2023 Artist Residency Jury Panel
Christina Vassallo
Christina Vassallo is Executive Director of The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) in Philadelphia, where she is redefining a living laboratory that creates, presents, and collects experimental works of art. She is a founding member of the Philadelphia Collaborative Arts Consortium, a member of the national association of Contemporary Art Museum Directors (CAMD), a 2022 Marshall Memorial Fellow of the German Marshall Fund, and a 2019-2020 cohort member of National Arts Strategies’ Chief Executive Program. From 2014 - 2019 Christina was Executive + Artistic Director of SPACES in Cleveland, where she provided creative direction and oversaw operations for one of the longest-running alternative art organizations in the country. Her most notable SPACES initiatives include launching a capital campaign and spearheading a relocation project, expanding outreach initiatives, developing 2 grant opportunities for Cuyahoga County artists, and curating critically acclaimed issue-oriented group exhibitions. While in Cleveland, she was an ex officio board member of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Contemporary Art Society and a contributor to Cuyahoga Arts & Culture's Support for Artists Planning Team. Before running SPACES, Christina was based in NYC, working as Executive Director of Flux Factory, where she set the course for a thriving institution comprising an international artist residency program, acclaimed exhibitions program, and unconventional education initiatives. Additionally, she has curated exhibitions for the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Everson Museum of Art, Jersey City Museum, NURTUREart, Lafayette College, and New Haven University. Christina also served as Programming Associate of Culture Push, Associate Director of Kinz, Tillou + Feigen Gallery, and Assistant Curator at the American Federation of Arts. She holds a B.A. in art history and an M.A. in nonprofit visual arts management from NYU.
Paul M. Farber
Paul M. Farber (he or they) is Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab. He also serves as Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art & Space at the University of Pennsylvania. This academic year (2021-2022) he is the William Wilson Corcoran Visiting Professor of Community Engagement at George Washington University. Farber and the team at Monument Lab were the inaugural grantees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s “Monuments Project,” a $250 Million initiative to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces,” including Monument Lab’s National Monument Audit and the opening of research field offices throughout the United States. Farber has co-curated Monument Lab projects including its original Philadelphia City Hall discovery exhibition (Philadelphia, 2015), citywide public art and history exhibition (Philadelphia, 2017), A Call to Peace (Military Park Newark, 2019), Public Iconographies (Pulitzer Foundation, 2019-2020), and Staying Power (Village of Arts and Humanities, 2021). Farber's research and curatorial projects explore transnational urban history, cultural memory, and creative approaches to civic engagement. He is author of A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) which tells the untold story of a group of American artists and writers (Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde) who found refuge along the Berlin Wall and in Cold War Germany in order to confront political divisions back home in the United States. He is also co-editor with Ken Lum of Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2019), a public art and history handbook designed to generate new critical ways of thinking about and building monuments. In addition to his work with Monument Lab, Farber served as curator for the inaugural Artist-in-Residence Program at the Office of the District Attorney of Philadelphia (2020), keynote speaker for the Americans for the Arts national conference (2020), and Scholar in Residence at Mural Arts Philadelphia (2015–2017). He serves as an advisor to numerous monument and memorial projects including for the City of Newark and the Emmett Till Interpretive Center.
Farber earned a PhD and MA in American Culture from the University of Michigan and a BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
Jean Shin
Jean Shin is an artist recognized for her site-specific installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community engagement. Her work is distinguished by her labor-intensive process and immersive environments that capture collective issues that we face as a society. Her work has been widely exhibited in major national and international museums, including in solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona and Crow Collection in Dallas. Shin has received numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures and Sculpture, Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art award. Shin’s many notable permanent public art commissions include the General Services Administration, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Metropolitan Transit Authority Arts and Design, City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and more. Shin has been featured in a multitude of publications world-wide.
Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in the United States, Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She is tenured Adjunct Professor of Fine Art at Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.