Janani Balasubramanian (they/them/theirs) is a New York City-based multimedia artist, working across installation, image, live and immersive performance, emerging media, poetry, and prose. Their practice aims to bring insights from contemporary science into usable, playful, divine, and mythic places in everyday life. Balasubramanian is an artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History; 2021-2022 Pew Foundation grantee through the Academy of Natural Sciences; inaugural Collider Fellow at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; 2021-2022 Sundance Institute Art of Practice Fellow; and a member of the Guild of Future Architects. Additionally, Balasubramanian was a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and their work has been presented and/or commissioned by dozens of venues across North America and Europe.

During their time at Camargo, Balasubramanian plans to connect with scientists at L’Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers (OSU) Institut Pythéas and explore French art historical, scientific, and philosophical texts that relate to questions posed by brown dwarf astrophysics to inform their work on the libretto, storyboard, and art design for Rogue Objects, an operatic film for planeteria.

Photo by Rowan Haber.

Kyle Roberts is a Consulting Controller in the CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen) Nonprofit Business Operations (BizOps) group with over 5 years’ experience of public accounting and outsourcing services. He specializes in nonprofit accounting with experience serving social service organizations, religious organizations, and private foundations. Since joining the BizOps group, Kyle has served as a Consulting Controller for several nonprofits who have annual budgets ranging from approximately $500k to $100M.

Melissa Levin is a values-driven arts administrator, artist-centered curator, and steadfast advocate for just and equitable practices in the arts. For more than 12 years, Melissa worked at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) where she was the Vice President of Cultural Programs. Her role encompassed wide-ranging institutional and artistic leadership, overseeing LMCC’s major artist-centered and public-facing initiatives including the River To River Festival, the Arts Center at Governors Island, and LMCC’s artist residency programs. She next led a newly formed Artists, Estates, and Foundations division at Art Agency, Partners in its inaugural three years. Starting in 2016, with collaborator Alex Fialho, Melissa has stewarded the legacy of and curated critically acclaimed exhibitions dedicated to the late artist Michael Richards, including Michael Richards: Winged (LMCC, 2016; Stanford University, 2019) and Richards’ first museum retrospective, Michael Richards: Are You Down? (The Bronx Museum, 2023–24; North Carolina Museum of Art, 2023; MOCA North Miami, 2021).

Melissa additionally serves on the boards of the Artist Communities Alliance and Danspace Project. She holds a B.A. with honors in Visual Art and Art History from Barnard College.

Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020). She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Futurepoem and elsewhere. She is the recipient of artist residencies from Marble House Project, Storm King: Shandaken, and Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2018, she was awarded a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry. Previously a senior editor of Triple Canopy, Lara currently teaches editing and publishing at the University of Minnesota. Most recently, she is coeditor of the artist monograph Darrel Ellis (Visual AIDS, 2021).

Photo by Venn Daniel.

Taryn Ward (he, him, his) is a filmmaker and writer currently working and living in Brooklyn, New York. His often deadpan-centric narrative-based filmmaking tends to revolve around the quotidian and the idiosyncrasies of the everyday layabout. Ward’s films have been screened in the Fast Forward Film Festival, NewFilmmakers at Anthology Film Archives and Atlanta Film Festival.

Project Statement

Ward’s upcoming comedic film Broken Goods follows the story of an aloof man named Vincent who, in addition to struggling with a sugar addiction, becomes a full-time test subject for clinical drug and product test trials in lieu of working a steady nine to five. Despite the risk, there’s a small fortune to be made when donating one’s body to experimental research—and instead of working more hours at his retail position, Vincent finds this risk worth the reward. Driven mostly by its satirical tone and existential character study, Broken Goods also underscores the relationship between mind and self as well as one’s relationship to both state and labor.