Adriana Corral critically examines the nuances of immigration, citizenship, economic trade, labor, public health, and policies in both national and international contexts that are informed by her upbringing on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. Her interdisciplinary, research-based practice boldly explores memory, loss, human rights abuses, and unacknowledged histories. Often working across international borders, she mines state and national archives for primary documents and engages historians, anthropologists, journalists, gender scholars, climate scientists, human rights attorneys, and victims’ families for information that materialize in her sculptures, installations and drawings. Corral meticulously uncovers primary documents while also investigating the physical and cultural landscapes of the sites she works with—examining the soil, the built environment, and the community’s collective memory. Her art symbolizes the remnants of destruction – earth and ashes that bear witness to the past. Corral received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and completed her BFA at the University of Texas at El Paso. Corral was an Artist Research Fellow at Archives of American Art and History at the Smithsonian Institution (2018), selected for the Latinx Artist Fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation (2021) and a Planet Texas 2050 Artist Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin (2023-24). Corral’s exhibitions include, Suffering from Realness, MASS MoCA (2019-2020), Prospect 5, Yesterday we said tomorrow (2020-2022), Tongues of Fire, Ballroom Marfa (2023), Unflagging: Futures, Ballroom Marfa (2024) and Hidden Histories, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2023-25).

Dr. Melanie L. Rodriguez is an instructor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown and an independent scholar of Mexican American History. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, she received her Ph.D. in Borderlands History from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2017. Her research on the police killing of Jose Campos Torres and the Mexican American struggle for justice will be included in the forthcoming anthology, Bayou City Policing: Chicanos, Law Enforcement, and Third Coast Activism, and has been presented at the Western Historical Association’s annual conference (2022) and National Association of Chicano and Chicana Studies (2023). As an independent scholar, she was an assistant producer for the Vox podcast series, The Chicano Squad (2021), and recently featured in the 2024 A&;E docuseries of the same name. Her volunteer work with the Houston Metropolitan Research Center resulted in the curation of “La Madre de los Mexicanos” (2019) within the exhibit Musica! The Sounds of Houston Latino Community. Currently, as a volunteer archivist for the Clatsop Historical Society’s Heritage Museum, she researches the history of the growing Latino migrant community of Astoria, Oregon.

Cherise Smith is the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies in the Department African & African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she is affiliated with Art History.  Her research centers on African American art, the history of photography, performance, and contemporary art. Smith completed the Ph.D. at Stanford University. In 2021-2022, Smith was an inaugural residential Scholar of the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. She is the author of Michael Ray Charles: Studies in Blackness (University of Texas Press, 2020) which won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The book places the artist’s work in the context of the 1990s, the rise in collecting of Black “memorabilia,” the challenges posed by art censorship, and Pop art among other historical trends. Her book, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Duke University Press, 2011), examines how identity is negotiated in performance art in which women artists take-on the characteristics and manners of a racial, ethnic, and gender “other.”  Currently, she is Executive Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies where she spearheads Black Studies’ Art and Archive Initiative which seeks to expand UT’s holdings of art and material collections relating to people of African descent and increase its exhibition spaces. Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University.  She has worked in the curatorial departments of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum, among other institutions.

Sarah Labowitz is a policy expert. She combines traditional advocacy, data-driven research, media, and storytelling to pursue ambitious public policy goals. Collaborating closely with movement-based organizers, she focuses on place-based strategies to achieve meaningful policy outcomes. Labowitz lives and works between Houston, Texas, and Washington, DC.