Meet NYFA’s Artist Advisory Committee!

These artists help NYFA stay true to its mission of serving artists at critical stages of their creative lives.

NYFA is pleased to welcome 10 new members to its Artist Advisory Committee. Meet the new and existing members here!

The Artist Advisory Committee plays an important role in ensuring that NYFA stays true to its mission of serving artists at critical stages of their creative lives. The main duty of advisors is to attend a yearly meeting to approve the proposed selection of NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows before it is presented to and approved by the NYFA board. Other duties include keeping NYFA informed about the issues facing their community, to help inform NYFA to meet the needs of its constituents.

By serving on this committee, artists agree to a three-year term. The committee also includes at least one member of the Board of Directors who is an artist to serve as liaison with the Board.

NYFA thanks past members Elizabeth Colomba, Tim Davis, Wafa Ghnaim, Sarah Hennies, Joyce Hwang, Tama Janowitz, Sibyl Kempson, Rajesh Parameswaran, Lina Puerta, Tashi Sharzur, Jayson P. Smith, Tattfoo Tan, Donna Uchizono, Ife Vanable for serving on the Artist Advisory Committee. Your passion and insights will be missed!

Current Advisors

Martita Abril
NYFA Learning Participant and NYFA Coaching Consultant
Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program Mentee ‘13 and Mentor

Martita Abril (Pichu) is an artist and curator from Tijuana, México. She has collaborated with artists including Lux Boreal, Kim Brandt, Yanira Castro, Yoshiko Chuma, Milka Djordjevich, Tess Dworman, Rebecca Davis, Devynn Emory, Simone Forti, Daria Fain and Robert Kocik, Allyson Green, Joan Jonas, Abigail Levine, Mina Nishimura, Cori Olinghouse, Okwui Okpokwasili, Will Rawls, Larissa Velez-Jackson, and Cathy Weis. Abril was part of the Fresh Tracks Residency at NYLA, Dance and Process at The Kitchen, and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research. Abril has served as a mentor for the NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Program and co-curates In/Between, a yearly exhibition for Immigrant Artists she created in 2019 with Yanira Castro and Poppy DeltaDawn. She also continues to guide workshops in Bushwick gardens to immigrant families, through the iLAND program by Jennifer Monson. She is currently the Director of MR at the Judson Church Program, the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Tour Company Manager, and a coach to immigrant artists through NYFA’s Coaching program.

Migdalia Cruz
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Playwriting/Screenwriting ‘16

Migdalia Cruz, the 2023 DGF Legacy and 2025 Re-Focus/Roundabout Playwright, is a Bronx-born playwright, lyricist, translator, and librettist with over 60 works performed in 150 venues across 40 cities in 12 countries. Her awards include: NEA, McKnight, NYSCA, and TCG/Pew, and the 2013 Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright. Cruz’s mentor María Irene Fornés at INTAR and her residency at Latino Chicago nurtured her voice. She co-chairs the DGF Playwriting Fellows, mentors the Latinx Playwrights’ Circle, was listed on The Kilroys Web 2023, and taught at Princeton, NYU, IU, and as founding member of the Fornés Institute’s Playwriting Workshop. Cruz, an alumna of New Dramatists, is a member of The Tent, a theater for esteemed “vintage” playwrights. Featured in: Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre, Shakespeare And Latinidad, Diasporic Journeys: Interviews with Puerto Rican Writers in the U.S., A History of Latinx Performing Arts in the U.S., The Routledge Companion to Latiné Theatre and Performance, and Fornés In Context. Her anthology, The Impossible Plays of Migdalia Cruz, was published by Tripwire Harlot Press in 2024.

Alvin Eng
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Performance Art/Emergent Forms ‘91, Playwriting/Screenwriting ‘96, Nonfiction Literature ‘20

Alvin Eng is a born-and-raised NYC author/playwright, educator, and performer. His plays and performances have been seen Off-Broadway; in Paris; Hong Kong; and Guangzhou, China. He is currently an NYPL Fellow––developing a companion book to his memoir, OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond (Fordham University Press 2022). Eng’s next nonfiction book, URBAN ORACLE BONES, is a stage-to-page adaptation of his solo acoustic punk raconteur performance piece, “HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN (or How I Kicked Punk).” Both works examine the profound impact of The Opium Wars and opium on the Chinese Diaspora to NYC as well as on NYC’s “heroin chic” punk/counterculture of Eng’s formative years. Other books/works: THREE TREES a play about sculptor Alberto Giacometti––the first of Eng’s “Portrait Plays” series of historical dramas that explore the parallels between portraiture and power as manifested in the convergence of different artistic disciplines and eras; and TOKENS? The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage (oral history/performance text anthology). Honors include: Fulbright Specialist Scholar in U.S. Studies/Theatre, LMCC, and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships.

Ulises Gonzales
NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship
Project: Chatos Inhumanos

Ulises Gonzales has worked as a correspondent for El Comercio (Perú) and La Opinión de A Coruña (Spain). He writes the weekly blog Newyópolis for the journalistic magazine Frontera D (Madrid, Spain) and his own literary blog, The New York Street. He has received awards for his writing and his graphic stories. He published his first novel, País de hartos, in 2010. His interviews and short stories have been published in the magazines Buensalvaje (Lima, 2013) Revista de Occidente (Madrid, 2012), Luvina (Guadalajara University, México, 2011), Renacimiento (Sevilla, Spain 2011), and The Barcelona Review (Spain, 2010). His comics have been exhibited in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá. His poems have been published in the Hostos Review (New York). He is the Editor of the New York-based Latin American literary magazine Los bárbaros and the director of the New York-based publishing house Chatos Inhumanos. He has collaborated with the magazine Words Without Borders. In 2024, he wrote a collection of personal essays: La vida papaya en Nueva York (Suburbano, Miami).

Shanti Grumbine
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts ‘20

Shanti Grumbine is a New York-based multimedia artist. She has been an artist in residence at the Millay Colony, Ucross, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Saltonstall Foundation, Wave Hill Winter Workspace Residency, Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency, Artist in the Marketplace (AIM), Women’s Studio Workshop, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, BRIC Workspace, Interlude Artist Residency, and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. Fellowships and grants include the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Grant, RVAC Money and Materials Grant, Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist Grant, and the A.I.R Gallery Fellowship. Select exhibition venues include The Bronx Museum, Dorsky Gallery, Dorsky Museum, CCA Santa Fe, Love Apple Art Space, Magnan-Metz Gallery, Fridman Gallery, Planthouse Gallery, PS 122, Smack Mellon, Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and IPCNY. Grumbine received an MFA degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Amir Hariri
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts ‘17

Amir Hariri was born in Tehran, Iran, and immigrated to the U.S. to attend college in the early 1990s. After earning a master’s degree in engineering from Cornell University, he spent over a decade working on design projects from concert halls and museums to glass designs for Apple. Amir spent five years studying painting and printmaking at the Art Students League, during which time he served as an assistant instructor and as a member of the board. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with pieces included in public and private collections in the United States, Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, and Japan. In New York, he has exhibited at various venues, including Atamian-Hovsepian Curatorial Practice, St. Thomas Aquinas College, Children’s Museum of Manhattan, Denise Bibro Fine Art, FIT, the Painting Center, PS 122, and Wave Hill. Hariri’s work has been written about in publications such as Arte Fuse, Hyperallergic, Pank Magazine, the Woven-Tale-Press, and Whitehot Magazine. Awards include the Museum of Arts and Design and NARS Foundation residencies, Smack Mellon ‘Hot Picks,’ and the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship.

Steffani Jemison
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Video/Film ‘18

Steffani Jemison (b. 1981) lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions and performances include Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2024); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2017); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017); and The Museum of Modern Art, NY (2015). Notable group exhibitions include Flight Into Egypt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2024); Counterpublic, St. Louis, MO (2023); A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration (traveling 2022–24), Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2021); and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Whitney Museum of American Art, all in NY, among others. Jemison is Associate Professor of Art & Design at Rutgers University; her first novel, A Rock, A River, A Street, was published by Primary Information in 2022.

Tommy Kha
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Photography ‘22

Tommy Kha (b. Memphis, Tennessee) received his MFA in Photography from Yale University. He is the recipient of the Hayes Prize, Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo’ Fund, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Photography. His work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Foam. He has had solo shows at Higher Pictures Generation, Baxter St. at the Camera Club of New York, and Blue Sky Gallery. He joined Higher Pictures Generation in 2022. His first major publication, Half, Full, Quarter was published by Aperture in February 2023. He currently teaches at Yale School of Art. His first museum show will open at the Addison Gallery of American Art in September 2025.

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Fiction ‘21

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, a product of the Puerto Rican communities on the island and in the South Bronx, was sent to live with her grandparents where she was introduced to the culture of rural Puerto Rico, including the storytelling that came naturally to the women, especially the older women, in her family. Much of her work is based on her experiences during this time. Llanos-Figueroa’s first novel, Daughters of the Stone (Thomas Dunne Books 2009), was shortlisted for the 2010 PEN Bingham Award. Her second novel, A Woman of Endurance, (Amistad, HarperCollins 2022; Spanish Edition: Indómita), was selected to represent Puerto Rico in the Library of Congress “Great Reads, Great Places” initiative at the 2024 National Book Festival in Washington, DC. The English-language edition won the 2024 International Latino Award Bronze medal for historical fiction and the ILA Gold Medal for best Spanish-language translation (Aurora Lauzardo Ugarte, translator). The Brazilian Portuguese edition was published by Primavera in 2024. Additionally, Llanos-Figueroa has won the following awards and Fellowships: Mellon Foundation, MacDowell, NYSCA/NYFA, Hedgebrook, BRIO, and the BCA Fiction Award.

Monteith McCollum
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Film ‘01, Music Composition ‘08, Video/Film ‘15

Monteith McCollum is an interdisciplinary artist working across film, sound, performance, and sculpture, with a fascination in topics encompassing ecology, agriculture, urban mobility, and technology in sound. Both his experimental shorts and feature essay documentaries have frequently blended nonfiction and fiction modes, with an interest in both character and subject driven concepts. His live audio visual performances and sound compositions interweave environmental field recordings with musical assemblages incorporating strings and modular synthesis. Several of his films have screened on PBS’s “POV” series, as well as been presented in museums such as MOMA, Wexner Arts Center, and The Hirschhorn. In addition to numerous international screenings his work has received generous financial support from NYFA, NYSCA, The Rockefeller Foundation, The National Endowment on the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, he received an IFC Independent Spirit Award for his feature Hybrid in 2002. Some of his side interests include the cultivation of a small pear orchard, folk music, and constructing alternative architectural structures. He currently is associate professor in cinema at Binghamton University in New York.

Joseph Morris
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Digital/Electronic Arts ‘17

Joseph Morris is a Brooklyn-based artist, expert craftsman, and coder who explores the integration of technology in the arts. His emotive machines and interactive installations have been exhibited widely, including at Ulterior Gallery, Harvestworks, Chazan Family Gallery, Creative Arts Workshop, Gibney Dance Center, 4heads, ACRE Projects, and Oi Futuro. Working with electronics in his art since 2006, Morris began by repurposing mechanical components into sculptural collages before expanding into coding and software-based interactivity. A self-taught programmer and prototyper, he continually pushes the boundaries of technology in sculpture. He has received numerous awards, including the 2020 Downtown Brooklyn Public Art and Placemaking Fund, a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts, and a 2017 NYSCA Electronic Media grant. He was also a Harvestworks New Works Resident and Pratt Institute Faculty Development Grant recipient. Morris holds an MFA degree in Art and Technology Studies from SAIC and a BFA degree in Sculpture from SUNY Purchase. He is a professor of 3D Design and Sculpture at SUNY Westchester Community College.

Sarah Oppenheimer
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design ‘06, ‘10, ‘16; Craft/Sculpture ‘23

Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator. Each work explores emergent dynamics between human and non-human systems. Rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change. Oppenheimer lives and works in New York, NY and Rotterdam, NL.

Wenhua Shi
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Interdisciplinary Work ‘15

Wenhua Shi received his MFA degree from University of California, at Berkeley (2009). He pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations, and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art, Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in China, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. His work is distributed by Light Cone, Paris, France, and Canyon Cinema, San Francisco, USA. Shi was on the jury for the 62nd Ann Arbor Film Festival (2024) and National Endowment for the Arts (2017, 2018 and 2021). He has received awards and grants including Mass Cultural Council (2024), NYSCA/NYFA (2015), the New York State Council on the Arts, and LEF Foundation (2021). Shi is the founder and one of curators of RPM Festival (2013 – Present).

Christopher Rudd
NYFA Board Member

Christopher Rudd is a Jamaican-born Guggenheim Choreography Fellow, the inaugural New Victory LabWorks Launch Artist, and the creator of the groundbreaking works TOUCHÉ and LIFTED for American Ballet Theatre. In hopes of bettering the world through dance, he blends contemporary dance, contemporary circus, and theatricality to speak to relevant issues. As founder of RudduR Dance, he is a two-time Exchange Alumni through the U.S. State Department, having presented his works in the United States, Canada, France, Trinidad & Tobago, Burkina Faso, Ecuador, and Italy. Rudd has created works for SUNY Purchase, The Ailey School, Duke University, and UNC School of the Arts, and received residencies from CUNY Dance Initiative, Vendetta Mathea’s La Manufacture, Tofte Lake Center, Kaatsbaan, STREB, BAM, and The Chelsea Factory. Rudd’s work was listed as one of 2023’s “6 Theater Works to Watch” by American Theatre Magazine. He credits the Armour Dance Theater, Dance Theater of Harlem’s Summer Intensives, and New World School of the Arts for his professional career, which includes Carolina Ballet, Les Grands Ballet Canadiens de Montréal, and Cirque Du Soleil.

Yolanda Sharpe
NYFA Learning Participant
NYSCA/NYFA Artist as Entrepreneur Program

Yolanda Sharpe is a mid-career contemporary artist whose working mediums are oil on canvas, encaustic on panels, pen and ink drawings, and watercolors. She also designs and builds steam-bent shaped structures for canvas. Sharpe’s artworks are compatible for residential and corporate spaces. 

Juan M. Usera-Falcon
NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship
Project: Caribbean Folk Songs for Kids of all Ages

Juan M. Usera-Falcon is an Afro-Puerto Rican, fourth-generation Bomba and Plena practitioner (dancer, percussionist, culture bearer), teaching artist, and community educator with many years of experience developing highly engaging cultural activities and arts programs throughout New York City. Usera-Falcon is the founder and director of the Sambuco Tribe, an Afro-Caribbean music and dance ensemble and arts in education company. The Sambuco Tribe provides performances, workshops, artist residencies, and assembly programs in Caribbean dance, music, and percussion for NYC schools, older adult centers, community centers, and colleges. The Sambuco Tribe has been featured at Lincoln Center’s “Midsummer Night Swing,” Hostos Center for the Arts and Culture “Bomplenazo” Festival, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute “SouSou Saturdays” and “AfriBembé Festivals,” and “Barefoot Dancing” at Van Cortlandt Park. Various grants have supported Usera-Falcon’s work as an artist. Most recently, he received the CUNY Dance Initiative, Bronx Council on the Arts’s Bronx Cultural Visions Fund Production Grant and Concept Development Grant for Caribbean Folk Songs for Kids of All Ages, and the NYSCA Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Grant.

Ann M. Warde
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow
Music/Sound ‘19

 

Ann Warde is an independent scholar and a composer of experimental music. Alongside practical study of ethnomusicology, the development of her composition practice has included work with Alvin Lucier, multiple composers at the University of Illinois, and the Once Group composer George Cacioppo. Following a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell, she worked for a decade as a bioacoustics researcher, applying audio technology to the analysis of whale sounds at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology. Subsequently, as a US-UK Fulbright Researcher at the University of York, her investigation of spatial audio led to an ongoing series of interactive computer music compositions and installations informed by animal sounds, behavioral networks, and acoustic propagation. A NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Music/Sound, her recent activities include artist residencies: VCCA, Evergreen College, Queen’s University (CA), the European University Cyprus; and presentations and publications: BEAST FEaST, Orpheus Institute (Belgium), Women in Pragmatism International Conference (Spain), and Black Mountain College. She is currently at work on a book and composition investigating women who forged American progressive music education.

Anna Warfield
NYFA Learning Participant and Consultant
Artist as Entrepreneur Syracuse ‘19

Anna Warfield (she/they, b. 1995) is based in Binghamton, NY. Their predominantly text-based fiber works engage with the body, unlearning, and identity. Warfield, a two-time NYSCA Artist Support recipient (2023, 2025), has an installation on view at the Rockwell Museum (Corning, NY) and a solo exhibition with the Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), both in 2025. They recently had a solo exhibition with SUNY Oneonta (2024), and the Roberson Museum (2023-2024). Warfield has exhibited with MAG Rochester, Finger Lakes Community College, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Site: Brooklyn Gallery, Schweinfurth Art Center, Ithaca Print Shop, and the Cayuga Museum. They have had residencies at Corning Museum of Glass and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. Warfield spoke as a panelist in the 2023 Text and Techne Conference at Trinity College, Dublin and has contributed as a guest speaker at NYFA, Cornell University, Binghamton University, and SUNY Oneonta. Warfield began the Artist Grant Navigation Project to assist Southern Tier artists on grants in 2024 and opened Praxis Project Space to support emerging and experimental artists in Binghamton in 2025.

The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program awards $8,000 unrestricted grants to artists living in New York State and/or Indian Nations located in New York State. Applications for this year’s awards will open in the fall. Sign up for NYFA’s bi-weekly e-newsletter, NYFA News, to receive updates. 

The program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional funding is provided by the Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Deutsche Bank, and individual donors.