Zeelie Brown

Zeelie Brown’s first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama. They make Black&queer wilderness refuges called “soulscapes” to (re)imagine what nature might be. Zeelie works with the MIT Department of Architecture, NOMAS, and Group Project to create sustainable human waste solutions in their native rural Alabama.

While in residence, Zeelie worked on Little Creole Gardens, which aims to tend a revolutionary front of Black wilderness that rages against the tide of white greed threatening to drown our world. To that aim, they spent six weeks designing a Creole liberation wild garden — via research in New Orleans’ wealth of Gulf South visual and material culture archives, providing a solid groundwork for future acts within a Creole survival aesthetic.

Quintron & Miss Pussy Cat

Quintron and Miss Pussycat created a live puppet show about extreme weather events, which utilized a “Wildlife Organ” built and installed by Quintron at A Studio in the Woods. The Wildlife Organ is envisioned as a musical instrument that uses specially-housed microphones to intimately capture and process the broad spectrum of natural sounds on site, routing each sound back to a playable, musical keyboard.

Quintron has been inventing electronic gadgets and creating genre-defying noise, soundscape, and house rocking dance music in New Orleans for over 20 years, much of it in collaboration with artist / puppeteer Panacea Theriac aka “Miss Pussycat”. In 1999, Quintron helped to foster a DIY analog synth revival with a patented instrument called the DRUM BUDDY, a light activated analog drum machine which creates murky, low-fidelity, rhythmic patterns. These experiments eventually led to Quintron’s focus on a weather-controlled drone synthesizer called Weather Warlock and a website devoted to streaming its music called Weather For The Blind.

Miss Pussycat began her career in art and puppetry as a child in the Southern Baptist Church of Antlers Oklahoma as part of the Christian Puppet Youth Ministry. She later moved to New Orleans and started a secret nightclub in her house, called Pussycat Caverns, which hosted bands and all types of performance in a unique and lively atmosphere. Today, and for over 20 years, she is busy presenting live puppet shows in rock clubs, libraries, and secret clubhouses all around the world, and singing and playing maracas with Quintron.

Her puppets and their worlds often become the genesis for other art projects, such as ceramic statues, paintings, videos, and electronic soundtracks. Four albums of her puppet show soundtracks have been released over the years; on Hanson Records, Skin Graft, and Terror Vision, as well various singles.

Her puppet movies include: Trixie and the Treetunks (for VBS), The Mystery in Old Bathbath, North Pole Nutrias (starring the Al Scramuzza and featuring the voice of Sheriff Harry Lee), and Electric Swamp (featuring the voice of Antoinette K-Doe and telling a story of Formosan termites and the Emperor of the Universe). In 2017 she created a character driven short, Frenchy and Jett, for Disney.

Art shows and installations are an important aspect of Miss Pussycat’s work. She has had exhibits at The New Orleans Museum of Art (Parallel Universe: Quintron and Miss Pussycat at City Park), and the Center for Contemporary Art in New Orleans (ANTHROPOMORPHIZER!). In 2017 she was a featured artist for New Orleans art triennial, Prospect 4, and had an exhibit (Cardboard Demon Mask) at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art. In 2019 her show The Puppet Worlds of Miss Pussycat was at the Galveston Art Center in Galveston Texas. Recent art projects include solo exhibits at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie Texas, the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi Mississippi.

Miss Pussycat’s most widely known role though is performing puppet shows, singing, and playing maracas in the band Quintron and Miss Pussycat. Together they present live organ-driven party music and puppet shows all over the world. Their latest album is Goblin Alert on Goner Records.

Niki Franco

Niki Franco is a Caribbean abolitionist community organizer, writer, and facilitator of spaces for collective study. Seeking to disrupt the institutionalized bureaucratic frameworks of academia and transactional ways in which relationships exist under capitalism, her work experiments with truth-telling, radical history and thought, and revolutionary imagination. She also curates educational and cultural programming that navigates the current urgency on global solidarity, environmental and ancestral preservation, and strategies on building emotional and intellectual capacities to dismantle systems of oppression that inform and deform our current lives. She is the host of “Getting to the Root of It with Venus Roots,” a podcast that leans into conversations with artists, theorists, and organizers.

Niki’s residency project functioned as the seeds for a short video educational/creative resource for community organizers, activists, researchers, artists, and educators available to the public. “Constellations Illuminating the Swamp”  have audio, visual, conversational, and written components to it. The short video is about 5 minutes and shot in both digital and camcorder footage, featuring emblematic visuals that represent communities of New Orleans, as well as making connections to the environments in other parts of the US South and Caribbean. She recorded poetic excerpts, interview excerpts, as well as informational-educational voiceovers. This project will reject binary interpretations of climate change and will center the resistance against disaster capitalism and climate crisis in places like New Orleans, Miami, and Puerto Rico, for example. It will be available for the public through YouTube, videoshare, and social media.

Nailah Jefferson and Laurie Sumie

With nature as their guide, a New Orleans-born filmmaker and Hawaii-born artist from two different tourist-driven, coastal economies grappling with climate-caused sea rise explore the historical effects invasive species have on fragile native ecosystems and relate it to the growing threat of gentrification in their neighborhoods. We ask the question, “Can equity be maintained when invasion occurs?”

Nailah Jefferson is a native New Orleans filmmaker intrigued and inspired by the enduring human spirit, whose films span fiction and nonfiction. Her acclaimed work has been distributed domestically and internationally on the film festival circuit, theatrically and televised. Nailah’s debut documentary Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe a la Hache, told the story of the little known African American oyster fishing community in Louisiana in the aftermath of the 2010 BP Oil Spill. In 2017, Nailah’s short documentary Essence Magazine’s Black Girl Magic Episode 4 was nominated for a National Magazine Ellie award. That same year, Nailah’s first narrative film Plaquemines was chosen as an American Black Film Festival HBO Shorts finalist and streamed on HBO/ Cinemax platforms. Plaquemines is now available on ShortsTV. Nailah’s current work includes the forthcoming short documentary Descended From A Promised Land: The Legacy of Black Wall Street about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the feature documentary Commuted-the story of Danielle Metz, a woman whose triple life plus twenty year drug sentence was commuted by President Obama in 2016 after serving 23 years in prison. Commuted is the winner of the 2019 Black Public Media PitchBlack competition. The project is also supported by the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Perspective Fund, Southern Documentary Fund, Black Public Media, ITVS and Firelight Media. nailahjefferson.com

Laurie Sumiye is a conceptual artist & storyteller whose work about nature and species extinction plays with themes of reciprocity, care and spirituality. Her cross-disciplinary practice spans drawing, painting, animation, sculpture, installation, film and immersive media. She has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Hawai‘i, UK, South Africa and Brazil, and screened her award-winning films at DOCNYC, BAMcinemaFest and PS1MoMA. She was selected for documentary fellowships with Sundance Institute, Firelight Media & UnionDocs Center for Documentary Arts. Laurie was awarded residencies with Blue Mountain Center (NY), Digital Artist Studios (N.Ireland), Sacatar Institute (Brazil) and Artfunkl (UK). Laurie has an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from CUNY Hunter College, BA in Art & BS in Communications from Bradley University, and studied art at Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence and Pratt Institute in New York. Laurie returned to Hawaii where she was born and raised to work on her first feature documentary. A PARADISE LOST is a hybrid animated documentary about the first animal that sued to save its kind from extinction. The project was awarded funding from Pacific Islanders in Communications and Firelight Media, and selected for Good Pitch Local Hawaii. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Mililani, Hawaii. lauriesumiye.com

Rachel Lin Weaver

Rachel Lin Weaver is an artist whose work spans video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Weaver’s creative interests relate directly to an upbringing in rural Alaska and West Virginia, and their projects explore intersectional identity, queer/trans embodiment, memory, and interdependence. They find many useful metaphors in the natural world. Weaver’s work has been exhibited in 40 countries, and they have held residencies at the Indiana Dunes, the Weight of Mountains Filmmaking Biennial, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the University of Utah Taft-Nicholson Center, and the Icelandic Textiles Centre. They regularly collaborate with Indigenous communities toward creative media sovereignty and the preservation of intangible cultural memory. Weaver received an MFA at Indiana University Bloomington and a BA at Berea College. A member of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid network, Weaver is also the Director of Cinema Reset, the XR and Emerging Media program of the New Orleans Film Festival. They have forthcoming exhibitions in London, Brooklyn, Santa Fe, and Addis Ababa. Weaver currently lives and works in the mountains of Appalachia where they are an Associate Professor of Creative Technologies at the School of Visual Arts at Virginia

While in residence, Weaver worked on MOSQUITO DANCE. Created through partnerships with tropical medicine researchers, entomologists, and Native elders, MOSQUITO DANCE is a two-part experimental short film and video/projection mapping installation. Looking closely at mosquitos as vectors and cultural symbols, the project contends with disease history in New Orleans and the greater American South, climate crisis-caused tropical disease spikes (which correlate to booms in mosquito population), and Louisiana American Indian community resilience in the face of climate crisis.

Ashley Teamer

Ashley Teamer’s collages explore the relationships between the body, nature, space, and time. She uses painting, sculpture, photography, and sound to creatively intervene with indoor and outdoor architecture revealing the malleability of our built environment. Through layering images, Teamer charts invented landscapes where dialogues between divergent moments and relationships are bridged.