Filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar is interested in telling stories, and getting personal. Known for both his intimate documentaries such as "In a Dream", a film about his father, and his Hollywood feature films "We the Animals" and "Hustle", he has put together a career in filmmaking that is independent, authentic and original. His work has won major awards at Sundance, Doville, and South by Southwest, to name a few. "In A Dream" was shortlisted for an Academy Award and received two 2010 Emmy nominations, including Best Documentary.

His latest success is the gritty HBO American crime drama "Task", where he was Executive Producer and Director of several of the episodes. He is in the process of finishing his latest film, "The Painted Bride" starring Jeremy Allen White, Mandy Patinkin, and Isabella Rossellini that is due out next year.

Philadelphia artist Larry Spaid has spent over 12 years of his artistic life travelling the planet,living and teaching in different countries and experiencing different cultures.

His expansive output of art includes painting, printing and various experiments with mixed media. He taught at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University for thirty-seven years. This included teaching in Rome, Italy and Tokyo, Japan, for seven years, and was awarded three major sabbaticals allowing him to return and travel extensively in South East Asia. He retired in 2010 as Professor Emeritus.

He has exhibited in galleries and museums extensively in the US and internationally including the United Kingdom, Italy, and Guatemala. His work is represented in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and The Museum of Fine Arts in Tokyo Japan.

Gbadebo's use of materials centers on her family history of enslavement in the American South, while her ceramics draw inspiration from traditional African pottery techniques, calling on her Nigerian ancestry. Fueled by research and a commitment to the archival record, Gbadebo's multidisciplinary approach investigates the complex relationships between land, matter, and memory.Grounded in historically and culturally significant materials such as indigo dye, human hair collected throughout the African diaspora and soil hand-dug from the True Blue plantation grounds in South Carolina, Gbadebo's practice is an exploration of heritage.

She lives and works in Philadelphia. She received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a certification in Creative Place Keeping at The New Jersey Institute of Technology.

In 2023, she was the recipient of the Maxwell and Hanrahan Craft Fellowship and the Keynote speaker for the American Ceramic Circle annual conference. In 2022, she was a Pew Fellow at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

She has exhibited her work across the US and internationally in Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Nigerian born but living in America since the age of one, Odili Donald Odita's work explores color on the grand scale and his hard-edge large paintings and mural installations have redefined abstract painting in the context of sociopolitical concerns. Most of Odita's work is inspired by the vibrant textiles of his home country, Nigeria, mixed with patterns from Western modernity. He has exhibited his work prolifically in important museums and galleries around the world including a recent large installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has also been an important critic, writer, and lecturer at major institutions including Yale University and his present position as Professor of Painting at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University in Philadelphia.

A Chicago painter with an endless amount of surprises that unfold inside her landscapes of the Rococo and fantastical. Her work represents a continuation of the Chicago Imagists of the 60's with an interest in combining eccentric figuration with abstraction.

"Bramson incorporates the passionate complexity of eastern mythology, the sexual innuendos of soap operas, and sometimes the happy endings of cartoons" said critic Miranda McClintic

She has shown her work prolifically in prestigious galleries and Museums internationally and her work is included in over 100 major collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago ,The national museum of American Art in Washington DC and many more.

She also was a professor of art at the University of Illinois at Chicago and then a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago …. totaling over 40 years of being a teaching Artist.

My guest today is Henry Burmudez. He became a major artist in his home country of Venezuela in the 70's through the early 2000's. He made a good living and prospered as a creative force in his home town of Caracas. Among his other accomplishments, he represented Venezuela at the 1986 Venice Biennale.

In 1998 , with the election of Cesar Chavez, his world began to fall apart. With the collapse of the economy, his collector base evaporated and left the artist with no way of making a living and support his family. With the help of artist Frank Hyder, he was invited to show in Miami Florida. He eventually made his way to Philadelphia where he forged a new life as an artist and in 2024 had a 20 year retrospective at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia. The exhibit was a survey of his extraordinary reinvention of himself and his artwork in his new chosen home. With the results of the recent election in the US, he is now reminded of the challenges he faced in Venezuela.We will be talking about all of that and what it means to be an artist in the world today.

Chip is a photographer, an international public street artist and activist who worked as a physician on the Navajo nation between Monument Valley and The Grand Canyon in Arizona for 36 years retiring in 2023. In 2012 he formed the Painted Desert Project – a community project which resulted in a constellation of murals across the Navajo Nation painted by reservation artists and artists from all over the world.

As an artist, a doctor and community activist he has committed himself to the vital health of the Navajo nation and the planet earth in general.

Thomas was a 2018 recipient of a Kindle Project gift and in 2020 was one of a handful of artists chosen by the UN to recognize the 75th anniversary of the UN's founding.

The independent filmmaker based in Salt Lake City, Utah has created his own very distinct and unique style of filmmaking. In 2013, Indiewire proclaimed Harris "The Best Underground Filmmaker You Don't Know — But Should."[5]

Harris' films have been featured at various festivals and museums worldwide, including renowned venues like Sundance, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the British Film Institute in London, the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna Austria, Les Laboratories in Aubervilliers France, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.[6]

Harris taught film and screenwriting classes at the University of Utah and worked as a documentarian and television journalist. He wrote and directed six feature films, many experimental movies, and more than one-hundred documentaries for PBS, National Geographic, NBC, and others.[6]

In 1991, he wrote and directed the comedy Rubin and Ed, in which Crispin Glover and Howard Hesseman wander the desert looking for a suitable place to bury a frozen cat.

In 2001 he released The Beaver Trilogy, The Movie he has received the most critical acclaim and world wide attention.

Harris has also written three books: The Wild Goose Chronicles, Fate Is A Hairy Rodent, and Mondo Utah.[10]

"I appreciate the Rococo for its extravagance and theatricality, as it appeals to my love of kitsch."- STUART NETSKY

Netsky is a conceptual artist making paintings, mixed media sculptures, prints and other objects. An original voice and artist whose work jumps off the canvas and confronts us with the eclectic absurdity of our image inundated culture. A lover of the theatrical, mixed with his unique version of pop and Romantic master painting.

His work is made in distinct series, creating a pictorial eclecticism that obscures our ability to make sense of the image, acting as a metaphor for the confusion and shifting dichotomies in social interactions.Digital images speak to our technologically driven world and reflect the temporal paradox in pop culture whereby the past is brought to the present, the present to the past. He digitally appropriates art and historical images with those from film and popular culture, juxtaposed with psychedelic and floral patterns and mixes them all together. His influences include Francois Boucher and Gerhard Richter, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Gene Davis, Bridget Riley, Nicholas Krushenick and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among others - the rococo and abstraction, op art and pop art, anime and realism, and the psychedelic all come together, layered, spliced and distorted, materials that evoke the psychosexual. He views his practice as a drag display operating within the time he has lived in while embracing nostalgia and romanticism for their tender and universal sensibilities.

He received a Master of Art in Art Education from Philadelphia College of Art in 1986 and went on to receive a Master of Fine Art in sculpture from Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, PA in 1990.

Netsky was an Adjunct Professor at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Jefferson University.

He has had solo exhibitions of his work at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Richard Anderson, NYC, Locks Gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, and a retrospective at the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts. He has also shown in innumerable group shows nationally and internationally. In 1995, he received the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His work is in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, as well as the Johnson and Johnson Collection and many private collections.

Donald Camp is a renowned Philadelphia artist and photographer known for his large scale images that explore the dignity and nobility that can be found in the human face.

Camp's unique printing methods are based on early 19th Century non-silver photographic processes. In 1990 Camp began his most acclaimed series, Dust Shaped Hearts. These large photographic monoprints are created with raw earth pigment and casein, and transmit haunting and intimate images of the human face.

He is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim and Pew Grants.

His work is included in many important collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art , and the Simon Guggenheim Collection.