Deem Journal presents Design for Dignity 04: A Convening of Possibilities, a two-day public program at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The convening brings together designers, cultural practitioners, and community leaders to examine dignity as a foundational principle of design. Through interdisciplinary dialogue and intergenerational exchange, the program highlights inclusive, human-centered approaches to design while fostering new connections, shared knowledge, and future-oriented practices.

Brendan Fernandes is a Canadian artist based in Chicago whose interdisciplinary practice brings together dance and visual art to explore race, queer culture, migration, protest, and collective movement. Often taking hybrid forms that merge ballet, social dance, and political action, his work creates spaces for participation, solidarity, and belonging. Fernandes is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program and has received numerous honors, including the Platform Award (2024), the Creative Voice Award from Arts Alliance Illinois (2024), the Artadia Award (2019), and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020). His work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the National Gallery of Canada. Fernandes is associate professor in the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.

Nu Goteh is a designer, strategist, and educator who envisions conditions for communities to thrive. A recipient of the 2025 National Design Award (Emerging Designer), Goteh is cofounder, managing partner, and creative director of *Deem Journal* and founder and principal of ROOM FOR MAGIC. Nu is at the forefront of an emerging generation of designers who integrate design, culture, art, community, and social practice. He has partnered with influential clients, including nonprofits such as the Art for Justice Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the World Peace Foundation; cultural institutions such as the National Memorial for the Underground Railroad; and global brands such as Nike and Google. He serves on the board of SEGD, and his work has been featured in *Forbes*, *Fast Company*, *Wallpaper*, *Design Miami*, *Monocle*, and *The Architect's Newspaper*. Influenced by his Liberian heritage and passion for counterculture, he also presents keynotes globally on design as an invitation for communities to reclaim their futures.

Curry J. Hackett is a multimedia artist and educator whose work explores Black relationships to land, media, and memory. A native of Farmville, Virginia, his practice speculates on the aesthetics, histories, and ecologies of the American South. Hackett's work has been featured in *The New York Times*, *The Washington Post*, and *Bloomberg*, among others. He has exhibited and lectured widely, including at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's *Making Home* Design Triennial, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Hackett was named a 2026 United States Artists Fellow and serves as clinical assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Kahlil Joseph is a filmmaker and artist whose work inhabits the space between cinema, memory, music, and visual art. His films unfold less as linear narratives than as living constellations, where personal history, archival fragments, performance, and dreams converge to reveal new ways of seeing Black life across time. Moving fluidly between the intimate and the epic, his practice is rooted in the belief that images can carry memory, spirit, and possibility simultaneously. Working across feature films, installations, and moving image works, Joseph has developed a distinctive cinematic language that resists convention while remaining deeply emotional and accessible. His projects have been presented internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, reflecting a practice that dissolves the boundaries between contemporary art and cinema. His feature debut, *BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions*, extends his ongoing exploration of media, history, and the Black imagination into a work that treats news, myth, and lived experience as parts of the same continuum. Whether working with musicians, artists, or communities, Joseph approaches filmmaking as an act of listening, seeking not simply to document the world but to uncover the hidden frequencies that connect people across generations, geographies, and time. His films invite audiences to slow down, to look again, and to experience cinema as a space for remembrance, revelation, and collective dreaming.

Ari Melenciano is a research artist and theorist investigating technoculture and forms of intelligence. She has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture at institutions including New York University, Pratt Institute, Hunter College, and Parsons School of Design. Her work has been presented internationally at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai. She is founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution dedicated to cultivating and expanding Black imagination and culture through art, design, and technology.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner, occasional theremin player, and death doula in training. Her middle name, Janan, meaning heart and soul, comes from the Arabic trilateral root (J-N-N / جنان), evoking that which is unmoored and veiled. Accordingly, she explores the politics and poetics of noncompliance and disobedience. Her genre expansive work has been presented worldwide. She is featured in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (*Greater New York*) and ICA Philadelphia (*The Shakers: A World in the Making*). Recent solo exhibitions include High Line Art (2026), Henry Art Gallery (2025), REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), the Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum, the Bronx Museum, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Palais de Tokyo, MASS MoCA, The Kitchen, and ICA Philadelphia, among others. She is the recipient of several honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), a Creative Capital Award (2022), the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2022), an Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant from Experiments with Google (2022), an Artes Mundi 11 nomination (2024), a High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree (2024), and a VIA Art Production Grant (2025). She has participated in residencies at UCross (2025), Triangle Arts (2018), Pioneer Works (2018), Denniston Hill (2017), Smack Mellon (2016), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (2016), Lower East Side Printshop (2015), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2015), and the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2012), among others. Having taught at Barnard College, Cooper Union, and the School for Poetic Computation, among others, she serves as a critic at Yale University's School of Art and holds the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at CalArts.

Carrie Sandahl is professor of disability studies at the University of Illinois Chicago in the Department of Disability and Human Development. She directs Chicago's Bodies of Work, an organization that supports the development of disability arts and culture through festivals, advocacy, and an artist residency program. Her research and creative activity focus on disability identity in live performance and film. Her publications include the coedited anthology *Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance*, which garnered the Association for Theatre in Higher Education's Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy Award (2006). Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including *Theatre Journal*, *Theatre Topics*, *Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism*, *Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies*, *GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies*, *Cinema Journal*, and *Disability Studies Quarterly*, among others. Sandahl frequently travels nationally and internationally to speak about her research and arts advocacy initiatives. Her 2003 article, "Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance," inspired the title of a 2022 exhibition at Berlin's Schwules Museum. She was invited to share with museum visitors how the concepts from that article were conceived and how they have evolved in her work as an artist, activist, and scholar. She collaborated on the documentary *Code of the Freaks*, a critique of disability representation in cinema, which premiered in 2020 and has been shown at festivals, on television, and on streaming platforms in the US and internationally.

Scott Vincent Campbell is an artist, arts administrator, and curator from New York, NY. He earned a BA in fine art from Haverford College in 2005 and an MFA from the University of Chicago in 2022. Campbell's work has been exhibited across the US at institutions including the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago); the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI); Library Street Collective (Detroit); Big Medium (Austin, TX); and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and Pierogi Gallery (New York). Campbell was a resident at Red Bull Arts Detroit in 2016, and in 2017 was the first Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He is a recipient of the SPARK Grant from the Chicago Artists Coalition, the Artist Grant from the Reva & David Logan Foundation, and a 2025 DCASE IAP Award. Campbell lives and works in Chicago, where he also serves as Midwest programs manager for Independent Curators International. He was named one of *Newcity*'s 2024 Art 50 and recently curated *Biennial 33* at the South Bend Museum of Art.

Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean) is a visual artist and cofounding director of exhibitions and programs at the Center for Native Futures, a contemporary art space in downtown Chicago dedicated to supporting Native artists. She previously served as community engagement coordinator at the Field Museum, where her work was crucial in developing the *Native Truths* exhibition. Her multimedia art practice combines digital collage and photography, focusing on themes related to her mixed-race identity, cultural heritage, and family and home, while incorporating Pueblo and urban aesthetics. Her work can be found in museum and private collections worldwide. Through her artwork and her role at the Center for Native Futures, she is dedicated to changing inaccurate representations of Native people, advocating for the inclusion of Native voices and perspectives, and supporting other Native artists. She serves on the Terra Foundation's Indigenous Advisory Committee and the Cultural Advisory Council of the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Debra lives in Chicago with her husband, artist Chris Pappan, and their daughter, performing artist Ji Hae Yepa-Pappan.

Joseph Cuillier is a multidisciplinary artist who explores Black radical pedagogies through social practice, installation, textile, and design. His practice at the intersections of education, visual art, and design centers on deconstructing histories to build counter narratives. Based in New Orleans, Cuillier received a master's from Pratt Institute and previously held faculty positions at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute in New York City. Cuillier's work has been exhibited, collected, and presented internationally at the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art Library, Bauhaus Dessau, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery at Pratt Institute, among others. Cuillier has been an artist in residence and fellow at Sweet Water Foundation through the Chicago Architecture Biennial, IdeasCity New Orleans, Spillways Antenna, the New Museum, The Laundromat Project, and A Blade of Grass. Cuillier is codirector of The Black School and Black Love Fest with Shani Peters. His work is deeply connected to a lineage of Black educational and community building practices that inform the development of The Black School.

Shani Peters is a multidisciplinary artist and administrator based in New Orleans. She holds a BA from Michigan State University and an MFA from the City College of New York. Peters' multidisciplinary art encompasses activism histories, community care, and the creation of accessible imaginative experiences. She has presented work in the US and abroad at the New Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and the Bauhaus Dessau. Selected residencies include those hosted by the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Laundromat Project, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Project Row Houses. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Creative Capital, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Peters has served as a faculty member at the City College of New York, Pratt Institute, and Parsons School of Design. In 2016, Peters cofounded The Black School with her partner, Joseph Cuillier. Her practice contributes to a broader lineage of Black cultural and educational work centered on care, access, and collective imagination.

Deem Journal is a print journal and online platform focused on design as social practice. Founded in 2019 by three Black creatives—Nu Goteh (a multidisciplinary designer and cofounder of the strategy and design studio Room for Magic), Alice Grandoit (a cultural researcher, nonprofit developer, and cofounder of Room for Magic), and Marquise Stillwell (founder of Openbox, a New York City-based design studio and consultancy), Deem has since published five substantial print issues alongside original online content and two podcast series, as well as hosted three digital forums and one hybrid in-person and virtual symposium. Through these platforms, Deem explores human-centered design frameworks beyond traditional institutions and industry categories; asking what design can do for communities by creating conversations that are transdisciplinary and intergenerational exchange. Its work seeks to uncover meaningful narratives, connections, and patterns that help us better understand our histories and imagine our futures