Department of Art

Golnar Adili (b. 1976, USA) is an Iranian American artist, designer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Adili holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and has participated in residencies with the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts (Bellagio, Italy), Center for Book Arts (NYC), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), MacDowell (NYC), Ucross Foundation for the Arts (Clearmont, WY), Lower East Side Printshop (NYC), Women’s Studio Workshop (Rosendale, NY), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace (NYC), among others. Her work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions organized by institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), Cue Art Foundation (New York, NY), Craft and Folk Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), and International Print Center New York (NYC). She is the past recipient of major grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, NYFA, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2021, Adili was a finalist for the Jameel Prize, sponsored by the V&A Museum and Art Jameel. Her artist books are in more than 50 collections, including the Library of Congress, V&A Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University, and the Smithsonian. 

Learn more about Adili at her website and Instagram page.

Pia Paulina Guilmoth lives and makes art in a 200-year-old shoe factory in rural Western Maine. She works with a 4x5 camera and various experimental analogue techniques in her practice. Her work is foremost about beauty, and her experience as a transsexual woman in the small town she lives in. Guilmoth's work and life are shaped by her rural roots, working class histories, practical escapism, and her devotion to preserving life in the countryside. 

Her work is held in the permanent collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Guilmoth released her third book in November 2024 with Stanley/Barker titled "Flowers Drink the River," which received the Jury’s Special Mention for the 2025 Paris-Aperture Book of the Year award and is featured in ICP's upcoming exhibition Photobooks USA. In 2024/2025 she had two major solo exhibitions open in London, and New York City with CLAMP Gallery, and Webber Gallery. Guilmoth’s fourth monograph, a collaborative project with Jesse Bull Saffire titled "Fishworm," was published with Void at the end of 2025, and is shortlisted for the Les Rencontres Arles Book Award. In the spring of 2026, Guilmoth will lecture at the Forum on Contemporary Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Guilmoth’s out-of-print monograph from 2021, "At Night Gardens Grow," is being re-issued in the summer of 2026 with Stanley/Barker books. In 2024 she won a Google/Aperture Creator Labs grant, and a Peter Reed Foundation grant in photography, and in 2022 she was a MacDowell Fellow in Visual Arts. 

Learn more about Guilmoth on her website and Instagram page.

Leslie Bender creates art in her studio at the Shirt Factory in midtown Kingston, NY. Her work is deeply personal, encompassing a deep exploration of her multidimensional human experience, from Earthen to Ethereal, expressed in paint, drawing and printmaking. 

In her early 20s, Bender attended a number of institutions to develop her own voice, including the Art Students League in Manhattan, Bennington College, and Pratt Institute. Yet, in the very intellectual, conceptual era of Clement Greenberg, abstraction and installations, Bender did not find the education necessary to develop her own style. Relying on innate talent, she studied from nature during the day, and deep into the night, broiled in painterly expressions of emotional torture. This was before violence against females and children was acknowledged in the culture at large, so for her, emotional and psychological influences upon creativity were relegated to small forays in art history, such as viewing Munch, Van Gogh, and Goya, and not recognized as valid forms of expression in university art classes. 

Bender’s first real breakthrough came in 1984, in her 30s; she discovered a way to retrieve her memories from the realms hidden by PTSD. For the next 30 years, driven by isolation and numbing emotional pain, and guided by an innate sense that underneath it all there was light, she investigated the darkness of the shadow realm in drawings and paint. 

A second major breakthrough occurred in 2019 at age 67. Perhaps all her hard work had loosened the walls of the tomb, but Bender discovered she could enter the world of spirit and departed loved ones. Artistic expression burned with new inspiration as she connected with her guides and the quantum energy field. Her painting shifted from a world of resolving hurt and darkness to the land of experiencing the light. Today, her decades-long goal is beginning to manifest in connection to self and love.

Learn more about bender on her website and Instagram page.

Linda Sormin’s current work brings experimentation in ceramics, sculpture, and installation together with video, sound, hand-cut watercolour paintings, and digital fabrication in a multi-sensory environment. In her installation "Uncertain Ground" (November 2025–April 2026) at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, visitors traveled on boardwalks and could sit or lie down on the pillowed shoreline of magnified clay terrain. Other recent installations include "Stream" in "Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay" at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA (2021-23), and Boru Sibaso Paet, on the Foam of the Primordial Sea in "Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA (2023). Sormin’s research and writing cast light on how her work has always been influenced—though at times unwittingly—by cultural practices in her family histories rooted in Thailand, China, and Indonesia. She holds a BA in English literature from Andrews University, a diploma in craft and design from Sheridan College, and an MFA in ceramic art from Alfred University.

Sormin is a professor of studio art at New York University and is based in New York City. Her work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON, Canada), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art (Middelfart, Denmark), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), and Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK).

Learn more about Sormin on her website and Instagram page.