence life since completing her PhD studies in 2019. Her self-described “chubby, anatomically misshapen” forms have been handbuilt in Taiwan, South Korea, Denmark, France, Turkey, China, and Poland, with each culture making a mark on Myronova and the stories she wants to tell.

Janina Myronova received her MFA at the Lviv National Academy of Fine Arts (Lviv, Ukraine) in 2012, an MFA at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Wroclaw, Poland) in 2013, and her PhD at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Wroclaw, Poland) in 2019. Continually developing her work and practice, she has attended numerous residencies including opportunities at Northern Clay Center (Minneapolis, USA); Archie Bray Foundation (Helena, USA); New Taipei Yingge Ceramics Musesm (New Taipei, Taiwan); Clayarch Gimhae Musem (Gimhae-si, Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea); Lefebvre and Fils (Paris, France); International Ceramic Research Center (Guldagergaard, Denmark); International Ceramics Studio (Kecskemet, Hungary).

Nick Galanin

September 26, 2024

Nicholas Galanin’s work is rooted in his perspective as an Indigenous man connected to the land and culture he belongs to. His work is embedded with incisive observation and critical thinking to advocate social and environmental justice. Galanin’s work expands and refocuses the intersections of culture, centering Indigeneity through concept, form, image, and sound.

His works are vessels for knowledge, culture and technology – inherently political, generous, unflinching, insistent and poetic.

Deftly engaging with past, present and future, Galanin celebrates the beauty, knowledge and resilience of Indigenous people. His work counters assimilation; insisting on differences as strengths. Rejecting binaries and categorization, Galanin works to envision, build and support Indigenous sovereignty.

Over the past two decades his work has ranged across media, materials and processes; in which Galanin has splintered tourist industry replica carvings into pieces, the rearranged pieces evidence the damage of commodification to culture through photos, objects, and video. His practice includes customary cultural objects, petroglyphs in sidewalks and coastal rock, masks cut from anthropological texts, and a taxidermied polar bear melting into a pool of it’s own fur.

In 2020 Galanin excavated the shape of the shadow of the Capt. James Cooke statue in Hyde Park for the Biennale of Sydney, examining the effects of colonization on land, critiquing anthropological bias, and ultimately suggesting the burial of the statue and others like it. In 2021 he created a replica of the Hollywood sign for the Desert X Biennial in Palm Springs CA, which reads INDIAN LAND, directly advocating for and supporting the Land back and real rent initiatives. Galanin holds a BFA from London Guildhall University in Jewellery Design and an MFA in Indigenous Visual Arts from Massey University in New Zealand, prior to which he apprenticed with master carvers and jewelers in his community; he is represented by Peter Blum Gallery in New York, his music is released by Sub Pop Records in Seattle. Galanin lives and works with his family on Lingít Aani, Sitka, Alaska.

Reno Leplat-Torti

September 5, 2024

Reno Leplat-Torti, born in Marseille, France, in 1984, is a silkscreen printer, graphic designer, comic strip author, documentary filmmaker and collector. After training in graphic design, he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, where he founded the independent publishing house Nunu. At the same time, fifteen years ago, he discovered the art of paños while surfing the Internet in search of small objects made in closed environments. Struck by the power of the subject and the form, he contacted the families of American prisoners, then the prisoners by snail mail, and today has a collection of over 800 handkerchiefs exhibited in numerous galleries and museums. After founding his own gallery in the south of France, he is now curator of a museum with moving walls.

Evangeline Griego

April 11, 2024

Evangeline Griego is an award-winning film director and producer. 

In documentary filmmaking, Griego’s credits include Calavera Highway, The New Americans, and My Journey Home for PBS. She has earned recognition for Paño Arte: Images From Inside, Border Visions/Visiones Fronterizos, and the Spirit Award nominated, Sir! No Sir!

Griego’s career also includes work with major production companies that include Netflix, Metro Golden- Mayer, Morgan Greek, and Walt Disney on films like Chevolution, Show of Force, Night Breed, Naked Lunch and Pocahontas. She worked on music videos for songs from the album Straight Outta Compton by hip-hop pioneers N.W.A. 

Whether collaborative or independent, Griego’s filmmaking sensibilities lie in activism and advocacy. Her company, About Time Productions, is currently developing Nuestra Historia/Our Story, a feature documentary about the history of New Mexico as told through the matriarchal perspective.  Griego’s films help return agency to marginalized and disenfranchised folk. 

Evangeline Griego is a Sundance Producers Institute alumnus, an international filmmaker, and a proud 12th-generation New Mexican.

Keltie Ferris

April 4, 2024

Keltie Ferris is a contemporary American painter known for his brightly colored abstractions. His surfaces are often compared to computer monitors and video games, suggesting pixelated digital screens. His abstractions often have specific reference points in mind, either a place or an artist, including Piet Mondrian, Frank Stella, and Peter Halley. “Often I think of my paintings in terms of theater sets—a fake world surrounded by a larger atmospheric light world—you only glimpse the stage through this light construction that permeates and creates the physical space,” he has explained. Born in 1977 in Louisville, KY, he received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Ferris’s works are held in the collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS.

Brooks Oliver

February 29, 2024

Brooks Oliver is a ceramics instructor and Program Coordinator at the University of North Texas and a studio artist based out of Dallas, TX. He recently completed a long-term residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. He received his MFA from The Pennsylvania State University, his BFA at Southern Methodist University, and completed his post baccalaureate studies at Syracuse University. He taught in Jindezhen, China in 2016 with West Virginia University and regularly teaches workshops in and out of university settings.

Kate Bingaman-Burt

February 15, 2024

Kate Bingaman-Burt mostly draws, letters, documents, and collects, but she also does a lot of other things that involve energy, conversation, and exchange. Kate is a full-time educator and makes illustrations for all sorts of clients all around the world. Since 2008, she has worked at Portland State University and now holds the rank of Professor of Graphic Design. She opened Outlet in 2017, which hosts workshops, pop-up events and a fully operational risograph print studio. She also sits on the board of Design Portland and has been scheming with them since 2012.