Earth Day Celebration

Based in New York since 2001, Nobuho Nagasawa is a transnational, transdisciplinary artist trained in Berlin and invited to the United States by the California Institute of the Arts in 1986. She creates immersive, site-responsive environments shaped by time, process, and collective engagement. Approaching each site like an archaeologist, she uncovers hidden histories, ecological and psychological traces within the landscape. Her practice explores how perception, memory, and embodied experience shape our sense of place. Nagasawa has received major grants and awards, including DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Rockefeller Foundation, the California Arts Council, multiple Japan Foundation grants, and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Among more than forty completed public art commissions, she has earned three Design Excellence Awards. A recent project exhibited at MoMA received a dozen awards, including Woman-Designed NYC. Her work has been exhibited at Prague Castle, the Ludwig Museum, the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico, and the Alexandria Library in Egypt, and represented in biennials and triennials across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. From 2026 to 2028, her work will be featured in exhibitions at Mudam (Museum of Contemporary Art Luxembourg), Lenbachhaus Munich, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Darla Migan’s independent curatorial practice takes up an interdisciplinary approach to creating aesthetic experiences, wherein philosophizing also means learning from artists. As a participant in the Arts Center Residency, she is considering ‘climate change’ through the lens of her current research on Black disinheritance to curate an exhibition on flourishing. Dr. Migan is based in New York City and holds the inaugural PRODIG+ Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Philosophy at (SUNY) Stony Brook University. She enjoys teaching artists and scientists in courses such as PHI:104 Moral Reasoning, PHI 264: Philosophy and the Arts, and PHI 501: Theories of Race. Learn more at darlanyc.com 

Zella Vanié is an artist, cultural organizer, and designer working across painting, zines, and portal-making. Their work asks what it means to be free: how communities embody knowing, seed care across time, and create conditions for Black queer folk to see our beauty, divinity, and the boundless worlds that have always been ours to inhabit. Zella’s paintings have been exhibited internationally, with support from Mass MoCA, Flux Factory, the Canopy Program, and The Other Art Fair. Zella earned an MFA in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts, has taught design at New York University and California College of the Arts, and splits time between Brooklyn and Abidjan. Zella is a co-founder and design lead with Black Veterans Project.

Elena Soterakis is an artist, curator, and co-founder of BioBAT Art Space, an interdisciplinary living laboratory embedded within a biotechnology incubator at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in New York City. Her work centers on ecology and the evolving relationship between biological life, culture, and civic infrastructure.  Her work and leadership focus on building inclusive, interdisciplinary platforms that explore urgent environmental and scientific themes. She has spearheaded numerous exhibitions, residencies, and public programs, as well as STEAM educational initiatives that champion emerging forms of bioart and experimental design, while fostering community engagement and cross-sector dialogue. Her artwork and curatorial projects explore themes of ecology and the relationship between nature and technology. Soterakis' work has been exhibited at venues, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Museum of Art and Design in Atlanta, the Torrance Art Museum, and the New York Hall of Science. In February 2024, her open-source project documenting the COVID-19 pandemic, The Great Pause, was permanently placed on the Moon’s South Pole, engraved in nano-fiche as part of Arch Mission’s Lunar Library, alongside the Rosetta Stone and Wikipedia. Soterakis has collaborated with institutions such as the Interstate Environmental Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, Reativity Space, and Space Perspective, blending scientific research with artistic expression. Her 2021 project, To Space, From Earth — DNA Capsule, was sent to the International Space Station, where her artwork was encoded into DNA through a collaboration with Twist Bioscience.

Karen Levitov is the Director and Curator of the Zuccaire Gallery and Professor of Practice in the Art Department at Stony Brook University. Prior, she was a curator and senior administrator at The Jewish Museum, New York. At the Zuccaire Gallery, she has presented over twenty-five exhibitions of contemporary art with a focus on social justice issues, collaborative projects, and interdisciplinary programming. She has published essays and exhibition catalogues; served as juror and panelist for national exhibitions, symposia and competitions, including MTA Arts for Transit; and has received grants and awards for her work, including a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence. 

Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025) and Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019), and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) and the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” He has published work in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Latin American Research Review, and Art Journal, and in popular outlets including Hyperallergic, TruthOut, and Indian Country Today. With S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri), he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds, and in 2024-2025 he was a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He is a citizen of Cherokee Nation.