Meet The Artists

An interdisciplinary artist, Leslie Berns works with everyday, utilitarian materials to create mixed-media pieces that explore aspects of social, racial, and personal history. In Shimworks and Bookmarks for a Mixed Race Narrative: Who Could and Couldn’t Marry Whom, she uses wood leveling sticks (shims) coated in oil and chalk pastel to graphically interrogate a historic document from the pre-civil rights era titled "Anti-Miscegenation Laws of the Several States: 1932." She incorporates visual memoir and textual excerpts into book art-inspired works that enable a narrative, object-based contemplation of key persons, experiences, and influences that have shaped her life and art. Her artworks typically develop from works on/of paper to sculptural objects to spatio-temporal ‘events' documented as moving images and digital prints. She participated in a residency, ‘an experiment with language and form for writers and artists', with Arts, Letters and Numbers, Averill Park, New York. As part of the Washington Project for the Arts Experimental Media Series, Grounding, her video of a choreographed, performative drawing was screened at the Hirshhorn Museum and the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.). In Germany, she presented theater- and dance-based performances in the Heidelberg Schloss Garten (Threshold) and at Unterwegs Theater (Life is Folding and Unfolding) and exhibited work at galerie transition in Berlin. Leslie was born in Buffalo, New York to parents of German and Jamaican ancestry. Formerly a Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at the University of Maryland, College Park, she is currently based in Hudson, New York, and University Park, Maryland. She holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from Pratt Institute, both in painting.

Rachel Eskin Fisher is a filmmaker and screenwriter who writes about people with marginalized identities navigating the intersections of their personal and political lives, with a focus on people in past times. She holds an MFA in Television Writing & Production from the TV Writers Studio of Long Island University and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She co-produced and directed the film Joachim Prinz: I Shall Not Be Silent. The documentary is about the rabbi who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, Joachim Prinz, who came to America in 1937 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. Rachel’s screenplay Miss Perkins is about Frances Perkins, who became Labor Secretary in 1933. As the first woman cabinet secretary in US history, Perkins had to take care of her mentally ill husband and hide her loving partnership with Mary Harriman while convincing FDR to undertake the New Deal. As a James Weldon Johnson Fellow, Rachel will be working on her next television pilot, about the friendship, feminism, and passions of three women suffrage activists in the 1910s: Grace Nail Johnson, Marie Howe, and Rose Pastor Stokes. Rachel lives in Maplewood, NJ with her husband, Dan Fisher. They are the proud parents of two high school and college-age sons

JUNNY Ann Hibbert [JUNNY] is a Jamaican-born, Harlem-based fashion designer who creates bold, size-inclusive clothing. She is known for her use of bold colors, prints, and textures, and her collections have been praised for their joyful and empowering Spirit. JUNNY started her career as a fashion designer after getting downsized from her job as an ESPN sales executive. She quickly gained a following for her unique designs, and in 2021 she debuted her first collection at New York Fashion Week. The collection was a critical success, and JUNNY was named one of the top emerging talents of the year by W Magazine. In 2023, JUNNY was awarded the Visa She’s Next in Fashion Grant, which recognizes and supports women entrepreneurs in the fashion industry. She is also a vocal advocate for diversity and inclusion in the fashion industry, and she is committed to creating clothing that makes everyone feel confident and beautiful. JUNNY's work has been featured in publications such as Essence, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, W Mag, WWD, and Vanity Fair. She is a talented designer and a role model for women everywhere.

Pianist, composer, and educator Pete Malinverni has been a fixture on the New York City Jazz scene since moving there in the early 1980s from his hometown of Niagara Falls, NY, where he'd begun Classical Piano studies at the tender age of six. Pete is a Steinway Artist. Since moving to NYC, Pete has recorded sixteen times as a leader, including in solo piano, piano/violin duet, trio, quartet, quintet, big band, and choral contexts. All of his recordings have been received by critics and the public alike and have seen heavy airplay on all platforms, from the radio to the internet. Throughout his time in NYC, Pete has established performing, recording, and inspirational contact with a host of masters on the scene there, including Joe Lovano, Vernel Fournier, Charles Davis, Mel Lewis, Dennis Irwin, Karrin Allyson, Steve Wilson, and many, many others. These collaborations have happened in studios and on stages like the Carnegie Recital Hall, the Caramoor Festival, the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, the Rome Music and Image Festival, the Santiago (Chile) Jazz Festival, and others, as well as in New York's great clubs, such as the Village Vanguard, Birdland, the Blue Note, the Village Gate, Bradley's, Smalls and Mezzrow. These experiences, along with his work in inspirational settings such as the Devoe Street Baptist Church in Brooklyn (Minister of Music for eighteen years), the Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, NY (Pianist and Conductor), and the Pound Ridge Community Church (Director of Music), have convinced him that music must be treated as a sacred gift, to be passed on freely to fellow musicians and listeners, with passionate control. Pete is proud of his work in education, too. After tenures at William Paterson University and New York University, he now serves as Chair of Jazz Studies at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College, State University of New York, just a few miles north of the City.

Pamela Woolford is an interdisciplinary artist, creating new forms of narrative multimedia work about Black women and girls, and others whose joy, imagination, and inner life are under-explored in American media and popular art. She is the recipient of six Maryland State Arts Council Awards, five film-festival awards internationally, a Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland and Horizon Foundation, two Baker Artist Awards in interdisciplinary arts, an aSHE Fund Micro-Grant, and a host of other honors. She has been awarded a Storyknife Writers Residency, an NES Artist Residency, and an Official Citation from the Maryland House of Delegates. Woolford's site-specific installation Antoine and Me was exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art during 2022 and 2023 in a show voted one of the top 5 exhibitions in the Baltimore area during the show's opening year by BmoreArt magazine. Her latest film, Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, had a limited online release with a virtual premiere event attended by 1.5 thousand people. Woolford has authored more than 100 memoirs, fiction, profile, human-interest, and think pieces published in The Baltimore Sun, Poets & Writers Magazine, NAACP's Crisis Magazine, Harvard University’s Transition, and other publications. Her writings have been selected for anthologies, translated into German, and widely cited. She has been the Bisson Lecturer in the Humanities at Marymount University.