Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award Jurors

The Ruth Arts Mary L Nohl Alumni Awards program is designed to reactivate all components of the Nohl Fellowship program, from former fellows to former jurors. A panel of former Nohl jurors will select four awardees, up to 50% of whom can live outside the greater Milwaukee area. In making this selection, they will take into account each applicant’s current artistic practice and their demonstrated commitment to contributing to the artist support network created by current and former Alumni Awardees.

About the 2025 Jurors

Evan Garza is a global contemporary art scholar, queer art historian, Fulbright Scholar, and curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. They earned their MA from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute. Garza served as a juror for the Nohl Fellowship in 2013.

Irene Georgia Tsatsos (she/inclusive they) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker whose practice centers memory, presence, and the ethics of care. Working across textiles, drawing, clay, writing, and spatial engagement, she explores how art can hold the unseen and tend to the relational. She is the former Chief Curator at the Armory Center for the Arts and former director/curator of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. She has published extensively, has served on numerous award and programmatic panels nationally, and has taught at UCLA, Claremont Graduate University, University of Southern California, California Institute of the Arts, and My Friends Place, a social service agency in Hollywood that assists unhoused and marginalized youth. Informed by the Latin curare – to care for – her artistic and curatorial work acts as a form of stewardship: attentive, embodied, and responsive. Across three decades, she has cultivated a deeply situated practice shaped by daily ritual, collective inquiry, and a commitment to creating spaces that remember, reclaim, and repair. Currently, she is examining how care is structured, experienced, and instrumentalized across different contexts. She lives on Tongva land in the greater Los Angeles area. Tsatsos served as a juror for the Nohl Fellowship in 2012.

About the 2024 Jurors

Kimi Kitada is a curator based in Kansas City, MO. Currently, she is the Gallery and Programs Manager at Charlotte Street, where she oversees exhibitions and public programs such as Movement Lab, the Art Writing Intensive, and The Guest Curator lecture series. Previously, she was a Curatorial Assistant at MOCA Los Angeles (2019-2020). From 2014 to 2018, she was Public Programs & Research Coordinator at Independent Curators International in New York. Her recent exhibitions include: Ways of Listening (2024); Potential Futures: Prototypes (2023); Handiwork: Art, Craft, and the Space Between (2022); With Liberty and Justice (2021) at Charlotte Street, Kansas City, MO; and where we came from & where we are going at Transformer, Washington DC (2019), among others. Kitada received a BA in Art History and Classics from Bucknell University and an MA in Museum Studies from NYU. She served as a Nohl Fellowship juror in 2023.

Astria Suparak is an artist and curator based in Oakland, California. Her cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues (like institutionalized racism, feminisms, and colonialism) made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science fiction movies, rock music, and sports. Straddling creative and scholarly work, the projects often take the form of publicly available tools and databases, chronicling subcultures and omitted perspectives.

In recent years, Suparak’s creative projects have been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York; Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ArtScience Museum, Singapore; and as part of the For Freedoms billboard series. She has curated exhibitions, screenings, and performances for the Liverpool Biennial; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; The Kitchen and MoMA PS1, in New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and Expo Chicago, as well as for unconventional spaces, such as roller-skating rinks, sports bars, and rock clubs. Suparak is the winner of the 2022 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award. She served as a juror for the Nohl Fellowship in 2012.

Past Jurors

2023

Ashley Stull Meyers, Horning Chief Curator of Art, Science, and Technology at PRAx at Oregon State University in Corvallis

Thomas F. James, Curator & Executive Director, The Last Resort Artist Retreat, Baltimore, Maryland