Toward a Sentence

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About the Curatorial Fellow:

Vu Thien An (Thea) Nguyen is a curator and art researcher based between New York and Hanoi. Her research considers how translation and communication operate within studio practice, tracing how ideas move across languages and forms of making. Grounded in care, her practice nurtures and presents evolving voices. She works as a facilitator and bridge-builder to bring together people, concepts, while responding to cultural narratives.

Recently, Nguyen curated Leah Liu's solo exhibition susurrus at the Chinese American Arts Council | Gallery 456 (New York), and co-curated Womb of Fire, a traveling exhibition and publication project featuring 100 works by Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese women and non-binary artists. She is part of Parsons School of Design, Design History and Practice Program Class of 2026 and currently serves as Curatorial Assistant to guest curator Phil Zheng Cai for the 2026 NYC-Based Artist Residency Program at Residency Unlimited.

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About the artists:

Obadah Aljerfri is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist and designerrooted in long-term investigations into identity and perception across queer,Muslim, and diasporic experience. Their conceptual practice integratespainting, sculpture, installation, performance, and illustration with satirical,abject, and tender gestures that trouble the violences of the gaze. Holding anMFA in Integrated Practices from Pratt Institute and a BFA in Illustration fromthe Savannah College of Art and De-sign, they bring over ten years ofexperience in art production, art direction, illustration, and branding acrossart, design, fashion, and marketing. Aljefri has worked on major exhibitionswith Muhannad Shono, Jenny Polak, and Andrew Woolbright, and has exhibitedinternationally at Ithra, the Bronx Council on the Arts, 21,39 Jeddah Arts, andVolta Basel.

Erika Choe is a Brooklyn-based artist working across sculpture, performance, video, and installation. She creates abstract portraits of bodies in mid-movement, taking on positionalities of weightedness, gravitational yield, subversion, pain, and grief. The bodies negotiate with constraint and separation - contained within the vessel bound by membrane, and disassembled into batched-out body parts that toe the line between recognizable and indistinguishable. Her sculptures store the implicit memory of her actions, where the imposition of her body lands as an imprint of a gesture, and the work becomes an archive of a performance that is no longer present for the viewer. Choe holds an MFA from School of Visual Arts and a BA with highest honors from University of Virginia. She is recipient of the NARS Foundation Full US Fellowship 2026, James Bernard Haggarty Scholarship Award by NYC Crit Club ‘25, Artist Sculpture Award by Zola ’25, Ceramics Residency by NYCxDESIGN Festival ‘24, and the Ruth Caplin Dance Award for Artistic Excellence ’15. Erika performed at renowned venues like The Shed NY, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Fridge Art Gallery NY, and Schrittmaacher Festival in Germany, performing for international choreographers like Akram Khan, Alejandro Cerrudo, and Yin Yue.

Jisoo Chung is a multimedia artist working across video, installation,drawing, and performance. As a Korean artist who relocated to the UnitedStates, she examines failures in language—mistranslations, autocorrections, andlinguistic omissions—to trace the sociocultural power embedded in language andnames. Her practice considers how identity is negotiated, distorted, orrendered invisible through systems of translation. Chung is a nominee for theUnited States Artists Fellowship, a fellow of the MacDowell Residency, and shehas received grants from the LACE Lightning Fund (Andy Warhol Foundation), thePuffin Foundation, the Seoul Arts and Culture Foundation, and Jungwoon Prize atthe Seoul International Experimental Film and Video Festival, among others.Chung holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BFAfrom Seoul National University. She served on the production committee atGYOPO, is a co-founder of an after school art program Drawwing Cabinet, and iscurrently an adjunct faculty member at Bakersfield College. She lives, works,and teaches in Los Angeles.

Priyanka Dey lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and holds a BFA from PrattInstitute. Originally, Dey is from Mumbai, India. Dey aims to create works thatplay with optics of perception by experimenting with and leveraging obscurity.Her process lays emphasis on striking balance between a calculative yetintuitive paradigm and resists a definitive categorization.

Nicole Economides (b. 1992, New York, USA) is a visual artist working betweenAthens, Greece and New York, USA. She holds an MFA from Parsons School ofDesign, The New School (2019). Economides has presented solo exhibitionsincluding Sunday Afternoon (Callirrhoë, Athens, 2024) and Illusion of Home, asa Memory (Callirrhoë, Athens, 2023), and participated in group shows at MOMus,Athens (2023); Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens, and LincolnCenter, New York (2021); and Queens College, CUNY, New York (2020). She hasreceived the Hopper Prize (2024), ARTWORKS Stavros Niarchos FoundationFellowship (2022), and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2018). Herwork has been featured in Financial Times, Coveteur, Loophole and Kathimerini.

Aviv Grinberg (b. 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist working acrosspainting, sculpture, installation, and readymade. His practice investigatessystems of order, concealment, and transformation through both industrial andorganic materials. Drawing from personal history, including his identity as agay man, his late sister’s mental illness, and his service as a prison guard,Grinberg’s work engages with structures of control and the ways in which theyshape behavior, perception, and memory. He has worked extensively with everydaymaintenance objects such as carpet beaters and cleaning product containers,using them to explore how social and psychological systems are maintained,hidden, and internalized. In recent work, he shifts from industrial defects toorganic ones, focusing on damaged plants, diseased leaves, and naturalprocesses of growth and decay. Through this transition, he examines the tensionbetween control and release, and questions whether what we perceive as flawsare disruptions or inherent conditions of living systems.

Arom Ju is a multidisciplinary visual artist from South Korea, now based in theU.S. Beginning in digital illustration, she translates the flat precision ofscreen-based imagery into painting, bridging digital and physical languages.She has recently expanded her practice to include mobile-like moving elementsthat explore motion and fragility. Ju holds an MFA from Hongik University andhas exhibited in the United States and Korea, including at the New Museum LosGatos, A Space Gallery, and Bushwick Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work has alsobeen featured by institutions such as Microsoft and The New York Times.

Noa Klagsbald (b.1992) is an interdisciplinary artist living and workingbetween Tel Aviv and London. She holds an MA in Photography from the RoyalCollege of Art, London, and a BFA (Magna Cum Laude) from Shenkar College ofArt. Klagsbald creates staged photographic and installation works exploringpower dynamics and masculinity within culturally charged arenas such as sport.Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Camden Art Centre, OOFGallery London, the Jewish Museum Lecce, Museum on the Seam, and the CulturalOlympics Paris. She was selected for New Contemporaries 2023 (UK) and is aForbes 30 Under 30 alumna. A photograph from her GOAL series was presentedaboard the International Space Station as part of Axiom Mission 1.

Colby Lamson‑Gordon is an artist, musician, and educator working across video, image, and sound. Adopted from China to the United States, they examine transracial (dis)placement through imagined memory and imperfect connection to place. They draw from expanded documentary, archive, and technology to probe longing and lineage. Lamson-Gordon's work has been screened and exhibited at the 2026 Every Woman Biennial; Film Diary NYC; Residency Unlimited; Snug Harbor Cultural Center and more. They hold an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design and a BA in Economics from Barnard College; they received the O’Connor Award for best economic thesis. Lamson-Gordon is an artist-in-residence at NARS Foundation, with an upcoming residency at Vermont Studio Center. They live in Brooklyn and teach as part‑time faculty at Parsons.

Ailyn Lee (b. South Korea) received her MFA in Fine Arts and BFA inIllustration from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City. She hasexhibited her work at various venues in New York and South Korea, includingA.I.R. Gallery, Latitude Gallery, SVA Chelsea Gallery, and the BusanInternational Art Fair. She has been an artist-in-residence at the New York ArtResidency and Studios (NARS) Foundation, International Studio & CuratorialProgram (ISCP) in 2025, Wassaic Project, and Vermont Studio Center.

Jill Smith (she/her) is a queer, Jewish multi-disciplinary artist, bornand based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She is interested in the archival properties ofmaterials, objects, and rituals. Through her material and process-basedpractice, Smith explores the tensions between presence and absence, connectionand distance, and the ways in which perception of memory and lineage may shiftover time.

Smith has exhibited work in Canadian spaces including theUniversity of Waterloo Art Gallery, Centre[3] for Artistic + Social Practice,The Brandscape, Ed Video Media Art Centre, Forest City Gallery, and Friends andNeighbours Gallery. Smith holds a Master of Fine Arts from University ofWaterloo, (Canada, 2024) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honors Specialization inStudio Art) from Western University (Canada, 2017). She has participated inartist residency programs at AGA LAB in Amsterdam (2017), and Luminous Bodiesat Artscape Gibraltar Point in Toronto (2018), and is currentlyartist-in-residence at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn (2026). Smith is therecipient of grants and awards from Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council,Canada Council for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council(SSHRC), and the Keith and Win Shantz International Research Scholarship, amongothers. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Cocoon in Montreal(2026).

Rowan van As (1991, Goes, NL) is a Rotterdam-based visual artist whocreates installations, sculptures, and performances, often as social gestures.He studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy (2010–2014) and earned his MFA atSt. Lucas, Antwerp (2015–2016).He draws from everyday urban life, remixingfound images and objects into layered, surreal works that shift the meaning ofthe discarded. Food forms an intuitive part of his later practice — as materialand connector. From April to June 2026, he will be in residence in New York,developing a project on the city’s oyster history. His most ambitious projectto date is a functioning reinterpretation of a classic yellow cab, which heaims to bring to New York. His work explores the relative powerlessness of theindividual, seeking a poetic language that is playful, confrontational, andopen to dialogue.

Chanya Vitayakul (they/them, b. 2003) is a multidisciplinary artist fromBangkok, Thailand. Their work has been exhibited in New York, Rhode Island,South Korea, and Thailand, and has appeared in publications including CuratoryMagazine, Divide Magazine, New Visionary Magazine, and the Survivor Arts andWriting Collective. Chanya holds a BFA in Graphic Design︎ from the Rhode IslandSchool of Design (RISD)︎ and is based in Long Island City, New York.

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