2026 Artist Residency Jury Panel
Ang Li
Ang Li is an architectural designer who joins the University of Toronto from Northeastern University where she held the appointment of Associate Professor. She is the founder of Ang Li Projects, an interdisciplinary design practice that works at the intersection of art, architecture, material culture and construction ecology to investigate the maintenance rituals and material afterlives behind the modern built environment. Her work unfolds across scales and media to include material research, designed objects and furniture, architectural installations and public space interventions that are held together by an interest in exploring alternative cultures of making centered around repair, reuse and recirculation.
Li’s work has been featured in national and international exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2024), the United States Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), The Boston Public Art Triennale (2022), Exhibit Columbus (2021), the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), The Villa Terra Decorative Arts Museum (2018), and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2013), among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residence), Landmark Columbus, and the Boston Public Art Triennial.
Prior to her current appointment, Li held faculty positions as a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as the 2015–16 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo. She has also worked as an architectural designer for several international design practices in New York, London and Stockholm on a range of cultural and infrastructural projects.
Li holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Cambridge.
Karyn Olivier
Karyn Olivier, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and raised in Brooklyn, creates sculptures, installations, and public art. Currently, Olivier is the Public Works Artist in Residence at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and will present a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. In 2026, Olivier will also unveil a memorial honoring Vel R. Phillips, the late politician, judge, and civil rights activist. In 2024, she participated in the Whitney Biennial (NY, NY), La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio (NY, NY),
Image courtesy of Ryan Collerd.
the Malta Biennale (Valleta, Malta), and Prospect.6 Triennial (New Orleans, LA). In 2024, Olivier also unveiled the Stenton House Memorial, Right Here, honoring Dinah, a formerly enslaved servant, and was commissioned to create a year-long installation at Rice University (Houston, TX). In 2023, Olivier presented her second solo show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and presented a solo show at Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA). In 2022 Olivier participated in Documenta 15 and installed a permanent commission for Newark Liberty International Airport.
Olivier has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan biennials (South Korea), the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Dakar, Senegal), The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), SculptureCenter (New York), ICA Watershed Boston, among others. Solo exhibitions include Everything That’s Alive Moves at Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2020), and A Closer Look at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis (2007).
Olivier has received numerous awards, including a 2025 USA Fellowship, a 2020 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the 2018–2019 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, a 2019 PEW Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock- Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, a Creative Capital Foundation grant, and a Harpo Foundation grant.
Olivier’s work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times; Time Out New York; The Village Voice; Art in America; Flash Art; Mousse; The Washington Post; Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art; Frieze; The Philadelphia Inquirer and Hyperallergic, among others. She is a sculpture professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Image Courtesy of Amelia Golden.
Maia Chao
Maia Chao is an artist making anthropological work across performance, video, sculpture, and public practice. She has been commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Times Square Arts, The Shed, and MoMA Education. Additional projects have been presented at the RISD Museum, Bronx Museum, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Boston Center for the Arts, Smack Mellon, and Oregon Contemporary. She has completed fellowships and residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, Pioneer Works, and Queer|Art, among others. Named a PewFellow in 2022, she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023.
For the 2026 Whitney Biennial, Chao presented BEING MOVED, a new performance commission. She is currently a 2026 United States Artists Fellow.
Chao is a teaching artist at The Youth Art & Self Empowerment Project (YASP), where she teaches youth charged as adults in Philadelphia’s jails. She is full-time faculty in Interdisciplinary Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore and resides in Philadelphia.