Ysabel Pinyol Blasi
Executive Director and Chief Curator
Board & Team
Executive director and co-founder of Monira Residencies at Mana Contemporary (Miami, Jersey City, and Chicago). Originally from Barcelona, she earned a Master of Architecture from Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona in 2006. Blasi began collecting art more than twenty years ago and from 2007 to 2011 directed a gallery in Barcelona that represented international emerging artists. Her publications include The Bull and the Donkey (Barcelona, Spain: Galeria Ysabel Pinyol, 2008); Trivium, (Miami, FL: Mana Wynwood, 2016); and “Alt-Art Spaces and the Question of Identity Refusal,” Brooklyn Rail, 2017. Ysabel Pinyol Blasi continues to curate diverse and ground breaking exhibitions through the Monira Foundation as Chief Curator.
Anne Muntges
Director of Residencies and Grants Development
Anne Muntges directs the residencies and grant development for the Monira Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation Anne was Program Officer of Fiscal Sponsorship for the New York Foundation for the Arts where she worked with artists to develop fundraising strategies and project development. She has worked with several non profit organizations including the Center for Book Arts in New York as well as the Western New York Book Art Center in Buffalo, directing education programs, studio and community development, and overseeing residencies. Anne received an MFA from the University at Buffalo and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. She maintains an active studio at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City and an active exhibition schedule.
Lidia Costa
Director of Public Programs
With a background in Art Education and Museum Studies, Lidia has worked as an Art Educator in Secondary Education for 8 years. In the field of Art Education, she has designed art curricula, worked with school and district administrators as Department Coordinator and Teacher Mentor while also teaching college courses in Art and Design as an Adjunct Professor. She has worked in the fields of Museum Education and Public Programs and coordinated projects in art institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, the International Center of Photography, as well as other museums and arts organizations in NY, UK and Galicia, Spain, where she is originally from. Lidia holds a BFA and a MA in Art Education from Universidade de Vigo, a MA in Contemporary Art, Museum Studies and Art Critics from Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and a PgMEd in Educational Leadership from Kean University. As Director of Public Programs, Lidia develops online and onsite collaborative programs and activities that connect audiences, artists and institutions and designs educational resources for visitors and educators.
Juan Diego Roque
Media Director, ROQ Initiative
Diego Roque aka Roq is a visually creative artist who produces media content for the Moniria Foundation. Roq received a BFA from New Jersey City University majoring in Media Arts and has worked in the field of video production for over a decade. He started his own company ROQ Initiative during the pandemic of 2020. ROQ Initiative is a creative entity that works to bring visual ideas to life through unique content, story telling, and multifaceted events. They handle all stages of video production with different brands, artists, and businesses providing a professional experience and cinematic outcome to the project that is undertaken. Diego’s personal work includes Emerge; an artist documentation series rooted in a drive to showcase the minds of different creatives and to also provide individuals with an experience both physical, at events, and digital, through cinematic content. He hosts a podcast called You Won’t Like This that exists as an experiment in freedom of speech and comedy.
Danielle Tuiran
Intern
Danielle Tuiran is an intern at Monira Foundation for the Summer 2024 semester. She is a rising senior at Stevens Institute of Technology, studying Visual Arts and Technology with a concentration in Moving Image and a minor in film. Danielle’s interest in video began during her childhood and became serious during high school, where she had the opportunity to major in Audio/Visual Production. During her time at Monira, she strives to expand her knowledge of videography and to contribute to Monira’s mission of amplifying underrepresented voices in the arts.
Jeremy Brown
Intern
Jeremy Brown is a sophomore Visual Arts & Technology student at Stevens Institute of Technology. His studies include a concentration in moving image and a minor in Film Studies. Jeremy is an independent filmmaker who has worked on a handful of short films. He is the executive producer for SITtv, Stevens’s film and television club. His career plan is to become a film director. During his internship at Monira Foundation, Jeremy aims to improve his videography and editing skills. His favorite parts of videography are finding the best takes in each scene recorded and seeing it all come together while editing. He enjoys working with lighting as it allows him to create dramatic changes to scenes.
Chunyan (Zoe) Zhang
Intern
Zoe Zhang is an intern at the Monira Foundation for the Summer of 2024. Just graduated from the University of Rochester with a double degree in Anthropology and Studio Arts, Zoe will be pursuing a Master of Arts in the East Asian Area Studies program at the University of Southern California. As a trained documenter and ethnographer, Zoe’s primary research interests center on representing the voices of grassroots communities in preserving intangible cultural heritage (e.g., performing arts and oral history) amidst globalization and modernization. Working with visual/audio documentation, installation, and book-making, Zoe creates a visceral yet intimate connection between her artworks and the audiences that reflect the downplayed cultural narratives. At Monira Foundation, Zoe aims to be a humble listener who understands and documents the stories of artists from the residency programs and collaborate in the organization of public programs and events.
Ysabel Pinyol Blasi
Executive Director and Chief Curator
Executive director and co-founder of Monira Residencies at Mana Contemporary (Miami, Jersey City, and Chicago). Originally from Barcelona, she earned a Master of Architecture from Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona in 2006. Blasi began collecting art more than twenty years ago and from 2007 to 2011 directed a gallery in Barcelona that represented international emerging artists. Her publications include The Bull and the Donkey (Barcelona, Spain: Galeria Ysabel Pinyol, 2008); Trivium, (Miami, FL: Mana Wynwood, 2016); and “Alt-Art Spaces and the Question of Identity Refusal,” Brooklyn Rail, 2017. Ysabel Pinyol Blasi continues to curate diverse and ground breaking exhibitions through the Monira Foundation as Chief Curator.
Anne Muntges
Director of Residencies and Grants Development
Anne Muntges directs the residencies and grant development for the Monira Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation Anne was Program Officer of Fiscal Sponsorship for the New York Foundation for the Arts where she worked with artists to develop fundraising strategies and project development. She has worked with several non profit organizations including the Center for Book Arts in New York as well as the Western New York Book Art Center in Buffalo, directing education programs, studio and community development, and overseeing residencies. Anne received an MFA from the University at Buffalo and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. She maintains an active studio at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City and an active exhibition schedule.
Juan Diego Roque
Media Director
Diego Roque aka Roq is a visually creative artist who produces media content for the Moniria Foundation. Roq received a BFA from New Jersey City University majoring in Media Arts and has worked in the field of video production for over a decade. He started his own company ROQ Initiative during the pandemic of 2020. ROQ Initiative is a creative entity that works to bring visual ideas to life through unique content, story telling, and multifaceted events. They handle all stages of video production with different brands, artists, and businesses providing a professional experience and cinematic outcome to the project that is undertaken. Diego’s personal work includes Emerge; an artist documentation series rooted in a drive to showcase the minds of different creatives and to also provide individuals with an experience both physical, at events, and digital, through cinematic content. He hosts a podcast called You Won’t Like This that exists as an experiment in freedom of speech and comedy.
Anam-Cara O’Brien
Digital Strategist
Anam-Cara O’Brien is Monira Foundation’s digital strategist. Prior to her work with the foundation Cara graduated from the NYU Stern with a BS in business. During her time at NYU she interned for 2 years at McCann NY where she was an associate on the regional strategic planning team.
Board of Directors
Phong H. Bui, Co-Chair
Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Publisher/Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, River Rail and Rail Curatorial Projects. Bui has organized more than eighty exhibitions since 2000, including Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, an ongoing curatorial project that was exhibited in 2019 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale, at Colby Museum in Waterville, Maine, and Singing in Unison at eight venues across New York in 2022-23. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Curatorial Advisor at MoMA PS1. Bui was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts in 2020 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts in 2021. Bui is a Board Member of International Association of Art Critics (2007-2019), Anthology Film Archives (2017-2023), Denniston Hill, Fountain House, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Monira Foundation, Second Shift Studio Space St. Paul, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Studio in a School, the Third Rail, and the Center for Fiction.
Gary Krat, Co-chair & Treasurer
A graduate of the School of Law at Fordham University, Gary Krat began his career as an attorney at Proskauer in New York. A few years later he joined financial services company Integrated Resources, Inc., and spent 13 years on the marketing, structuring, and acquisition of several hundred real estate, equipment leasing, cable TV, and other operating company transactions. Krat also built and led the largest financial planning broker dealer in the US at that time. When in 1990 Integrated was acquired by Eli Broad and SunAmerica Inc., Krat moved with the enterprise, eventually occupying the positions of chairman, CEO, and president for various SunAmerica companies. In 1999, following the acquisition of SunAmerica Inc. by American International Group, Inc., he began working directly with AIG’s chairman, traveling in Europe and the Far East to create SunAmerica core businesses there on behalf of AIG before eventually becoming a Senior Consultant to AIG. Upon leaving AIG, Krat formed a series of companies which, to this day, have engaged in hundreds of real estate, art and storage company purchases and lending and investing transactions.
Shirin Neshat
Born in Qazin, Iran, artist Shrin Neshat left to study at the University of California at Berkeley before the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Moving from her overtly political early photographs to more abstract film and video works such as Rapture (1999), which explores the relationship between women and the value systems of Islam, the New York-based artist has consistently focused on themes of gender and identity. Her Women of Allah series of the mid-1990s, for example, looks at the discrepancies of public and private identities in Iranian and Western cultures, while her video Turbulent (1998) won her the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Her works are included in the collections of the Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.
Birte Kleemann
Birte Kleeman is a director of Michael Werner Gallery, New York, and Art Editor of King Kong magazine. Previously, she was a director and curator at Pace Gallery, New York, and Galerie EIGEN+ART, Berlin. Her recently curated exhibitions include Pat O’Neill: Sweep/Broken Sweep; Jörg Immendorff: LIDL Works and Performances from the ’60s; and Shakers&Movers (all at VW-VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin); Joseph Beuys: Make the Secrets Productive at Pace Gallery, New York, and PRAXIS at Wayne State University, Detroit.
Artist Advisory Board
Eva Ruiz
Eva is an independent art advisor with over 20 years of experience providing bespoke and strategic art consultancy for corporations and private collectors across Europe and the Americas. She also specializes in connecting collectors and new participants to the art ecosystem. Ruiz has worked in every part of the art ecosystem: as a consultant, gallerist, art advisor, collector, curator and developing public art spaces. This gives her a unique perspective of how all the agents involved in the art market.
Yolanda Cesta Cursach Montilla (she/ella)
Yolanda is an advocate and resource for artists developing and presenting multidisciplinary work in a range of institutions and entrepreneurial environments, US and international. She is Artistic Director of High Concept Labs, a residency and presenting organization which is in Joint Residency with the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary Chicago. Her independent curation focus is interdisciplinary artists in Ibero-Latin America, France, Sub-Sahara Africa, Japan, and Australasia; Indigeneity; and Disability Culture and Aesthetics.
Miriam Parker
Miriam Parker is an interdisciplinary artist who uses movement, paint, video art and sculpture/installation. Miriam has been influenced by her experience as a dancer, her study of Buddhism phenomenology, and her connection to the free jazz tradition. Through re-organizational practices, Parker refines her understanding of individuality, outside of traditions built from oppressive ethics. Her practice is to find new modes of freedom through multiple narratives as a means to evolve. She does this through collaboration with other artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, and meditation practitioners – all equally concerned about social injustice and deeply rooted in experimental performance and interdisciplinary creation.
Machine Dazzle
Matthew Flower, aka Machine Dazzle, has been living and working in New York City since 1994. An artist, costume designer, set designer, singer/songwriter, art director, maker, and all-around creative, Dazzle has worked with many from the New York downtown scene and beyond, including Diane Von Furstenberg, Cara Delevingne, Godfrey Reggio, Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac, Basil Twist, Julie Atlas Muz, Jennifer Miller, The Dazzle dancers, Big Art Group, Mike Albo, Stanley Love, Soomi Kim, Opera Philadelphia, Pig Iron Theatre, the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, Spiegelworld, The Curran Theatre, and more. He describes himself as a radical queer emotionally driven, instinct-based concept artist and thinker.
