Alvaro Azcárraga is a Mexican artist living and working in Brooklyn. Merging art, science, and cultural history, his practice revolves around maize (Zea mays) as both a biological entity and a symbol of complex colonial narratives. By tracing how maize transforms into “corn” when it crosses the US–Mexico border, he reveals the social, political, and scientific forces at play in this seemingly simple shift in language and identity.

Alvaro currently serves as Director of Operations at BioBAT Art Space and is a NEW INC Y11 Member (2024–2025). He has held notable residencies at Genspace (2024) and the University at Buffalo’s Coalesce Artist Residency (2022–23) and was awarded the Theresa Cha Fellowship at the Berkeley Art Museum (2018). Alvaro earned an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA (2022) and dual BA degrees in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Art Practice (Honors) from UC Berkeley (2018).

Felecia Davis’s work in computational textiles questions how we live, and she reimagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. For Davis, textiles are heuristic, metaphorical, and real material with which to rethink architectural design and practice. Computational textiles are textiles that are responsive to cues in the environment using sensors or the changeable properties of the natural material itself to communicate information to people. Davis is interested in developing computational methods and design in relation to specific bodies in specific places, engaging specific social, cultural, and political constructions.

Davis is principal in her design firm Felecia Davis Studio and an Associate Professor at the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing in the School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Graphic Design at the Pennsylvania State University, where she is the director of SOFTLAB@PSU. Her work was featured on PBS’s Women in Science Profiles, connecting art, science, engineering, and design. Davis’s Black Flower Antenna was part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Reconstruction: Blackness and Architecture in America. She is a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective, a not-for-profit group of Black architects, scholars, and artists supporting design work about the Black diaspora. In 2023, Davis exhibited Textural Threshold: Dreadlock using machine learning pattern recognition in the Central Pavilion at the 18th Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Davis has received several finalist awards for her architectural designs in open and invited design competitions and has been presented with many awards and residencies supporting her contributions to design, including a 2025 MacDowell Fellowship; a 2022 New York Architectural League Emerging Voice Award; and a 2022 National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum for Digital Design.

Meaghan Elyse is a sculptor working collaboratively in clay and public art. She believes collective pieces are an antidote to disconnection: that sitting, making, and talking together restores connection with each other, with our own bodies, and the natural world.

Born in 1992 in London, she is based between New York City and Massachusetts. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she received the Leroy Neiman Fellowship, and has attended residencies at Yaddo, AZ–West, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

LIZ ENSZ (b. 1983, Minnesota) was raised by resourceful metal scrappers and trash pickers who shaped their understanding of craft, material, economies, and the edges of public space. They received an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and have been full-time faculty in Fiber at the Maryland Institute College of Art since 2018. ENSZ currently lives and works in Baltimore and Brooklyn.

Sasha Fishman is a New York–based sculptor and researcher whose work explores marine biomaterials, toxicology, and energy harvesting as points for critical analysis and mechanisms for sculpting. Fishman holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she collaborated with labs on salmon, fountains, and carbon capture materials. She is a current fellow at Lighthouseworks and recipient of the 2026 Folly Tree Dancing Tree Award.

Fishman has exhibited her work at Murmurs (Los Angeles), Below Grand (New York), Resort (Maryland), Parrish Museum (New York), Hesse Flatow (New York), Bozomag (Los Angeles), ILY2 (Portland), the Jewish Museum (New York), KunstHausWien–Museum Hundertwasser (Austria), and the Indian Ceramics Triennale (New Delhi, India). She has participated in residencies at EKWC (Netherlands), Smack Mellon (New York), Shoals Marine Laboratory (Maine), Art Ichol (India), ACRE (Wisconsin), and the High Desert Observatory (California). She was a 2025 Pratt Foundations Lab Art + Sci Visiting Artist, participated in an Earth Day panel with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation at the Parrish Art Museum, and has presented her work and led workshops at Printed Matter, Genspace, Carnegie Mellon, Pratt, University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, University of Denver, University of Colorado Boulder, Kenyon College, MICA, SUNY Purchase, Caltech, PNCA, CSULB, PICA, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been written about in Brooklyn Rail, Dezeen, MOLD Magazine, and The American Scholar.

Laura Maria Gonzalez is a designer and researcher whose work explores how living systems can become part of the way we design and fabricate the built environment. Working across computational design, additive manufacturing, material science, and biology, she develops material processes that treat biological matter as an active agent in design. Her work looks at how processes such as microbial growth and mineral formation can influence material behavior and create new possibilities for sensing, adaptation, and environmental response.

Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Microbial Assemblies Lab at Florida Atlantic University. She holds a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from MIT and a Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the London Design Biennale, NYCxDESIGN, Cornell University, and MIT.

Fernando Laposse is a Mexican designer who transforms humble natural materials into refined design pieces. He has worked extensively with overlooked plant species native to Mexico, including sisal, loofah, corn, and avocado. His work develops from long-term research, creating objects that highlight materials and their cultural significance. Collaborating with Indigenous communities, he explores themes of environmental crisis, biodiversity loss, and migration through the transformative power of design.

Precious Lovell is an artist-designer-maker and curator based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her sociocultural creative practice explores the narrative potential of cloth and clothing, centering the African Diaspora. Precious was the 2022 Brightwork Fellow at Anchorlight in Raleigh and has been granted artist residencies in Brazil, Ghana, Canada, and Puerto Rico. She has presented lectures at national and international institutions, and her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad. Precious has traveled to 45 countries researching textiles and clothing.

Elise Vazelakis’s art practice explores the transformation of discarded materials through textile sculpture and contemporary basketry, repurposing everyday waste into objects that examine consumption and environmental impact. The featured work Driving With My Eyes Closed reflects on Vazelakis’s relationship to convenience and the materials that accumulate through daily life. Using traditional basketry techniques such as twining, Vazelakis transforms Amazon packaging into plastic yarn through slow, repetitive handwork. The work maps personal patterns of consumption while reflecting on the larger systems that shape contemporary life. Through this process, materials intended for disposal are given new life, becoming records of use, labor, and accumulation.