About the speakers:
Matthew Goulish co-founded Every house has a door in 2008 with director Lin Hixson. He is dramaturg and performer for the company. His books include 39 microlectures – in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2001), The Brightest Thing in the World – 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure (Green Lantern Press, 2012), Pitch and Revelation—Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, co-authored with Will Daddario (Punctum Books, 2022), and Kingfisher (both are worse, 2024). His essays have appeared in Richard Rezac Address (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Propositions in the Making – Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the Writing Program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lin Hixson co-founded Every house has a door in 2008, the Chicago-based performance company that she directs. She was director of the performance group Goat Island (1987 – 2009). Every house has a door has presented both nationally and internationally including Prague, Helsinki, Glasgow, London, New York, Austin, and Chicago. She has received awards from the United States Artists, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Driehaus Foundation, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Residencies have included The Bellagio Center, MANCC, and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Her writing has been published in the journals Poetry, Performance Research, and Parallax, as well as the anthologies The Creative Critic – Writing as/about Practice and The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader. She is Professor Emerita of Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts.
Stephanie Cristello is a contemporary art curator, critic, and author based in Chicago, IL. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 with a Liberal Arts Thesis in Visual Critical Studies. She was previously the Senior Editor US for ArtSlant (2012–2018) and founding Editor-in-Chief of THE SEEN, Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary & Modern Art. Her writing has been published in ArtReview, BOMB Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Mousse Magazine, OSMOS, and Portable Gray (where she serves as Editor-at-Large), in addition to numerous exhibition catalogues nationally and internationally. She served as the Artistic Director of EXPO CHICAGO (2013–2020) and is currently the Director / Curator at Chicago Manual Style and the curator of recent exhibitions at the Driehaus Museum (Chicago). From 2020–21 she curated exhibitions at Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark) and the Malmö Art Museum (Sweden), and was a Curatorial Advisor to the 2020 Busan Biennale (South Korea). She is the author of Theodora Allen: Saturnine (Motto / Kunsthal Aarhus, 2021) and Barbara Kasten: Architecture and Film 2015–2020 (Skira, 2022), which was awarded a grant by the Graham Foundation.
Karsten Lund is Senior Curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art institution with a long history going back to 1915. In this role he organizes solo and group exhibitions, works closely with artists on new commissions, edits publications, and oversees wide-ranging public programs. In 2017 he launched Intermissions, an ongoing series of performances and other category-defying live works, staged twice a year in the gallery space in between exhibitions. Now in its eighth season, with a pause during the pandemic, the series has featured projects by artists variously incorporating sound, choreography or improvised movement, collaborative processes, music, digital media, site-specific systems, and more. The next Intermissions project, by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, will be presented on November 16th and 17th. Karsten has previously worked at MCA Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP).
Born in Georgetown, Guyana, janera solomon draws inspiration from the music and dance, writers and artists of the African and Caribbean diaspora. She holds a BA from University of Pittsburgh and an MA in Writing (nonfiction) from Johns Hopkins University. Her cultural strategy projects with Lord Cultural Resources include the Museum of the African Diaspora, Louis Armstrong House, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Ministry of Tourism in Ontario, and August Wilson Center for African American History & Culture. For more than a decade, janera served as executive director of Kelly Strayhorn Theater, transforming the community center into a national producer and presenter of contemporary performance while still maintaining its role as a vital neighborhood cultural anchor.
Named by Pittsburgh Magazine as one of the “50 Most Powerful People in Pittsburgh,” janera serves on the board of trustees for Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, International Women’s Forum (Pittsburgh Chapter), and University of Pittsburgh Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. She is working on a forthcoming collection of essays and poems. In 2024, in collaboration with a team of colleagues, she launched ARTPOWER Inc, to transform personal financial management tools for independent artists.
About the presenters:
The Driehaus Museum engages and inspires the global community through exploration and ongoing conversations in art, architecture, and design of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions are presented in an immersive experience within the restored Nickerson Mansion, completed in 1883, at the height of the Gilded Age, and the 1926 Murphy Auditorium. The Museum’s collection reflects and is inspired by the collecting interests, vision, and focus of its founder, the late Richard H. Driehaus.
The Luminarts Cultural Foundation cultivates Chicago’s vibrant arts community by supporting exemplary young artists through its competitive programs that offer financial awards, artistic opportunities, and mentoring that bridge the gap between education and career. Founded in 1949 as the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation (CAF), Luminarts Cultural Foundation was created by members of the Union League Club of Chicago as a separate, not-for-profit organization. Deeply rooted in the Union League Club of Chicago, Luminarts strengthens the cultural community of Chicago by upholding the club’s century-long tradition of advocating for the arts.
Artadia has awarded over $6 million in unrestricted funds to over 400 artists nationally. Celebrating visual artists and their foundational role in shaping society, the Artadia Award benefits three artists annually in seven major US cities with high concentrations of creative workers—Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Image: Every house has a door and Essi Kausalainen, “Broken Aquarium,” 2022, image courtesy of the artists.
