Volume 14 Contributor Bios
Queer Life at Black Mountain College (Fall 2023)
Kyle Canter is a master’s student at Hunter College, where he is finishing his thesis on photography at Black Mountain College. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Stella Douglass (she/her/hers) was born in Blacksburg, Virginia and raised in Tucson, Arizona. Stella graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelors in Art History in 2023. She plans to continue her education at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Evie Horton is a current student at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and is majoring in Sculpture with a minor in Environmental Studies. They are a mixed media artist who currently works primarily with kudzu and is interested in woodworking, metalworking, fibers, and performance. They are fascinated by the relationship between humans and the natural world as well as exploring the connection between nature and queerness. Evie worked at the Black Mountain College Museum as an intern during the fall of 2022 and had a memorable experience that propelled them into the portfolio she is currently working on. Evie is also an assistant instructor at Skillset and student worker at UNCA’s STEAM Studio.
Kira Houston is an artist, writer, and LGBTQ+ advocate based in Asheville, NC. He graduated from Clark University with a BA in Art History and Spanish, and now works as Outreach Coordinator at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. In addition to art history and BMC scholarship, his research interests include queer theory, science fiction, and webcomics. kiyye.com
Alex Landry is a graduate student in art history in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University, where she is completing her thesis on Ray Johnson and the impact of his time at BMC on his work. She has held curatorial positions at the Newcomb Art Museum and the Asheville Art Museum, where she curated a digital exhibition titled “Dear Lorna, Love Ray” on the letters that Johnson wrote to Lorna Blaine Halper while he was a student at BMC. Alex is currently a gallery assistant at The Parlour Gallery in New Orleans. In her writing and sculptural work, she studies how queerness relates to art-making and reception.
Sophie Mak-Schram is an art historian, producer, educator and occasional practitioner. Her current research (in part held through the academic frame of the EU: Horizon 2020-funded FEINART project, where she is completing a PhD at Zeppelin University in Germany) thinks alongside contemporary alternative educational projects about pedagogical propositions that work through art to propose ways of learning (to be) together. At the moment, she’s particularly interested in radical pedagogies, embodied knowledge and the ‘and’ between art and education.
Andy Martrich is the author of several works of poetry & prose, including Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot: A peripheral history of the Jargon Society as told through its missing books, forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press. He is a co-founder and editor at Hiding Press.
Christopher-Rasheem McMillan is a performance-related artist and scholar. He has a joint appointment between Dance and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. McMillan received his BA from Hampshire College, his MFA in Experimental Choreography from the Laban Conservatoire, London, and his PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from King’s College, London (2017). His interests concern choreography in an expanded field, something that he has approached through experimental practices and creative processes in a multiplicity of formats and expressions. He uses video, performance, photography, and oral storytelling to explore themes of race, memory, queer desire, religion, personal and public mythology.
Born in southwest Wyoming, Chase Pendleton is a writer with a degree in art history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her specialties include queer history, transgender studies, feminism, and photography. Chase now lives in Philadelphia where she continues to write about history, art, and culture.
lydia see (she/they/y’all) is a multiform artist, educator, and curator of art and archives from New England, tied to Appalachia, and residing in Tucson, AZ. lydia is a serial collaborator and a firm believer in art as a catalyst for social justice + civic engagement. lydiasee.com / @lydiasee.studio
David Silver is associate professor and chair of Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he teaches classes in urban agriculture, hyperlocal food systems, and food, culture, and storytelling. His book, The Farm at Black Mountain College, will be co-published in 2024 by Atelier Éditions and the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
Melissa Wilkinson is a long time academic and active professional. She’s actively exhibiting her works while attempting to find transcendental happiness at the bottom of a coffee cup. She serves as Assistant Teaching Professor of Art at UMass-Dartmouth where she holds a studio as well as the Hudson Valley, NY where she holds a home with her lovely wife, Amber, dog Rowlf, and cat Meshach.
Emilio Williams is a bilingual (Spanish/English) award-winning playwright, essayist and educator. He currently teaches at DePaul University and Columbia College Chicago. He holds an MFA in Writing and divides his time between Chicago and Paris. www.emiliowilliams.com
Editors
Thomas Edward Frank is University Professor and Associate Dean for Continuing Studies in the Graduate School of Wake Forest University. He teaches and writes about American communities of ideals, particularly liberal arts colleges and utopian movements, as well as the conservation of the natural and built landscapes that tell the stories of how American culture developed.
Carissa Pfeiffer is a Librarian at Buncombe County Special Collections and former staff member of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. She holds an MS in Library and Information Science + an Advanced Certificate in Archives from Pratt Institute.
Ant M Lobo-Ladd (b. 1996, they/them) is a North Carolina based Queer artist, curator, and writer. Their work focuses on Queer history and narratives, sexuality, and ecology. With these themes Ant creates vignettes into constructed Queer worlds of past, present, and future; using their scholarly research on Queer Modernism and Black Mountain College as the backbone of their practice. Ant lives in Raleigh with their husband, is a gardener, orchid collector, and studied analog processes in photography at Appalachian State University.
Special thanks to Fall 2023 Interns Isabel Baggett and Emma Lester for their work as Production Assistants.