Art & Mind: Covid, Climate & Our Futures

Sponsors/Funders

"Art & Mind 2025: Covid, Climate and Our Future"

Sista Creatives Rising and our 2025 Art Direction Team are currently developing the next event, set for FREE tickets to go live in August 2025, and for the event to occur in September 2025. As we lead up to the event, more details and official graphics will release. Please view our initative statement below, and our core Art Direction Team. More team members, speakers and our artists will be showcased as we approach the release of tickets.

Stay Tuned!

Our 2025 Team Members

The majority of our team members are disabled, queer and have been (and continue to be) heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team consists of folks from all around North America, Australia and Indonesia.

Art Direction Team: Nabila Nugroho / Crezi Creative - Graphics Assistant

Nabila Nugroho (K027) is an artist and graphic designer based in Indonesia. Under her design brand Crezi Creative, she has worked with various brands that focuses on branding and illustration. She also has her own personal project named Maquire by K027 which she creates original character merchandises.

CREZI LOGO ID
This is Crezi Creative's logo that consists of white "CREZI" words with orange colored & inverted light bulb shape for the "i" on a black background.

ID
A photo of Nabila. She is a tall Chinese woman wearing glasses and has long hair. In this picture she is wearing a white graphic tshirt, black jacket and posing with her left hand on her hips. The background is a monochrome grafitti wall.

ID: Chi is a nonbinary biracial Black person who has short curly black hair, brown eyes, and light tan skin. In this photo they are facing forward and smiling slightly, wearing a black sweater vest over a white shirt with a silver chain and small silver earrings.

Art Direction Team: Chi / Chillusions - Graphics Assistant

Chi, who uses they/them pronouns, is a 31 year old artist, graphic designer, and mental healthcare worker based in New York State. They have contributed illustrative works to local organizations, mutual aid projects, and virtual advocacy spaces since 2018. For the past 4 years Chi has lived with chronic illnesses and disabilities that impact their ability to create, so through their work they hope to create a healing experience for all by focusing on projects that deal with disability, community building, liberation, and justice for marginalized groups.

Outreach & Resources: Masked NH - Han & Katie

Masked NH is a COVID cautious virtual and in person hang out hub which also provides| COVID cautious education & resources.

ID
A bright and colorful selfie of Han and Katie from MaskedNH. Han and Katie are both white. Han is a feminine nonbinary person. They are on the left of the image. They are wearing a keffiyeh headband. Han has short brown hair that flips out on the ends. Han has short, straight across bangs, and is wearing a blue KN95 respirator. They have bold black eyeliner on, are wearing a silver choker necklace and a black shirt. They are holding up a white card that says free Palestine on it with a red and white watermelon slice. Katie is a feminine woman. Katie is on the right. She has long wavy brown hair and is wearing a black KN95 respirator. She is holding up a white postcard that says free Palestine on it with a cartoon cat. Katie is wearing an all black outfit. The background behind Han & Katie is a blue/purple ombre.

ID: "White woman with shoulder-length brown hair dressed in a black hat, black-framed eyeglasses, a black feather boa and a black dress."

Art Direction Team: Jan Steckel - Run of Show Development

Jan Steckel was a Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician who took care of Spanish-speaking children until chronic pain persuaded her to change professions to writer, poet and medical editor. She is an activist for bisexual and disability rights who lives in Oakland, California.
Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her work won the Goodreads Newsletter Poetry Contest, a Zeiser Grant for Women Artists, the Jewel by the Bay Poetry Competition, Triplopia’s Best of the Best competition, and three Pushcart nominations.

ID: Sarena, a brown person with shoulder length wavy dark brown hair peers into the camera. They have on a pop of gold eyeshadow, a tiny carabiner necklace, small gold hoop earrings, and black chest tattoos of ivy and an acorn peeking out from the color of their black and white floral dress.

Outreach & Resources: Sarena Brown

Sarena Brown (they/them) is a visual artist and poet, a Dreamyard Fellow, and a Sista Uprising Fund grant recipient. They make art to feel through gender feelings, queer belonging, and disability. Their artwork has been on display at The Painted Bride, Studio 3C, and elsewhere. Their chapbook "i am thankful for feeling & for the first time on earth" is out now with Big Lucks. Sarena earned their MFA in Poetry at UMass Amherst. You can find more of their work at Track//Four, Night Coffee, and on social media @sarenabrownie.

Mel Chilianis is a white, Anglo-Greek queer person. In the photo, Mel is smiling, showing a little teeth, they are wearing a light brown turtleneck jumper. Behind Mel it is dusk and she is visiting a National Park on south eastern lands belonging to the Boon Wurrung and Gunai Kurnai First Nations. Mel is in the foreground of the photo, while the blurred background show hills reflected in a tidal river with pink clouds above and below.

Art Direction Team: Mel Chilianis - Composer

(They/Them)
My practice ties together performance, temporality and the body inviting viewers/listeners to reflect on the fragile arrangement of the chronicity of illness, disability, technologies and culture and the environment. Using the sonic and musical, I explore disorientation and consider how I can fold the materials of sound, improvised music and spatial settings into engaging encounters for myself and others. I recently was a musician in residence for Hub Feenix Residency in Finland and Tenjinyama Residency in Japan. As a composer and sound designer I have worked with Sista Creatives Rising, on their Art and Mind virtual film documentary. I've published articles in feminist technoscience journals and feminist journals on the question of music, the gendering of the flute, where I think through speculative trajectories of repair.

Photo by Shawn Marquis. Photo Description: Artist and dancer Michael Winward is smiling, looking down and away from the camera. He has white skin, dark brown hair, and a short beard. He is wearing a grey tee shirt, and holding a jacket over one shoulder.

Sponsor / Grant Application Support - J. Michael Winward, Co-Founder of Dancing Queerly Boston

Dancing Queerly is an annual festival featuring workshops, mixers, discussions, and performances by and for the LGBTQ2SIA+ community, friends, and allies. Dancing Queerly’s mission is to bring queer folks with varying dance experience together in the joy of dance as audience members and participants.

Sista Creatives Rising

MORE SOON

Initiative Statement

COVID is not over. Through SCR and Art & Mind, we raise awareness about COVID and its ongoing effect on our communities - BIPOC, Disabled, and Queer. According to WHO, the international health emergency has ended, but COVID-19 is still an ongoing pandemic, with The Hill stating in their article, "Is Covid-19 Still a 'Pandemic?' (May 2024) that COVID is consistently present, but not limited to a particular area or population, which, if it were, would be 'endemic.'

COVID is a mass disabling event (according to WHO) that is airborne (according to the CDC), disabling those who weren't disabled previously and worsening the conditions of those who were already disabled. According to Forbes, 1 in 5 Adults with COVID-19 develop Long COVID, and according to the University Of Nebraska Medical Center, "each subsequent COVID infection will increase your risk of developing chronic health issues like diabetes, kidney disease, organ failure, and even mental health." We hope to raise awareness about the ongoing effects of COVID-19 while highlighting the threat of climate change accelerating adverse outcomes such as more illnesses, disability rights issues, displacement, and environmental damage.

CNBC news stated in 2021- "U.S. Covid cases need to fall below 10,000 a day to get to a 'degree of normality…' but Covid cases in the U.S. may need to fall as low as 3,300 per day for the nation to gain control over the virus."

America has never reached this low level of infection. Infections finally lowered below 100,000 per day in April 2021. Viewing data scientist and infectious disease modeler JP Weiland's charts, we've continuously seen over 125,000 cases (at a minimum) per day, with the omicron strain reaching over 5,000,000. In many instances, we've reached over 100,000,000 COVID cases per day. JP Weiland references data from Biobot.io and NWSS (CDC Funded).

We want to educate people on how these issues have isolated many disabled artists and how art can be used as a tool to empower and uplift others, fight against these injustices, and imagine an equitable and empathetic world.

Through this theme, we feel it's imperative to highlight Indigenous experiences about COVID & Climate, with our artists underscoring the impact on Native American communities and the plight of Indigenous Palestinians as they suffer from loss of shelter, food, clean water, famine, rampant disease and loss of their ecosystem. We hope you can join us in understanding and hearing these stories and feel encouraged to take action for humanity to reach peace & prosperity through the arts.

Event Speakers

This year our speakers will be experts on COVID, climate and the ongoing grief caused by these tragedies, all while finding hope and clarity as we move forward into the future. Speakers will be officially announced & highlighted in Summer 2025

Accessibility Statement

With knowledge gained from the disability community, COVID conscious community, lived experience and guidance from disability-focused residency Socially Distant Art, Art & Mind shows incorporate several aspects of virtual accessibility. Amaranthia joined the Socially Distant Art cohort in August 2022.

Our team, which changes per event, accomplish tasks such as content warnings, open captioning, closed captioning, auto captioning, and tech assistance during the Zoom reception. Shows from 2023 forward include live ASL interpretation. All speakers will Self-ID before presenting. This is also included in our documentaries. Artist videos contain artwork descriptions as well.

All gallery works via Kunstmatrix are accompanied with image descriptions and video descriptions.

A pattern design showcasing vector art of disabled folks doing regular activities with their friends and family. Some poeple are in wheelchairs, playing with their kids while using objects of accessibility such as walking devices, etc. The colors are vibrant.

Contact

General Inquiry
Art & Mind Inquiries
Virtual Workshop/Presentation Inquiries
Virtual Speaking Engagements
Virtual Media Interview

info@sistacreativesrising.com

Sponsors/Funders

"Art & Mind 2025: Covid, Climate and Our Future"

Our 2025 Team Members

The majority of our team members are disabled, queer and have been (and continue to be) heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team consists of folks from all around North America, Australia and Indonesia.

Contact

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Accessibility Policy