ARTogether's Member Artists
ARTogether’s Membership Program is a initiative with an aim to connect with and support Bay Area refugee and immigrant artists. Through this program, artists are able to receive early access to our calls for artists, free access to professional development workshops, regular artist meetups, low-rate fiscal sponsorships for projects, and additional opportunities.
Edward Gunawan
Sunroop Kaur
Somaieh Amini is a painter and illustrator based in San Jose. After studying and teaching painting in Iran and Italy, Somaieh relocated to the United States in 2012, a transition that continues to have an emotional and creative impact on her art.
Originally from India, Nimisha Doongarwal is a mixed media artist currently based in the San Francisco. Her work explores the varying relationships between past and popular culture by referencing social issues such as racism, gender inequality, and immigration.
Roya Ebtehaj is a multifaceted artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She intermingles art and technology by exploring the digital culture that has formed due to the ways individuals interact with current media and consume information.
Ruta Ghebrewold (also known as Ruta Yoseif) is an Eritrian artist based in Oakland, CA. She employs various methods and techniques to create her abstract realist works including acrylic paint, grains, soldering and collage.
Bushra Gill is interested in finding order within the chaos of everyday life through art. She abstracts personal and narrative images using Islamic geometric patterns playing with color, spatial structure and the idea of privacy.
Edward Gunawan integrates creative elements from the cinematic, literary, visual, and performing art traditions to tell community-rooted impact-driven stories. A queer immigrant from Indonesia and of Chinese heritage, his transnational work often interrogates notions of power and status, (in)visibility and displacement, as well as healing and belonging.
Kacy Jung investigates the ways in which culture is shaped by capitalism and explores the idea of existentialism within the late capitalism era. Her subjects often intertwine the manipulative nature of capitalist system, the anxiety of being part of the disappearing middle class and her immigrant experience in the USA.
Sunroop Kaur is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice employs Eastern + Western iconography to decontextualize cultural materials, creating spaces that reclaim South Asian narratives. Using cultural hybridity as a lens, Kaur translates the struggles of a lived experience while allowing for the synthesis of critical spaces and generative dialogue within the Punjabi Sikh Diaspora.
Juliana Mendonca’s work is mainly focused on the development of dance as a fundamental tool for self-knowledge, stimulating corporal expression, creativity and health. Currently, she is based in Oakland, CA working on her dance projects Liquidanza, Latin Contact Dance and Raíz de Agua.
Palija Shrestha is from Kathmandu and currently works and resides in San Francisco, CA. Shrestha’s work explores an iteration of self navigating the conflicting cultural norms in modernity, as it shifts and changes the language of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ into that of dislocation.
Born in Kabul, Afghanistan and raised in rural Washington state, Gazelle Samizay’s work often reflects the complexities and contradictions of culture, nationality and gender through the lens of her bicultural identity. Much of her work explores familiar history, cultural expectations, and gender norms.
Romina Zabihian is a graphic designer, painter and illustrator based in Berkeley, CA. She is passionate about human rights and expression of social values through art. Her background in psychology and Art Therapy inform her work and have become a fundamental part of how she chooses her art and design projects.
If you are interested in learning about the Membership Program and additional Artist Support programs at ARTogether, please reach out to us at info@artogether.org.
