Melanie Crean is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher based in New York. Her teaching and artistic practice explore the relationship between speech, space, and social structures of control. She works with new forms of moving image, narrative and performance to deconstruct contested sites and oppressive architectures.

Crean is an Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design at The New School, teaching courses on emerging media, narrative, social engagement and visual culture. She previously directed the production studio at the arts non-profit Eyebeam; managed animation, motion capture and speech recognition teams at MTVDigital Television Lab; and produced documentaries in Nepal and India on the effects of women trafficking. Crean has received fellowships and commissions from A Blade of Grass, Art in General, Performa 11, Rhizome, Creative Time, Franklin Furnace and No Longer Empty.

Shaun Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist whose multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice is participatory in nature and invested in a process of embodiment, promoting the political potential of attention and discomfort as a means to disrupt meaning and shift perspective.

Leonardo is from Queens, New York City. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is a current Smack Mellon artist-in-residence, as well as a recipient of support from Creative Capital and Guggenheim Social Practice. His work has been presented in galleries and institutions, nationally and internationally, and recently featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, Recess, and VOLTA NY.

Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York and Richmond Virginia. Using video, sculpture, photography, and text, she points to the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian to speak about a violence that is largely unseen, and potentially imperceptible.  Her work has been featured at MoMA Ps1, New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem,  JTT, Rachel Uffner Gallery, and Recess Assembly, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Artist Television Access, San Francisco, CA; Birkbeck Cinema in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, London. Her writing has been published in Radical Teacher, Studio Magazine and Affidavit and she is currently working on her first book, in addition to publishing numerous artist books.  Smith has received awards from Creative Capital, Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture & Extended Media at the University of Richmond.