BRUNA was made possible by the following...
GABBY CAGLEY
As an Editorial Assistant and Research Fellow, GABBY Cagley is currently assisting the B R U N A publishing program for an upcoming book on Nancy Holt, a co-publication with the Western Gallery at Western Washington University (WWU). Through this archival research, she hopes to present Holt’s deep connection to feminism, mysticism, and nonlinear concepts of time. GABBY was born in Anchorage, Alaska, but has lived in the Pacific Northwest on the lands of the Puget Sound Salish since the age of five. She moved to Bellingham to attend WWU, where she obtained her Bachelors in Art History with a concentration in postmodern art and theory. When not at B R U N A, she finds joy in crocheting, knitting, and catching a film at the Pickford. Most recently, she has taken up the task of teaching herself Korean.
TERRELL CARTER
As Research Fellow in Critical Design, TERRELL Carter has worked with B R U N A and Localgroup Studio to support The Vienna Model, an exhibition and events program featuring Vienna, Austria’s innovative approaches to housing, architecture, affordability, as well as urban, neighborhood, and community development. He is currently at work on a report developed from the exhibition and events which will be presented to the public for further discussion and research.
Originally from the San Juan Islands, TERRELL has a long-held love of design, community, and place-making. This love propelled him to enter Deep Springs College, a self-governing educational community in California, followed by studies at Yale University, where he got an undergraduate degree in Humanities, focussing on antiauthoritarian responses to modernist architecture in the 1960s. After completing his degree, TERRELL travelled broadly, by nesting in Beijing, Vancouver, Sitka, San Francisco, Brooklyn, and Paris. TERRELL keeps his perspective global while focusing on the local by working as our research fellow. When he's not in the studio, you can find him practicing improv with Momentum Improvisation Lab, volunteering at the Pickford Film Center, or working at Northwest Youth Services.
BAILEY CHENEY
As Special Projects Manager, BAILEY has overseen many of BRUNA’s larger programs including exhibitions such as Lo, the Ourobourou its tayle devouring, the BRUNA holiday shop, the Hiroshima Library, and the BRUNA Hermitage Residency and Risograph Studio. While managing these projects, she is also in pursuit of various questions regarding the connections and manifestations of space and self.
Born on the traditional lands of the Snohomish people, with familial roots in Sweden, Greece, and Mexico, BAILEY has long explored and cared for the spaces in which people find refuge and peace. This curiosity blossomed while at Western Washington University, where she graduated early with a dual undergraduate degree in environmental systems and communications. Outside of academia, BAILEY is the creator of a limited-print zine series exploring the joys and difficulties of finding space for oneself. What I Meant combines Bailey’s affinity for Risograph printing, anthropomorphizing, and misunderstandings, and was most recently featured at The Art Lab in Fort Collins, Colorado. She exists at the artistic intersection of sanctuary, its seekers, and the reasons it is sought.
YANARA FRIEDLAND
As Curator of Mutter Courage, an occasional reading series that invites writers at the corner of poetic, embodied, and intersectional practices to share their work with the B R U N A community, YANARA has so far organized poetry readings, an artist talk, and an artist-writer residency. She is a German-American writer and translator. Her first book Uncountry: A Mythology was the winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Fiction award and is forthcoming in German translation with Mattes & Seitz. “Abraq ad Habra: I will Create As I Speak,” a digital chapbook, is available from Essay Press. She is the recipient of research grants from the DAAD and Arizona Commission on the Arts, supporting her current book project Groundswell, a chorography of border regions in the German-Polish and Sonoran borderlands. She is Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies in Bellingham. (Photo: Ben Johnson)
AMANDA GRELOCK
As a Board Member, AMANDA is doing the hard yards to ensure B R U N A is in good health and thriving. Born and raised in Saint Petersburg, Florida (home of the manatees), AMANDA’s heart lies in Hawaii’s Ko’olau Mountains while her feet are firmly planted in Bellingham. AMANDA works as the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Coordinator at the Community Food Co-op, a position designed to assist and enable systems that truly make healthy food accessible to EVERYONE. B R U N A is lucky to have this passionate advocate and warrior, who wages peace through artistic and creative thinking, community building, consciousness exploring, project design imagining, conversation and story-based truth-telling, social justice standing, and paradigm shifting futures.
MONICA KOLLER
As Community Research Fellow at B R U N A, MONICA Koller will present Story Corner, a storytime series for kids and kids-at-heart that expands our world while also bringing us closer together at the same time. Four times each year, she will read a kids’ book to local audiences that presents and values inclusive narratives.
Story Corner continues MONICA'S life-long discussions about race. With an early curiosity about cultures and diversity, she was confused, as a little girl, by the lack of dolls and books resembling her or her classmates. Decades later, as a mother of two young children, she finds new challenges in locating children's stories and images that celebrate all ways of walking through the world. For the past 3 years, MONICA has developed intercultural programming and curriculum that addresses race and inclusion with youth aged 0-18. After creating Children's CommUNITY in 2017, she decided to broadened her scope of work by encouraging lifelong cultural learning, and, in 2018 she established Connecting Community, LLC.
An SF-Bay Area native, MONICA has an MS in Counseling from San Francisco State University and has worked with under-served populations for over 15 years. Since moving to Washington in 2011, she has facilitated intercultural learning in the Bellingham region.
KRISTINA LEE PODESVA
KRISTINA Lee Podesva is the Editor & Publisher of B R U N A, which she founded in late 2017, opening with The Zizi Show. She is an artist, writer, editor, and publisher. Her artwork has appeared in exhibitions at Artspeak (Vancouver), Darling Foundry (Montreal), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), No Soul for Sale at the Tate (London), Dorsky Gallery (Long Island City), and the Power Plant (Toronto), among other venues. In addition, her publication-based art has appeared in various books and catalogues. She has presented artist talks and other lectures internationally including at the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (Alexandria), Arco Art Fair (Madrid), Art in General (NY), Art Metropole (Toronto), Casco (Utrecht), the Justine M. Barnicke gallery (Toronto), Kadist Art Foundation (San Francisco), MOMA (NY), the Power Plant (Toronto), SFMOMA, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco), Werkplaats Typografie (Arnhem), the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco). She has taught at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, Emily Carr University in Vancouver, and the Malmö Art Academy at Lund University in Sweden.
KATE STEINMANN
As Children’s Book Editor, KATE Steinmann is writing and editing B R U N A’s first picture book for young readers. A publishing professional and parent, KATE is interested in picture books that present big ideas to little readers—not didactically, through lecturing, but through powerful stories that invite children to walk in the shoes of a diverse range of compelling characters tackling familiar human dilemmas. An award-winning writer, she has worked as a publishing director, editor, writer, content strategist, and consultant for a range of clients including art museums, publishers, and universities. She is a veteran of Fillip, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently KATE is Senior Editor at Yishu, Vancouver, and a writer for the service design consultancy Bridgeable, Toronto. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the Cabbagetown Residents’ Association in 2018. KATE holds three degrees in art history: an Honours BA from Trinity College, University of Toronto, and an MA and PhD from the University of British Columbia.
JASMINE VALANDANI
As a Board Member, JASMINE Valandani brings much wisdom and many insights to B R U N A as an artist, amateur alchemist, and former educator at the Museum of Northwest Art. As an artist, she has worked across disciplines and media to explore the margins of experience, drawing attention to the undervalued or overlooked through subtle re-imaginings of material and space. Her sculpture, installation, and works on paper have been exhibited in the U.S., Canada, and South Korea. She is a graduate of the University of San Francisco where she earned a BFA and of the Cranbrook Academy where she received an MFA. JASMINE is currently living in Morocco. One can trace her adventures and everyday experiences by following her exquisite Instagram @ordinary sublime.
X’WELWELAT’SE AND ANE BERRETT
X’welwelat’se (WILLIAM John) and ANE Berrett are the forces behind Cultural Orientation to Coast Salish Concepts of Time + Space. WILLIAM is a Lummi Elder, storyteller, and retired teacher from Ferndale High School and Northwest Indian College, where he taught Lummi language classes. ANE is a licensed and holistic mental health counselor who has worked for over 25 years in culturally diverse contexts including the Northwest Indian College. She currently serves on the Board of the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force supporting social justice initiatives in the region and cultural inclusivity and reciprocity at B R U N A.
ROBERT YERACHMIEL SNIDERMAN
As Curatorial Fellow, ROBERT Yerachmiel Sniderman is activating BRUNA's archive by curating micro-exhibitions that form interconnective pathways between the collection's thematic threads and concerns arising locally. In addition, he is in the process of writing community guides that facilitate ways to enter and navigate the collection's many perspectives, ideas, and media.
ROBERT is a poet, artist, and curator who works with Jewish history as the primary medium for a context- and site-dependent practice. His work, in this vein, was first realized over three consecutive winters in the abandoned apartment above his grandfather's store in rural Pennsylvania. There, he tried to feel, inhabit, and archive what he could of his ancestors' remnants before the store sold. From 2016-2018, he worked as a curator and director of education at the Jewish History Museum and Holocaust History Center of Tucson, where within one of the most militarized political projects in the continental United States, he initiated intersectional programming, curricula, exhibitions, and community collaborations on forced removal, legislative racism, and interethnic resistance.
Through 2018, he worked as a DAAD Research Fellow at the Institute for Art in Context of the University of the Arts Berlin, where he contemplated inside, amassed an archive from, and performed public art actions with the largest intact and active Jewish cemetery in Europe after the genocide of European Jewry. A book documenting the project, Lost in Jüdische Friedhof Weißensee, is forthcoming in 2019.