Announcing 2024 Jurors Soon!
2023 Jurors
Jing Lauengco
Jing Lauengco’s deep belief in Modern Diversity, Design, and Digital Storytelling grew as an award-winning Brand Strategist and Female Founder of JING INC. - her brand and business consultancy; OTHER BROWN GIRL (OBG) - her storytelling community for modern “Women of Culture” leading colorful and creative lives; and NEXT THING WITH JING - her podcast about next chapters and new adventures in the “new now”. A Cleveland Leadership Center - SOCIAL CHANGE Finalist winning The Cleveland Foundation’s 2021 TECHNOVATION Civic Pitch Award and a 2022 SPACES Urgent Art Fund Award for DEI digital storytelling, featured in AdAge, Cleveland Magazine’s “10 Women Who Inspire Us in Cleveland - International Women’s Day”, Cleveland’s Most Interesting People - Creative Thinker, StoryClub Cleveland, ideastream’s "The Sound of Ideas", and YWCA’s reFRESHed Empowering Women speaker series, Jing serves on Literary Cleveland’s Board of Trustees and OPAWL - Ohio Progressive Asian Women Leadership, a female-led social justice coalition building intersectional feminist advocacy.
Andrea Price
Andrea Price is an eclectic artist, art administrator, and entrepreneur. She is passionate about social justice, equity, and helping others. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2-Dimensional Studies from the University of Toledo and is pursuing a Masters in Counseling and Art Therapy from Pennsylvania Western in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. Price is also the owner of Andrea & Her Art and co-owner of Healing Conversations, two businesses that mirror her interests. As the Art Services Manager for The Arts Commission in Toledo, she is able to help local artists advance their careers through advocacy and programming. Andrea Price is hopeful and fighting for a world of equity through her art and service.
Denise Astorino
Denise Astorino is the Community Engagement Coordinator for the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland. Beyond the work she does there, she is also a theatre director/ actor and producer in the Cleveland theatre community. Denise has been involved as an advocate in the Cleveland arts community for over 25 years and has built her midlife career around this mission. Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Denise now resides in Lakewood with her small terrier, Elvis.
2022 Jurors
Letitia Lopez
While working in the corporate sector for a large chain restaurant company, Letitia Lopez found her passion for art, culture and community in 2008 when she became a volunteer at Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center. Shortly thereafter, she joined the Board of Trustees and in 2009 accepted the position of Executive Director. Since then, Letitia has navigated this grassroots organization through small-scale changes, board development, and two moves in which she was able to secure a forever home for the organization. The most she enjoys about her work is witnessing how the arts, in all forms, impact the youth and families she serves. She has also found her strength planning community events and celebrations where the outcomes truly reflect the center’s mission.
Jes Allie
Jes Allie is a Detroit based independent curator and arts facilitator. She actively wears many hats as Executive Director of BULK Space, Artist Liaison at Red Bull, and Program Coordinator at University of Michigan's Museum of Art. As a native Detroiter she has worked with many cultural institutions such as the National Conference of Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Independent Curators International, ApexArt, and Contemporary&, and ProjectArt. Her main focus is exploring how the arts continue to act as a means of cultural preservation among change.
Aaron Williams
Aaron was born and raised in Cleveland, OH and has developed into one of the best kept secrets in the city's thriving art scene, since taking a more serious approach to his work back in 2012. His art style, which often involves an unorthodox approach with color pencils, was nurtured at a visual communication program held at Euclid High, where he won The Scholastic Art Award, Virginia Marti Award, Two Gold Keys and a Silver Key, while also being chosen as a American Vision Nominee. Since 2014 after a brief stint at CIA, Aaron has been working as a freelance artist, collaborating with various creatives across the city and expanding his artistic prowess to other mediums to suit not only their expressive needs but his own. With each project revealed, his goal to move observers with a raw perspective that transcends cultural borders becomes more solidified, and only adds to the timeless Black American story of using the rain of hard times to bloom something remarkable.
2021 Jurors
Gisela McDaniel
Gisela McDaniel (b. Bellevue, NE 1995) is a diasporic indigenous Chamorro artist. Her work is based in healing from her own sexual trauma and reflecting the healing of people who have survived sexual, intergenerational trauma, and institutional trauma. Interweaving assemblages of audio, oil painting, and motion-sensored technology, she creates pieces that “come to life” and literally “talk back” to the viewer upon being triggered by observers. She intentionally incorporates survivor’s voices in order to subvert traditional power relations and to enable both individual and collective healing. Working primarily with women who identify as indigenous, multiracial, immigrant, and of color, her work deliberately disrupts and responds to historical and contemporary patterns of censorship as it relates to the display and exhibition of women’s bodies, voices, and stories. She aims to heal those who have experienced gender-based sexual violence, giving a voice, space, as well as a confidential vehicle for survivors to not only share their experiences, but to also explore how those experiences have affected them long-term. Based in Detroit, she received her BFA from the University of Michigan and is represented by Pilar Corrias Gallery in London.
LaToya Kent
LaToya Kent is a full time artist, musician and healer of 25 years. Her music career started in her teen years in Cleveland, Ohio. She began her studies of yoga, midwifery, energy work and tantra in high school.
LaToya completed 3 yoga programs and is one of the first certified yoga teachers of color in Cleveland. She is an advocate for natural birth and has attended close
to 100 natural births. She works with women of all ages and backgrounds, instilling wholeness of body, mind and spirit. Latoya has performed her music all over the United States and Canada as a solo artist and with her current collective, Mourning {A} BLKstar. Her collective had the opportunity to perform at The Kennedy Center, Democracy Now and graced the cover of WIRE magazine. LaToya has collaborated with Christa Ebert, who performs as Uno Lady, on a project titled GROUNDED. She lent her voice to a guided meditation track on this album. She also collaborated with the international group ALGIERS and performed on the Stephan Colbert show in accompaniment for their song, Dispossession. LaToya runs Cleveland Tapes, an underground art and music platform, with her longtime collaborator. She is a facilitator and board member for The Tantra Love Academy, a non profit that aids women in healing traumas and building their dreams.. She has 16 full length albums and is signed to 5 record labels. LaToya has surrounded herself with the power of creative outlets to keep her motivated in her mission to share her art. She lives life by example and plans to continue to be inspired and creating as the world shifts and changes.
Asia Armour
Asia Armour is a photographer and mixed media artist in the greater Cleveland area. She found her passion for photography after attending film school at Cleveland State University. In 2017 she started her art company called Art Amour, forever living by her business model of "live like it's an art, for the love of art" and every day she embodies that. While her first love is photography and painting she also loves her work as a curator. She is one of the resident curators for Deep Roots Art Experience, a black-owned art gallery located in the heart of Cleveland. Curating shows like The Night Glow Art Show and Deep Roots Annual all women of color art show SheArt. She's done projects with Slavic Village for Rooms to Let and numerous projects around the city of Cleveland. Her work has been shown in a few galleries in Cleveland, Deep Roots Art Experience, Worthington Yards, and East Cleveland's Public Library.
2020 Jurors
Marisa Williamson
Marisa Williamson is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology. She has produced site-specific works at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and by commission from Storm King Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Monument Lab Philadelphia, the University of Virginia, and the National Park Service. Her work has been featured in gallery exhibitions nationally and internationally. Williamson holds a BA from Harvard and an MFA from CalArts. She is based in South Orange, New Jersey and serves as an assistant professor of media arts at the University of Hartford in Connecticut.
Cigdem Slankard
Cigdem Slankard is a Cleveland based filmmaker and educator. She was born and raised in Turkey and received her BA in translation and interpreting from Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey) in 1999. She first came to the United States in 1998 to study film and video at State University of New York in Binghamton. In 2002, she received a Master of Fine Arts in filmmaking from Ohio University. She has written and directed several short film and video projects including narrative, documentary, and virtual reality stories. Her work has been included in exhibitions and film festivals nationally and internationally.
Dr. Leah C.K. Lewis
The Reverend Dr. Leah C.K. Lewis, J.D., is a writer, documentary filmmaker, social entrepreneur, and event planner. A former community organizer, minister of community engagement, elected official, and adjunct faculty at Tri-C and Georgia State University, Dr. Lewis now fully focuses on projects that promote equity and justice for African American people in arts, culture, and technology. Of late, she has published works in The Christian Century and on Blavity.com. With degrees from Ashland Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School, Howard University School of Law, and Bowling Green State University, Leah brings her whole being to every task she undertakes, and justice and equity are always her focus. Dr. Lewis received The Urgent Fund grant from SPACES is 2019 for Black Buckeyes: A Tale of Two Cities, which is a comparative piece on the histories and lives of African Americans in Cleveland and Cincinnati. Currently, she is putting the finishing touches on the first iteration of a documentary for MidTown Cleveland on the legacy of Cleveland's famed Leo's Casino, a multicultural entertainment venue from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
2019 Jurors
José Carlos Teixeira
José Carlos Teixeira is a visual artist, filmmaker and educator. His interdisciplinary work involves video-essay, documentary, installation, text and photography. Through participatory and performative structures, he investigates notions of identity, boundary, exile and displacement. The relationship with, and the critical representation of otherness occupy a central role in his aesthetic materializations. In his socially-engaged practice, situated between cinema and anthropology, Teixeira is concerned with generating an encounter and framing the moment. Genuinely open to what the situation and the participants have to offer, he is interested in carving space for empathy and intersubjectivity, while rethinking the politics of representation. Born in Portugal, José Carlos Teixeira holds an MFA from UCLA. His work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as LACE, Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Armory Center for theArts (Pasadena), UnionDocs, Anthology Film Archives (NY), MOCA, The Sculpture Center (Cleveland), Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts (Princeton), Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart), DAZ (Berlin), 104 Cent Quatre (Paris), NCCA (Moscow), Hélio Oiticica Art Center (Rio de Janeiro), SP Cultural Center (São Paulo), Oriente Foundation (Macao), MNAC, Museu da Cidade, Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), to name a few. Recent solo shows at MAAT (Lisbon), SPACES (Cleveland), MMOCA (Madison), AANM (Detroit), and the Townhouse Gallery (Cairo). His films have circulated in numerous festivals: LIDF, SMHAF, Eindhoven Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Arthouse Asia, Currents: New Media Festival, AIFVF, AFFESTNYC, among others, and included in the media libraries of HotDocs and Visions du Réel. Teixeira has been the recipient of a Fulbright Grant, Efroymson Award/Contemporary Arts Fellowship, Best Documentary + Jurors Award at the AFFEST 2019 (New York), SMHAF Experimental Film Award 2019 (Glasgow), FUSO Video Festival Jury Prize 2011 (Lisbon), and the 2005 EDP New Artists Prize nomination. In addition, Teixeira was an artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), MacDowell Colony, 18 th Street Arts Center, and the Headlands Center for the Arts (USA).
Archie Green
Dream Chaser. MC. Creator Extraordinaire. Cleveland, Ohio rapper Archie Green is a dream believer. But more than that, he’s a “dream, then wake up and go-getter.” Green’s pen game is over twenty years strong, coupled with a business acumen he picked up while attending Morehouse College and eventually NYU for Music Business. Archie is also an advocate for mental health, having himself been diagnosed with clinical depression. His introspective single, “Layers,” which premiered at VICE.com in 2016, garnered over 25,000 streams in 2 weeks. The 35-year-old artist subsequently began to host more dialogues on mental illness with Peel Dem Layers Back, a Hip-Hop centered workshop to promote mental health awareness. Most recently, Green made history after becoming the first rapper to ever perform at the world-renowned Severance Hall which is home to The Cleveland Orchestra. The performance, titled “My Violin Weighs A Ton,” served as a summer-long partnership with Lexington-Bell Community Center which engaged the center’s youth incorporating music and writing instruction to address areas of mental health as well as bridge the gap for diversity and inclusion in arts and culture in Cleveland. Archie has been featured on various Cleveland-based media outlets including WKYC Channel 3, WCPN Ideastream, Cleveland Magazine, Cleveland.com, and Cleveland Scene. His most recent noteworthy accomplishment is being selected as one of The Guardian’s 2019 Cleveland City Champions.
Christina Vassallo
Christina Vassallo is a convener, cultural producer, and instigator. She currently serves as Executive Director of The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, where she is redefining a living laboratory that commissions, presents, and collects experimental works of art. Her role at FWM is supported by her work as a member of the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program and as a 2021 German Marshall Fellow—an opportunity through which she will study the rebounding of transatlantic cultural spaces from the effects of COVID-19. Previously, Christina was Executive + Artistic Director of SPACES. Her most notable initiatives during her 6-year tenure include spearheading the SPACES relocation to its current home; developing the Urgent Art Fund and the Satellite Fund, which distributed $85,000 to 15 Cuyahoga County artists per year; expanding outreach initiatives; and curating critically acclaimed issue-oriented exhibitions, including Michael Rakowitz: A Color Removed for the FRONT Triennial, The First 100+ Days, America’s Well-Armed Militias, and the SPACES 40th Anniversary exhibition. Before running SPACES, Christina was based in NYC, working as Executive Director ofFlux Factory. Additionally, she has curated exhibitions for Everson Museum of Art, Jersey City Museum, NURTUREart, Lafayette College, and New Haven University.