Bad at Sports (Various contributors, “Centerfield: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports“)  features over 20 principle collaborators and is a weekly podcast and daily blog produced in Chicago, with correspondents from San Francisco, Detroit and New York City. The podcast and blog features artists and “art worlders” talking about art and the community that makes, reviews and participates in it. For their twice-monthly column on the Art21 Blog, a rotating series of contributors from the Bad at Sports team contribute columns and a special podcast (“Fielding Practice”) focused on art in Chicago and the Midwestern United States.

Nicole J. Caruth (Writer and Columnist, “Gastro-Vision”) is a freelance writer and curator based in Brooklyn. She has been a regular writer for this site since 2008. Her monthly column “Gastro-Vision” explores food and drink in contemporary art and visual culture. Caruth’s writing has been published by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Joan Mitchell Foundation, ARTnews, C Magazine, Gastronomica, and Nka, among others. Visit Caruth’s personal blog, Contemporary Confections.

 Rachel Craft (Flash Points Editor) is the Communications and Web Manager for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. In addition to managing the institution’s website and online exhibition catalogues, she helped start a collaborative blog with the neighboring Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis called 2buildings1blog, and initiated many program-based blogs, designed to showcase the behind-the-scenes workings of the Pulitzer. Most recently, she’s worked on St. Louis Art Map, a city-wide visual arts blog developed with representatives from museums and non-profit-spaces around St. Louis.

Thom Donovan (Columnist, “5 Questions for Contemporary Practice“) is an essayist, poet, curator, editor, and archivist. He edits the weblog Wild Horses Of Fire, now in its 7th year. His  book, The Hole, is now available with Displaced Press. He is currently at work revising and editing a book of essays and statements, Sovereignty and Us.

Born in Oakland, California, Ali Fitzgerald (Columnist, “Lives and Works in Berlin“) is an artist and writer living (and occasionally working) in Berlin. She holds a B.A. from Davidson College (2004), attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture the same year, and received her M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, and Artlies! She has also collaborated with Artlies! on their visual space and written for ..might be good. She is represented by Houston’s Art Palace and her work can be found in the Drawing Center’s Viewing Program. She also has a Berlin comic diary, found here.

Joe Fusaro (Columnist, “Teaching with Contemporary Art”) received his Masters in Education from the City University of New York and his BFA from Hofstra University. He is an exhibiting artist, educator, and the Visual Arts Chair for the Nyack Public Schools in New York since 2003. He was also a teacher and staff developer in the New York City school system for 13 years. Fusaro is an adjunct instructor for NYU’s Graduate Program in Art and Arts Professions, certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and has led staff development workshops and teacher training for education associations, museums, and school districts around the country. His recent exhibitions include solo shows at Kickstart Gallery (NYC), the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Garnerville Arts Center (NY).

Victoria Gannon (Columnist, “Bedfellows: Art and Visual Culture“) is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California, who is particularly interested in the intersections of writing, autobiography, and aesthetic experience. She received a master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts and an undergraduate degree in English from Mt. Holyoke College. She is a frequent contributor to and senior editor at Art Practical, an online arts journal based in the Bay Area, and works in the Publications Department of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Nettrice Gaskins (Writer and Columnist, “Art 2.1,” “The Weekly Roundup“) is an artist and educator who bridges the actual and virtual worlds and explores how these realities can have a transformative impact on people’s lives and experiences when it can be fully implemented and realized. Her purpose is to bring together people, concepts, modalities, media, and worlds through art. She is currently a member of the vibrant community of practitioner/theorists in the Digital Media PhD program at Georgia Tech as a student and teacher.

Jacquelyn Gleisner (Columnist, “Praxis Makes Perfect“) is a visual artist and writer who lives and works in New York City. She holds a BFA in studio art from Boston University and an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has also studied abroad at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy and at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland as a Fulbright scholar. Gleisner’s writings have been published on the Open Enrollment column for Art21, the United States Embassy of Finland’s blog, Beat of America, and in the exhibition catalog Funeral Notice for the Finnish artist Jani Leinonen. She has exhibited her paintings and installations in the United States and Europe.

Sarah Kirk Hanley  (Columnist, “Ink: Notes on the Contemporary Print“) is an independent print curator and specialist appraiser.  She has over 10 years of experience and has published extensively in the field of prints; her knowledge spans the Northern European Renaissance to the present.  Hanley is also an adjunct instructor in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at New York University. As Associate Specialist and AVP in Christie’s New York Print Department from 2006-09, Hanley was involved in business getting, catalogue preparation and research, as well as insurance, gift tax and estate appraisals.  Prior to her auction experience, she was Associate Curator and head of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Milwaukee Art Museum.  Hanley holds an M.A. in Museum Education from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and a B.F.A. in Printmaking and Art History from the University of Iowa. She is a certified member of the Appraiser’s Association of America in the area of fine art prints.

Born and raised in Freeport, Maine, Ethan Hayes-Chute (Columnist, “Lives and Works in Berlin“) now makes art in Berlin, where he thinks about hypothetical domiciles, fantastical isolation, outsider architecture, self-sufficiency, landscape, self-preservation, rusty nails, viewer participation, found materials, daily life, nostalgia, seclusion, sublimity, ad-hoc construction, knick-knacks, craftsmanship, customization, longing and decay. He can often be spotted towing a wagon overflowing with cast-off wood and other special acquisitions.

Kelly Huang (Columnist, “Inspired Reading“) is an Associate Art Advisor with Mary Zlot & Associates in San Francisco. She works with private, corporate, and public clients, internationally, on building and managing their collections of art. She currently serves as a founding member of Artadia’s Junior Council WEST and as a Programming Chair for SFMOMA’s Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA). Previously, Huang worked as a Curatorial Assistant at The Renaissance Society, and has also served as Visiting Gallery Manager for Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she co-curated This Shadow is a Bit of Ideology with Anthony Elms. Huang completed her Masters in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. She has been an Art21 contributor since 2009.

Claudine Isé (Art21 Blog Editor) has worked in the field of contemporary art as both a writer and a curator.  She has a Ph.D. in Film, Literature and Culture from the University of Southern California and an M.A. in Critical Studies in Film and Television, also from USC. She has worked at the Wexner Center for the Arts as an associate curator of contemporary art, and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as an assistant curator.  Throughout her career, Claudine has also worked as a freelance art writer and critic. She was a freelance art critic for the Los Angeles Times and has written for a number of other art publications in Los Angeles. Since moving to Chicago in 2008, Claudine has focused exclusively on arts writing. She is a regular freelance contributor to Artforum.com, Chicago magazine, Bad at Sports, Art Ltd., and other online and print journals.

Hailing originally from the Scottish Borders, Michelle Jubin (Columnist, “Open Enrollment“)  is a doctoral student in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a Teaching Fellow at Baruch College, New York, where teaches courses on, among other things, the global art history survey and the art market. She worked as a contributor for BBC Radio Scotland and as an artist’s assistant for the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy before coming to New York to work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Independent Curators International (ICI), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her research and writing centers on social histories of architecture, contemporary art, museums, and the pedagogical turn.

 Georgia Kotretsos (Columnist, “Inside the Artist’s Studio”) is a visual artist based in Athens, Greece. She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004) and a BFA from The Durban Institute of Technology in South Africa (2000). Kotretsos is the co-founder of the Boots Contemporary Art Space, St. Louis MO, USA and the founder and editor-in-chief of Boot Print, a publication dedicated to contemporary art, which is published by Boots. She also writes for Highlights Magazine in Athens, Greece. Kotretsos has exhibited her work in South Africa, the United States, and Europe.

Richard McCoy (Columnist, “No Preservatives”) is Associate Conservator of Objects & Variable Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art where he conserves artworks across all areas of the collection. His research extends beyond the technology and structure of artworks to include artistic intent and execution as it relates to the preservation of contemporary art. His current research includes the investigation of interior channels in African Songye power figures.

Wesley Miller (Writer, Video Producer) is the Associate Curator at Art21 where since 1999 he has had a guiding hand in all five seasons of the Peabody Award-winning television series for PBS, Art in the Twenty-First Century(2001-2009), as well as the online Exclusive video series (2008-10). He holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Art from Sarah Lawrence College (2000), an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Yale University (2002), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2002) and the Pilchuck Glass School (2003). Before joining Art21, Miller worked at the Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston and at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Miller has served as a guest lecturer, critic and panelist at institutions such as MoMA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, Artecinema, Penn State, Brooklyn Museum of Art, SUNY Stonybrook, and the School of Visual Arts, among others.

 Jonathan Munar (Writer/”Art 2.1” Editor) is the Manager of Digital Media and Strategy at Art21, where he manages the Art21 Web presence, edits the “Art 2.1” column on the Art21 blog, and oversees the organization’s social media initiatives. Before joining Art21 in 2008, Jonathan was the Website Technology Manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In various roles throughout his career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jonathan was deeply involved in all aspects of maintaining and advancing the museum’s Web and new media initiatives, including the technical, the managerial, and the conceptual. Jonathan holds a B.A. in computer science from Fordham University.

Kelsey Elisabeth Nelson (Columnist, “Open Enrollment“), is a second-year student in the Master of Arts in Art Education program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a BA in Art History and French, and divides her time equally between reveling in Chicago’s cultural scene, dreaming of sipping espresso in Parisian cafés, and missing the mountains of her native West Virginia and adopted home of Vermont. While pursuing a passion for art museums and informal learning environments, Kelsey keeps her fascination with the intersections between visual art, language, and cultural empathy close at hand.

Marissa Perel (Columnist, “Gimme Shelter: Performance Now“) is a performance artist, writer and independent curator currently living and working in New York City. She is interested in how the fields of writing, performance, visual art and criticism intersect and inform one another. Her work has been shown at Dance Theater Workshop, The Chocolate Factory Theater, through Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church and numerous clubs, bars and lofts in New York. The Chicago Cultural Center, the MCA (Club Nutz), Co-Prosperity Sphere and Elastic Arts are among the many galleries and dance venues in which she has performed in Chicago. She has also performed at Medium Gallery, Slovakia and the D.I.V.O Institute, Czech Republic. She holds a B.A. in Writing and Literature from Naropa University and an M.F.A in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lily Simonson (Columnist, “Looking at Los Angeles”) is an artist based in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in Art from UC Berkeley and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from UCLA. Her work has been exhibited nationally and in Europe. In addition to blogging for Art21, her art and writing has been featured in a diverse range of media outlets including Ms. Magazine, The Census of Marine Life Annual Highlights Report, LA Weekly, The Washington Academy of Sciences Peer Review Journal, and MTV. Simonson has taught painting, drawing, and art history at The Public School/Telic Arts Exchange, Stanford University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and CSU Pomona. Visit www.oldgenres.com.

Raji Sohal (Columnist, “Calling from Canada“) is a CBC Radio One host, arts journalist, independent curator, fashion stylist, and pop culture fiend. Her work has been featured in the Globe and Mail, XLR8R, and on CBC Television. Research from her Master’s on Janet Cardiff and sound installation art will be published later this year. She lives in Montréal.

Jeffrey Augustine Songco (Columnist, “Praxis Makes Perfect“)  is a San Francisco-based artist.  He received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute.  His work has not been shown internationally, but eventually, Jeffrey would like to represent the US at the Venice Biennale 2023. His website is www.songco.org.

Ania Szremski (Columnist, “Cairo in Context: Art and Change in the Middle East“) is an associate curator at the Townhouse, a non-profit contemporary art space in downtown Cairo, Egypt. She is also currently researching Egyptian art during the transition from socialism to free market capitalism on a Fulbright grant.

Meg Onli (Columnist, “Bound,”) is a artist and writer currently based in Chicago. She is the founder of the website Black Visual Archive, which is dedicated to the documentation of black and post-black visual culture and is the former Associate Producer of the Chicago-based art and culture podcast/blog, Bad at Sports. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has worked in the printing industry since the age of 16. Working primarily within universities, Onli has assisted in the production of numerous small run artist books, worked as a senior designer for Oregon State University’s printing department and is currently employed at Northwestern University, where she overseas the production of printed material for the Alumni Association’s Marketing Department. In winter 2012 she was selected to participate in the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Art Writers Workshop. Onli often purchases books based on their covers.

Catherine Wagley (Columnist, “Looking at Los Angeles”) is a writer and artist living in Los Angeles. She primarily writes about art, architecture, and visual culture and is currently exploring decadence and empathy in contemporary photography. She justifies her obsession with primetime TV by calling it “research.”

Max Weintraub (Columnist, “On View Now“) is a Visiting Professor at Hunter College in New York City, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on modern and contemporary art and theory. He holds a Ph.D in modern and contemporary art from the History of Art Department at Bryn Mawr College, and has worked in curatorial and educational departments at the Denver Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  From 2006-2008 he was the curator of The Reis Collection of Modern & Contemporary Art in New York City.  His essays on Bruce Nauman have appeared in the scholarly volume Clowns, Fools and Picaros: Popular Forms in Literature, Drama and Film and the journal Drain Magazine: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture. Max has also contributed to a number of exhibition catalogs and publications, including ARTnews, Saatchi Online, The Mantle, and the Routledge Press Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Photography.

Lindsay Preston Zappas (Columnist, “Open Enrollment“) is an artist from San Diego, who is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work explores connections between sculpture, body, image, and sound. She creates situations that embrace the visceral, and meld it with the compositional; union of body and object, prop and sculpture, photograph and subject. Her website can be found at www.lindsay-preston.com.

Blogger-in-Residence Series: Every two weeks, a new guest-blogger takes up residence at the Art21 Blog to share their perspective on contemporary art and art education. Hundreds of artists, writers, art administrators and educators have participated in this program; click here to access posts written by our current and previous guest bloggers.