Meet the 2024 Jurors

Alyssa Velazquez specializes in the material culture of gender, performance, and women’s studies. Prior to living and working in Pittsburgh, she was the Curatorial Research Associate at Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina. She also assisted in the development of exhibitions at Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York. Velazquez holds a MA in decorative arts, design history, and material culture from the Bard Graduate Center and a BA in history and anthropology from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. She organized Locally Sourced, highlighting new work by the Pittsburgh region’s most talented present-day makers of functional goods and furnishings at Carnegie Museum of Art. Other projects include Extraordinary Ordinary Things and Sharif Bey: Excavations. And most recently, The Pittsburgh Satellite Reef, part of the Worldwide Satellite Reef project by Maragaret and Christine Wertheim.

She has published articles in AutoStraddle, GRLSQUASH, The Establishment, Women’s History Magazine, The Fashion Studies Journal, and Votive Project. Velazquez was selected in 2021 to participate in María Irene Fornés Playwriting Workshop, sponsored by the Latinx Theatre Commons that included writers from India, Mexico, Argentina, Canada and Puerto Rico. In 2022 she was writer in residence at City Books, Pittsburgh’s oldest bookstore and a Freshworks Resident at Kelly Strayhorn Theater.

Soude Dadras is a citizen of the world, having lived and traveled all over the globe. Her art is born from her fascination with the transformative properties of language. She uses this passion to show how discarded materials can be given new life. This exhibit is a transfiguration of unwanted materials into textiles that communicate the way data and information are part of our everyday lives, whether we realize it or not.

She has been the CEO and curator of the Ongoing Conversation for the past five years. Ongoing Conversation is a platform for showcasing artists from different backgrounds in venues around the world. Ongoing Conversation's mission is "to bring together disparate voices in the visual arts through an international purview in order to examine cross-cultural similarities of the human condition." She curated international exhibitions that took place in prestigious venues in Japan, Turkey, Iran, Belarus, and the United States.

She is a Ph.D. student in Art Education at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, United States.

Dadras cherishes the history of each item in her work and allows the materials to directly influence and guide her creative process. Her art is inherently participatory, from the people who donate materials to the audiences who interact with her finished creations. Dadras is enchanted by the language of art and its ability to transcend traditional communication. This language is founded in each item's history and in the emotional response her participants experience witnessing the material's transformation.