Southwest Contemporary is immensely grateful to our volunteer Community Editorial Advisory Board members for their support of the publication and our work.
As a new addition to our editorial operations, the advisory board provides direct links from our team to arts communities across the Southwest with the goal of making our journalism more relevant and inclusive.
The board is comprised of community members from across the region with different life experiences and expertise, and meets with our core editorial team throughout the year to discuss community issues we want to examine, guide and inform stories, connect us with writers, sources, experts, and other stakeholders, and be a valuable source of input and feedback.
Laura Augusta
El Paso
Laura Augusta, PhD, is a U.S.-born curator and writer who has worked between the U.S. and Central America since 2014. Her curatorial and essay projects connect the landscapes of disaster-prone cities, thinking specifically about floods and muddiness, shared space, and everyday forms of resistance. Her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2017. Augusta completed the Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2016-18), and was an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration in 2021. She currently works with the Archives of American Art’s Oral History Project and as a developmental editor and program consultant for American Art journal’s landmark program, Toward Equity in Publishing. She has curated more than twenty exhibitions at museums, university galleries, and artist-run spaces across the U.S. and Central America. She is currently curator at the Gerald & Stanlee Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso.
hazel batrezchavez
Albuquerque
Hazel batrezchavez (they/them) is a brown queer artist and educator. Their textiles, performance, and sculptural works are rooted in the politics of survival and the poetics of movement.
Batrezchavez’s work has been exhibited at El Paso Museum of Art, Santa Fe Art Institute, Loom Indigenous Art Gallery (NM), Southern Exposure (CA), SOMA (MX), Radford Museum of Art (VA), ICOSA Collective (TX), and Higher Art Gallery (MI) among many others. Batrezchavez received their BFA in anthropology and studio art from Grinnell College and their MFA in sculpture from the University of New Mexico.
Hazel batrezchavez descends from the Nauhua, Lenca, and Mayan peoples of Kuskatán (El Salvador) and Tamaulipas, Mexico. Currently, they live and work as an artist and educator in Tiwa, Tewa, and Pueblo territory (Albuquerque, New Mexico). They are a founding member of the fronteristxs Collective and Granadina Co-op.
Gretchen Dietrich
Salt Lake City
Gretchen Dietrich is executive director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The UMFA is the flagship fine arts museum for both the state and the university. Under Dietrich’s leadership, the UMFA has flourished, with increased attendance, audience engagement and community outreach, higher revenues, and new institutional support.
Dietrich began her career as a museum educator and has held positions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. From 2015-2018, Dietrich served on the board of the Association of Art Museum Directors and oversaw AAMD’s Education & Community Issues Committee. In fall 2019 she was selected to join the inaugural Board of Directors for Art Bridges Foundation, a organization dedicated to expanding access to American art across the country.
Angela Ellsworth
Phoenix
Angela Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist traversing disciplines of drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Her solo and collaborative work has taken on wide-ranging subjects such as illness, physical fitness, endurance, religious tradition, and social ritual. She is interested in art merging with everyday life where public and private experiences collide in unexpected spaces.
Her work has been reviewed in Art News, Frieze Art, Fiber Arts, ArtUS, and Artforum. She has presented work nationally and internationally including the Getty Center (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia), Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw, Poland), National Review of Live Art (Glasgow, Scotland), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Scottsdale), and Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix).
Ellsworth was born in Palo Alto, California, grew up in Salt Lake City, and resides in Phoenix where she is a professor in the School of Art at Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University.
Ally Grimm (A.L. Grime)
Denver
Ally Grimm (A.L. Grime) is a Venezuelan-born, Denver-based artist whose work explores the intersection of modern technology, emotion, and the human experience. Entirely self-taught, Grimm has built a distinctive visual language characterized by monochromatic palettes, dynamic linework, layered abstraction, and an electric sense of movement that reflects both her cultural roots and her fascination with digital evolution.
Under the moniker A.L. Grime, she has created large-scale murals and fine art pieces that can be found across the United States and internationally, transforming public spaces into portals of connection and reflection. Beyond her studio practice, Grimm serves as the founding director and creative director of DENVER WALLS, a globally recognized mural festival that brings together artists from around the world to celebrate creativity, community, and cultural exchange through public art. She has recently expanded her studio practice to focus on fiber and ceramic installation as a resident artist of both Redline Contemporary Art Center and Community Clay in Denver, Colorado.
Through both her art and leadership, Ally Grimm continues to champion inclusivity and innovation in contemporary muralism, bridging the gap between the organic and the digital, the personal and the universal.
Andrea Hanley
Phoenix
Andrea R. Hanley (Navajo) is the vice president of programming at the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She is dedicated to the work of contemporary Native American artists and the Native American fine-art field. She has more than thirty years of experience in the field, including at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., as both special assistant to the director and exhibition developer/project manager, the fine arts coordinator/curator for the city of Tempe, executive director of ATLATL, Inc., a national service organization for Native American arts, the founding manager of the Berlin Gallery at the Heard Museum, and the membership and program manager for the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. More recently, she was the chief curator at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. She serves on the board of directors for the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, Santa Fe Indian Market, Voices in Contemporary Art, and is currently an arts commissioner for the city of Tempe. She sits on the Native American advisory board for Nest. She is an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation.
Mary Kershaw
Flagstaff
Mary Kershaw is the executive director and CEO of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona, having moved there from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she served as director of the New Mexico Museum of Art.
Prior to moving to the Southwest, Mary worked in museums across the UK including as director of collections at York Museums Trust, and Head of Museums & Arts in Harrogate Borough Council. One of the driving passions in her career is to bring the power of art and the work of artists, past and present, to as wide an audience as possible through exhibitions, programming, publications, and partnerships. International experience includes cultural projects with the UK, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, and Germany.
Tiffini Porter
Salt Lake City
Tiffini is a writer and content strategist with a broad background spanning arts, culture, travel, and lifestyle communications. Her work has appeared in regional magazines and numerous projects for nonprofit organizations and corporate clients, including the Utah Office of Tourism, Park City Magazine, Park City Style Magazine, Utah Style & Design, Homo Faber Guide, Starbucks, and Adobe.
An active advocate and leader in Utah’s contemporary art community, Tiffini is a former gallerist and has served on multiple nonprofit boards and program committees, including at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. She currently serves on the Salt Lake Art Design Board, which oversees the public art program within the Salt Lake City Arts Council.
Chris Taylor
Lubbock + Marfa
Chris Taylor was born in West Germany, raised in Southwest Florida waters, and lives in the arid American Southwest. An architect, educator, and director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University, Taylor is deeply committed to the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of the planet. Terminal Lake Exploration Platform, created with support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, continues to facilitate visual and performative research within under-examined basins and internal aquatic fringes. Taylor studied architecture at the University of Florida and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and is a member of the Lubbock Scapes Collective.
