​Founders, Former Staff & Emeritus Board

Aaron Finbloom 
Co-Founder & Executive Director

Matheson Westlake
Co-Founder & Special Projects 
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Aviva Avnisan
Co-Founder & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member

Adriana Disman 
Co-Director & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member

Rachel James
Residency Director & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member

Sharon Mashihi 
Co-Director & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member
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Mollie McKinley 
Co-Director & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member

Millie Kapp 
Education Coordinator ​

​anique vered
Curatorial and Strategic Development Consultant

Josephine Decker
IMMERSION Co-Founder, Former Development Coordinator & Emeritus Board Member

Naima Ramos-Chapman
IMMERSION Co-Founder and Emeritus Board Member

Jaimes Mayhew
Emeritus Board Member, Former Treasurer

Raven Cassell 
Emeritus Board Member, Former Vice-Chair

Tchaiko Omawale
​Emeritus Board Member

Aaron Finbloom
Co-Founder &
Former ​Executive Director

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, performance artist and musician.  Much of his work involves re-kindling the connection between the philo-sophical and the performative by creating quasi-structured conver-sations through games, improv-isational scores, booklets, audio guides, dance maps, theatrical lectures, existential therapy and philo-sophic rituals. He is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program.

Rachel James
Residency Director & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member, 2012-2017

Rachel James is a Canadian poet and artist with a background in experimental ethnography. She has presented her work in the United States, Canada, and Europe, including at Miguel Abreu Gallery and Essex Flowers in New York City, Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, The New Gallery in Calgary, and Totaldobže in Riga. Her poems have been published by The Recluse and Form IV. As an audio documentarian she has worked with BBC Radio, The Magnum Foundation, WNYC, The Organist, and others. She holds an MFA from Bard College, an MA from the University of Toronto, and has taught seminars on performance scores and essay films. She lives in New York City. 

Sharon Mashihi 
Former Co-Director & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member, 2012-2017

Audio artist, screenwriter, performer, and story editor Sharon Mashihi is the creator and host of the podcast Appearances from Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia. The show is an elaboration and response to her award winning personal documentary, Man Choubam, which won the Silver Prize for documentary at Third Coast International Audio Festival in 2018. Her work can be heard on the podcasts The Heart, Stranglers, Snap Judgment, Unfictional, and many others. She has served as a longtime editor at The Heart podcast and was editor of the CBC fictional podcast series, The Shadows. She is co-writer of the 2017 feature film The Ticket, and story editor of Madeline’s Madeline. She spent several years as a session leader at The School of Making Thinking.
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www.sharonmashihi.com

Photo by Eric Rudd/Indiana University

Josephine Decker
​IMMERSION Co-Founder, 
​Former Development Director & Emeritus Board Member, 2017-2022

Josephine Decker is a filmmaker committed to collaboration, poetry, play, cinema and the new genres and personal transformations that emerge from their mixing. Her work focuses on women’s interiority and sexuality.  Her feature film Shirley, starring Elisabeth Moss and Odessa Young, won Sundance 2020’s U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking and centers around two women whose subtly erotic friendship is both liberating and destructive.  Josephine’s work tends to bend the space between imagination and reality. Her feature film Madeline’s Madeline follows an unstable teenager as she is seduced into a large role in a theater company.  The film’s visceral cinematography, editing and sound design thrust the audience into the ever-shifting first-person perspective of her main character Madeline. Madeline’s Madeline, scripted through a devised process with ten actors, played Sundance, Berlinale and scores of festivals worldwide, was hailed as a “mind-scrambling masterpiece” and was nominated for Best Picture at IFP’s Gotham Awards and for two Independent Spirit Awards. Said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker, Josephine premiered her first two narrative features at the Berlinale Forum 2014 to critical acclaim. Her newest project The Sky is Everywhere (A24/Apple, adapted from Jandy Nelson's YA novel) will come out Valentine's Day 2022.  Josephine also explores collaborative storytelling via TV directing, documentary making, performance art, accordion-playing, acting, teaching at places like CalArts and Princeton University and leading artist residencies with the School of Making Thinking.  She was present at the very first SMT session in 2011, and that session and her subsequent involvement in SMT has been life- and art-changing for her.  It has helped her trust making work in a messy process involving lots of people. She has written every film she's written at SMT or through collaboration with the SMT community.  She wishes she could do more end climate change and mass incarceration. 

www.josephinedecker.com

Jaimes Mayhew 
Emeritus Board Member, 2021-2024

Jaimes Mayhew makes participatory, interdisciplinary work that addresses identity and how it is expressed through land use, speculation and ecology. From installation, photography and video to fiber art and performance, Mayhew’s work is conceptually tied together through experimentations of  queering relationships between humans, places and things. Mayhew has exhibited nationally and internationally, and reviews of their work have appeared in Hyperallergic, Art Papers, and The Creators Project, among others.  An article about Mayhew’s work titled “Performing Trans Ontology: The Body (and Body of Work) of Jaimes Mayhew” was published in the academic journal Feminist Frontiers in late 2020. Mayhew holds an MFA in Intermedia and Digital Art from University of Maryland Baltimore County and a BA in Film from Emerson College. He currently teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in the Studio Art program at American University. 

jaimesmayhew.com

Matheson Westlake 
​Co-Founder &
​Special Projects

Matheson Westlake is a Brooklyn-based teaching artist, writer, per-former, and theater director. Her work is highly collaborative, and seeks to create surprising connections within the context of a heightened reality. Recent projects include theatrical adaptations of The Seagull and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She received her BA in theater from Emerson College.

Adriana Disman
Former Co-Director & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member, 2012-2016

Adriana Disman is a performance art maker, thinker, and writer.

Since 2010, their solo work has been presented in numerous festivals and galleries across Canada, the United States, Europe, and India. Disman's practice searches for minor modes of resistance as they seek liberation – an interdependent and as yet un-imagined state – through refusing to adhere to the logics of power. Often engaging with self-wounding, their work is minimal, poetic, and intense.

Disman’s writing on performance can be found in both academic and arts publications including C Magazine, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, ICE HOLE, Something Other, and two performance art books. Disman was awarded the 2018 GOG Art Writing Award for their text in Deirdre Logue's monograph Beyond Her Usual Limits. She is currently co-editing a book entitled "50 Key Performance Artists" for Routledge with T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko.

Disman is presently a co-curator of the Buch Apotheke/Book Pharmacy at Grüntaler9 in Berlin. They previously curated the LINK & PIN performance art series (2013-2017) in Toronto and Montreal, directed Morni Hill's Performance Biennale (2016) in northern India, was an organizer for The School of Making Thinking (New York), and the artistic co-ordinator of RATS9 Gallery (Montreal).

Curious and never satisfied, they acted in theatre and voice overs from a young age, studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre (NYC) conservatory before abandoning acting. Disman then began developing their own solo performance and writing practice, teaching themselves about performance art histories and theories, and eventually doing an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University, Toronto. There, they focused their research on the ethics of participatory performance and its documentation. In 2023 they completed a PhD on the pathologisation of self-wounding in performance at Queen Mary University of London, UK with supervision by Dominic Johnson and Martin O'Brien. Disman has not developed her performance art practice within an institutional learning context.

A sensitive facilitator, Disman gives workshops and guest lectures regularly and has taught at McGill, U of Toronto, Concordia, and Abrons Art Centre, amongst others. They have also taught undergraduate courses at Queen Mary University in the department of Drama. They are passionate about teaching.

Disman is currently writing a novel on housing precarity in Berlin and, in their spare time, paints.

Photo credit: Christian Bujold

www.adrianadisman.com

Naima Ramos-Chapman
IMMERSION Co-Founder & Emeritus Board Member, 2021-2022

Naima Ramos-Chapman works to tell stories of transformation and understated bravery by rendering the juxtaposition of psycho-spiritual realities we cannot see alongside the normalized brutalities “hiding” in everyday life.

Her first short, And Nothing Happened, explored the psychological aftermath of a sexual assault and premiered at the 2016 Slamdance film festival. Her second short, Piu Piu, a meditation on frontier justice and victimhood ontology, premiered at Blackstar Film Festival in 2018. In 2017, she became a Sundance Institute screenwriter intensive fellow. In 2018, she wrote, directed, acted, and edited for the Peabody award-winning Random Acts of Flyness (HBO). In 2020, as part of a multi-media installation produced by Aljazeera Contrast, she wrote and directed Still Here, a virtual reality experience about the obstacles black women face who re-enter society after being kidnapped and traumatized by the prison industrial complex. It premiered in the New Frontiers section of the Sundance Film Festival. In 2020, she also co-produced, and story edited the tv series Betty (HBO), a coming-of-age story of a diverse group of young women navigating their lives through the predominantly male world of skateboarding.
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Naima is currently in the metaphorical woods developing several projects in the docu-narrative hybrid space that center BIPOC femmes taking back their power after surviving hierarchal abuses internalized by the dominant social order of white supremacy and toxic masculinity.

naimaramoschapman.com

Raven Cassell
Co-Vice Chair, Emeritus Board Member 2021-2025

Raven Cassell is a theatre artist; an actor, writer, producer and educator based in New York with her fingers dipped in African diasporic communities in Africa and Latin America. Her work lies at the junction of diaspora studies, visual art and storytelling. She's interested in investigating and experimenting with the way we learn, engage and produce stories. 

Raven is currently in development for her debut play, For the Love of Jazz (a jazzical) for which she is starring in and co-producing. She’s earned a BFA in Dramatic Arts with concentration in Acting and Writing from The New School for Drama and her residencies include Dramatic Need, South Africa; Thread, Senegal; and The School of Making Thinking, NY, USA. She’s performed in The Black Joy Project, JAGfest 2.0, BRIClabs, The Fire This Time Festival, NY International Fringe Festival and other self-produced works.
 
“The theater has been a vehicle of transformation, the grounds where I could confront, explore and transgress my intersectional identities.”  
​– Raven Cassell

www.ravencassell.com

Aviva Avnisan 
Co-Founder & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member, 2012-2016

Aviva Avnisan (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is situated at the intersection of image, text and code. Using a host of emerging technologies including 3D scanning, augmented reality and virtual reality, she creates applications for mobile devices, interactive installations and technologically mediated performances that seek to subvert dominant narratives through embodied encounters with language.

Aviva has presented her work both nationally and internationally. Selected exhibitions, biennials and performances include: Inside Practice at the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL (2020), Refiguring the Future at 205 Hudson Gallery in New York, NY (2019); Between Bodies at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington (2018-19); the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017); a four-person exhibition at _Post-Screen: International Festival of Art, New Media and Cybercultures_in Lisbon, Portugal (2016-17); We Have Always Been Digital at The Kitchen in New York, NY (2016); and_Electronic Literature in Chicago_ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in Chicago, IL (2014). She has presented her research at the &NOW Festival of Innovative Writing as well as the College Art Association (CAA), Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) annual conferences. She has been interviewed by BOMB Magazine and her work has been published in INDEX Vol. 6: An Annual Document of Performance Practice, the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and others.
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Aviva is the recipient of a Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship through the Simpson Center for the Humanities, a Digital Studies Fellowship through Rutgers University—Camden, and the Rosen and Edes Foundation Semi-Finalist Fellowship for Emerging Artists. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College and an M.F.A in Art and Technology Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Aviva is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media & Technology and Media & Journalism at Kent State University. avivaavnisan.com

Molly McKinley
​Former Co-Director & Emeritus, Inaugural Board Member 2012-2017

McKinley’s work has been shown at Fridman Gallery, NADA, Pioneer Works, Independent Curators International, The Museum of Arts and Design, Momenta Art, Field Projects, Anthology Film Archives, and others. They were awarded a fellowship in glass at Wheaton Arts, and a two-year fellowship in sculpture and glass at Alfred University. McKinley holds a BA in photography from Bard College, and an MFA in sculpture/dimensional studies from Alfred University. Their works are held in private collections, as well as the permanent collection of the Samuel Dorsky Museum.
McKinley’s work has been featured in Vice, Clocktower Radio, The Corning Museum of Glass’ New Glass Review, The Chronogram, Hyperallergic, Fjords Review, and Vernissage TV Magazine. They are the former co-director of The School of Making Thinking, an educator at the Dia Art Foundation, and their writing on radical education has been published in the journal Performance Research. McKinley’s first artist book is titled Summer Goth (2021).
www.molliemckinley.com

Millie Kapp 
Education
​Coordinator 

Millie Kapp has a MA in Performance Studies from New York University and BA in Visual and Critical Studies from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Professional experiences include teaching performance-based classes and workshops and visiting artist lectures at Maryland Institute College of the Arts, the University of Chicago and Stony Brook College. Kapp is a performance artist and has presented her work in Oakland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, and New York, recipient of the CAAP grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and participated in artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, the Chicago Cultural Center and the School of Making Thinking. Though her performance work is primarily dance-based, her work crosses disciplines incorporating video, sculpture and text. Kapp is also a writer and curator and has curated performance events in Chicago and New York.

anique vered
Curatorial and Strategic Development Consultant

anique vered is an artist-researcher, development practitioner and community leader. She has over ten years experience in collaborative, interdisciplinary communities of practice through groundbreaking, cross-sectoral initiatives in research and cultural environments. anique is currently focused on bridging speculative and critical theory with development practice through explorations that cultivate a “response-ability” to existing and forthcoming social, political and environmental conditions. She specializes in strategic interventions and inclusive, generative techniques across levels of society with the intention of transforming the orientations and apparatuses that enable individual, collective and planetary wellbeing. 

aniquevered.com

Tchaiko Omawale
Emeritus Board Member, 2023-2024

Tchaiko Omawale is a writer/director whose filmmaking is influenced by growing up in 8 countries by age 16. Themes of living in and in-between, fill her work. Her impulses for fantasy connect to African indigeneity and the healing powers of body and spirit. She centers an ethic of care, a creative process grounded in intuition and deep listening to her body, her dreams and motherhood.

Her debut feature film SOLACE, about a Black girl navigating an eating disorder, is streaming on Paramount + and KweliTV, and won Special Jury Mention for Best Ensemble cast at the LA Film Festival and an Audience Award at the New Orleans Film Festival. Workshopped in a South African township, the audience was invited to recognize their community's relationship to self-harm and disordered eating with compassion. The film's outreach included a conversation about food, trauma and the Black body with Roxane Gay.

Her fantasy short film SITA, exhibited in the Project Row House show “Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter,” co-curated by Simone Leigh, the first Black woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale.

Tchaiko’s recent episodic work includes QUEEN SUGAR, CHERISH THE DAY, SACRIFICE and GOOD TROUBLE.

tchaiko.com