Faculty
We collaborate with artists, critics, writers, and curators from around the world whose work we admire and who bring a rich diversity of experience to our programs and community. Their insight, feedback, and ongoing support are integral to the growth of our participants’ practices and to fostering a dynamic, inclusive artistic community.
Michael David
Michael David is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. He has exhibited internationally since 1981 and is represented in major public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MCA Los Angeles, LACMA, and the Aspen Museum of Art.
Over the last decade, David established the Fine Arts Workshop in Atlanta and the Yellow Chair Salon, working with artists through immersive one-on-one mentorship to develop their voice, professional practices, and exhibition opportunities. He also founded and directed two influential Brooklyn galleries: Life On Mars and M. David & Co.
Daniel John Gadd
Daniel John Gadd is an artist living and working in New Jersey. His work blurs the boundaries of painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, and “high” and “low” art, creating work that expresses a range of human emotion; at once violent, fragile, sensitive, fierce, vulnerable, and compassionate. His most recent shows were mounted at M. David & CO. and John Davis Gallery and his work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic and Whitehot Magazine among others.
Astrid Dick
Astrid Dick is a painter born (1972) and raised in Buenos Aires and currently living and working in Paris. She began painting intensively on her own at 13 and later pursued studies in economics in Buenos Aires while continuing to draw in her free time. In 2002, she was awarded a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT. After a life as an art double-agent, at age 36 she left her career as a university professor to devote herself entirely to art.
She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center, and has been an artist-in-residence at the Leipzig Spinnerei. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows across Europe, the United States, and Argentina, including the Grand Palais in Paris and the Manoir de la Ville de Martigny in Switzerland. Most recently, she has shown at M. David & Co. Gallery, Below Grand Gallery in New York, and Johnson Lowe Gallery in Atlanta. Her work has been reviewed by John Yau in Hyperallergic.
Dick has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses at INSEAD in France, where she was tenure-track faculty, as well as at New York University and Columbia University.
Ali Rossi
Ali Rossi is the founder and director of Olympia, a New York–based gallery dedicated to dismantling the cis-male-centric art canon. Originally launched as a nomadic project while Rossi was earning their BA in Art History and Painting at Mount Holyoke College, Olympia evolved into a permanent space on Orchard Street in 2020 and expanded to San Francisco in 2024. Rossi also holds an MA in Arts Administration from CUNY Baruch. The program emphasizes community, experimentation, and transparency, with a strong focus on women, trans, gender nonconforming, and non–cis male artists.
Under Rossi’s leadership, Olympia has garnered critical attention from leading art publications, including Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Artnews, and Hyperallergic. The gallery has participated in prominent international art fairs such as NADA Miami, miart, Zona Maco, and NADA Paris, bringing its mission to a broader audience while maintaining a distinct curatorial identity.
Olympia has been a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) since 2021 and continues to operate as a collaborative, artist-first space committed to disrupting exclusionary structures within the contemporary art world.
Paul D'Agostino
Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, translator and curator. He is former Art Editor at Brooklyn Magazine and The L Magazine, and he now contributes critical writings on art, film and books to various publications on a freelance basis. He is also a translator of a number of languages, and he contributes to and reviews translations for several publications concerned with literary translation, also as a freelancer.
Tom McGlynn
Tom McGlynn is an artist, writer, and independent curator based in the N.Y.C. area. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian. He is the director of Beautiful Fields, an organization dedicated to socially-engaged curatorial projects, and is also currently a visiting lecturer at Parsons/the New School.
Jennifer Samet
Jennifer Samet is Senior Director of Eric Firestone Gallery and faculty at the New York Studio School. She has interviewed over 100 artists for her column “Beer with a Painter,” in Hyperallergic. She has contributed to monographs and authored dozens of catalog essays. She wrote the contemporary art chapter for the forthcoming book about the FAMM collection (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum). Recent curatorial projects include “The Feminine in Abstract Painting,” Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation; and “Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network,” Eric Firestone Gallery.
Fox Hysen
Fox Hysen was born in the Bay Area, California and currently lives and works in Norfolk, Connecticut. She is full-time faculty at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting, the graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
Her work explores the relationship between composition and bodily perception: Between the conventions of depth and space in landscape painting, the linearity and speed of hand writing and the woven-ness of painterly supports. Her direct, gestural mark-making produces different types of painterly objects. The casual materiality of these objects are experienced in tension with their organization into composed spaces.
Awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022 and the Tournesol Award at the Headland’s Center for the Arts in 2016. She earned her MFA from Yale University (2015) and BFA from NYU (2006). Solo exhibitions include Below Grand and Soloway gallery in New York, Gallery 16 in San Francisco and the Suburban in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
John Yau
Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1950, Yau earned his MFA from Brooklyn College in 1978.
A noted critic and curator, he served as Arts Editor of the Brooklyn Rail and remains a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. He has taught at Pratt, MICA, SVA, Brown University, and UC Berkeley.
His honors include the Lavan Award, National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and being named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France.
Wallace Whitney
Wallace Whitney is a New York-based painter whose work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, most recently Take the Air at Ceysson & Bénétière in New York. He is also a writer and educator, having taught at the University of Tennessee and Tyler School of Art.
Whitney has curated exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including Unfurled: Supports/Surfaces 1966–1976 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He is also a co-founder of the artist-run gallery Canada.
Helen O'Leary
Helen O’ Leary was born in Wexford, Ireland. She attended NCAD and earned a BFA and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. She has been honored with the Rome Prize American Academy in Rome, Hennessy Purchase Award, IMMA, Dublin, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; two Pollock-Krasner awards; the Joan Mitchell Award for painting and sculpture; and several grants from the Arts Council. She has attended many residencies, including the Culturel Irlandaise, France; the Sam and Adele Golden Residency, NY; Mac Dowell, NY; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME; and Yaddo, NY. Exhibitions include the American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY; The MAC Belfast, Ireland; National Gallery of Art, Ireland; Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, Lesley Heller Gallery, NY; Galerie le Petit Port, Ireland; the Contemporary Arts Centre, Australia; Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, IL; Kerlin Gallery, Ireland; and Fenderesky Gallery, Ireland. She currently is a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. She lives in Jersey City, NJ, State College, PA, and Leitrim, Ireland.
David Rhodes
David Rhodes (b. 1955, Manchester, England) is a New York-based painter known for his austere yet expressive works made using black paint on raw canvas or Sumi ink on paper. His abstract compositions—structured through repetition, mirroring, and spacing—emphasize process, line, and materiality, offering a tactile and temporal experience that resists representation.
He has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at venues such as Anthony Wilkinson Gallery (London), Galerie Katharina Krohn (Basel), and High Noon Gallery (New York, 2024), and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and The Huntington Museum, among others. A recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and nominee for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, Rhodes continues to explore the boundaries of abstraction and perception.
Joanne Greenbaum
Joanne Greenbaum earned a BA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Over the past twenty years, Joanne Greenbaum has exhibited widely at international venues including at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Germany; and MoMA PS1, New York, among many others. In 2008, a career-spanning survey of her work was mounted by Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, Switzerland and travelled to the Museum Abteiberg in Monchengladbach, Germany. In 2018, the Tufts University Art Galleries at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston mounted “Joanne Greenbaum: Things We Said Today,” a comprehensive solo exhibition that travelled to the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles..
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter, writer and teacher. She attended the Evergreen State College in the 1990s and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for her graduate degree. She was a full time senior critic at Yale School of Art until 2021. She has shown at The Blaffer Museum in Houston, TX, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The 2014 Whitney Biennial, The Program at ReMap in Athens, Greece, Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany and many others. In 2013 she received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award.
She is a frequent guest lecturer at many schools across the country, including, in the past few years, Princeton University, The University of Texas at Austin, Cranbrook, University of Alabama, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Low Residency Program, and Columbia University. She is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago and Rachel Uffner Gallery in NYC. In 2021 she opened a mid-career survey show at the Blaffer in Houston, Texas, called Comic Relief and accompanied by a monograph.
Kyle Staver
Kyle Staver earned her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize.
Staver has exhibited extensively in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Brussels, and beyond. Her work is held in the collections of the National Academy of Design, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The National Arts Club, and The McEvoy Foundation.
Hannah Beerman
Hannah Beerman (b. 1992 Nyack, NY) lives and works in New York City. She holds a BA in studio art from Bard College and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. She currently has a solo exhibition up at Kapp Kapp through Jan 6 2024.
Recent exhibitions include Up All Night, Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY; Call me if you get lost, Claas Reiss, London, UK; Friends & Family, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; As Above, So Below, curated by Barry Schwabsky, Duck Creek Arts Center, East Hampton, NY; and Sunspots and Underpants, T293, Rome, IT. Beerman is a forthcoming resident at the MacDowell Colony. Her work has been featured in Art Forum and the Brooklyn Rail. Her next upcoming solo exhibition is this winter at Sim Smith in London.
Judy Pfaff
Cited by critics as the pioneer of installation-art, this oft-cited label for the sprawling career of Judy Pfaff provides an introductory sense of Pfaff’s legacy, but proves limiting to the ever-changing work she has been making for decades and still today.
Born in London in 1946, Pfaff received a BFA from Washington University Saint Louis (1971), and an MFA from Yale University (1973) where she studied with Al Held. Her work spans across disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture to installation, but is perhaps best described as painting in space. These spatial paintings inhabit and transform their environments, becoming ad hoc homes for viewers and the artist.
She exhibited work in the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1981, and 1987, and represented the United States in the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal. Her pieces reside in the permanent collections of MOMA, Whitney Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. She is the recipient of many awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2014), the MacArthur Foundation Award (2004), and the Guggenhiem Fellowship (1983). Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, New York.
