Samuelle Green is from a small rural town called Honesdale, PA. The artist’s early years were surrounded not only by nature, but also by a family of artisans and craftspeople that had a lasting impact on her current practices. She apprenticed under artists in her community before going on to study at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Parsons School of Design in New York, earning a BFA. Green continued to live in Brooklyn and work there in the arts for nearly 20 years. Her time in NYC was spent as a freelance artist working on her personal work as well as fabricating work for other artists and museums, as well as working in set design, mural and sign painting, and creating window displays. Green is now based in her hometown in Pennsylvania, where she is continuing to show her work both nationally and internationally. Her large-scale, immersive installations have been shown in museums in China, Venice, Italy, Estonia, and France, as well as in many varied locations across the US. Her work has been included in publications such as Hyperallergic, Colossal, Design Boom, and The Gothamist, as well as appearing in television series on HBO and AMC+. Samuelle has been the recipient of grants and awards, including those from The Foundation for Contemporary Art,  The F. Lammot Belin Award, and was the winner of the Arte Laguna Prize in Venice, Italy.

‍Amir Khadar is a Sierra Leonean-American multidisciplinary artist from Minneapolis, MN. Their work builds personal cosmologies through drawing, textiles, beadwork, digital media, and design, blending mythology, memory, dreams, and speculative symbolism to illuminate the unseen and visceral forces of everyday life. Rooted in Black diasporic and queer perspectives, Khadar engages art as a liberatory force, collaborating with nonprofits, grassroots organizations, and communities to explore ancestry, justice, and collective imagination. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Oakland Museum of California, Anacostia Community Museum, Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, and the London School of Economics.

Vanessa Villarreal is a mixed-media assemblage artist based in Washington, DC, using denim as her principal medium. Since pivoting from her studies in healthcare to pursue art in 2022, she has exhibited her work in several galleries and exhibitions across the DMV and Baltimore. Villarreal has nurtured her practice through residencies, including the Wassaic Project, has collaborated with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Phillips Collection, and is simultaneously operating a sustainable wearable art business called Lion’s Den Creative LLC. Villarreal’s current exploration of denim is reclaiming the material as a creative tool to narrate and honor Black life, including her own. While denim is integral to her practice, she is committed to pushing her boundaries in materiality beyond denim, creating multidimensional pieces. Villarreal’s work reflects and is inspired by her cultural backgrounds as a Black and Panamanian-American, her community, and the shared experiences of Black people across the diaspora.

Margaret Jacobs is an artist, educator, and independent curator. A metalsmith who creates fabricated steel sculpture and powder-coated, one-of-a-kind jewelry, her work reflects a kinship to the natural world, referencing cultural, historical, and personal narratives while exploring the lines of contemporary craft and fine art objects.

Her life has been greatly influenced by rural living, and her interest in object making stems from her youth in Northern New York and a constant respect for creating, repairing, refinishing, and re-making objects that were vital to survival. Her artistic process involves steel fabrication techniques that intermingle traditional blacksmithing tools and techniques--primarily forging and hot forming with a forge--with more present-day metalworking fabrication processes. This is a unique process that makes the steel feel alive and organic. Jacobs is a 2025 ARTS/INDUSTRY John Michael Kohler Arts Center Resident and Harpo Grant Foundation Awardee; a 2024 Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort, NYS Rural and Traditional Fellowship, and Smithsonian Native Arts Fellowship recipient; a 2023 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Research Fellow and a 2019 recipient of the Artist in Business Leadership Award through the First Peoples Fund. She has participated in several artist residencies, including at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM, and Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, MN. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Boise Art Museum in Idaho; Burlington City Arts in Vermont, and Ma’s House in Southampton, NY.