(55) Artist Talks

Genesis Báez (55) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Massachusetts, Báez grew up in both the Northeast US and Puerto Rico. Working primarily with photography, her work considers how people relate to place, community, and imagination.

Báez holds an MFA in photography from Yale University, a BFA with honors from MassArt, and is an alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited her work internationally, including ARCO Madrid with Ponce & Robles, Huxley Parlour in London, Yancey Richardson in New York, and CHART in New York. Báez is a 2022 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Photography, and is the recipient of the 2022 Capricious Photo Award. Her work has recently appeared in publications such as Aperture, The British Journal of Photography, The Cut, and BOMB Magazine.

Báez is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Art at Williams College, and a graduate critic in photography at the Yale School of Art.

Kerri Conlon is an artist and educator living and working in San Francisco,CA. Kerri’s work focuses on construction, not only architecturally, but also in the way that culture and identity are constructed. Through tactile manipulation of both craft and architectural materials, she creates large scale sculptural installations that fuse the architectural with the ornamental. As a result, this in-between carves out space for vulnerability, while undermining the desire to seek shelter in the ideals represented by classical and contemporary architecture. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art (2019) and her BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design (2009). She has exhibited nationally including in San Francisco, CA, New York, NY, Providence, RI, and Ferguson, MO.

Ansel Elkins (55) was born and raised in Alabama, the daughter of a half Puerto Rican mother and a father who was the son of sharecroppers. She earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her first collection, Blue Yodel (2015), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected by Carl Philips. Her poems have appeared in magazines and journals such as The American Scholar, The Believer, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, and the Southern Review, among others. Elkins is the recipient of a Paris Review Writer-in-Residence fellowship, “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, and the Fugue Ron McFarland Prize for Poetry. She has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the North Carolina Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where she is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Berea College.

May Jeong is a writer for Vanity Fair. She is the 2022 winner of the Ida B.Wells Award administered by the Newswomen's Club of New York. Her upcoming book on sex work was awarded a 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in- Progress Award and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Her work has been anthologized in the 2020 Best American Sports Writing among others. Her reporting from Afghanistan, where she lived from 2013 to 2017, has been awarded the South Asian Journalist Association’s Daniel Pearl Award, and the Bayeux Calvados Normandy Award for War Correspondents, and has been recognized by the Kurt Schork and Livingston Awards. She lives on land ceded by the Lenape people in the Treaty of Shackamaxon in 1682.