2022 ITI Graduates

	Saxon Baird is a writer, photographer and producer located in Brooklyn, NY. His writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Vice, Slate, Guernica, and many other publications. His short fiction and poetry has appeared on Juked, Maudlin House, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and The Fanzine. He is also the producer of several hour-long documentaries on Caribbean music and politics for PRI’s Peabody-Award winning Afropop Worldwide. His work often engages with phenomena, catharsis, and negotiated spaces.
	Raegan Bird makes, gleans and arranges images through both visual and written work. She has had fiction published in RECIPES UNDER CONFINEMENT from Ma Bibliothèque and PETS from Tyrant Books. She currently lives in Virginia, and co-runs the publishing project, BLUE ARRANGEMENTS.
	Cinthya Santos Briones is a nahua-mestiza participatory artist, popular educator and community organizer based in New York. She grew up in small towns between mountains and valleys surrounded by indigenous communities -Nahuas, Otomi and Tepehuas- in central Mexico. She studied Ethnohistory and Anthropology and for ten years - Cinthya worked as a researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History focused on issues on indigenous migration, codex, textiles and traditional medicine. As an artist, her work focuses on a multidisciplinary social practice that combines participatory art and the construction of collective narratives of self-representation. Through a variety of non-linear storytelling mediums she juxtaposed photography, historical archives, writing, ethnography, drawings, collage, embroidery, and popular education. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Magnum Foundation (2016/2018/2020), En Foco (2017/2022), National Geographic Research and Exploration (2018), We Woman (2019), and the National Fund for Culture and the Arts of México (2009/2011).
	Robert Contreras II was drawn into the photographic medium because of a force that lures him in. It is a void-it makes itself present when one stares at an image or creates one. Images have always been fascinating to him in regards to keeping memories and dreams alive-allowing us to rediscover who we are. With multiple lenses come multiple perspectives, multiple conversations and endless questions come forth. Photography is a rabbit hole. This endless cycle of wanting to uncover the true nature of the medium is what has driven him to practice photography.
	Nan Heyneman is a lens-based artist from Rochester, New York. Using found image, text, and ephemera, they create collages, zines, and photo-based artworks informed by intrusive thoughts and intruding ideologies. Tearing, cutting and pasting creates a visual urgency that responds to their own obsessions — towards death, of ego, and indulging in (and failing through) fantasy. They earned their BFA in Expanded Media/Photography at the New York State College of Ceramics in 2017.
	K. Kovacs is a visual designer and artist living in Western Massachusetts. They earned their B.S. in Graphic Communication Design in 2014 from the University of Cincinnati. As a designer, they deeply value research and conversation—by working together to give ideas shape and structure, we can shape the world and ourselves. Their work as a visual artist questions the role of photography in the Age of the Internet, captures moments of queerness in the capitalist landscape, and probes their relationship with body and memory as a queer, trans, non-binary person.
	Jared Lindahl is a scholar, writer, and photographer whose work attends to the natural and cultural history of places in northern latitudes. He is also interested more generally in the relationship between the perception of place and the sense of self. One ongoing project of his, currently entitled Seven Thousand Years on the Ångerman River, incorporates historical research, creative writing, and photography to communicate the diverse ontologies of the human, natural, and mythological worlds associated with one of the major rivers of northern Sweden.
	Hyacinth Schukis works from the starting point of their body and desires to explore classical longing, known and felt histories, queer/trans and sick symbologies, replication, and beauty. They are an artist, writer, designer, researcher, and educator. When making pictures, Hyacinth practices studio photography, self-portraiture, reenactment, appropriation, assemblage, and collecting. They hold bachelor’s degrees in Art and Art History from the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. Hyacinth is from and lives in Portland, Oregon.
	Dale Small is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, photographer, and organizer based in Wichita, Kansas. At the intersection of design, photography, writing, and new media, their work confronts issues regarding misinformation, power, and privilege by emphasizing the importance of identity, memory, and representation. In 2019, they graduated from Wichita State University with a BA in Art History focused on new media, public art, and social practice. Dale’s work has been exhibited at the 13th Havana Biennial and 12th Gwangju Biennale as part of the offline digital exhibition !!!Sección ARTE: El Paquete Semanal. Dale currently works with the arts nonprofit Horizontes (known for the largest mural in the world) which facilitates advocacy and social justice through community arts initiatives.
	John Smieska is a poet, filmmaker, and photographer based in Ithaca, NY. His interests include nomadism, hypnotic (as well as hypnogogic and hypnopompic) trance states, mythology, Renaissance art and philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, Gaston Bachelard, Carl Jung, as well as psychiatry and medicine.
	Daax Ukaj is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer working in a diaspora between the Balkans and the Bronx. Their practice dances with with intergenerational pattern making, intimate spaces invaded by necropolitics, and the family home as a bodymind. Their work in essay and installation has its roots in rituals like the valle, the gjama of the north and the polyphonic sounds of the south—Albanian folk traditions which manifest in pattern and swerve, circularity, gesture and rhythmic bodies. Intersecting with diasporic traditions of the Bronx, the work is made primarily in a learned language and steeped in the birthplace of hip hop as well as native dialects that defy borders. Ukaj's current work, Nobody’s Home, is concerned with inherited anxieties, misplaced memories, displaced lineage and pattern alteration within failing surveillance states.