Presenters
Pamela Capalad, CFP® AFC®
Get Shameless, Inc.
Brooklyn, NY
Pamela Capalad is a Certified Financial Planner™ and Accredited Financial Counselor™ She's been in financial services since the last bad time, and we'll get through this one too. She is a cofounder at Pockets Change. Her work is centered around helping people heal their relationship with money and navigate predatory financial systems while honoring their humanity and dignity.
Mel Chin
Conceptual Artist
Burnsville, NC
The work of Mel Chin (2010 USA Fellow) employs a wide range of approaches, from unique, idiosyncratic objects to operations that require multi-disciplinary collaboration. He insists that projects in the public field are dosed with a rigorous pragmatism and an elevated poetic. Chin’s studio work is notably without a signature style, resulting in works suffused with a deeply considered restraint or excess to promote an unpredictable aesthetic. His Revival Field (1990) pioneered in the field of "green remediation" the use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil. From 1995–1998 he formed the GALA Committee, a collective that produced In the Name of the Place, a public art project conducted on American primetime television. He is the recipient of many awards, grants, and honorary degrees, including the MacArthur Fellowship (2019), the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2021), and the Hiroshima Art Prize (2024).
Kim Córdova
Boston Art Review
Boston, MA
Kim Córdova is a Mexican American journalist and critic. She is the Arts Policy and Civic Culture Desk Editor at Boston Art Review. She is also a contributor with several publications including New York Times, El País, and e-flux among others. Previously, she was the Mexico City contributing editor at Momus. She is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation arts writers grant and a Critical Minded fellowship.
Dyalekt
Get Shameless, Inc.
Brooklyn, NY
Dyalekt has been an MC, theater-er, and educator (mostly all at once) for over twenty years and has been in financial education since 2014. As a cofounder and Director of Pedagogy at Pockets Change, he uses Hip Hop pedagogy to help students heal their relationship with money. He brings hip hop to places that don't know they need it but desperately do.
Althea Erickson
Co-Director, National Arts Policy Alliance
Brooklyn, NY
Althea is Co-Director, Advocacy & Policy for the National Arts Policy Alliance, which is dedicated to building collective power among arts workers to win economic rights and security for all. She is a policy, research, and advocacy professional focused on labor and social protections for the self-employed, with over 25 years experience starting and leading advocacy teams in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. She previously served as Vice President of Global Advocacy & Impact at Etsy, and Advocacy Director at Freelancers Union, in addition to working as a community and campaign organizer for various grassroots advocacy organizations.
Marjani Forté-Saunders
Choreographer/7NM
Pasadena, CA
Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a three-time Bessie Award-winning choreographer, performer, teaching artist, mother, and 2023 United States Artists Fellow. Her credits include the Metropolitan Opera’s El Niño, Chicken Soup 2025 at Danspace Project, and Dreaming Zenzile Off-Broadway. She co-founded 7NMS with Everett Saunders and is the Visioning Founder of Art x Power, a platform supporting resilient futures for Black radically experimenting artists through investment, innovation, and purpose-driven creative practice.
Fred Moten
Poet and Cultural Critic
Los Angeles, California
Fred Moten (2018 USA Fellow) teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. His latest book is préfume, a collaboration with Nan Collymore. He is also co-author with Stefano Harney of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and All Incomplete and with Wu Tsang of Who Touched Me? In addition, Moten frequently accompanies musicians Gerald Cleaver and Brandon López. Their latest recordings are the blacksmiths, the flowers, and revision.
Helena Huang
Co-Director, National Arts Policy Alliance
Long Island City, NY
Coming from a family of artists and human rights activists, Helena is most at home working at the intersection of culture and public policy. She is a collaborative social justice leader with more than twenty-five years of experience in philanthropy, civic engagement, narrative change, and movement building. She is dedicated to bridging the worlds of foundations and advocacy to support artists, organizers, and communities working for policy and systems change. Helena has co-launched and led several start-up initiatives, most recently serving as Project Director for the Art for Justice Fund (A4J).
Jane Yong Kim
The Atlantic
New York City, NY
Jane Yong Kim is a deputy editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees its culture coverage. She was formerly the culture editor at the Village Voice, and has also edited at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Al Jazeera America. She grew up in Los Angeles.
Liz Pelly
Writer
Brooklyn, NY
Liz Pelly is a writer based in New York. Her first book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her byline has appeared at The Baffler, Guardian, Harper's, NPR, Financial Times, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, and many other outlets. She currently co-hosts Critical Listening, a podcast about music and technology.
Lolan Sevilla
Co-Director, National Arts Policy Alliance
Northampton, MA
Lolan B. Sevilla, MPA is a cultural worker, and organizer rooted in community, study, and practice. They are Co-Director, Organizing at the National Arts Policy Alliance. Lolan supports collective power building among creative and cultural workers to win policy reforms in establishing economic rights for all. Their work centers cross-sectoral leadership, conflict transformation, and strategy grounded in anti-oppression frameworks.
Anna Stothart
Co-Founder of Davila-Villa & Stothart
Brooklyn, NY
Anna Stothart is co-founder of DVS and an art historian specializing in contemporary art. She oversees institutional relations, market growth, sustainability, and studio management, guiding placements of significant works and long-term artist strategies. Formerly Curatorial Director at Lehmann Maupin, she also held roles at the San Antonio Museum of Art and ICA Boston. Stothart holds a master’s from Tufts University and has led seminars in New York City programs.
Jillian Steinhauer
Journalist and Critic
Brooklyn, NY
Jillian Steinhauer is a journalist and critic who writes about art and comics. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, and many other publications. Jillian has won a 2023 Rabkin Prize, a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and the 2014 Best Art Reporting award from AICA-USA. She was previously an editor at Hyperallergic, and she organizes with the National Writers Union's Freelance Solidarity Project.
Jenny Toomey
Founder of Quietnova
Catskill, NY
Jenny Toomey is a Mozilla Foundation Fellow and associate at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. She founded Quietnova, exploring tech, arts, and labor. At the Ford Foundation, she spent seventeen years building the Public Interest Technology field, leading the International Technology and Society and U.S. Internet Freedom teams. She founded Future of Music Coalition in 2008 and co-founded independent label Simple Machines in the 1990s. A Grammy-nominated musician with thirteen albums, she is currently writing a book and obsessing over quilts.
Terence Trouillot
Writer and Editor
Brooklyn, NY
Terence Trouillot is a writer and editor based in New York City. He is a contributing editor at BOMB and has written about contemporary art and visual culture for magazines including BOMB, Momus, The Brooklyn Rail, The Village Voice, Arts.Black, Artnet News, Art in America, Artforum, art-agenda, and Eye on Design, among others. He is currently an associate editor at frieze.