About the Panel
Barbara Pollack is the co-founder of Art at a Time Like This, a nonprofit organization providing a platform for free expression to artists addressing pressing issues of the 21st century. In this capacity, she has curated or organized 15 online exhibitions, 6 public art projects and numerous panels and conferences. Since 1994, Pollack has contributed many articles to the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Village Voice, Artnews, Hyperallergic, Art in America and Art and Auction, among others. Her most recent book, Brand New Art from China, was published by Bloomsbury in 2018. She has also written essays for many leading and emerging artists including Joyce Kozloff, Jennie Jieun Lee, Liu Ye, LuYang, Zhao Zhao, Zhang Huan and others. This is her second curatorial effort at Jane Lombard Gallery having organized LuYang: Digital Alaya in 2021. More recently, Pollack curated Multiply! Strength in Numbers at the Shanghai Modern Art Museum in 2024 and Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity at Asia Society in 2022. Her earlier shows have been presented at Long Museum/Shanghai; Yuz Museum/Shanghai; Asia Society/Texas; Tampa Museum of Art/Florida; Oklahoma City Museum of Art; and Orange County Museum of Art. Her first exhibition, My Friends in My Apartment, literally took place in her loft and was reviewed by New York Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. In support of this research, Pollack received the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant in 2008 and two fellowships from Asian Cultural Council in 2008 and 2016.
Jazia Hammoudi is a curator and XR producer specializing in contemporary art and immersive technologies. She holds degrees in art history and museum studies from the Courtauld Institute of Art (London), and has held positions at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, the Barbican Centre, the Newark Museum, and Artnet. She got her start in XR as studio manager & researcher for Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and has brought projects to SXSW, the Venice Biennale, and the Serpentine Galleries. On the side, Jazia leads art & architecture tours in her native Morocco, as part of a larger effort to bring exposure to North African artists.
Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work incorporates archival research, somatic studies, and dialogical practices, supporting often overlooked narratives of intersectional identities.
Metaferia’s solo exhibitions and projects include Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2024 and 2017); Center for Book Arts, New York, NY (2024); RISD Art Museum, Providence, RI (2022-2023); and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021-2022). Her work was included in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates. Group exhibitions include Blaffer Museum of Art, Houston, TX (2024); ICA San Francisco, CA (2023); Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2023); The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI (2019); and Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Art Center, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2019). Her work is in the permanent collection of institutions including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; KADIST, Paris, France; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY.
Metaferia received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, Bemis, Recess Art, Project for Empty Space, and Silver Art Residency. Her work has been written about in publications including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine, and ARTNews. Metaferia is an Assistant Professor at Brown University in the Visual Art department, and lives and works in New York City.
Azita Moradkhani's work in drawing and sculpture focuses on the female body as a complex locus of pleasure and pain, venerated yet vulnerable. A symbol subjected to societal norms, scrutiny, and violence in public and private, the body is a subversive form in Moradkhani’s layered compositions; the sensuality of the drawings seduce the viewer’s gaze, only to confront them with embodied images of political uprisings, historical and current events, and human exploitation. This disruptive iconography challenges the fraying constructs of nationhood and belief inherited by the artist, unraveling across her new body of work.
Two worlds – birthplace and adopted home – live alongside one another in Moradkhani’s work. Both realms join intimately on the picture plane, whether in 2-D on paper, or on 3-D casts of her own body. In her sculptural work, through the collaborative process of casting her body, and in her printed textile work, she emphasizes the marks of history and memory on the body and its coverings.
Azita Moradkhani ( b. 1985, Iran) was born in Tehran where she was exposed to Persian art and culture, as well as Iranian politics, and that double exposure increased her sensitivity to the dynamics of vulnerability and violence that she now explores in her art-making. She received her BFA from Tehran University of Art (2009), and both her MA in Art Education (2013) and her MFA in drawing, painting and sculpture (2015) from Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. Currently, she teaches at Parsons School of Design and Rhode Island School of Design.
She was a recipient of both the Young Masters Art Prize and the Young Masters Emerging Woman Art Prize in London in 2017. She received the Saint Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artists Grant that same year as well as the NYFA City Artist Corps Grants in 2021. The Financial Times (London) reviewed her series of drawings “Victorious Secrets” and the Boston Globe (MA) published reviews of her collaborative performance piece “Irezumi,” and her curated exhibition “Echo” over the past few years.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan, CHN. She has also been a visiting artist/lecturer at universities such as Davidson College, Davidson, NC; Lesley University, Cambridge, MA; and Parsons School of Design, New York, NY. Moradkhani served as a panelist at Harvard University, Southern New Hampshire University, and MIT. She has been granted numerous residencies, including Yaddo, Virginia Center For the Creative Arts (VCCA), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), Silver Art Projects, Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA), and LMCC.
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