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THE DIRT PALACE
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. In 2016 she was the RISD Museum artist fellow. 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.
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).
ANNA KERBER: Work/Exchange AIR
Anna works semi-autobiographically in animation, painting, costume, cello and voice, drawing inspiration from intimate love, dreams, and the nonhuman world. Through improvisation and collaboration, Anna seeks to (re)encounter pleasurable ways of being and relating.
ZOE RODEN: Work/Exchange AIR
Zoe Roden is a writer and art historian based between Providence, Rhode Island and Brooklyn, NY. Her research interests include legacies of Surrealism, feminist artist-led spaces, histories of land-use, and documenting slow violence in the American Southwest. Most recently, she has presented her work at the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Rachofsky Collection, and the American Comparative Literature Association 2023. She has previously held research positions at The Armory Show, the Harry Ransom Center Archive, and Ballroom Marfa.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
BECCI DAVIS
Becci Davis is an artist who finds inspiration in exploring nature, archives, memory, and connection to place. Born and raised in Georgia, she now calls Providence, Rhode Island home. Becci currently teaches Foundations in Brown University’s Department of Visual Art and is a member of the WARP Collective.
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.
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STEPHANIE FORTUNATO
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.
LOIS HARADA
Lois Harada is an artist and educator based in North Providence, Rhode Island. She has worked at DWRI Letterpress, a commercial letterpress print shop, since 2011. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Printmaking in 2010 and recently rejoined the institution teaching classes in that department and Graphic Design. Harada has previously volunteered as an Artist Mentor and Board Member at New Urban Arts and on the Art in City Life Commission for the City of Providence.
BONNIE JONES
Bonnie Han Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, https://technesound.org/, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center on technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She has received commissions from the London ICA and Walters Art Museum and has presented her work extensively at institutions in the US, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland and Providence RI on the lands of the Susquehannock, Piscataway, Algonquian, and Narragansett. https://bonnie-jones.com/
CODY ROSS
Cody Ross is an indebted beneficiary of alternative cultural institutions, subcultural space-making, and radical political interventions. He has contributed to a range of projects and organizations, including collective housing experiments, worker-owned cooperative businesses, art collectives, artist-run community and studio spaces, academic research projects, and youth movement organizing against incarceration. In collaboration with a collective of artists, he helped found New Fruit, an artist-run studio, printmaking, and exhibition space in Portland, Maine dedicated to supporting feminist, queer, and radical cultural production. His art practice is informed by a general ontological confusion provoked by queer, feminist, and affect theory as well as a faith in the space of encounter. Cody has worked for libraries, archives and museums throughout the northeast, including the Maine College of Art, Bowdoin College Library, the LGBTQ National History Archives, the Leslie Lohman Museum, and Brown University Library's Special Collections. He currently tends to obscure academic infrastructure with DataCite. He is grateful to have been a resident of Dirt Palace from 2018 to 2020.
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.
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