Board & Team

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.

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.

Rachel Sellinger

Communications Director

Rachel Sellinger is our Communications Director. Before joining the Monira Team, Rachel graduated with a BA in Art History and Photography from Muhlenberg College. Post-grad, she began an internship at the New Museum in New York City where her passion for contemporary art started to grow. After her internship ended, Rachel started working at TOTAH, an art gallery on the Lower East Side, where she gained relationships with artists, collectors and curators. Now, at Monira Foundation, Rachel is able to use her connections and experience to help the foundation flourish.

Joo Eon Park

Intern

Joo Eon Park is an intern at the Monira Foundation for the Spring 2024 semester. Currently a junior at the University of Rochester majoring in computer science and minoring in digital media studies. Joo Eon specializes in web development and graphic design, and has an ever-growing passion for art and design. At Monira Foundation, Joo Eon aims to bring a different lens to the organization – a perspective grounded on technological expertise and a strong passion for art. 

Danny Geib

Intern

Danny Geib is an intern at Monira Foundation for the Spring 2024 semester. Danny is currently a senior at Stevens Institute of Technology studying Music Technology with a minor in Visual Arts and Technology. His interests include music production, video, audio, and installation work, although he enjoys exploring different methods of media production and developing creative solutions to problems. Danny will create and edit videos that creatively document various exhibitions and programs.

Timothy Paczesniak

Intern

Timothy Paczesniak is an intern at Monira Foundation for the Spring 2024 semester. Currently a Visual Arts and Technology senior at Stevens Institute of Technology with a minor in film. Tim has been doing video editing since his sophomore year of high school. For this internship, Tim aims to hone his skills and learn how to work with artists in translating their work into video format while finding a way to reflect his own style in video production.

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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.

BROOKLYN, NY - JANUARY 18: Artist Anne Muntges on January 18, 2020 in Brooklyn, New York. © Ann Hermes 2020
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.

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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.

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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

Phong H. Bui, Co-Chair

Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, a free monthly journal of arts, culture, and politics. He is also the publisher of Rail Editions, and has organized more than fifty exhibitions since 2000. In 2014, Bui was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine, and in 2015, the New York Observer dubbed him a “ringmaster” of the Kings County art world. Bui is a board member of the Brooklyn Rail, Miami Rail, Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, and International Association of Art Critics United States Section. He lives with his wife, painter Nathlie Provosty, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Bui is a Board Member of the International Association of Art Critics, Anthology Film Archives, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Miami Rail, Second Shift Studio Space St. Paul, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Studio in a School, and ThirdRail, Minneapolis, among others.

Gary Krat

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.

Neshat

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.

Kleemann

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 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_image

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.

M.Parker.photocredit. Shana. Trajanoska

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.

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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.