BOARD & STAFF

STAFF

Xander Marro has been living the good life in the feminist sub-underground for too many years to count on her long bony fingers. A jack-of-all trades type, she works in probably too many media ranging from printmaking to paper mache to 16mm film. She cut her teeth in arts management on the jagged edges of spreadsheets at AS220. She's been involved with issues around affordable housing and the changing landscape of urban America for nearly two decades. She writes rambling essays that sometimes touch on life as an arts administrator for her newsletter Wild Goose Chase.

Pippi Zornoza is an interdisciplinary artist working in sound, performance, installation, video, and printmaking and is a co-founder of the Dirt Palace feminist art collective in Providence Rhode Island. Zornoza's work has been featured internationally and is housed in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Her work has been published in the Bell Gallery's Building Expectation: Past and Present Visions of the Architectural Future, Anthony Alvarado's DIY Magic, Mathew Barney and Brandon Stousy's Tubal Cain, and in the art-poster anthology, the Art of Modern Rock.

XANDER MARRO: Co-Director

PIPPI ZORNOZA: Co-Director

JORI KETTEN: Interlace Grant Fund Program Manager

As Program Manager of the Interlace Grant Fund, a regranting program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Jori is grateful for the opportunity to support visual artists in the Providence, RI area. Jori is a longtime youth arts educator (Community MusicWorks, New Urban Arts, Project Open Door, PCL, and others), gallery director and curator (186 Carpenter, 159 Sutton, Bell Gallery, and others), drummer (Undertow Brass Band, Kvetch Mode), and parent (Arah, b. 2017, and Izzy, b. 2023).

COLE BESPALKO: Work/Exchange AIR

REG/INA GUTIERREZ: Work/Exchange AIR

Shifting scales from precious metals tediously fit over a smile to immersive and modular murals- Reg/ina centers the mouth as a physical manifestation of assimilation in America. Between silver, spit, or obsessively iterative forms, their work draws upon Filipino cultural motifs and pre-colonial gold work as well as moments when the multiplicity of their queer body lays the foreground for navigating familial landscapes.

Cole Bespalko is a Canadian-American painter and other project-doer born in Chicago, IL and raised on the East and West coasts of the US. They play with mediums like writing, puppet making, and fiber arts but painting with oil is their true love. They are driven to make by the little animal at the back of their head that likes organizing, comparing, and telling stories. They received their BFA from Pratt Institute in 2024 and was a LeRoy Neiman Fellowship awardee in 2023. Currently, they are learning to be serious about having fun.

Find Cole @colebespalko on instagram, Colebespalko@gmail.com, or Colebespalko.com. Feel free to send DMs or email if you would like to connect!

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

CHARLOTTE ABOTSI

Charlotte Abotsi is a poet and arts administrator raised in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work as a poet has been featured in HuffPost and Mic.com, and her poems have been published in Wax Nine journal and The Chicago Reader. Abotsi has received fellowships from the Pink Door Writing Retreat, the Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, Tin House, DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, AIR Serenbe, Define American, and Undocupoets. She previously co-curated season two of the poetry-based web series Ours Poetica for The Poetry Foundation. With deep roots in creative arts organizing, Abotsi has been a longtime volunteer, mentor, and teaching artist with the Providence Poetry Slam at AS220. She currently serves as the Special Projects Manager for the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism.

ANGELA DIVEGLIA

Angela DiVeglia is an educator, artist, archivist, and urban gardener. Steeped in New England’s post-industrial landscapes, her human-scale, socially engaged art practice focuses on collective experience and innovative placemaking. After an early introduction to archival practice through social movement documentation, Angela has worked in public and academic libraries and archives throughout New England and the southeast. She currently works as the Instruction and Outreach Librarian for Special Collections at the Rhode Island School of Design and serves on the community advisory board for the RI LGBTQ+ Community Archive.

SHAUNA M. DUFFY

Shauna is the Co-Executive Director of AS220 and a founding Board Member of Dirt Palace Public Projects. Shauna believes strongly in AS220's founding principles that freedom of expression is crucial for the development of strong communities and individual spirits, and that artists play a critical role in shaping our communities to move towards justice and together are a force for change. She previously spent many years as a CPA in public accounting working with Rhode Island not-for-profits including museums, social service agencies, schools, and arts and culture organizations, as well as teaching accounting. She is a musician with a background in classical music, brass bands, and Javanese gamelan, and hosted a freeform radio show for a decade. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the RI Philharmonic Orchestra & music School and the Providence Downtown Improvement District.

LAUREN FARIA

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STEPHANIE FORTUNATO

Lauren Faria is an independent writer, fundraiser, and program consultant. They spent the first 22 years of their career working in the nonprofit arts and culture sector with organizations including MacDowell, Creative Capital, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the RISD Museum. In early 2025 they left institutional employment to pursue independent work, aligning more intentionally with projects and organizations that center collaboration, experimentation, and liberation. Clients in this work include Boston Children’s Museum (MA), Fathomers (CA), and Council on the Uncertain Human Future (MA). They serve as Vice Chair of the AS220 board of directors and chair of AS220’s programming + strategic planning committee. They also volunteer with food and environmental justice projects through the URI Cooperative Extension master gardener program, serve as a grant writing mentor for Interlace Fund, and volunteer with Congress of the Birds.

Stephanie co-founded Constellations Cultural Studio to inspire discovery and understanding through the arts and humanities. Her place-based approach is informed by her experience within city government. She served as director of Providence’s Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, working at the intersection of cultural planning and community development to integrate arts and culture into community life while showcasing Providence as an international cultural destination. Stephanie is Special Projects Director for the Global Cultural Districts Network and co-host of its podcast The Three Bells, produced by AEA Consulting.

JAN HOWARD

Jan Howard is curator emerita at the RISD Museum where she served as the Houghton P. Metcalf Jr. Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, as well as the curatorial chair and chief curator. Prior to arriving at RISD in 2000, she held curatorial positions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. She has extensive experience curating, writing about, and collecting modern and contemporary art and has overseen the care, growth, and interpretation of 30,000 western works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection. Among the scores of exhibitions she organized are: Laurie Simmons: The Music of Regret (1997); Pat Steir: Drawing out of Line (2010); and Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities (2021-2022).

HANNAH LIONGOREN

Hannah Liongoren, a Filipina interdisciplinary designer and educator, employs illustration, graphic design, and exhibition design to illuminate marginalized stories. Her creative practice centers on making stories accessible to the general public, particularly through the intersection of illustration and design. Through the creation of comics, she delves into her immigrant experience, offering a platform to reexamine her heritage and process the impacts of colonization on her identity. In her design endeavors, Hannah utilizes space to convey narratives or bodies of knowledge in a way that is easily digestible to a wider audience. Based in Providence since 2014, she frequently travels back and forth to the Philippines to care for her family's legacy art gallery.

SAGE MORGAN-HUBBARD

Sage Morgan-Hubbard, BA Brown University, MA+ with Ph.D. coursework in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, is an educator, public speaker, engaged scholar, and organizer who co-curates inclusive diverse public spaces for lifelong living and learning for all people. She is the current Director of Learning and Engagement at the Museum of African American History of Boston and Nantucket. An award-winning poet, social justice artist, and activist, she has worked at four colleges and six museums, four of which are Smithsonian museums including the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of American History (NMAH). She was the inaugural Ford W. Bell Education Fellow at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), and has taught students from pre-K through senior citizens- online, incarcerated, and everything in between. Sage uses her creative lens to make sure that everyone has the multimedia tools of poetry, performance, storytelling, collage, history, and curriculum they need to bring their dreams and ideas to life. She loves aqua aerobics, her two spirited children, her Jindo dog Broch A. Lee, and her middle name, Xaxua, which is an onomatopoeia meaning the rustling of the leaves in the wind.

ANABEL VAZQUEZ RODRIGUEZ

Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez is an independent curator, artist and organizer based in Providence, Boston and San Juan. She is currently Curator at Leica Gallery Boston and Assistant Programmer at MassArt Film Society.

Why do you serve on this board?

"As a curator, manager and arts advocate deeply involved in the arts community of New England and beyond for nearly two decades, I am thrilled to be part of the Dirt Palace Public Projects and to be working collaboratively, implement projects, and to continue building community."

SUSSY SANTANA

Sussy Santana is a poet, cultural organizer and performer. Her current work explores writing as a tool for healing. She has published four poetry works: Pelo Bueno y otros poemas (2010). RADIO ESL a poetry cd (2012) Poemas Domésticos, a poetry chapbook (2019) and the zine, La Caminata (2023). Her work explores the bi-cultural indentity through text and performance. Santana is working at the intersection of arts & healing at the Providence Healthy Communities Office. In 2015, Sussy became the first Latina recipient of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship in writing. She is a Creative Community Health Worker Fellowship recipient from the City of Providence Art Culture and Tourism Department and Rhode Island Latino Arts 2023 Poet-in-Residence.