Team

folaṣade (b. 1992) is a blackqueer neuro/quirky poet, curator, and organizer concerned with the immediate survival and ongoing liberation of people of the global majority. intuitively guided by her ancestors, folaṣade nurtures a reverence for indigeneity and the erotic within her slow moving body. she has self-published three poetry chapbooks, plus her most recent poetry zine titled the river is a memory (Moody, 2025). her first solo-curated exhibition as i lay changing opened in January 2026, adding to her growing body of co-curated exhibitions and film programs.

folaṣade has additionally published writing with Saint Paul Almanac, Blue Earth Review, The Kitchen, Hair+Nails and MN Women’s Press, and has additional essays, poems, and musings on her substack water of fire. folaṣade was born and raised on ohlone + muwekma lands, currently living on anishinaabe lands with her cat parsley.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). His writing has been published by Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, and the Bettering American Poetry anthology.

Duplan is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. As an independent curator, he has facilitated artist projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. Duplan’s video and performance work has been shown at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2020. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He now works as Program Manager at Recess.

Uchechi Anomnachi is a PhD student in American studies. His current work centers on race-making in American visual culture, Black spectatorship, and post-modern Blackness.

Esé Emmanuel is a writer, artist and curator attentive to the forms of things and the ways they escape formation. They think across architectures, black poetics, third cinema and other visual, textual and material cultures. Their work has appeared in spaces as varied as the MoMA PS1, TriQuarterly, PARSE and Black Camera.

They are working on a novel, a book-length essay on the avant-garde, and several screen and text-based installation projects at the University of Iowa, where they are slated to receive an MFA degree in creative writing by 2027.