AYANA  M. EVANS

Ayana Evans is a NYC based artist who is originally from Chicago, IL. Evans received her MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. In 2015 she received the Jerome Foundation's Theater and Travel & Study Grant for artistic research abroad. During the summer of 2016 Evans completed her installment of the residency, "Back in Five Minutes" at El Museo Del Barrio in NYC. The next year she completed a 10 hour endurance based, citywide performance and 100 person performative dinner party in the Barnes Foundation museum (free and open to the public) during the Spring of 2017 for "A Person of the Crowd” which was a major performance art survey featuring artists such as, Marina Abramovic, Tania Bruguera  and William Pope L. in Philadelphia, PA. Her international work includes FIAP, a performance festival in Martinique and Ghana'a Chale Wote festival which drew 30,000 people. Evans was a 2018 Fellow in the Studio Immersion Program at EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, as well as, a 2018 resident and grant recipient at Artists Alliance Inc (NYC), and a 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art. Recently she completed her first solo exhibition at Medium Tings Gallery in Brooklyn, which featured two solo performances, interactive works and a talk with professor and scholar Uri McMillan. Evans is also a 2018 NYFA Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts.

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Evans’s on-going performances/public interventions include: "Operation Catsuit" and "I Just Came Here to Find a Husband." She has curated and co-curated performance art shows throughout the U.S and worked in arts education for a decade. She is  currently an adjunct professor at Brown University and  Editor at Large for www.cultbytes.com.  Her recent press includes articles on New York Magazine's The Cut, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post,  gallerygurls.net and Bitch Magazine.