Muña 2024

An eight-sided polygon is an octagon; an eight-writer Muña cohort is an Orochi (an eight-headed hydra) that hides a sword in its eight tails—tales.

Chile Dulce	Inés Arango-Guingue
Jasmine Barnes	Jennifer Seas
Jessica Zi Chen	Mrittika Ghosh
Yashi Davalos	Emrys Brandt

Out growing previous years’ structures, Muña 2024 initiates its new residency format, of eight writers and six-months, with hopes of providing a more pensive and vigorous writing support system for the residents.

Muña 2024 includes curators and writers from Kansas City, Charleston (IL), and Chicago. Their interests range from South Asian postcolonial literature to Caribbean/South American philosophy. They value intentional witnessing and poetic data re-presentation. They also critique cultural tokenism and the anthropocene. As a cohort, these eight residents reflect just a slice of the fascinations and journeys found in the Mississippi River Basin region.

Whether critiquing, interpreting, or chronicling, the Muña 2024 writers have their sights on triumph; whether cited as a monster or care-taker, the Orochi still grows an ecosystem of cypress and moss on their back.

Learn more about the Muña 2024 cohort below!

Chile Dulce (they/elle) is a queer K’iche’ multidisciplinary artist, curator, and organizer. They particularly enjoy utilizing performance and avant garde theatre to capture candid, awkward, and meaningful life experiences. Chile has written some things here and there; exhibited visual and multimedia projects at Qulture Collective, SOMArts, the Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics; performed with Topsy Turvy Queer Circus at Brava Theatre in San Francisco; and curated film programs for the Seattle Queer Film Festival, Festival of (In)Appropriation, Black Cinema Collective, and Sundance Institute. Follow Chile’s journey on IG @_chiledulce.

Mrittika Ghosh (she/her) is a reader, writer, and translator currently based in Chicago. She holds an MA from the University of Chicago and received her BA from Mount Holyoke College, where she focused on Francophone and South Asian postcolonial art and literature. She is energized by the power of art writing to create important dialogues across communities and cultures. She has been a bookseller, journalist, oral history archivist, advocate for immigrant rights. She has taught French, English, and Bengali. Her writing can be found in Sixty Inches from Center, Kajal Magazine, and the Cleveland Review of Books, among others.

Jasmine Barnes (she/her) is a writer, community builder and creative who currently calls the South Side of Chicago home. With a degree in sociology and journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, Jasmine’s multidisciplinary writing explores culture and identity from a place of intentional witnessing and curiosity. She rooted in a womanist perspective, centering themes of relational healing, community building, creative expression and spirituality in her work. Jasmine is a contributing writer and photographer for her local newspaper, South Side Weekly, and has published work in various arts and literary platforms including Sixty Inches From Center. She shares monthly reflections on all things wonderful, astonishing and mystifying in her Substack (news)letter, Sugar From Sun. The ancestors who inform and guide her work include Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Grace Lee Boggs and Maya Angelou.

Jennifer Seas (she/they) is an artist, curator, writer, and educator who creates experiences that are durational and unfold in space. Exhibitions and screenings of her work have been presented across the country, as well as internationally as the recipient of a Cultural Exchange Grant from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. She was the inaugural curatorial fellow for the Granite City Art and Design District, a land art conglomerate and project space in downtown Granite City, Illinois. Her writing has appeared in a number of academic publications and catalogues. She has taught or lectured on studio art and curatorial practice at universities in the U.S. and abroad. As Director and Chief Curator of the Tarble Arts Center, a teaching museum on the campus of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, IL, she organizes exhibitions, teaches courses, and imagines unique experiences for various audiences.

Yashi Davalos (b.1995) is an experimental lens-based artist, art writer, and independent curator. As an Afro-Latine Atlanta native, she aims to curate multidisciplinary expressions of social dialogues. Yashi’s research critiques hyper-capitalist focus on cultural tokenism vs. non-monolithic aspects of identity. As an experimental lens-based artist, she explores the social intersections of fantasy and reality through editorial realism and archival manipulation. Yashi is a collective member of the 501c3 artist-run gallery, The Front Gallery New Orleans. She is the 2023-2025 curatorial fellow at The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City. Davalos is also the recipient of the Muña x Sixty Inches from Center Art Writing Residency, and a participant of the 2024 Burnaway Art Writing Incubator. Her art has been exhibited throughout New Orleans, ATL, KCMO, and at MECA Art Fair in the Dominican Republic.

Inés Arango-Guingue is a Colombian curator and writer whose work centers artists from Latin America and its diasporas. Growing up surrounded by syncretic magical practices, she gravitates towards epistemologies that look away from Western standards of reason and categorization. Her recent research focuses on Caribbean and South American art and philosophy that acknowledge the social power of the unknown, the opaque, and the illegible.

She has participated in organizing and curating exhibitions for Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois in Chicago; the Exhibitions Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC); the Mildred’s Lane Complex(ity) in Narrowsburg, New York; Museo del Banco in Bogotá; Flora Ars + Natura in Bogotá; and Casona de Linea in Havana, Cuba. Arango-Guingue was a resident at Mildred ‘s Lane (Beach Lake, PA); Lugar A Dudas (Cali, Colombia); and Instituto Superior de las Artes (Havana, Cuba). She was also a 2023 Art Table fellow and a 2022 Abakanowicz fellow at SAIC’s Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice. She is a contributing author to the upcoming book “Tuning Calder’s Clouds” to be published by The Calder Foundation and the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. She contributed an essay on contemporary Venezuelan artists that engaged with Alexander Calder’s 1954 acoustic panels at the Aula Magna in Caracas. She holds a BFA from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and an MA from SAIC.

Jessica Zi Chen (she/her; b. Changzhou, China) is an art historian and independent curator currently working and living in Chicago, homelands of Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi nations. Seeking critical symbiosis of human and non-human in the anthropocene, Chen integrates her interest in nature, ecofeminism, indigenous theory, and archipelago methodologies with her curatorial and theoretical work. She has presented her research on transpersonal ecology and un-master aesthetics by examining the experimental videos of artists Marwa Arsanios and Naomi Rincón-Gallardo at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Chen is also the co-founder of Working Title, an art-historian-led initiative that fosters collaboration between researchers and artists through AAH Conversation series, roundtable discussions, and commissioned exhibitions within and beyond communities at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She received her BA in History of Art and Architecture and also French Studies from Boston University and MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History from SAIC.

Emrys Brandt (he/they) is a trans-disciplinary artist and writer based in Chicago, on the stolen land of the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa peoples. An avid reader and wikipedia editor, he holds deep love in learning and sharing knowledge. Enamored with the language of a document, his practice is based around re-presenting data to poetically address technologies that deal in collection, identification, and modification. They are the Co-Director of Craft Night, a queer exhibition and event space in Chicago, among other projects.