Our Team

Bianca Mońa
Black Utopian Fellowship Consultant

Bianca Mońa is a lover of the arts.  As an artist, curator, educator, and advocate, she has initiated a number of projects at institutions such as Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY) and The John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, DC), and Market Photo Workshop (Johannesburg, SA).  

All of her artistic endeavors center on a greater understanding of contemporary Africa and her Diaspora.  In addition, she is particularly keen on investigative projects that tackle the living histories of regular citizens who negotiate grand topics.  As an oral historian centered sound artist she had received commissions from Initiatives of Change USA, and Culture Push.

C. (Constantine Jones) Administrative Director

C. (Constantine Jones) is an interdisciplinary Greek-American thingmaker raised in Tennessee and housed in Brooklyn. Their practice is collaborative in nature and rooted at the intersections of HIV/AIDS futurity / archival as cultural care-work / poetry as catalyst for social instigation. They are the author of a novel, IN STILL ROOMS (Operating System 2020) and a collaborative chapbook with Portuguese visual artist Vicente Sampaio, BALEEN: A POEM IN TWELVE DAYS (Ursus Americanus 2022). They served as Director of the Visual AIDS Oral History Project, THE BODY AS AN ARCHIVE, from 2021 to 2024, and are an active member of the collective, What Would An HIV Doula Do? They are an independent student of world epic poetry and are currently at work on their own epic. They live at the corner of stories and noise.

Clarinda Mac Low
Executive Director, Co-Founder

Clarinda Mac Low, co-Founder and Executive Director of Culture Push, oversees all operations and programs of the organization. Clarinda has been creating cross-disciplinary artworks using dance, performance, video, installation and other disciplines for over 25 years, and she initiated Culture Push as a continuation of her experimental performance and socially engaged art practice. Her work has been produced nationally and internationally, and her practice is deeply embedded in her hometown of New York City. Clarinda facilitates the Fellows’ strategic planning and creative development and leads the development of the vision and foundational philosophies of the Fellowship program as it matures and adapts to changing social and political climates. www.clarindamaclow.com

Moira Williams
Access Doula & Disability Culture Activist

moira (they/them), is a disabled Indigenous artist, cross-disability* cultural activist and access doula; weaving disability justice together with crip** celebratory resistance*** and environmental justice. moira believes in access as art and “access intimacy”**** as an attitude beyond the Americans with Disabilities Act. Their often co-creative work leads with disability, asserting that deep-rooted cultural changes must be made in the arts and environmental justice to become accessible. One part of affecting change is by placing disabled artists and activists in positions of influence to shape change from within.

moira’s on-going work with water focuses on “access intimacy” and water intimacy as ways forward to accessible NYC waterfronts.In 2021, as part of Works On Water’s Tending the Edge, moira engaged NYC’s disability communities with NYC’s Department of City Planning newest Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, which led to extended comment deadlines to support comments from NYC’s disability communities, and an online and in-person Disability Cabaret on an accessible boat. Learn More.

Surabhi Naik Digital Media Manager

Sur is a transmedia artist and designer who works with web-based interactive media, digital image-making, drawing, video, augmented reality and data/documentation. Her practice is rooted in storytelling, world building and surrealist modes of thinking, feeling and belonging.

Sur received her B.Arch degree from KLS Gogte Institute of Technology, India where she trained as an architect and her MA in Media Studies from The New School in New York City. Her work has been presented as part of Verizon's 5G EdTech Accelerator 2019 (Parsons) and exhibited at eminent forums such as National Awards for Excellence in Architecture and Charles Correa Gold Medal.

Denae Howard Director of the Black Utopian Fellowship

Denáe Howard aka Artsch00lscammer is a Brooklyn-based Conceptual artist, educator, curator and advisor. At the moment they are cultivating their collaborative practice by spearheading the Black Utopian Fellowship in conjunction with their cooperative #Dayonesart. Which focus is working specifically with Black, Indigenous and PanAfrican creatives investing in making creating space for their necessary conversion of narratives.

Denáe’s practice stems from a need for reflection around the systems that govern our natural existence presently. As a visual artist and contributor to culture Denáe feels it is imperative to create art that generates cognitive, emotional and social pedagogy. At times their work is a re-appropriation of social archetypes and stereotypes to reclaim and transcend positive meaning for subjugated black peoples. Their focus is imagining the limitless opportunities of Black Existence and create a Divergent from the Magnetism of Whiteness by illuminating the nature of the Hungry Ghost. You can find their work here.

Sneha Ganguly Accounts Manager

Sneha is an interdisciplinary artist with over a decade of experience running Rajas Art Services, providing art handling, collections management, project management and bookkeeping services to arts institutions and non-profits in the NYC metro area.  She holds a double major in Art History and Economics from Rutgers University, New Brunswick.  When she is not handling art, you can find her in the urban wilds of NYC, foraying for wild mushrooms with a special interest in bio-materials and pigments! 

learn more: www.kalimushrooms.com

previous staff

Shawn Escarciga (9/2018-3/2020)

Pelenakeke Brown (5/2018-12/2019)

Linnea Ryshke (2017-2018)

Madelyn Ringold-Brown (2016-2018)

Board:

Chloë Bass
Artist, Culture Push Fellow 2013 and Faculty at Queens College-CUNY Social Practice Program
Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: most recently, the 2022 – 2024 Kupferberg Arts Incubator fellowship, a 2022 – 2023 Silver Art Project residency, the 2022 Future Imagination Fund Fellowship at NYU Tisch College of the Arts, a 2020 – 2022 Faculty Fellowship for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), and a 2020 – 2022 Lucas Art Fellowship at Montalvo Art Center. Previous honors include a grant from Art Matters, a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at the Skirball Cultural Center, California African-American Museum / Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, Time Magazine, Forbes, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her monograph was published by The Operating System in December 2018; her chapbook, #sky #nofilter, was published in November 2020 by DoubleCross Press. Her short-form writing has been published in Paletten, Hyperallergic, Arts.Black, and the Walker Reader. She is the co-director of Social Practice CUNY with Gregory Sholette, with whom she published the book Art and Social Action in 2018. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates.
www.chloebass.com

Nancy Nowacek
Artist, educator and Culture Push Fellow 2012
Nancy Nowacek makes art engaged with power and politics of the body in late-capital, post-industrial culture. Embodying latent or invisible systems—bureaucracy, infrastructure, computer coding—she intervenes into the designed environment with sculpture, performance and installations that challenge and shift assumptions of the social and body schema. Often situated between speculation and reality, Nowacek’s work brings conceptual environments and uses of the body into concrete, tactile sensory experience through the transformation of found objects and readymades. Her projects are often socially-engaged and process-driven, involving the collaboration of dozens to hundreds of participants in their realization. Nowacek was an honorary Culture Push fellow in 2013. Her work has also been supported by Eyebeam, the Brooklyn Arts Council, Recess, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Zero1 San Jose, and the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. She has exhibited and presented works in New York, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Canada, South America and Europe. www.nancynowacek.com

Carolyn Hall is a freelance dancer originally from Los Angeles. She has performed with numerous choreographers/directors and was awarded a "Bessie" for performance in 2002. She has been a company member of the "Bessie" Award winning Then She Fell with Third Rail Projects for over three years and is currently working with Lionel Popkin, Rebecca Davis, Clarinda Mac Low, and Shannon Hummel/CORA Dance. She has also performed in the works of Sally Silvers, Carrie Ahern, Heather Kravas, Jordan Fuchs, Amanda Loulaki, Allyson Green, Ori Flomin, Jimena Paz, Abigail Levine, Sarah Maxfield, Ralf Jaroschinski, Sam Kim, Nina Winthrop, Karl Anderson, and Helena Franzen. Additionally, Carolyn is a marine ecologist working as a research assistant with author Paul Greenberg and is an instructor with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. To combine her two interests, she is a board member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Arts, Nature and Dance (iLAND).

Haiba Hamilton is and artist and curator, and the accounting manager for both a New York City non-profit and a Chicago-based design software educational company.

Laura Nova is an artist, educator, and activator who lives and works on New York’s Lower East Side, connecting generations and diverse communities around public health and the environment. The first Public Artist in Residence to be embedded in NYC’s Department for the Aging, Nova designs participatory projects – which include performances, hands-on craft kits, technologically infused textiles, interactive video portraits and billboards – to enhance social wellness and decrease social isolation. Supported by numerous artist residencies and grants, her work has been featured at the New Museum, Museum at Eldridge Street, Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Real Art Ways, Substation Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa and the National Arts Center in Tokyo, Japan. She is currently designing and teaching in the CareLab at The New School and an Urban Field Station Collaborative Arts fellow advocating for the care and longevity of humans and trees.