Megan Olson CHASHAMA Open Art Studios Brooklyn NYC (Season 20, Episode 3)

About Christl Stringer: Christl Stringer is a Black surrealist figurative painter, writer, and filmmaker whose work has been shown at Shockboxx Projects, Latela Curatorial, Hot Bed Gallery, Maake Projects Gallery, Piano Craft Gallery, and Philly Art Collective. She explores the interiority of Black womanhood and childhood experiences. Her films and scripts have been accepted into NFFTY, Thuh Film Festival, New Haven International Film Festival, and Another Hole In The Head Film Festival. Instagram: @christlstringer About Adam Hersko-RonaTas: In addition to fostering the creative pursuits of fellow up-and-coming artists, I’ve collaborated with many people as a director, cinematographer, actor, animator, and editor to create works that bridge various media forms. These projects range from dramatic narratives to sketch comedies, educational PSAs to environmental documentaries, stop-motion to hand-drawn animations, virtual reality installations to music videos. Some of these have earned global festival recognition and awards over the years. I’m interested in how we perceive our shared world with its infinite plurality and how various media best equip us to sift through little bits of that chaos. I have a deep love of science; however, art – and film specifically – can often be the most compelling and accessible means for us to interpret the state of humanity and our role within Nature. Where are we, how did we get here, and where are we heading? Instagram: @adamhrrr

Laurie Berg (b. 1980, works and lives in New York City) is a dancer, performer, collagist, and jewelry maker. Her projects have appeared at The Kitchen, WeisAcres, BAX, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dixon Place, Beach Sessions Dance Series, Astor Alive! Festival, The Invisible Dog Art Center as part of The Joyce Theater’s Unleashed Series, The Whitney Museum, The Mattatuck Museum of Art (CT), Catch, Avant-Garde-Arama, WiM at the TBG Theater, Pieter PASD (CA), Roulette Intermedium, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Food for Thought, Danspace Project’s Food for Thought and DraftWork series, and at Danspace Project as part of PLATFORM 2011: Body Madness – Rhythm and Humor, FACADE/FASAD, 303 Gallery, ICMC at Stony Brook University, the TANK, draftwork, and AUNTS among others.

Bianca Abdi-Boragi works across media using sculpture, video, installation, and painting to enact representations of self and others, often using found materials and landscapes as receptacles to address different states of being, with a specific focus on alienation and territory. Tending towards the absurd though with care and respect, her works respond to the contemporary political and social environment in the United States, France, and Algeria, engaging with themes of gender, subsistence, and migration while linking this moment to the historical repercussions of post-colonialism. Bianca Abdi-Boragi is a French-Berber/ American interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Paris, France, who received her BFA from ENSAPC (Paris) and her MFA from Yale School of Art, Sculpture in 2017. Abdi-Boragi has been living in New York since 2010. Recently in residency at Pioneer Works her shows have been featured on Hyperallergic, Artnet, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. Solo exhibitions include the Border Project Space Gallery and CADAF Art Fair, she has exhibited with GHOSTMACHINE, Central Part Tower's Penthouse, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, the Flux Factory, Heaven Gallery Chicago, the Immigrant Artist Biennial, NARS Foundation, The Border Project Space, VCU Arts, NURTUREart Gallery, Chashama Gallery, Field Project Gallery, Galerie Protégé, The Clemente Soto Velez Center NY, throughout the United States and internationally and has screened art films at Anthology Film Archive, UnionDocs, Video Revival, NY, the Whitney Humanity Center, and Loria Center, New Haven, CT. Abdi-Boragi was the recipient of the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights from the Yale Law School and was recently in residency at NARS Foundation and previously at MASS MoCA's studios, the Centquatre, Paris, France, Pact Zollverein, Essen, Germany, CalArts, Los Angeles. ​ Instagram @biancaabdiboragi

About James Rose: I have made work to identify people in power responsible for social injustice. Their social, environmental and financial crimes are excused by our system of free market capitalism. Since the 1980s, free market has been purposely and wrongfully conflated with freedom. I made a body of work which includes politicians, fossil fuel executives and Wall Street bankers. I started to think about what I can directly do something about. I live in Bay Ridge, with views of the Verrazano Narrows and NYC Harbor. Neighborhoods like mine are the last stop for plastic waste before it ends up in the ocean. I started to make paintings about the pollution that I can go out and clean up. I want others to see what I see and feel what I feel. A plastic bag floating down the road or a straw sitting in the drainage grate is on its way to the ocean unless I stop it. When I walk by it and don’t do anything, I feel complicit. For most of my career my paintings have been urban. I see something that makes me feel a certain way and I try and convey that with paint or charcoal. I have always been fascinated by public transportation and the systems that move people around a city. I still make paintings of people in cities, but in 2019, I began painting trees in forests. Like the city, the forests make me feel a certain way. This feeling is always good. The fresh air, rocky trails and lush green reduces my stress and increases my mood. The forests are what will save the people I paint from all the other injustices I make work about.

Megan Olson has been making art since childhood. She is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute and has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the world, most notably in New York, Berlin, and Seoul.

Avani R Patel -Born in Mumbai 1976, India, Avani Patel was immigrated to Pennsylvania with her family at 11 years old. She holds a BA from the Penn State University and an MFA from Tyler School of Arts (Temple University). Her cultural background has had a profound impact on the forging of her identity as an artist. As a young girl living in India, she fell in love with the patterns of dresses, exotic colors, the sound of music, as well as the spectacle of both theatre and cinema. They were all fluidly interconnected, effectively symbolizing the rhythm of daily life. Indian culture is the starting point of her work. The range of Indian culture expressed through film, theatre, music, and performance are all sources of artistic inspiration for her. Even though from far away from home, she continue to explore the boundaries between Eastern and Western cultural influences.

Ooh Baby By Anika started in 2018, with two racks of hand painted clothes and a weekend street market. After following my intuition and dropping out of college to pursue this dream of creating art, I taught myself how to sew through friends' help and youtube “university” haha. ;) My goal with Ooh Baby was to create pieces that start conversations, encourage others to express themselves, and bring more unique garments to market. After almost 7 years, Ooh Baby has organically grown into a company that has served tens of thousands and is on the path to grow larger every year.

Diane was an avid competitor in the sport of eventing, an olympic equestrian sport. She represented the United States in the North American Young Rider Championships in 2013 and 2015 bringing home team gold and individual gold. In early 2016, she had her sights set on qualifying for the Rio Olympics. Unfortunately, not far into the season a horse fell on top of her, completely severing her hip flexor causing extensive nerve damage. This injury ended her competitive eventing career. Unable to do anything physically active during her recovery, she turned to the canvas. Many of Diane's works feature a theme of growth and decay, a balance of hope and cynicism representing the struggles she faced as she moved on with her life in the wake of the injury. Since she began selling her paintings in late 2016, her work has been featured in many galleries throughout Florida. Her sales mostly consisted of commissions, but in a very short time her work is sweeping through the South Florida urban contemporary art scene.

Zeljka Paic was born in 1987 in Prijedor, former Yugoslavia. She is a graduate of both the Academy of Fine Arts (2015) and Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering (2011). Zeljka Paic has garnered multiple accolades including the award from the Association of Innovators of the Republic of Srpska for her contribution to the innovative approach to art, in 2024. As an artist and architect, Zeljka Paic combines her two professions to create an original style of painting: imagination, fused with knowledge of geometry, composition, and color harmony, are the foundational principles of her art. Since 2017 she has exhibited her paintings internationally, first showing her architecture-inspired paintings and then sculptures from the Art Beyond Frames Series. Her work has been exhibited as far and wide as New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, and London. She was featured in The Guardian’s Future of Art – in Pictures article and picked as one of the top 5 artists by Art Aesthetics Magazine for The Other Art Fair in London in 2017. Her artworks are collected in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, etc.

Lauren Bencivengo is an Encinitas, CA - based painter and interior designer. After receiving a BFA in Interior Design from Miami University of Ohio, Lauren started her career as a Commercial Interior Designer in San Diego, CA. In 2018 Lauren established her art studio, Carmela Designs, to further express her passion and deepen her skills as an artist. She primarily works with Acrylic and Gouache, and is heavily influenced by design, nature, and everyday moments.