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.
Amanda Curreri
Albuquerque
Amanda Curreri is an artist and educator. Her artwork is situated between textiles and painting, characterized by an engagement with social histories of resistance. Textiles are key to her work for their ability to invite an experience of collectivity and connection. In 2022, she joined the faculty at the Department of Art at UNM.
Curreri’s artwork has recently been commissioned by Facebook Open Arts, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), and more. Her artwork has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, VICE, Hyperallergic, Frieze Art, KQED Arts, San Francisco Chronicle, and more. Curreri holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BA from Tufts University in Sociology and Peace & Justice Studies. Curreri is represented by Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco.
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.
Nancy Good
Las Vegas
Las Vegas-based artist, advocate, and curator Nancy Good is known for conceptual abstracts, colorful murals, photographic composites, and analog-to-digital visual works. Influenced by synesthesia related to vibration and eclectic DNA revealing connections with cultures the world over, Good’s work weaves the materials and tools of modern times while also honoring the mark-making of ancient ancestries.
In addition to facilitating the artist-run nonprofit Core Arts Concord since 2018, operating her gallery Core Contemporary, and supporting the arts community of Las Vegas, Good maintains a disciplined studio schedule and stays active in private/public art commissions, mural projects, mentoring, and teaching.
Good’s multi-disciplinary work has been seen in exhibitions across the country and abroad in locations such as regional museums and immersive art spaces; private, corporate, and institutional art spaces; and galleries across the country. Good has received four congressional commendations for her artistic contributions, and her work is found in private collections throughout the U.S. and overseas.
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.
Emily Hallowell
Tucson
Emily Hallowell was born in 1969 in New York City. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University. In 1996 she earned an MFA from Mills College.
Works by Hallowell are held in public and private collections and have been exhibited in galleries in the U.S. and UK and featured in periodicals including Harper’s Magazine. Currently, Emily is a member of Untitled Gallery in Tucson, Arizona, where she oversees curatorial decisions, promotion, and all social media content. Untitled Gallery, a nonprofit, volunteer-run fine-art gallery in Tucson that features local, nationally recognized artists.
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.
Lisa Le Feuvre
Santa Fe
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, and editor. Focusing on art as a powerful force to retune perceptions, Le Feuvre has curated more than sixty exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator, played a pivotal role in shaping academic and arts organizations, edited more than thirty books and journals, spoken at 150 museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 125 essays and interviews with artists. Currently, she is the inaugural executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Santa Fe dedicated to the creative legacies of artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Until 2018 she was based in the United Kingdom, where she variously directed the Henry Moore Institute, a center for the study of sculpture; taught on the post-graduate Curatorial Program at Goldsmiths College; led the contemporary art program at the National Maritime Museum; and has sat on various juries including Sculpture Dublin (2021), Turner Prize (2018), Hepworth Prize for Sculpture (2016), British representation at Venice Biennale (2015), Max Mara Prize for Women (2013), and co-curated British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (2009-10).
Djamila Ricciardi
Denver
Djamila Ricciardi is an arts worker from Denver, Colorado. She is proud of her diverse cultural roots and has a great appreciation for all forms of creative expression. Djamila majored in art history at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and studied abroad in Florence, Italy. Upon the completion of her BA degree in 2010, she returned to her hometown and became fully immersed in the local art scene through her work at various cultural and arts-based organizations. Djamila is a creative thinker and community connector who finds fulfillment in sharing ideas and working collaboratively with others.
John Sproul
Salt Lake City
John Sproul works with the figure to explore human identity and experience, pushing into what we know we don’t know from places we know. Sproul earned a BFA from the University of Utah in 1993. The artist has had more than twenty solo exhibitions and participated in more than 120 group exhibitions internationally, which include the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; UMFA, Salt Lake City; UMOCA, Salt Lake City; The Painting Center, New York; Bipolar Projects, Barcelona; Galerie Metanoia, Paris; Kunstwerk Carlshutte, Germany; and the Sienna Art Institute, Italy.
As an arts advocate, he served on UMFA’s FOCA Executive Committee (2006-2013, chair in 2013); founded and directed the Foster Art Program (2009-2011); founded and directed the Utah Contemporary Art Think Tank (2010-2011); owned and directed Nox Contemporary Art Gallery (2010-2022), and is the director of The Art Group (2007-present).
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.
Steve Yazzie
Denver
Steven J. Yazzie lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Yazzie is a member of the Navajo Nation and a veteran of the Gulf War, serving honorably with the United States Marine Corps from 1988 to 1992. Yazzie is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, video/film, and community. He is the co-founder of Digital Preserve, a video/film production project prioritizing collaborations with Indigenous communities and arts and cultural institutions. Additionally, Yazzie was a founding member of the Indigenous arts collective Postcommodity and is the co-founder of the Museum of Walking.
He received a BFA degree in Intermedia at Arizona State University and was named the 2014 outstanding graduate of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. He also studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 2006. Yazzie is a 2021 recipient of the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship and was awarded Community Scholar for the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (in)Equality, University of Denver. In 2022, Yazzie was the Native Artist in Residence at the Denver Art Museum.
