Connected Places

Sarah Stefana Smith is an artist-scholar based between western Massachusetts and Washington D.C. who works predominantly in photography, sculpture, and installation. Through the visual forms of archives, repurposed materials, and historical narratives, the artist considers questions of repair and disrepair, and lines of demarcation around difference, human, and species. Smith has exhibited nationally and internationally, having held residencies with MASS MoCA, The Walkaway House, University of Pittsburgh the Creatives Project with the Center for Humanities, DCAC Sparkplug, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. Sarah has published writing in the Drain: Journal of Art and Culture, Bmore Magazine, Journal of Women & Performance (2018), The Black Scholar (2019), and Handbook on Race in the Arts in Education (2018) to name a few. Smith received their Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and their MFA from Goddard College. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College.

Sylvia Eken is a multimedia artist based in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

She received her BFA in painting and printing from Artibus, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Her background is in teaching art, photography, and technology in International Schools, in Utrecht, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Singapore, and Rome. In 2002, she received a Master of Science in Computers in Education, Shenandoah University, Winchester, Virginia. She received her master’s in InterMedia and Digital Arts, at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore County, USA, in 2022.  

Sylvia Eken is a Dutch multimedia artist living in Baltimore. Her practice uses the act of walking to map and construct environments, including psychological and virtual spaces that intertwine and honor multiple viewpoints and histories.