We asked featured artists to provide brief bios, collected here.
Derrick Beasley
Derrick is a multidisciplinary artist based in Durham, NC. Derrick’s work is largely a meditation on possibilities of living in community with people (particularly Black people) and the environment. His work is an invitation to be in conversation around what is possible and aims to catalyze engagement in new practices that bring about a liberated and sustainable future.
Carlyn Wright-Eakes
Carlyn Wright-Eakes is an artist and educator from Durham, North Carolina. Her public and community artistic work - from murals to installations and interactive exhibits - center around themes of identity, community, storytelling and social justice. Her abstract paintings are reflections on perspective and mindfulness. At first, one may observe the overall landscape, and move inward to notice intricacies and details potentially overlooked on first glance. In our own lives and in others, we are reminded to attend to the intimacy of moments, portents of small actions, and the beauty of details that, moving too fast, may be entirely missed. Carlyn enjoys turning just about anything into art and uses a variety of mediums from ink, wax, collage, acrylic, book making, jewelry, and mixed media sculpture.
Jermaine “JP” Powell
Jermaine “JP” Powell is a North Carolina based mixed-media artist and muralist. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, JP holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute, located in Brooklyn, New York. His paintings and public art projects explore the complexities of human relationships, materialism, and consumerism.
Bethany Neigebauer
Bethany Ann Neigebauer, also known as BAN Artwork, is a Durham based artist who creates unique blends of photography, digital, print, lenticular, and LED design. Her mesmerizing light structures boldly affront western culture's chromophobia while pulling one's attention into the psychedelic world she creates in each piece. The work touches on themes of human connection, LGBTQI+, sex positivity, body positivity, a love of color in all forms, and the every changing nuances of the human condition.
Mailande Moran
Mailande Moran is a writer, brand strategist, artist, and speaker. Fueled by curiosity, her career has been an exercise in understanding the intersections between creativity, business, and social change; adventures on that path have included starting an artisan-made textile company, creating the first tablet classroom in a Kyrgyz village school, teaching design thinking in Cuba, and helping people clean out their closets. In 2015, she started drawing on the backs of her grad school business cards and posting them to Instagram, which changed her life forever.
Samir Knego
Samir Knego is a multidisciplinary artist and zinester. His recent exhibition, “The Divine - dreams of disabled gods” combined poetry and visual art and explores disability and ableism through the language and imagery of religion. When he’s not making art, Samir works in a library and listens to lots of heavy metal.
Jim Lee
Jim Lee is a multi-dimensional, self-taught artist whose work is heavily influenced by his love of nature, science, psychology, and technology. Working with cameras, scanners, lighting and collections of found and fabricated objects, Jim creates photographic images that range from the darkly mysterious and figurative to the elegantly simple and abstract. He often ventures outside of his photographic practice into three dimensional creations. The work can be beautiful, disturbing, or even whimsical. One rarely leaves one of Jim’s pieces without some question and that is exactly what he wants. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibits and can be found in collections at American Tobacco Campus, Andrew Young Enterprises, Cassilhaus, Duke University Medical Center, and numerous other private collections.