Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist, who makes paintings, installations, public art and multiples. Born in the former Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1989. Meksin received a MFA from The Yale School of Art, a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a joint BA/MA in Comparative Literature from The University of Chicago. She has exhibited her work at Regina Rex Gallery (2011, 2014), Airplane Gallery (2014), Primetime (2013), Adds Donna (2011) and Thomas Erben Gallery (2009). Meksin has created site-specific installations at The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, UMOCA (2016), The Kitchen, NYC (2015), BRIC Media Arts, Brooklyn (2015), Brandeis University, Waltham (2014), the former Donnell branch of the New York Public Library, NYC (2011), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project in New Haven, CT (2012). Her work has been featured in BOMB magazine, TimeOut Chicago, Chicago Tribune and many other publications. She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist grant (2015) and the co-founder of Ortega y Gasset Projects, a gallery and artist collective in Brooklyn, NY. Her website can be found here.
Wayne Koestenbaum has published eighteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction,including Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). Koestenbaum has had solo exhibitions of his paintings at White Columns (New York), 356 Mission (Los Angeles), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum. He has given musical performances at The Kitchen, REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art; this fall he will perform at the Centre Pompidou and the Walker Art Center. His first solo record, Lounge Act, will be issued by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in Fall 2016. He has also written the libretti for two operas, Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O and Mohammed Fairouz’s Pierrot. Koestenbaum’s essays and poetry have appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, Artforum, The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Believer, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Cabinet, and many other periodicals and anthologies. Winner of a Whiting Award, he has taught at Yale (in the English department as well as in the School of Art’s painting department), and is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.
