Maria Anasazi, Tell Me More Stories, installation, fairy tale book pages, wire, paper twist and
staples, 6’ x 3.5’

Maria Anasazi is a native of Greece who has lived in the United States since 1980. She is an active member of the arts community in the Mid-Atlantic region and has been teaching since 1993, in schools and various institutions including detention centers and prisons.

Anasazi studied art in the San Francisco Bay area where she started exhibiting her sculptural and installation work in 1990. She has had solo exhibitions at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Arlington Arts Place (VA), and Montpelier Cultural Arts Center (MD). Her work has been featured in many group exhibitions , including South/Center, Miami, Florida; Frumkin/Duval Gallery, Los Angeles, California; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and School 33 and Maryland Art Place, both in Baltimore, Maryland.

She has received numerous awards from the Maryland State Arts Council for her work with the Artists-in-Education Program, and she was the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Award in 2001. Recently she received an Art and Community Visual Arts Residency Grant from the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. Her work has been reviewed in Art Papers, The Washington Post, Fiberarts magazine, and Surface Design.

Anasazi holds a BFA in Graphic Design from California College of the Arts and an MA from the Creative Arts Department of San Francisco State University, California. She also received a certificate in Expressive Arts Therapy from JFK School of Psychology, in Orinda, California.

Francesca Pfister’s photos and videos are an archeological exploration of the everyday. These visual records, of permanent marks or ephemeral traces found on the physical world around her, examine human presence. Struggling between embrace and rejection, awe and disgust, her work investigates personal points of reference within the shifting formulations of cultural identity and an increasingly nomadic condition of contemporary society.

Ms. Pfister has an Art History degree from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, as well as a professional certificate in Museum Studies from NYU in New York. After working for several years as a curatorial researcher and educator for museums and other nonprofit organizations in New York, she moved to Philadelphia and shifted her involvement in the arts. Pfister has studied photography at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, as well as at the Centre Iris in Paris. She recently earned an MFA in Photography from The University of Pennsylvania, where she is a lecturer. Ms. Pfister’s work has received numerous positive reviews. Her MFA project work, exhibited at Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, was reviewed by Libby Rosof in artblog; fallonandrosof.blogspot. her triptych Pink Stacks was noted by Benjamin Genocchio as a part of his review for the New York Times of the Perkins Center for the Arts Pink at Perkins show. Her photography has also appeared in several architecture publications, including the third edition of Deborah Gans’s The Le Corbusier Guide and the upcoming Penn publication, VIA: Occupations.

Sarah Stefana Smith is a photographer whose creative work is influenced by her political work. Educated at Spelman College (BA) and Goddard College (MFA) she is a member of the Anti-Displacement Support Committee, working to support groups fighting gentrification in South, North, and West Philadelphia. Since 2006, she has also been a part of the Media Mobilizing Project (www.mediamobilizing.org), a group that engages in collaborative media making with organizations and individuals whose issues and experiences are purposely submerged from view. The media that they create is designed to clarify the issues at stake, document lived human realities, and act as a tool to inspire and unite those who have a vested interest in change.

Smith has been a recipient of the Leeway Art & Change Grant (2006, 2007) and has exhibited her work in a variety of venues including Spelman College and the High Museum of art (Atlanta), and the African American Museum (Philadelphia).