Lauren Kelley (b. 1975, Baltimore, Maryland) currently lives and works in New York. In 2015 she was the Creative Capital Award winner. In 2011 she was a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award recipient and, in 2007, was presented an inaugural Altoids Award through the New Museum. She has been a resident of the Skowhegan School, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Glassell School's Core Program and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program. Her work has been exhibited in such venues as the New Museum, Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., The High Line, and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston. Reviews of her work have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art: 21 Blog, Art in America, ArtLies, Houston Chronicle and Houston Press. Inspired by the malleable nature of young minds and the twisted intricacies of immature adults, her work is a response to historical narratives. Her animated tales have been culled from ideas supported by 1970s feminist logic, and the 1940s Doll Tests, a race-based psychological study of Black American youth. Kelley’s studio practice is interdisciplinary and for the past six years, she has focused on a labor-intensive body of work as a response to 70s gender politics, and notions of female strength.

Allison Schulnik (b. 1978, San Diego, California) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She earned her BFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Laguna Art Museum; Oklahoma City Museum of Art; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; ZieherSmith Gallery, New York; Rokeby Gallery, London; Unosunove Arte Contemporanea, Rome; and Division Gallery, Montreal. Schulnik's work is in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Santa Barbara Art Museum; Museé de Beaux Arts, Montreal; Farnsworth Art Museum; Laguna Art Museum; Montreal Contemporary Art Museum; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Schulnik choreographs her subjects in compositions that embody a spirit of the macabre, a Shakespearian comedy/tragedy of love, death and farce. The subjects often stare back at the audience and study them as they are in turn studied, aware of their ancestors from the “Grand Theme” works of the past, the genre paintings that inform them. Although a haunting sense of foreboding, discomfort and unease is palpable, a sense of understanding, compassion and hopefulness for her cast of characters is still evident in the heavy impasto paintings. Her sculptural use of oil paint references her clay-animation background, as a motion-like sensibility affords her paintings unparalleled depth and energy. Schulnik has an upcoming solo exhibition this fall at ZieherSmith in New York.

Robin F. Williams (b. 1984, Columbus, Ohio) currently lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Williams has been included in numerous exhibitions internationally and abroad including an exhibition at Gallery Poulsen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work is currently on view in Et in Arcadia Ego at the New Museum Los Gatos, CA. Williams has been honored as the Josephine Mercy Heathcote Fellow at The MacDowell Colony and the 2010 Brooklyn Academy “Playbill Artist.” Her work has been featured in numerous publications including The Brooklyn Rail, Juxtapoz, and The Observer. Through an exploration of psychological portraiture, Williams' previous series of works depicted narratives surrounding children, teenagers and men. Williams’ experimental painting techniques have continued to develop alongside her expanded subject matter. Within these works Williams draws resemblance from a number of sources including the innovative mark-making of post-impressionist Georges-Pierre Seurat, the paintings of Mary Cassat that re-cast the role of women over a century ago, the paintings of Edouard Manet that postured the role of the viewer as active participant in the painting's narrative and the psychedelic palette of nineties graphic designer Lisa Frank.