Brief Biographies

Halima Afi Cassells (b. 1981) is an award-winning interdisciplinary community-engaged artist, mom of three, avid gardener, with deep roots in Waawiiyaataanong/ Detroit, MI. She credits gardening as inspiring her move away from painting to a practice where she aspires to use natural and upcycled materials and processes that lend to the thriving of all (human and non-human) communities.

Halima continues to explore relationship-building, and the notions of freedom and work, value and disposability in a participatory context within her work through projects like the Free Market of Detroit and her Tables and Thrones series. As an advocate for artists and cultural practitioners, she has spearheaded many community processes that uplift cultural capital from often-exploited communities and creates in a collaborative context. She has been awarded grants from: Panta Rhea Foundation, BulkSpace, Art Matters, Culture Source, Knight Foundation Arts Challenge, and Artplace America. In addition to exhibiting at the Virgil Carr Center, Charles Wright Museum, MOCAD in Detroit; her work has also been featured in gallery spaces in New York, Oakland CA, Oaxaca, Berlin, Copenhagen, Bogota, and Harare and in a multitude of spaces in the public realm.

Shanna Merola is a visual artist, photojournalist, and legal worker. Her sculptural photo collages are informed by the stories of environmental justice struggles past and present. Traveling to EPA-designated Superfund sites, she has documented the slow violence of deregulation – from her own neighborhood on the Eastside of Detroit to Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, and Love Canal, NY.

Merola has been awarded studio residencies and fellowships through MacDowell, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Banff Centre for Arts + Creativity, Kala Institute of Art, the Society for Photographic Education, Bulk Space, the Puffin Foundation, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Her collaborative projects include Detroit Resists: A Digital Occupation of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2016), Oil + Water: Photography in the Age of Disaster Economies (2017), and Reunioning with Halima Afi Cassells, and the Restorying Agency Project (2021). She has shown her work in solo exhibitions both nationally and abroad - most recently at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea. Merola has held teaching appointments at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Wayne State University, and the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan. She is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley in California.