Matthew DeNicola

Heya is a multimedia project using photography and videography to portray a celebration of ethnic identity and redefinition of gender roles within the culture. Participants in the project are young-adult Arab women, whose origins’ from the different twenty-two Arab countries, migrants or born to Arab parent(s), of different religious believes (Muslim, Jew, Christian and atheists), celebrating their ethnic identity by turning away from widely accepted norms and embracing a revolutionary attitudes and ideology of their gender role in the Arab culture. “Resisting is existing” said Kamelya one of the subjects “critiquing the culture allow me to assert my existence and owning my identity”. Heya will open windows into the lives of non traditional Arab Women who praise their culture and find a way to exist through it by breaking expectation and redefining their rules. The portraitures and video interviews invite the viewer to embark in a journey of memory and present with each subject sharing their space, experience and quest of identity.

I create interactive artworks that encourage participants to view each other in a different perspective.

Ogden First will exhibit twelve For Freedoms billboards and activate their community with For Freedoms lawn signs. The exhibit, titled FOUR | FOR FREEDOMS opens with a reception from 6-9 p.m. Friday, July 5 at PLATFORMS, at 25th Street and Adams Avenue, as part of the city’s First Friday Art Stroll and is on display through the end of August. Billboards include: Hank Willis Thomas: Us is Them Hank Willis Thomas: They Are US Hank Willis Thomas: All Li es Matter Paula Crown: Hurt People Hurt People Mitch Epstein: The Common Air For Freedoms: Four Freedoms Eric Gottesman: Where Do We Go From Here Zoe Buckman: Grab Em By The Ballots Zoe Buckman: Inaction is Apathy Sanford Biggers: Just Us

The City Club of Cleveland is one of the nation's great free speech forums. A product of the Progressive Era, the City Club was founded in 1912 and are one of the nation's oldest continuous independent free speech forums, renowned for our tradition of debate and discussion. For more than a hundred years, all of our speakers — from sitting presidents to community activists — have answered unfiltered, unrehearsed questions directly from the audience.

Born in Tunisia in 1978, Karaoud left the country to New York in 2002. After ten years career in Wall Street, she pursued her dream to become photojournalist. In 2011, she covered stories of the Tunisian Revolution, including protests and the Libyan refugee crisis. In 2013, she documented stories on women’s roles in their communities around the world, focusing particularly on tribal communities in Oceania and Asia, including tribes from Isle of Pines in New Caledonia, Louisiade Achipelago islands in Papua New Guinea, where she sailed for two months to live with tribes, and the Hmong in Sapa, in Northern Vietnam. In 2014, her exhibition Ligne Rouge on women’s rights and access to public spaces around the world, toured Tunisia, Finland, France, and the US. Since then she has produced, exhibited and published work on women’s labor and exploitation in rural areas of Tunisia and Southeast Asia. In 2016 she received the first prize for photography at the Chouftouhouna Festival in Tunisia and received grants from the Great Meadows Foundation. In 2017, she presented her work on displaced Palestinians in to the American Anthropologist Association conference in Washington DC. In 2018, she won the International Photography Contest Shining a Light award, organized by the UNHCR and the Women’s Refugee Commission. In same year her photo essay on womanhood and nationhood of Sahraoui women was published in Advances in Gender Research. She received same year grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and Great Meadows Foundation as well as a scholarship from International Center of Photography to purse one year certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism. During her year at ICP, 2019, Karaoud worked on the project Heya, celebrating Arab women, living in the US, identity and redefinition of gender roles through series of portraits.

Two women who are living examples of what it means to be an advocate, an ally and a revolutionary for everyday people; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tiffany Cabán. As a Congresswoman and Queens District Attorney frontrunner, these progressive latinas use their power and platform to speak truth to injustice, systemic racism and immigrants' rights; they are my heroes.

Female photojournalist documenting history as it happens as well as women in the male-dominated field of politics.

Power, Gender, Firearms

My visual thoughts swing from social issues and fear of humanity growing cold to a celebration of the wonder of life. My vision has come to be a plea for respect, dignity and a connection with other peoples. I want to visualize my hopes and fears and enlarge our circle of understanding. My work has mostly been based in organic forms from nature. Lately however, a mother's worries about the world has subsumed my reverence for the natural world and wondered at the glorification of violence and the elements that inflict them. Guns seem to be flowering like weeds with a reverence for brute force and a resistance to humanity. What I have found is that you cannot have democracy at the end of a gun. Democracy is founded on civility and civil discourse. In 'Taking Aim,' I offer viewers an invitation to partake in this very loaded topic.

A poster series giving awareness to gross injustices currently taking place in the U.S.

Visual Art Director with a hobby of creating activist posters.