NYCxDESIGN Festival
Call to Gather & AIGA NY

Echo is a multi-disciplinary artist from New Jersey now living in Brooklyn. Much of her personal art and research is around our human relationships to the geography and other living beings that we co-inhabit the Earth with. As a kiddo she used to make arrangements from flowers in her mom’s garden and the woods behind her house and leave them for her neighbors on their porches. These days she spends her time creating floral compositions with lots of movement, texture, and color for spaces and production sets.

As a pediatric physical therapist for the past 15 years, Sarah’s work has framed how she views her role as a kintsugi facilitator. Sarah’s desire is for all people (children and adults!) to be able to live their lives to their fullest potential. She sees play as an essential component to learning, not only with pediatric clients, but with adult learners as well. She holds a B.S. from Vanderbilt University and a DPT from Duke University. Sarah is also a committed advocate for a variety of organizations including International Justice Mission, Safe Families for Children, Down Syndrome Achievement centers, and LifeWay Network. And, she is a mom, and enjoys spending time with her three amazing and crazy children and her dog, Caesar!

Linda is a poet, editor, and educator. As a teaching artist, she leads one-on-one writing sessions with pediatric patients at NYU Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital. She holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA in English and American Literature from NYU. Her own poetry circles questions of genetic illness, life in the disabled body, and the ways in which we are made and remade through sickness, loss, and caregiving. She’s particularly interested in the poetry that arises from our individual and communal vernaculars, and she helps students find the poetry that’s within their own everyday cadences and voices.

David is a renowned artist who has pursued the art of western calligraphy for the past 20 years. His masterful study of calligraphy is driven by a passion for “bringing the essence of a word or message to life.” Chang’s calligraphic mark—vacillating between traditional scripts and contemporary abstraction—issues statements of personal, cultural, and spiritual awareness while retaining a formal beauty full of urgency and redemption.

“Art of Grazing is one of 3 things she teaches” Rachel is the founder and owner of Rachel Snyder Hospitality. She lives in Manhattan, where practicing hospitality is part of her everyday life. Chef by trade, Rachel crafts meaningful public and private dinner parties and events where strangers become friends. Rachel’s laid-back approach takes the fear out of what New Yorkers think hosting requires.

Rebekah founded Picture Theory—a contemporary art gallery supporting artists through exhibitions, publishing, and programming—in January 2023, initially out of her Greenpoint apartment. She expanded to Chelsea in October 2023. Rebekah has worked in the art world for 10 years for New-York-based galleries including David Zwirner, Pace, and Anton Kern. Additionally, she worked for a London-based art advisory and for Galerie Cecile Fakhoury in Paris/Dakar/Abidjan. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Bianca is a Connecticut born artist specializing in fine art and illustration. Her illustration work leans towards surrealism and abstract expressionism with a highly concentrated focus on the exploration of dreams, theology, and the ontology of the self. The concentration of Bianca’s paintings respond to the aesthetic energy of abstract expressionism with its active movement towards work in which the gesture of the artist’s hand or process is highly evident in the final compositions as the work explores theological cosmology and the act of making.

Katie trained under American Herbalist Guild herbalists Lupo Passero and David Winston in traditional herbalism and clinical herbal medicine. Her personal journey with plants as medicine started while working as trail staff for a primitive wilderness-based drug and alcohol rehab in southern Utah, learning about the abundance of useful and medicinal plants in such a stark environment. But it wasn’t until her formal study, years later, that she fell in love with the beauty of plants and the process of creating as a part of medicine and wellness. Katie is convinced that good healthcare should start with education, and she loves helping others get started on their journey of investing in their own health and making medicine for themselves.

Jacqueline is an illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in Illustration and has worked on editorial, advertising, packaging, book, and fine art commissions. Movement and emotion are consistent themes in her work and she often draws inspiration from the natural world to represent our shared and intangible human experiences.

Amanda Iglesias is an architect and curator in New York City. She has professional experience in both institutional and single-family residential projects at Robert A.M. Stern Architects. Her gallery design and curation via the Iglesias Project seeks to enrich the church’s sense of possibility and architectural imagination. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Wheaton College, a Master of Architecture from Yale University, and a Master of Philosophy in Architecture and Urban Studies from the University of Cambridge. Amanda loves drawing millwork details, sketching in museums, and can often be found in the architecture section of any bookstore.

Elyas is a Romanian American queer ARTIST, Curator, Human Rights Advocate, Writer, & Restaurateur based in New York City. Through his work, Popa establishes a unique visual vocabulary of community through engendering moments of hospitality. His art creates space for the viewer to meditate and reflect on complex human desires through the use of tension, balance, endless repetition,  & allegory. His art, as well as his curatorial works, have exhibited in New York, Hong Kong, & China to name a few. It was in his last home, Hong Kong, where he founded THE HUMAN RIGHTS NETWORK, a non-profit using art as a language for diplomacy & human rights. Popa is also the Executive Chef and Owner of OTI a New-American restaurant with true Romanian roots in Lower East Side NYC. Named after his mother, Oti’s mission is to deliver beautiful and honest hospitality through elevated traditional cuisine. In his free time, you can find Popa rock climbing, traveling, reading…and most of all, rarely sleeping.

Katie is the Ceramicist & Founder of Dear Gloria, a shop of artist-made home goods in New York City. Katie has worked in ceramics for the last 15 years in various capacities from teaching, to working for other artists, to creating her own work. In 2020 with a renewed appreciation for creating a sense of home and permanence in New York City during the pandemic, she started Dear Gloria, a business centered on all things handmade for the home made by NYC artists. A natural connector and curator, Dear Gloria brings together her love for making functional dishes for the home and her natural penchant for connecting people to each other and artists to new audiences. Katie holds a B.A. in Art, Business and Community Development from Covenant College on Lookout Mountain, Georgia and an M.S. in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute in New York City.

Sherry’s connection to scent is by way of passion and profession. Born in Cairo, and raised in Abu Dhabi, her upbringing was steeped in a region, and family, where fragrance was significant and ever-present. Her scent memories range from the sweet jasmine of her mother’s workplace garden, to the deep Turkish coffee her grandfather drank, to the heady Arabian aromas of the local Emiratis. After her Georgetown MBA, she was recruited to work for L’Oréal where over 12 years she led and launched fragrance brands in the U.S for luxury brands like Viktor and Rolf, YSL, Maison Martin Margiela, Atelier Cologne, and Ralph Lauren Fragrances, where she most recently served as the Head of Marketing. She is a seeker and lover of beauty in all its forms, whether nature or literature, stories or scents.