The Team
Katherine “Kat” Cheairs, Curator
Katherine “Kat” Cheairs is a filmmaker, educator, curator, activist and community artist. Kat’s areas of interest and research include: HIV & AIDS; visual culture; media arts therapy; community arts; and, critical race theory in art education. Ms Cheairs is the producer and director of the documentary, Ending Silence, Shame & Stigma: HIV/AIDS in the African American Family. Kat’s current video projects include Voices at the Gate and In This House, which explore HIV/AIDS narratives through the Black body. Kat has presented on panels at the Tribeca Film Institute, BAM, Pratt Institute, The New School, New York University, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Aperture Foundation, and UnionDocs. Ms. Cheairs holds a Master of Fine Art in Film and Television Production from the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University. Katherine serves on the Archive Committee for Visual AIDS and is the Director of Education for Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project.
Theodore (ted) Kerr, Curator
Theodore (ted) Kerr, is a Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based writer, organizer, and educator. He is an adjunct professor at The New School, and a founding member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective. He was the guest editor of What You Don’t Know About AIDS Could Fill a Museum, for On Curating. His writing has appeared in the Village Voice, The Advocate, The Body, Poz, and elsewhere including the academic publications WSQ, QED, and Drain. In 2017 he was an interviewer for Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. With Alexandra Juhasz, he is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Culture Production (Duke, forthcoming), and is the guest curator of A People’s History of Pandemic: AIDS, Posters, and Stories of Public Health (National Library of Medicine, 2021).
Photo by Wiafe Mensah-Bonsu
Jawanza Williams, Curator
Jawanza james Williams (He, Him) is a Black, Radical Queer, Abolitionist and Socialist. He is currently the Director of Organizing at VOCAL-NY, a grassroots organization building power among poor and low-income New Yorkers. He is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a founding member of its Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus.
Alexandra Juhasz, Curator
Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, alexandrajuhasz.com, is a Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She has been making and thinking about AIDS activist video since the mid-80s. She is the author/editor of scholarly books on AIDS including AIDS TV (Duke, 1995) and AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (with Jih-Fei Cheng and Nishant Shahani, 2020), fake (and real) documentaries, YouTube, and black lesbian filmmaking (with Yvonne Welbon, Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of African-American Lesbian Filmmaking, Duke 2018). Her current work is on and about feminist Internet culture: fakenews-poetry.org.
Photo by Leon Mostovoy
Umi Hsu, Creative Director/Producer
Umi Hsu (they/them) is a public humanist and strategic designer with research and organizing agendas for equity in arts, technology, and civic life. They are currently the Director of Content Strategy at One Institute. Previously, Hsu led digital and data initiatives at the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. They have published extensively on digital media, data, and Internet culture and teach as adjunct faculty at ArtCenter College of Design and USC Marshall School of Business. As a sound ethnographer and artist, Hsu has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Council for Learned Society, Shuttleworth Foundation, and LA Metro and has works presented by the Rubin Museum, Japanese American National Museum, and CTM Festival in Berlin.
Photo by Clifford Landon Pun
Saphir Davis, Designer
Saphir Davis (they/them) is an Artivist whose creative work meets at the intersections of healing and social justices. They work with organizations which further decolonial, communal, intersectional, and radical healing practices through the arts. Currently they serve as the Exhibitions and Programming Intern at One Institute. Saphir graduated with honors from Loyola Marymount University with a BA in Studio Arts in 2020, with a concentration in Multimedia Arts and interdisciplinary study in the African-American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Psychology departments. Their thesis work was a multisensory physical-turned-virtual installation titled Confessions, which explored a queering and abstraction of a womb, and the notions of comfort and intimacy that is associated with it.