Shani Peters (b. 1981 Lansing, MI) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in New Orleans, LA. She holds a B.A. from Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from the City College of New York. Peters has presented work in the U.S. and abroad at the New Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem; Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in South Korea; the National Gallery of Zimbabwe; and the Bauhaus Dessau. Selected residencies include those hosted by the Mississippi Museum of Art, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Laundromat Project (NY), and Project Row Houses (TX). Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Creative Capital, the Rauschenberg Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Peters is a former faculty member of The City College of New York, Pratt Institute, and Parsons School of Design. She is a Co-Director of The Black School, an artist initiated experimental art school that is presently working to build a physical home for it’s art education and community programing in New Orleans 7th Ward.

Jane Hait is the founder of the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), a nonprofit arts organization, research center and publisher in New York City founded to expand public discourses and historical records to reflect art’s abundant pasts, presents and futures.

From 2003 to 2015, Hait co-owned Wallspace, a contemporary art gallery in Chelsea. When Wallspace closed in 2015, Hait began to investigate how a nonprofit platform might support and
amplify the diverse, varied and vibrant voices so critical to the wellbeing of the cultural ecosystem in New York and beyond. Since 2016, Hait has worked in dialogue with with artists, curators, writers, researchers, publishers, facilitators, scholars and cultural workers to imagine an arts organization that would champion the polyvocality of arts and culture as integral to the movement towards a more just society. CARA is a result of this inquiry.

Hait holds an advanced certificate in Management for Public and Nonprofit Organizations from NYU’s Robert Wagner School of Public Service and a bachelor’s degree in Art Semiotics from Brown University. She sits on the Director’s Councils of SculptureCenter and Triple Canopy, the Publisher’s Circle of Blank Forms, and the Feminist Art Council at the Brooklyn Museum, all in
New York, and on the Director’s Circle at ICA LA and Steering Committee of the Artists Acquisition Club in Los Angeles.

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist and writer Justin Beal, and their two children.

Katheen Goncharov is a Senior Curator at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. She served as US Commissioner to the 50th Venice Biennale where she curated an exhibition by Fred Wilson for the American pavilion.

She has also organized international exhibitions in Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, Bologna, Venice, and Rome, as well as numerous exhibitions and projects in the US.

She was Public Art Curator at the List Visual Art Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she oversaw the Institute’s Percent-for-Art Program; Executive Director of Rutgers University’s Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions artist-in-residence program, and Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum at Duke University.

For fourteen years she served as Curator of the University Art Collection at The New School in New York City where she built a major art collection and organized public programs for the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.