Co-MISSION Artist-in-Residence

AiRos 頌恩 medill is a yellow hapa nonbinary trans Taiwanese american circle keeper, care worker, storyteller, facilitator, bodyworker, and culture bearer who is moving to organize abundance in the ecology of home. AiRos practices with the 5 elements (water, wood, fire, metal, earth) to align bodies to heaven and earth in reciprocity and reverence of feeling and the distribution of energies. As part of the diaspora air has a lifelong practice of traveling, moving through and shifting culture.

Co-MISSION Artist-in-Residence

Jamila Kekulah is ever evolving. They are a mover, an observer, a movement creator, a lifelong learner, and a deep listener of the body. Jamila is interested in investigating how we inhabit ourselves and each other in this human experience.

Co-MISSION Artist-in-Residence

Eshan Rafi is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, expanded photography, and video. Their works deal with the intersection of political events and personal archives, often staging the impossibility of representation. Their work has been exhibited, performed, and screened internationally including at SummerWorks Lab, Toronto; Sharjah Film Platform; M:ST 9 Performance Art Biennale, Calgary; and neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin. Rafi holds an MFA in Art, Theory, and Practice from Northwestern University, Evanston.

Co-MISSION Fellow-in-Residence

Lani T. Montreal writes to create her home in the diaspora. She is a queer feminist Filipina educator, writer, performer, and community activist based in Chicago, whose works have been published/produced in North America, the Philippines, and in cyberspace. She is a two-time 3Arts Residency Awardee (2009 and 2016) and a 2017 alumna of the VONA Writers of Color Workshop.

Co-MISSION Fellow-in-Residence

Najee-Zaid Searcy is a Chicago born interdisciplinary artist with a focus on performance and identity. Najee-Zaid uses their background in music, facilitation, and informal arts learning to explore the intersection of space and identity within the context of healing modalities through their new body of work “Immersion” which received its debut at Elastic Arts late 2022. Najee-Zaid’s latest works combine elemental and plant ancestries with the human experience while hybridizing their performance acoustically, electronically, and spatially with a range of accessible sensory activations. Learn more at najeezaidsearcy.com