AYANA  M. EVANS

Ayana Evans is a NYC-based performance artist. Her guerilla-style performances have been staged at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Newark Museum, Queens Museum and a variety of free public  locations. Her performances have been reviewed in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, Hyperallergic and New York Magazine's The Cut. She was a 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance, 2018 New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts, 2021-2022 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2021-22 Professor of the Practice at Brown University, and 2022 Chamberlain Award winner at Headlands Art Center. Her past residencies include Yaddo, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Evans' most recent projects included a performance in Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat at the Venice Biennale and the  development of a career fair and outdoor projection series that welcomed over 150 formerly incarcerated individuals and transformed the job hunting space into a fun environment. - complete with soul food,  a live DJ, and green neon t-shirts for everyone involved.

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Evans was also featured in or editor of the following publications: "We Are Here: Visionaries of Color Transforming the Art World," by Jasmin Hernandez with forward by Swizz Beats, 2020 - features interviews with 50 contemporary artists of color, "Institution as Verb," Edited by Elizabeth Lamb, Ayana Evans, Esther Neff and Tsedaye Makonnen, "Volume 11 Friend of the Arts" Edited by Thomas Flynn II, and "Re-Envisioning The Contemporary Art Cannon: Perspectives in a Global World" Edited by Ruth Iskin, 2017.

 

Evans is currently a professor at Brooklyn College and NYU.